Tenebrae: the
Cross as Via Negativa
Commentary on
Theme 14 of Original Blessing by Matthew Fox
Creation Spirituality Communities, 2008
"What light is shed on a theology
of sin, salvation, and Christ as a result of this befriending of
darkness?"
For Christians the liturgical journey into darkness – Matthew Fox’s Via
Negativa – begins with Jesus’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem on Palm
Sunday, crescendos through Maundy Thursday of Holy Week and the death
of the Messiah on Friday afternoon, and reaches the depths of despair
on Holy Saturday. But a theology of the Cross as via negativa is
not simply the static starkness of an unjust death; it is much more
than a substutionary atonement for the sin that human civilization is
prone to create. The via negativa embraced at its deepest point
brings a dynamic turning. “The emptying and letting go of the
cross [is] a prelude to an ever greater birth . . . .”
As Jesus and the 12 and the rest of the followers journey from Caesarea
Philippi to Jerusalem, Jesus tries on three occasions to convince the
12 that to be first in the Kingdom of God means giving personal power
away, or using personal power-with and for another as a servant or
slave or child, not political or personal power-over others. To
follow Jesus’ way means to participate with him in bringing about
God’s justice-compassion – the non-violent alternative to Roman
imperial violence. He warns constantly that to do that means to
follow him into and through death itself. He will be captured,
tortured, and killed because his message attracts the people, and
offers a direct threat to the authority of the Roman occupiers.
Indeed, the writer of John’s Gospel tells us in 12:9 that “. . . the
chief priests planned to put Lazarus to death as well, since it was on
account of him that many of the [people] were deserting and were
believing in Jesus.”
But the disciples don’t believe Jesus. Just as it was unthinkable
that God would allow his temple to be destroyed, so it was unthinkable
that God would allow his Messiah to be defeated. The disciples
ignore the gathering political storm clouds, and imagine themselves
sharing the glorious victory. They don’t get the paradigm shift
Jesus is insisting on. They can’t see their way out of the
prevailing normalcy of imperial, hierarchical rule. Judas makes
the ultimate betrayal, literally selling Jesus to the Romans, in John’s
version of the story, which makes Judas into an ordinary thief or
robber, interested in his own selfish agenda, rather than a
collaborator with imperial power who is unable to give up his
identification with the normalcy of Roman rule, and the paradigm of
hierarchy and power-over.
In Mark’s version of the story (Mark 14:1-11) the unnamed woman with
the alabaster jar is the only one who gets Jesus’ message. She
alone hears and believes his certainty that his body will need to be
prepared for burial. It is the final service that can be done for
anyone; it was the job of women to do it; and she will not have another
chance to do so. In a demonstration of the kind of
servant-leadership that Jesus kept trying to get the disciples to
understand, she takes a jar of perfume – which cost at least a year’s
wages – and pours it over Jesus’ head. In John’s version, she
washes Jesus’ feet with it, and dries them with her hair – a dramatic
and startling act of total submission and hospitality. Mark has
Jesus say, “Truly I tell you, wherever the good news is proclaimed in
the whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of
her.” These words are similar to the familiar words of
institution of the Lord’s Supper in Luke’s later gospel: “Do this in
remembrance of me” (Luke 22:19).
When a story is so powerful that it appears in all the gospels, the
probability is that something similar actually happened. The
question is when, and under what circumstances. Mark, Matthew,
and John place the story of the woman with the alabaster jar in Jesus’
last days as he journeys toward Jerusalem, death, and
resurrection. She must have been an important member – even a
leader – in Jesus’ entourage, even though she is unnamed in Mark,
Matthew, and Luke. John assumes she was Mary, the sister of
Martha and Lazarus, close friends of Jesus (John 12:1-8). In
Luke’s version she is a penitent prostitute (by legend, Mary
Magdalene), and the story is removed from the events of Holy Week and
treated as a scandal. By the time Luke was writing the early
church had aligned itself with the normalcy of Roman rule, and the
woman with the alabaster jar was reduced from prophetic leader to a
common and insignificant sinner.
John’s Jesus not only acknowledges Mary’s action, he repeats it by
washing his disciples’ feet on that fateful last night before the
Passover (John 13:1-17; 31b-35). In an extraordinary
demonstration of kenotic servant-leadership, Jesus takes off his outer
robe, wraps a towel around himself, and proceeds to wash his disciples’
feet and dry them with the towel. In the normal course, as the
master teacher, Jesus would be justified in expecting that his
disciples wash his feet. But Jesus never does what would be
expected in the normal course. His kenotic action is a
demonstration of how his followers are to treat one another, a radical
abandonment of self-interest. After he has washed their feet he
says, “I have set you an example that you also should do as I have done
to you . . . I tell you, servants are not greater than their masters,
nor are messengers greater than the one who sent them. If you
know these things, you are blessed if you do them.”
When the Church conflates John’s pre-Passover footwashing with the
stories of the “last supper” in the synoptic gospels, the result is a
mixed metaphor. When Peter objects, and Jesus says, “Unless I
wash you, you have no share with me,” Jesus’ footwashing becomes a
demand from master to servant, not an illustration of the profound
equality of power in the Kingdom of God. Peter does not
realize that what Jesus means is that participation in the Kingdom
means kenotic action for justice-compassion, which requires letting go
of the demands and assumptions of normal civilization.
"Recall . . . the challenge of Jesus in [Mark] 8:34-35: “. . . those
who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life
for my sake . . . will save it.” Recall also [that] . . . Peter
wanted no part of that fate, the Twelve debated their relative worth,
and James and John wanted first seats afterward. But Jesus had
explained to them quite clearly that his and their life was a flat
contradiction to the normalcy of civilization’s domination
systems. In other words it was by participation with Jesus and,
even more, in Jesus that his followers were to pass through death to
resurrection, from the domination life of human normalcy to the servant
life of human transcendence." Marcus J. Borg and John Dominic
Crossan, The Last Week
(Harper SanFrancisco, 2006) pp. 119-120.
If the writer of Mark was aware of Paul’s theology, the story of the
woman with the alabaster jar becomes profound, as she prepares Jesus’
earthly body in advance for the transformed spiritual body, raised as
the first fruits of those martyrs who died in the service of God’s
justice-compassion. She is already participating with Jesus in
the establishment of God’s Kingdom on earth, here and now. Who
knows what the circumstances were that produced the original action on
the part of that unnamed woman in Jesus’ company? Who knows what
the gesture might have meant, if she did it two (Mark) or six (John)
days before Passover of the week Jesus died? From the 21st
Century point of view, it is a declaration of solidarity, and
willingness to see Jesus through whatever the Roman occupiers might
like to subject him to. A far cry from the response of the
perhaps willfully blind 12, who pay him lip service, then desert him at
the first opportunity. At least Mark’s Judas is honest. He
can’t believe Jesus’ way can possibly work, so he abandons the company
and turns Jesus in to the authorities.
This interpretation of the story is an indictment of 21st Century
“believers” who reduce Jesus’ death and resurrection to payment for
individual petty sin, and ignore the injustice inherent in the imperial
air we breathe every day. Just like the 12, we cannot see the
difference between leadership and tyranny; we cannot see the difference
between accountability and retribution. Wealth, physical
strength, ability to persuade, age, gender, social class, religion,
race – all the different expressions of humanity – become hierarchical
qualifications that determine access to power and the opportunity to
survive.
As with much of the theology and practice of the past nearly 2,000
years of Christian hegemony, commemorations of the last night Jesus
spent with his disciples risk empty if not dangerous piety. Piety
is empty when it relies on the certainty of forgiveness without
accountability and unaccompanied by transformation; piety is dangerous
when it is aligned with imperial injustice. John’s Gospel taken
literally has resulted in holocausts against “non-believers.”
Traditional fall/redemption theology drenches the commemoration of
Jesus’s last night with his disciples in unforgivable guilt on the part
of believers who identify with the disciples who betrayed and abandoned
Jesus. The journey into darkness gets stuck in the depths of
horror, treachery, and fear that belief in resurrection fails to
assuage, because belief – or rather suspension of disbelief – in a 1st
Century story about post-death appearances and a bodily ascension
toward a rendez-vous with an interventionist god somewhere beyond
Antares – is very different from trust in a universe that contains the
possibility of distributive justice-compassion, where the rain falls
without partiality whether deserved or not.
The Maundy Thursday Tenebrae ritual sends us out of the church in
silence and darkness to contemplate our complicity in Judas’ betrayal,
not because of petty sin, but because it is so hard to abandon our own
self interest, and choose not to participate in the retributive systems
of imperial war and systemic injustice. But we can change our
consciousness, change the paradigm in which we live, whenever we have
the will to do so, and when the rare opportunity presents itself, we
can break the alabaster jar in remembrance of her.
Tenebrae Eucharist
One: On the last night with his
disciples, as they lounged at their dinner, Jesus decided to try one
last time to make them really understand what he was doing, and what it
really meant to follow him.
Another: He picked up a loaf of bread, and spoke into
the hubbub of their conversation: Listen! – he said – This bread is
like God’s justice in this world. Then he tore the loaf into two
pieces. This is God’s justice in the hands of the Romans and the
Temple authorities who collaborate with them. Believe me, one of
you is going to turn me in to them soon. If not tonight, then as
soon as the Passover is finished. Whenever you eat together
after this night, remember that, and remember me.
One: Then Jesus picked up the jug
of wine.
Another: This wine is also like the Kingdom of God –
it is the blood of the paschal lamb, painted on the lintels and
doorposts of our people as a sign that they belong to God and not to
Pharoah’s Empire. But now the collaborators have made this wine
into a corruption – a libation poured out in honor of the Empire of
Rome. – a repudiation of God’s protection and deliverance.
One: And he poured the wine into a
cup and held it up to them.
Another: He said, “Let the one who has chosen this
cup take his possessions and do what he must.” And he dumped the
contents into a bowl for disposal.
One: Several of the company began
to leave quietly, and he let them go. Then he poured a second cup
of wine and said, “But this cup that I drink is a new cup. It is
a libation of my blood poured out for justice for all those who chose
to share it. Drink it. All of you who are willing to commit
to establish God’s justice-compassion, and remember.
Another: He passed the cup to them, and they passed
it among themselves as a pledge. And while they were doing this,
one of the women – perhaps it was Mary of Magdala – the one who Jesus
loved – left the room and returned with a tiny jar of essential oil of
lavender. And she came up to Jesus’ couch and said, “You will die
for what you have done this week – perhaps tonight – and I know I will
never have the chance to prepare your body for burial. If they
take you, there will be nothing left.”
One: Then she broke open the vial
and anointed his face and hands. And he took it from her and went
to the one next to him and said, “She has done what she could.
She has prepared my body for death. Do the same for one another
in remembrance of her.” And he anointed that one, and that one
went to the next until all in the company had been so ordained.
* * *
Holy Saturday takes the journey into darkness, despair, and
hopelessness, as the writer of Job plunges us into the stark reality of
the death of the Servant, who dies in the service of God’s justice, and
waits for God’s vindication (Job 14:1-14). As far as Jesus’
community of followers was concerned, as of the Sabbath, the powers and
principalities had won. It is important to realize how possible
such an outcome is in the 21st Century. The powers and
principalities, the normalcy of civilization, the seemingly inevitable
domination of empire and systems of retribution have brought us to the
brink of human if not planetary extinction. To quote Crossan yet
again, “ . . . we can do it already in about five different ways –
atomically, biologically, chemically, demographically, ecologically –
and we are only up to e.” We should sit in dust and ashes for a
moment, and not skip blithely into Easter’s happy ending. Without
experiencing via negativa, without traveling to the middle of the
labyrinth, past the demons, we can never arrive at the fire at the
center where the creative response is generated, and the key to the way
out into transformation is found.
Without death, there is no life. This is the law of the Universe.