And Jesus turned from Satan and turned to God, praying with drops of sweat like blood. “Oh, God, if you’re willing, take this cup from me. Nevertheless not my will, but yours, be done.” To the religious leaders he was a blasphemer and a criminal and according to their law he deserved crucifixion.
He was not asking if God wanted him to be crucified. He was asking, “Do I have to do it? Stay human till the very end? Die like a mortal? A criminal? I know that I have not been understood, except by a few, and that people want power, not love. Do I have to keep on offering love, as a mortal, not as God, but as one of these strange creatures I came to join? If I die, will they understand? Or will it all have been for nothing?”
And Satan came in again, saying, “Nothing. You’re absolutely right. It has all been for nothing. Look. Let me show you just a few little things that are going to happen in the next few thousand years, and all because of you. Start with just a short while after your death, and look at all those people out on the street killing each other, with rage and hatred on their faces. Do you know why? They’re fighting about the Arian heresy, about whether there was a time when the Son was not. Funny, when you think about it, isn’t it? And then there was the Albigensian heresy, and that will cause lots of bloodshed, too. Now let’s jump to the split between the Christians of the East and West, and don’t forget the Crusades. Or the men of science who were burned at the stake because they opened up the universe, your universe, I might add. And then of course there are the Protestants and the Catholics and the literalists and the—”
No. No.
“Oh, yes.” Satan smirked and smeared the air with the most terrible of temptations. “How much more harm has been done in your name, Jesus, than good? Change it now, Jesus. Flame into God with your power and change it.”
And Jesus turned from Satan with drops of sweat like blood.
And what did God want?
What was the Father’s will?
Was it not love?
* * *
—
Satan was clever. Jesus could have avoided the cross, but he did not. He took with him onto the cross all the sins that had ever been committed since Adam and Eve disobeyed God. He took those sins on him when he was born, but then he took them as a baby, and now he took them as a grown man, knowing what they really were, how terrible, how death dealing. But also knowing that Satan was (and is) the father of lies. And Jesus was and is the Son of Love. Satan is the great deceiver, tempting us with half-truths. Satan grasped after power. Christ opened his hands and let power go, falling through his fingers like so much sand.
* * *
—
Knowing the horror that lay ahead, Jesus rose from prayer and Judas came and kissed him, the prearranged signal.
Jesus was seized and led to Caiaphas, and all his disciples fled from him in terror, all of them, abandoned him to be accused and condemned and screamed against.
Peter at least hung around the courtyard where Jesus had been taken, but three times vehemently denied that he had had anything to do with him. “I do not know the man of whom you speak.” And immediately the cock crowed, and Jesus turned and looked at him, and Peter went out and wept bitterly.
Peter wept. Judas killed himself. The other disciples hid. Pilate tried to save Jesus, but could not, for the rage of the crowd screamed “Crucify him! Crucify him!”
Barabbas was spared instead of Jesus, Barabbas who had led an insurrection against Rome, and who had murdered, Barabbas, whose name means “Son of the Father,” whereas Jesus called himself the “Son of Man.”
* * *
—
Jesus was led out to be crucified, carrying the great crossbar of the crucifix, because the uprights were permanently set in the ground. He was exhausted, his feet stumbling. When they saw a man of Cyrene, Simon by name, they gave him the cross to carry. And that is somehow a comfort and a lesson. Jesus did not carry his own cross the whole way. Simon carried it for him. So we, too, may accept help when the cross is too heavy. And sometimes we are called to be Simon and carry the cross for someone else.
Jesus was nailed to the cross and the disciples were not there in his agony, except for John, who stood with Mary, his mother, and Mary Magdalene and Martha and Mary and some of the other women, and the sword must have pierced all the way through his mother’s heart.
The crowd shouted and mocked. “If you’re the Christ, come down from the cross, come down, that we may see and believe.”
And he could have, and Satan knew that he could have. Was that what Judas had hoped for? But Jesus, Son of Man, stayed there, keeping his promise.
And there was thunder and the veil of the temple was rent and God shook the earth. God was not silent. God was there.
* * *
—
Jesus was taken down from the cross and his dead body was laid in his mother’s arms. Joseph of Arimathea, who was a respected member of the council but who also loved Jesus, offered his own tomb, and Jesus was wrapped in a clean shroud and taken there, and then a stone was rolled against the door of the tomb.
* * *
—
When Mary of Magdala went to the sepulcher, that stone had been rolled away and she was frantic. She asked a man she thought was a gardener if he knew where they had taken her Lord. And Jesus called her by name, and she knew him. It was Jesus! Imagine the joy of that moment of recognition! It was all love affirmed in a moment of glory.
When the other women came the angel told them that Jesus was risen, and they went with great joy and told the disciples what had happened, but they were not believed. (Why are women often not believed?) But at last Peter and John came to the tomb, and then Jesus spoke to the couple on the road to Emmaus.
We know that one of the two was Cleopas, but the other is not named, so perhaps she was Cleopas’s wife.
Finally Jesus appeared to the disciples and ate fish with them, and at last they believed the impossible, the wondrous, glorious impossible marvel of the Resurrection.
* * *
—
When Jesus asked Peter three times if he loved him, did Peter realize that Jesus was redeeming the three times Peter rejected him? Did Jesus’ friends understand the amazing change that had happened within them? Turning them from defeated shadows to radiant lovers?
Oh, thank you, Jesus, for being born for us, and living for us, and dying for us, and rising for us, and sending us the Holy Spirit. Thank you, with thanks that are beyond words, but must be expressed in the lovingness of our lives.
* * *
—
Love. Love is not power, but is that humility which leads to freedom. A terrifying freedom!
* * *
—
Do we want freedom? Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor was certain that we did not, and that Jesus has done us great harm in offering it.
We want security. We want comfort. We want affluence. None of these give us freedom. But there is no such thing as certain security. We never know what is going to happen, what news we’ll be given when the phone rings, what horror story will break into the television program we’re watching. I have children and grandchildren, and they give me vulnerability, not security. In my immediate family in the past year we’ve had the terror of life-threatening diseases, automobile accidents, broken marriages. It has been a year of anxiety and grief—and love. And joy, the joy of weddings, birthdays, puppies, parties. And love. Love offers us the greatest joy and the greatest pain.
We all want comfort. How many television commercials offer us pills against any kind of pain? We’ve become a pill-popping nation, and it is important to relieve pain, to take medication for problems which can and need to be corrected. But it is not helpful to take pills for the slightest ache. Our bodies have their own defenses against pain, and when we keep turning to popular chemicals, we lower those defenses.
We’re thought of as an affluent country, though right now the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. I want enough money for shelter, a healthy diet, a comfortable mattress, enough clothes to keep me warm in winter. Affluence has not helped us as a nation; it has softened us. When we are soft we are less free. When we are less free we are less human.
Beyond the split between the flabby permissivists and the rigid fundamentalists are the sects and cults which are proliferating. In the sects and cults freedom is relinquished for answers, answers to everything. Every question has to have an answer. There are rules to follow, and they can be followed without thinking because they promise that you and your group are going to be saved. It has become all right to dislike, distrust, and even hate other groups, because your group is the chosen one. Keep your guns; it is your right. Hate your neighbor; he doesn’t think the way you do. Tell people what they can read and what they cannot read. Give them your list of those you think are candidates for heaven, and consign the others to hell. And you will have power.
And it doesn’t work. It never has worked.
When we read the Gospels, and, indeed, Scripture in general, we see the same message, over and over again. Love. As I grow older and love more and more people I am more and more vulnerable. My husband died and I miss him daily. We had forty years of marriage and I am grateful, but his death is still grief to me and will always be so. And I would not want it otherwise. The freedom Jesus offers me contains within its vastness the freedom to grieve, not to become addicted to grief, but to learn to live with it.
* * *
—
I don’t always want freedom. I want security. I want comfort. I want nothing to go wrong, nobody I love to be hurt, to disappoint me. But that is not what Jesus offered. He offered life, and life more abundantly, and that means everything, the whole spectrum, laughter and tears, joy and disappointment, but above all life lived fully and openly and appreciatively. That is how Jesus lived, and how we are to live.
There is much to weep for, and much to be thankful for. Little things. Big things. Little ones blowing soap bubbles. Cooking in pots that came to me from my grandmother. Serving from a dish bought in Iona. Thanking the street woman who helped me across a snowdrift. Being grateful for enough covers on my bed at night, for clean sheets and pillowcases. For a hot, soaky bath. Being grateful, ultimately, that I have been given strength to get through a lot of major and minor vicissitudes of life and that I am stronger because of them. Hoping that the freedom that Jesus offers me is going to give me strength and courage and humor to get through whatever comes.
Freedom is a frightening gift, but it was what Jesus gave us, the freedom to forget power and become human. Our addiction to power is nothing new. It goes all the way back to Adam and Eve.
Jesus’ human actions had human consequences. He was steeped in Hebrew Scripture, in the prophets, but his response was a human response along with his quiet acceptance of the divine. As a young man he was full of the joy of his message, and he did not, I believe, expect it to be rebuffed and rejected by the religious leaders. The terrible loneliness of his last weeks was something he had to go through. Even his closeness to the Father could not take the anguish of those last weeks away. He had to die, to be killed by those with whom he had come to rejoice.
But he could not be killed. Power could be killed, but not humility.
* * *
—
And then the sun rose and Jesus was alive and terror fled and the Resurrection was an inner brightness as glorious as the outer brightness of the Transfiguration. And that light, inner and outer, began its journey around the earth, the solar systems, the furthest galaxies, light that is not power, but is wholly love.
* * *
—
O Jesus, my Companion, my Guide upon the way, morning star to evening star—what wondrous love is this! God so loved the world that the Creator of it all came to be with us.
Then, and now, and forever.
Thank you. Amen. Alleluia.
Crosswicks Cottage
1 January 1997
Reader’s Guide
by Lindsay Lackey
Before I came to Madeleine L’Engle’s writings, I rarely considered paradox. I’ve been reading L’Engle for most of my life, starting as a child with her fiction and coming to her non-fiction and memoir in my twenties. When I finally came to her spiritual writings, I found myself wrestling with new, deeper questions in my faith. Questions about suffering and evil, about the role of love in the universe, about free will and God’s plan.
Where, I wondered, was God when war tore through nations, brutally displacing hundreds of thousands? How could we see Love’s power when children murdered other children in a hail of bullets? Did Jesus choose the cross, or was it predestined by God? And if it was predestined, what about Jesus’ human free will?
My faith was pushing against the boundaries of my religious knowledge. It was, as L’Engle says, emerging. I didn’t know it at the time, but at the heart of my questioning was paradox. Wrestling on my own, I felt the sting of the unknown. Doubt was tinged with shame, and questions made me nervous. But when I entered into the works of Madeleine L’Engle, I suddenly felt at home.
Here was a woman who not only asked tough questions, she celebrated the questioning. The unknown didn’t trouble her. In fact, she rejoiced at her inability to comprehend her God. Her willingness to exist in the grey spaces, in the mystery and “magnificent paradox” of her faith, renewed my spirit.
“A comprehensible, anthropomorphic god has never worked for me,” she says in Penguins and Golden Calves. She had no interest in proving God. There was no need—for God exists beyond our understanding. And yet, God is close enough to know the number of hairs on our head; close enough to call us by name.
As I journeyed with L’Engle through her spiritual writings—her questions, her struggle, her hope—I began to recognize the beauty of paradox. God, the Creator of the universe; God, the embryo in the womb of a virgin. God of justice; God of mercy. Jesus, the Son of God; Jesus, the Son of Man. In And It Was Good, L’Engle says, “Indeed I am beginning to feel that without contradiction and paradox I cannot get anywhere near that truth which will set me free.”
And so, with L’Engle as my companion, I have come to embrace the mystery of my faith. I do not have answers for all of my questions, and I am learning that I do not want answers for all of my questions. Who wants a comprehensible God, after all? I want a God who is bigger than my understanding, more powerful than the limitations my doubt puts on his love. Dwelling in the unknown is not comfortable by any means. But it is holy. And day by day, question by question, it draws me closer to that truth which will set me free.
Chapter 1: A Sky Full of Children
Have you ever thought about your place in Creation as L’Engle describes it in the opening of this chapter? She celebrates the “sky full of God’s children,” acknowledging that all of it—every subatomic particle to every star—is created by God, and is therefore God’s child. What do you think about this idea?
What is your earliest Christmas memory? What is your earliest memory of the story of Jesus and his birth?
L’Engle says, “My parents taught me a God of love, yet a demanding God who expected me to be honorable and truthful but who also allowed me to ask questions.” Who first told you about God? What God were you taught? (Demanding? Angry? Loving?)
Do you remember some of your earliest questions for God? What were they?
What role did story play in your childhood? What role does it play in your life now?
What were your favorite Bible stories as a child? If you didn’t have one, what is your favorite Bible story now? Why?
Chapter 2: Beyond the Silver Hairbrush
L’Engle says, “God gave away power when he mad
e creatures with free will….God, who is all power, gave away power! And yet the ability to give power away, lavishly, lovingly, is greater than hanging on to power as human beings try to do. With us power is control. With God it is freedom.” Is this idea—that God gave away power—surprising to you? Do you agree with her summary of power in human hands versus power in God’s hands? In what ways do you struggle with power in your own life?
The author’s father said to her, “Legalism does not make for moderation.” What does this mean? In what ways have you seen this play out in history or in your own life?
How were you disciplined as a child? Was it effective? Why or why not? Was discipline followed with love and forgiveness, as it was for L’Engle, or was it followed with guilt or fear?
After the stock market crash, young Madeleine felt her world changing, but she was too afraid to ask questions—a fear she’d never had before. She says, “By refusing to ask what was wrong, I was holding the fragile bubble of my world in my hand, protecting it by not questioning it, keeping it from shattering into a million fragments.” Have you ever felt this way? When?
L’Engle recounts much of her childhood in this chapter. Are any of her experiences similar to your own? How so? What about her emotional experiences—are these familiar to you? Why or why not? How was your childhood different?
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