Christ is the sacred Yes within the cosmos

[The Great Open Dance]

In turbulent times, we must affirm both joy and suffering (then work for joy)

How can we say Yes to life in our morally disturbing times? If you are paying attention, then you may feel hopeless right now, especially if you are an American. Even our spirits feel tired, and you may feel that your religion is letting you down. Active participation in life without fear or dismay is the everlasting and unachievable dream of faith. We seek to practice engagement without anxiety, compassion without disturbance, and presence without agitation, yet somehow we always seem to find ourselves anxious, disturbed, and agitated.

We are in good company. Jesus also lived under a despotic empire, and the writers of the Gospels are very honest about his anxiety, disturbance, and agitation. Jesus slung anger at hypocrites (Matthew 23), was troubled by the grief of others (John 11:33), wept over the death of a friend (John 11:35), lamented the impending destruction of Jerusalem (Luke 19:41–44), got tired and needed rest (Mark 6:31), and sweat blood in anticipation of his crucifixion (Luke 22:44).

Jesus did not model detached transcendence. He modeled steadfast faithfulness, the ḥesed or “loving kindness” of God. “It is the propensity of religion to avoid, precisely, suffering: to have light without darkness, vision without trust, hope without an ongoing dialogue with despair—in short, Easter without Good Friday,” writes Douglas John Hall. Hall reminds us that Abba did not create, Jesus did not enter, and Sophia has not promised any spiritual absolutes of pure joy, perfect peace, or abiding satisfaction. We may yearn for such a universe, but God denies it to us, because only mutually amplifying contrasts produce existential abundance. Anything that exists independently exists insufficiently.
In this interrelated worldview, joy, suffering, and love are inseparable. They are triune, like the three points that form a triangle. Abba declares, “I form light and create darkness, I make peace and create evil; I am YHWH, who does all these things” (Isaiah 45 ). Metaphysical difference fosters experiential bounty, even as negative qualities cause tribulation.

God prioritizes challenge and development over ease and comfort because God wants our lives to be meaning-laden, not comfort-stultified. Jesus models ḥesed (steadfast mercy) within the fluctuating contrasts of existence, revealing that although we are never perfectly safe, we are always perfectly loved.

Now, the Holy Spirit Sophia invites us into the boldness of the beloved, embracing the multiplicity of existence. Life is beautiful, difficult, and thrilling. Life asks us how we will respond to its extravagance, and the way we live our lives is the answer. Sophia invites and empowers us to respond in the affirmative, to say Yes to both the pleasure and the pain, to both the joy and the suffering.

Too often—confused, hurt, or afraid—we say No to the offered bounty. Historically, Jesus is the inexhaustible Yes to our existential situation, hence the perfect expression of the image of God within the universe. Paul writes:

Don’t think I make my plans with ordinary human motives so that I say “Yes, yes,” then in the same breath, “No, no”! As sure as God is faithful, I declare that my word to you is not “yes” one minute and “no” the next. Jesus Christ, whom Silvanus, Timothy and I preached to you as the Only Begotten of God, was not alternately “yes” and “no”; Jesus is never anything but “yes.” No matter how many promises God has made, they are “yes” in Christ. (2 Corinthians 1:17–20a)

Jesus is the Amen, the Yes, because he is the faithful and true witness, the divine participant in creation whose life reverberates with the purpose of creation (Revelations 3:14). Jesus fulfills the human calling to say Amen to life as it is, to heed the profound whispers of Sophia, to love Abba even in the midst of futility and defeat.

To the extent that we can share in Jesus’s Yes, to that extent will we find his sacred passion in our own lives. This Jesus is water to the desert, the faithful one who, as Leonardo Boff writes, “lives to live, in absolute spontaneity, in the self-evident meaning of light that shines to shine, clear spring water that gushes to gush, the bird that sings to sing.” The example of Jesus, coupled with the inspiration of Sophia, invites us into an existential transformation that we experience viscerally, that converts the totality of heart, body, and mind. The sacred Yes reinterprets our experiences, reorganizes our thinking, revalues our values, and changes our overall affect. We do not merely revise our beliefs or tinker with old rituals or break old habits. We don’t just rearrange the furniture; we access a new way of being alive, a new experience of the cosmos as holy. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 205–207)

*****

For further reading, please see:

Boff, Leonardo. Trinity and Society. Translated by Paul Burns. 1988. Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1988.

Hall, Douglas John. God and Human Suffering: An Exercise in the Theology of the Cross. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1987.

Oord, Thomas Jay. God Can't: How to Believe in God and Love After Abuse, Tragedy, and Other Evils. Idaho: SacraSage Press, 2019.

[NoRethugFriends]

1. Uh huh

[OmegaX]

2. Amen...

...and amen...