This passage is such a hard one to get right. It’s a fine line between “let it fall” and “throw it into the ground,” between “let it burn” and “burn it all down.” Do we praise this seed that sacrifices itself for the good of others, or do we sort of romanticize this seed and begin to think that the only way out of pain is through pain and destruction? It’s such a fine line between the prosperity gospel and a resurrecting Gospel. Should we rejoice that the seed is dying, that our family members have passed away, that martyrs have sacrificed their lives because something good is going to come out of it? Do we rejoice that the caterpillar has to literally decompose into goo because a butterfly is going to come out of it eventually? Where’s the right place to land between sorrow and hope, between idealizing violence and resurrection? I mean, if God always transforms tragedy into triumph, why aren’t we all running out into the street right now so we can get hit by a bus, or entering war zones with flowers and our hands up? When bad stuff happens, why aren’t we just shaking it off and saying, “eh, no worries, it’ll all turn out right in the end”?
I think it’s because we all know, deep down, that sometimes, God doesn’t win, at least not right now, not right here where we really need it. Sometimes, God comes to us as weak and broken and nailed to a cross. Sometimes people twist and manipulate God’s word and people of Asian descent, or African Americans, or the poor or the sick end up dead. Sometimes we plant our seeds and they don’t grow. Toddlers get swept up onto the beach and kids live in cages and families spend their entire lives starving in refugee camps. Sometimes things just don’t work out. The thing we want most in the whole world just doesn’t happen.
We try to come up with reasons why bad things happen. We try to find a way to understand it so that somehow we can find out what or who is to blame so then we can avoid it. That way, it’s your moral failing if you’re poor or sick or shot by the police. It’s easier that way. We don’t have to see the suffering other as us. We can distance ourselves. We can keep ourselves safe. In fact, we set up systems to promote these ideas. These structures and institutions reinforce that if we just get health insurance or study hard in school or grow up in a certain neighborhood or invest in retirement that it’s all going to be ok. If we plant the tulip bulbs in the Fall, surely, surely, they’ll come up in the Spring.
But we all know that when tragedy strikes us, it never makes sense. The first question we ask when it happens is “Why?” And we keep asking it ever after, even though we know that there will never ever be a satisfactory answer.
I do this with my kids all the time. Somehow, I think that if I tell them to “be careful” and then they choose not to be, then somehow it won’t hurt so much when they get hurt. I can just stand back and say, “See, I told you so. You should have listened to me.” But not only can I not predict and step in every time my child takes a risk that might result in some negative consequences, but when they do suffer from negative consequences, I end up hurting just as bad anyway. I think that finding someone or something to blame will make me feel better, even if it’s my kid, but in reality, it just doesn’t. And it never works if we rush in to see the “silver lining” or “the light at the end of the tunnel” or the “good in the bad” before we’ve let them really feel the pain of it all. There are some things in this world that I just can’t fix for my kids. All I can do is hold them. Hold them and cry, and let them cry and lash out and feel all the feelings they’re having. Jonah’s going through it right now. Lots of his close buddies are going to a different school next year. And he’s wrecked. And there’s nothing we can do about it. All we could do was try to mitigate some of the pain by ordering some sushi and letting him watch Phineas and Ferb on a school night, but, that pain, his pain, isn’t really going anywhere. It will come back. So we all have to deal with the hard things. I just have to let them experience whatever it is for themselves, as themselves. I can stand next to them. I can hold them. But I can’t take it away. It’s their life and they have to live it. I can’t keep myself safe from their pain, no matter how hard I try.
So. Ok, I think to myself. Ok. Let’s just embrace the pain. If we can’t beat it, why not join it? God calls us to walk the path of suffering with Jesus. So let’s go. Let’s do it. Let’s sacrifice and feel the pain and believe that it’s through the pain that we get our ticket out of here. No pain no gain, right? The only way out is through, right? Just throw yourself down, and some “angels will lift you up with their hands so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.”
I’ve been struggling with this in my prayer times. In these Ignatian Exercises that I’m working on, we’re supposed to meditate on the Suffering Christ and consider in what ways we are being called to follow him all the way to the Cross. We’re supposed to listen to where God wants us to sacrifice, and “die to the self” so that we can participate in the suffering and then somehow, also participate the redemptive work of Christ. So I’m reading the Gospel of Matthew, the part where Jesus is tempted by Satan in the wilderness, and then I keep reading on to where Jesus is rejected by his friends and family in his own home town and almost thrown over a cliff, and I’m praying, “Ok Jesus. Teach me to be like you. In what ways do I suffer from temptations, how can I avoid temptation like you did, how can I take risks like you did, and how should I handle rejection, give me the boldness to confront even people I’m terrified will reject me, and show me show me show me how to be like you, Jesus.”
“I’m listening for you, Jesus. I’m waiting. Look at me! I’m ready! Tell me what you want me to hear. Speak O Lord, your servant is listening!” I have my journal turned to a fresh page, and I have my favorite pen, and I’m ready to make a plan, Jesus. I’m ready to fall to the ground and break open for you, Jesus. I’ll buy the plane tickets to war torn Syria, I’ll sell all my my worldly possessions and become a missionary in the Congo, I’ll donate both of my kidneys, I’ll open my home to homeless folks struggling with addiction, just say the word, Jesus, and I’m there. I’ll do it. I’ll sacrifice because I love you so much and the grain of wheat must die before anything can grow and after the darkness comes the dawn, and after the storm comes the calm, and sometimes you need a forest fire before the pinecones will open up and release their seeds. I have the matches and the kerosene ready to go God, just tell me when.
And you know what I “heard” when I was so busy worrying about what I needed to do ? It was so faint, and I was so busy asking for what I wanted, and I was so anxious to hear God speak, and I wanted so badly to know what to do, and I don’t really think that God talks to me anyway so why trust it now, that I almost missed it. Something, somewhere, something, somehow, sent me a message. And you know what it said? It said, “Would you just listen to me?!” With a few more expletives than are appropriate in this particular setting added in. (I really should start coming to an understanding that when a voice speaks to me out of love and also uses salty language, it’s probably something I should really listen to.) See, I was so caught up in how I could learn from this, in how I must sacrifice for that, in what learning objective or metaphor for faith I could wrestle out of these passages that I totally missed it. I simply couldn’t be present with the struggle and the hurt and the pain that Jesus felt this whole time. I was ready to “get something out of it,” rather than listen, really listen, to Jesus, listen to his experience, listen to his hurt and his pain and the feelings of rejection, and how hard it was for him, simply because he was human. I couldn’t hear his pain because then if I did, I wouldn’t be safe. I might have to feel some pain. I might have to participate in who Jesus is, and well, who wants that? We want the get out of jail free card, we want the ticket to heaven, we want the easy fix and the plan and the answers. Too bad Jesus doesn’t give us any of those things. He only gives himself.
Do you remember your early grammar classes when you learned about subjects and objects? The subject of the sentence is the thing doing the action. And the object of the sentence was the thing being acted upon. The cat chased the dog. The cat is the subject, the one doing the chasing, and the dog is the passive object, the one being chased.
I think, maybe, even when I haven’t intended it in any way, I’ve been the subject of my own life, and everybody and everything else has been the object. Martin Buber calls this the “I-It” relationship. We live in a world and in structures and systems that distill our experience into these kinds of subject/object, I-It relationships. I’m the focus of my world, and everything else is an object, a thing to serve, or to love, or to use, or to manipulate, or to even sacrifice for. It’s not all bad to live like this. In fact, it’s pretty important to have a sense of self. And this is more layered than “I’m just a selfish person,” but rather, I’m the actor, everything else gets acted upon. I can’t really know anyone else’s experience, I can only know mine, and out of that, I act.
Now, actually, this is pretty healthy. We want to be subjects. We want to have agency and be free to determine our own destinies and be our fullest individual whole selves. But here’s the challenge. So often when we do that, when we make ourselves the subjects, we turn others into the object. Jenn chases Jesus. Jenn sacrifices for Jesus. Jenn asks Jesus what to do. Jenn is ready to respond and see and understand and act. Jenn falls to the ground and dies so that new things can be born. Can you hear it? Even in my good intentions, even when I’m being my most self-less, Jenn is still the subject, and everything else, even Jesus, is the object. Everyone gets acted upon instead of being freed to act and feel and think however their true selves want to act and feel and think.
In other words, “Would you just shut up and listen, Jenn?” Would you just let me be me?
Would you just see that I am hurt? That I have pain? That I struggle and my soul is troubled? Don’t rush to the lesson. Don’t rush to how this affects you. Don’t try to make some sense of this so that you feel better. Just see me. Let me reveal myself to you. Let me drag you in to this awkward, painful, difficult space where there is nothing you can do to fix any of it. There’s no “right way” to be. There’s no perfect response. There’s just a You and a Me. A subject and a subject. Me as me. You as you. And we’re both seeing each other as full and complete and whole without us having to do anything to fix one another. It’s just me and you, Jenn. So just listen. You’re not an object. And I’m not an object. We’re both here, as we are, whole, present. Subjects. Nothing needs to be fixed. The pain is here, and you can’t take it away. So just feel it with me. Enter it with me. Listen to how it hurt and challenged and changed me. See me.
And I think that’s the thing.
There it is.
We are terrified of what this might mean. We are terrified of what this might ask of us. Because it means that I can’t control what another subject thinks or feels about me. I can’t manipulate them into liking or hating me. I can’t fix things for them or rephrase things for them or help them in some way so that they don’t hurt anymore. I have no control over who another subject is. I just have myself, my messed up, broken, revealed, wide open self that can do nothing other than order up some sushi and sit with you while we watch twenty minute episodes of Phineas and Ferb.
We have to risk making each other the Subjects. Buber calls this the I-Thou relationship. It’s a place where I encounter You. Where I-my fullest “me”- meets up with You-your fullest, realest you. And I have to risk that maybe you won’t make me a Subject in return. We have to risk being our real selves accepting their real selves. And I think this is actually what all the dying seeds and dying to the self and rejecting the flesh and sacrificial language is actually all about. It's about taking the risk. But instead, I think we’d all rather be confirmed in what we aren’t than chance the possibility of not being accepted at all. So we pretend to be who we aren’t, which means we aren't really subjects in the first place, and we try to make everyone else an object, because deep down, we’re scared that we’ll be rejected. But Jesus invites our true selves into his true self. There is no rejection. Jesus is the great “I AM.” He takes the risk to be the subject. He takes the risk to invite others as their own subjects. He invites us, not to change, but to let ourselves be revealed, just as he reveals himself to us.
“And now my heart is troubled,” he says.
There he is. Showing up. His real, full vulnerable self.
“And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” When I die, when I show up as my fullest self and you all reject me, that’s when you’ll be invited as your full self. That’s when you’ll see the me in the you. And that’s salvation.
“Father, glorify your name.” You be you, Jesus says. He doesn’t even make God into an object. Be who you are. Don’t let me change or manipulate you. Because when you are you, then I am free to be me, and when we are free to be ourselves, then so are they. This union, according to Richard Rohr, is “realized by surrendering to it and not by any achieving of it.” It’s not by achieving some object, but by surrendering to the Subject.
The Gospel isn’t about transforming or embracing pain. It’s not about nailing ourselves to the cross.
It’s not about chasing down pain and embracing hardship and running out in front of busses. It’s not about glorifying pain so that something good can come out of it. It’s about listening. It’s about letting Jesus be the subject, even while you are also the subject. It’s about letting go of the self that wants to turn everybody into objects, and embracing ourselves and each other, as full subjects, with all the mess and the misunderstanding and the pain that that brings.
Maybe there is a rainbow after the storm, and maybe there is a heaven where everything is made right, and maybe God does “win” eventually, and we all get to escape this world of suffering through the power of the resurrection. Maybe bodies come back to life and justice is done and the persecuted will cry no more. But until then, there is a You and a Me. Subject and Subject.
Thanks be to God.
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