Jesus Is No Help At All
I think most of us view Christ as a helpful, if not also a spiritual or religious adornment or decoration to our own actual activism and ethic and our aspirations for being good and doing well. We want to do good. We want to be just and loving and we appreciate and enjoy, and perhaps even need for some personal or cultural feeling of completeness, that God be involved in the event or effort. It is much like the couple who wants to get married by a pastor or “in the church,” but if the officiant or building is not available, the show still goes on. It just doesn’t seem or feel complete. Christ is not necessary, only convenient or the touch that will really make it all so very special.
Do not misunderstand. It is not that the good deed done is not beneficial (or the marriage is not efficacious and loving). Indeed, in many cases the good done for others is literally life-saving. And, thus, of course, sorely needed. Please, the earth and neighbor are hurting. Please do what you can!
But this: do not call yourself Christian because of it. Because of it you can say you live out the Christian ethic, but because of it you cannot say you are dependent on God for your relationship with God. If you are dependent on God for your relationship with God then the good you do does nothing for your relationship with God. Only God does something, effects anything, for your relationship with God.
We say this posture toward a relationship with God is “Christian” because of the cross, the death and resurrection of Jesus. Think of it. Nothing gets accomplished in the death of Jesus. Nothing. Not some meta-physical atonement for sin (of course, I know, that is the primary narrative imposed as a meaning of this tragic and unjust execution, the killing of an innocent and perfectly good man). Ok, maybe some inspiration for like-minded followers to do right and love others, but we all know that’s about as good to last as up to the next threat to bodily harm.
No, truth be told, the death of Jesus at the hands of Pilate and Herod’s minions was, as I have just said, tragic and unjust. End of story. It did not get us anywhere. And, watch this now: that is the story! The good does no good (metaphysically, spiritually, “relationship to the divinely”) but is only good (that blind man who was given sight by Jesus and that woman whose hemorrhaging was stopped by Jesus certainly would attest to this “good”). Really? That’s the deal? My good gets me nowhere but….dead? Yes. The reason the story of Jesus is so compelling is not because it’s a superhero story where the good man wins the prize but because it’s a story where the good man gets nothing. All he can do is be dead and wait until Somebody might decide to do the good thing and raise him from that dead! He is totally dependent on God.
Jesus’ story, if you are with me on this, is our story. Our good gets us nothing but dead. And all we can do is wait until Somebody raises us from that dead. And that is what it is be a Christian: being totally liberated from any need to be good for the sake of any truck with God (the New Testament, and writer Paul in it, calls this being freed from “the curse of the law”) and being totally dependent on God to give us anything, including wherever we might think an “eternal salvation” might be.
So, where are we? Jesus is not helpful in our relationship with God. He is our relationship with God! This, too, by the way, is what I believe John is trying to tell us when he writes that Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth and the life. Nobody comes to the Father but by me” (John 14). This is not meaning what the church mostly has said it means: Jesus is the only correct path, among many wrong ones we might choose, to get to God. This means, instead, that Jesus (alone among “spiritual leaders”) gets us nowhere with God because there is no path to God. There is only God getting to us. And that, uncomfortably for us, too, in God’s good time.
But, have no fear! That “time” is now! Be baptized and come as often as you can to the Eucharistic (“give thanks!”) Table where God gives you your relationship with God! Jesus is no helper there. He is Lord and Savior. And then, after, always, that feast at the Table, get on out there and do the good the world needs so badly but that you don’t need (for that “relationship to God” thing) at all.
