The Church Failed You. Now What?

Easter morning in a multiverse of responses to human wickedness

This Easter Weekend Edition of Ecstatic is by Yi Ning Chiu

---

Isaiah predicted the Savior would arrive as an ordinary man without any beauty or majesty to draw us in. Among his distinguishing qualities would be the strangeness of his behavior. Indeed, the Gospels record Jesus as a man whose oddness is at the forefront of his personality – he holds our attention in part because everything he does is so bizarre. 

Take Jesus’ behavior on the day of his resurrection. Here is a man who, in the span of a single week, has been worshiped and then repudiated by crowds, betrayed by his friends, assaulted by religious leaders, crucified by colonial powers, and is newly restored to life. Immediately upon exiting the grave he embarks on a reconciliation tour extending peace to the world that just tried to annihilate him. 

Mary Magdalene is the first person to see Jesus in his resurrected form, and at their meeting Jesus doesn’t say a word about the many wrongs that were done to him. He only utters Mary’s name as a single sentence, addressing her with a loving directness that is apparently so emblematic of his speech that it causes Mary to recognize that this is her teacher, back from the dead. Later that day Jesus appears to his disciples and shows them his hands and his side. This is not to rebuke them for their part in what he has suffered but to reassure everyone that yes, he is the one they have pierced. 

Isaiah described Jesus’ ordinariness by saying he would be a man of sorrows, acquainted with suffering. He would be a supernatural being who took his incarnation seriously by living as God in the context of pedestrian tragedies, such as betrayal by good friends. So here is a relatable point of entry to an event which might otherwise seem incomprehensible: most of us know what it feels like to be wounded by the people we love, and to discover that no response to such a common yet stupefyingly traumatic occurrence seems logical in its aftermath.

Acts of betrayal can splinter single narratives into a multiverse of possible reactions, each based upon a different set of assumptions about what the betrayal means. Was this relationship real, or was the closeness imagined? Was this church ever devout, or was it corrupt the whole time? These kinds of questions are impossible to answer definitively, which is a problem for Western Christians, who have been watching the church dissolve into every variety of hot mess for many, many years.

One way to deal with this difficulty is to deny the basic validity of these questions. This appeared to be the approach chosen by places like the Southern Baptist Convention and Ravi Zacharias Ministries, where ambitious projects were launched in Jesus’ name without much attention to the collateral damages they incurred. If people got hurt, it was suggested that they take one for the team. These ministries seemed to operate with the notion that Christians could inflict zero net damage so long as they remained committed to the Lord’s work. In response to revelations of their wrongdoing and the questions that followed, they simply directed everyone to proceed as if nothing had happened. 

At the other end of the spectrum of possibilities, there is an alternate response that seeks total prosecution of every flawed person or institution associated with the church, demanding that everyone implicated in its misdemeanors pay the full price for their actions. Usually these demands are voiced by groups who have distanced themselves from the church and are primarily interested in adjudicating its wrongs, and though they may accurately diagnose aspects of the church’s cruelty and foolishness, they cannot seriously deal with its sins because they treat them as unique instances of badness that are outside the normal scope of forgiveness and change. 

These are two of the many paths that can be taken after the people of God break fellowship with one another: construct a world in which evil behavior is a nonissue, or one in which it is an aberration. They seem to be popular options at the moment, as evidenced by the protocol of denial adopted by churches under scrutiny, or by the existence of “deconstruction merchandise” that treats human fallibility as something that can be extracted and jettisoned. At their most basic level, these responses are the same – they are ways to recoil from the truth that people can profess good things and still retain their capacity for wickedness. 

The Scriptures say the wages of sin is death. This truth becomes supremely evident in the wake of a church’s moral failure, after which most reactions seem unable to counteract the varieties of destruction that follow a moment of human foolishness. No denial or scorched-earth rebuke can reassemble the lives destroyed when a church falls apart, or restore the sense of safety, already so precious and rare, that evaporates from a community once somebody is abused in the house of God. The best they can do is minimize the horror of what has happened, or provide a sense of indignant self-righteousness that can keep everyone occupied until they are overtaken by news of the next church scandal, because in every realm of human response, the guarantee of our continued error is among the few constants. 

The Bible is an expansive narrative, but when read solely for the actions of its human characters, it can grow claustrophobic and predictable. These characters perpetually exhibit a gap between what they profess and what they do, an inability to account for past wrongs, and a compulsion to add misery upon misery—so that a story beginning with a single couple sharing a forbidden fruit will compound into a multigenerational drama of violence and displacement. Even with changes in setting or time the characters seem reflexively drawn back to variations of this pattern, which is why in declaring “there is nothing new under the sun” the author of Ecclesiastes sounds like he is both making an observation and pronouncing a death sentence.

So perhaps Jesus’ strangeness is his newness. The appalling generosity with which he approaches his friends, his wounds fully visible, the wages of sin on unabashed display, is like the gesture of someone from a different dimension. His actions seem opaque because of how badly they fit established patterns for managing human transgression. He behaves as if he is responding to a reality that no other human being has ever been attuned to, one in which life can persist in the face of death. 

Those of us who are grasping for a response to the church’s brokenness are discovering, like our forebearers, that death is the endpoint to every path we’ve mapped for ourselves. Deaths of community, deaths of relationship; deaths of our tenderness and our capacity for mercy; deaths of our moral curiosity and attentiveness to what is right. Yet Jesus managed to live and die in a human body that he surrendered to the world’s various depredations, and emerge from the grave scarred with physical reminders of sin’s brutality while revealing himself to be intact in every way. Here is his strangeness, the thing that had not yet appeared under the sun: a man of sorrows, acquainted with suffering, victorious over death in all its forms.

In Paul’s letters to the Corinthians he says we now share in Christ’s victory. That Paul maintained this argument as his life of privilege devolved into one of chronic dispossession tells us that this will never be the kind of victory that is easily legible to its surrounding culture. For Paul, it seemed to consist of drawing ever nearer to a Body that continuously wounded him. His life acquired the mesmerizing oddness of his Savior’s, as if through his conversion he had abandoned most conventional paths and was walking in another way. 

Jesus, who first told us to love our enemies—before revealing that the enemies most capable of wounding him were the friends at his side—knows something of the betrayal that is endemic to life in the church. On the morning of his resurrection he returned to them, full of grace and truth, not because he was naive or immune to the pain of their actions. He was there to inaugurate a new world to which he was the only path of entry, in which death would finally be swallowed up by life. 

---

Yi Ning Chiu
Writer & Teacher

Yi Ning is a writer who has contributed features to Relevant and Teen Vogue. You can find more of her work here: yiningchiu.com

Thoughts on Yi Ning’s article? Leave a like and share in the comments!