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.
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