Friends, Drew said I could kindly share with you something I’m processing. I hope it’s of help for all those learning to pray, and feeling like they can’t.
Your brother in our nonviolent Annointed One,
Jarrod.
—
“I’m so angry at an all-powerful God who doesn’t stop a genocide.”
Across a table this week a few thoughtful friends expressed a profound grief and anger at the barely applied handbrake of ceasefire being removed from the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
91 children murdered this week. There is not a way to write that sentence that holds the reality it points to.
I pick my 4 year old Noah-Otis from school. I look across the playground. Then tears as 91 precious children visit my soul. I can’t shake that these children should be laughing and playing on the monkey-bars, on the slide, in the sandpit. I don’t know how to comprehend they are in the ground. I can’t.
But nor do I want them to leave. Please precious children don’t damn us from your presence. Unlike our ancestors, why are the dead so far from us? Please precious children let us pray for you. Please pray for us. Don’t leave us, though we were not worthy of you.
Let me gather myself and address us, and not the dead with us. ¡Presente!
For people of conscience who refuse narratives of racist scapegoating to explain such horror, we are left with looking in the mirror of our collective humanity asking, *how*?
Not merely a diagnosis of ongoing colonialism, collective trauma unhealed that manifests as fear-fueled dehumanisation expressed in the extermination of God’s precious children, but the *how* of the brutal boundaries segregating our empathy. In practice are we not parents who love our own children yet allow walls to be erected in our hearts when it comes to these children?
If the walls of empathy were to fall between the barrier of the living and the dead, what would you say to these children? If the ‘communion of saints’ is a reality and empathy allowed for the sounds of paradise to pierce our place, what might these 91 children speak to you? What would they tell us about their life? What would they say about ours?
[The Man in Sapphire Blue by Hildegard of Bingen]
An empathy that fails to move out in concentric circles of compassion to embrace all of humanity, all of creation, all of time, is empathy aborted. Empathy that doesn’t embrace all is a tragedy. The tragedy of limited empathy cannot be overstated. Limited empathy is preyed upon by fascists and authoritarians who want empathy to stop at ethnic or national boarders so to be weaponised against an “other”. Empathy is not only why we care, it can be abused to become why we don’t care for those outside our limited “own”. An empathy that leaves some out is an empathy ready to scapegoat and kill for a “greater good”. This impart starts to name an aspect of *how*.
This *how* is not abstract queries about moral philosophy. Not extracted, clinical questions found in air-conditioned library’s discussing human nature. Not anthropological speculation from the safe distance of the academic desks who feign neutrality as the sunshine of political and spiritual transcendence while bombs fall like rain on our neighbour as their blood, and their children, cry out from the ground.
No. To hell with a transcendence that never risks descending into hell. A transcendence that fears imminence can’t trample down-death by death. It transcends nothing. Political transcendence can only be assessed by what it has risked in incarnation with those who are suffering. The immanence of solidarity is the doorstep of transcendence.
[Christ by Robert Lentz]
These are questioned caked in tears and dust, spoken with the metallic taste of blood in our mouths. Questions stuttered because of both our indifference and involvement.
For people of faith, we are not only disturbed by questions about the nature of humanity, but the nature of God.
“I’m so angry at an all-powerful God who doesn’t stop a genocide.”
I know no place to go with such lament but Christ, and him crucified. I am both disturbed and comforted to find faithful lament on his lips before mine, as he hangs before us, reigning at the heart of creation.
My friend’s righteous anger, my righteous anger, your righteous anger, deserves our patience. Not mere putting up with, or pity, but patience as the practice of deep respect. Patience is not mere waiting, but attention. Waiting is the passing of time as we do the work of not letting go of what must be transmuted. If we don’t share in this deep grief, we must ask why. What we are feeling is not a problem to solve, or a beast to chase away, but a powerlessness to harness. A power to act from.
[the transfiguration by Khrystyna Kvyk]
Righteous anger flanks Christ on Mount Tabor. It is not driven away or destroyed. The Mystery ask us to look upon Jesus of Nazareth in the Uncreated Light, and listen to him. Righteousness anger looks upon the Truly Human to be divinely transfigured.
But so much that passages as spirituality wants to banish Moses and Elijah from our Mount Tabor. They’re too problematic. Their testimony is too tattered. The weeds and the wheat are all rolled in together. Much of what passes as spirituality acts as bouncers wanting remove God’s ache for justice only to make room for what Abraham Joshua Heschel called, “the evil of indifference”.
[Abraham Joshua Heschel]
It feels superior. It’s neat and manageable. It’s only confessions are comparisons dressed up as gratitude. All angles are flush with the way things are. It behaves at dinner parties and has impeccable manners. Moses and Elijah are too wild, too real, too involved, too impassioned. The danger of spiritual Marcionites who do away with Moses and Elijah —the Torah and the prophets— is they do away with God’s pathos and passion for liberation. Without Moses, without Elijah there is no Jesus.
They do away with that peasant class, brown skinned, Palestinian Rabbi who has no where to lay his head as he announces God’s reign of justice. They do away with his good news to the poor, his jubilee economics, his healing of outsiders, his enemy-love, his liberation of captives. They will leaves us with a clean Christ who knows nothing of the nonviolent messiah of the Gospels, Jesus from Nazareth.
Their Christ is not the fulfilment of the Jewish hope of universal justice, and peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit. Instead we are left with spiritualities that make peace with a world at war. Theories that cost us nothing and transform even less. They school us in a desire to escape what God so loves that God gave of Godself in the Son to save through the Spirit that we might be caught up in praying with our bodies, “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven”.
[Jesus and the Three Marys by Harlem Renaissance artist William H. Johnson]
Yet it is not just Mount Tabor where righteous anger flanks the nonviolent Messiah, Jesus. At that hill Calvary hangs three. Anger is powerful. Anger is a gift. Yet anger must be transfigured into a healing force. My anger must look upon the Human One and see the invitation to a humanity that embraces our vulnerability as context of the power of God. As Dr King put it in his letter from a Birmingham Jail,
“In that dramatic scene on Calvary’s hill three men were crucified. We must never forget that all three were crucified for the same crime–the crime of extremism. Two were extremists for immorality, and thus fell below their environment. The other, Jesus Christ, was an extremist for love, truth and goodness, and thereby rose above his environment.”
Paying attention to the Greek in the New Testament the two “criminals” (lēstai) a term used for political rebels, insurrectionists. Three insurrectionist hang at Calvary. Do we mock Jesus and his vulnerable way of insurrection that harms no one and heals all? Or do we embrace our own powerless and see him for who he truly is and ask him to not forget us because we see him as he is, God become king of a strange vulnerable kingdom.
[Passage to Light – Palestinian artist Nabil Anani]
Honestly, because we have done away with our internal Moses and Elijah —and their Scriptures, the Torah and the Prophets— we never get to the temptation of insurrectionists because our spiritual journey’s are trapped in a suburban cul-de-sac of playing chaplain to the forces that crucified Christ.
Answers are rarely pilgrimages to walk. Yet there are narrow paths that open if we dare to open. Paths where idols are abandoned for encounters we cannot control, with a God who transcends “control”.
“God rid me of God” the 14th century mystic Meister Eckhart prayed. Standing before Jesus of Nazareth being executed on a Roman Cross, all categories of omnipotent, omniscient & omnipresent must bow a knee or be named as idols. We must be rid of “All-powerful” unless it has passed through Calvary in light of the Resurrection to be radically transfigured and redefined.
[Crucifixion, 1945 by Romare Bearden]
God’s power is seen in the powerlessness of Jesus, most clearly while being executed upon a cross. This “weakness of God” is the power that raised Jesus from the grave and is stronger that any human strength. This is not wishful thinking or a fain finish to a horrific end. It is a cosmic trauma and defeat for all principalities and powers (and we who are caught up in them) that have yet to radically be caught in the undertow of Love incarnate in Jesus as, in the words of Desmond Tutu, “a force more powerful than violence”.
[Desmond Tutu]
Mechanistic theories of the Cross often play control games to protect us from this mystery —the Almighty is all-vulnerable. The Word of the Cross is foolishness for those invested in what will perish but for those opening to liberation, this is the very power of God. The question for us is can we allow our lives, “down to their most disappointing details” as my friend Ben Myers puts it, to be caught up in this powerless-power in solidarity with the powerless. Action, not as reaction but participation in powerless-power with the powerless.
Action, not as reaction but participation in powerless-power with the powerless.
Words fail. they must. They can carry us to the precipice from where we vulnerably step out in action, in powerless-power with the powerless in participation with a force more powerful.
I’ll leave you with the words of my friend from afar Chris Green who this week was sitting with similar realities,
“Power as we understand it (that is, the ability to make things happen, to achieve intended effects) simply cannot be ascribed, even in full-throated superlatives, to the One who infinitely transcends all our categories an infinite number of times. Thus, strange as it might sound to our ears, we must say that God is not powerful. Indeed, God has no power at all. God cannot as God exert power over creation, no more than God can lie.
To say that God has no power is not, of course, to suggest divine impotence. Rather, it is to acknowledge that God cannot be described in terms of potentials and actualization, as though divine action were a matter of sometimes doing this, sometimes that—now with greater effect, now with less. God is not a being who possesses power and occasionally deploys it. God simply is, in unchanging, endless fullness, the eternal act of the Father glorifying Jesus through the Spirit. This is what we mean when we speak of God’s work—not occasional interventions or supernatural displays, but the ceaseless performance of Christ’s exaltation through which all things are held in being and led, in ways we can neither trace nor control, toward their transfiguration in the uncreated goodness of God. Here, then, lies the deepest and most moving truth of Zechariah’s prophecy: the Spirit’s presence has nothing whatsoever to do with might or power as we understand them—and precisely this is our hope.”
