My first instinct is to blame lawyers, but I know it’s not all their fault.
I’m talking about the fact that Christianity has become something different than what it was at the beginning in those earlier wilder centuries of faith; our faith is now barely recognizable, most probably, to our co-religionist ancestors. Mark Twain wrote once that, “There has been only one Christian. They caught him and crucified him—early.”[1] Sometimes I think that’s right. Indeed, the Christian faith was once a wild and exotic thing, not the tame and tepid and decent religion it has become of late, so conscious of its liability. It was once, our religion, the mother of the weird and risky as well as the holy.
Saint Euthymius of Salonica, for obscure example, was the first founder of the first monastery on the great Mount Athos—to this day, the spiritual heart of Orthodox Christianity. When he was eighteen, he decided to spend the rest of his life walking around on all fours eating grass as a way of renouncing the vanities of the world.[2] A holy man, still venerated. We certainly don’t encourage our youth in this sort of behavior today. Syria, for another example, now riddled with blood and bullets and civil war used to be riddled with stylites, crazy but holy men who had chosen to live atop pillars in prayer and fasting, preaching and cursing the wickedness of heretics, the flesh and the devil. Thousands came to see and hear them.[3] Culturally nearer, of course, is Saint Francis of Assisi: he began his ministry by taking off all his clothes in front of his father, the bishop, and the entire town (even his “underpants,” Brother Thomas, his biographer, tells us), “struggling naked against the naked enemy.”[4] Today we would have him arrested. We wouldn’t let him anywhere near our kids. He would be a ruined man, not the founder of a movement. And these are only some of the more family-friendly examples; others I just can’t tell you about in Mass. Christians used to be called incestuous atheists, haters of mankind, the singular reason for the ruination of Rome.[5] Christianity was once dangerous, feared, and despised as much as loved. But of course, that was then. Christianity is different now, more calm and maybe less believable.
And there’s a corollary here in the way theologians sometimes do theology and in the way preachers sometimes preach as well as in the way many of us make use of Christianity. I don’t really want to say “practice” Christianity; it’s more today a matter of “making use” of it. Often a preacher will look at a text of scripture, for example—some wild miracle or other—and he will feel the need to translate it into some abstract or broad moral. Or, when we come across some more stunning supernatural claim—that Jesus walked on water once and so did Peter; that his mother was a virgin, and he even rose from the dead—when we come across such things, often the preacher will want to allegorize them out of existence, render them parables of life and not what the Bible has always called them, “signs and wonders.”[6] They’ll say their goal is “practical application,” some simple offering of a Christ-tinted conventional wisdom meant to help you get out of bed in the morning, make it through the week.
But of course, the problem with this is that often such a translated gospel is quite simply no longer Christianity. Kierkegaard, the great Danish philosopher, talked about this long ago. He said what happens is that although we leave “Christian terminology untouched,” we secretly change it ever so slightly and just enough so that “it involves no decisive thought.” “And so, they remain unrepentant,” he said, “for after all they have destroyed nothing.”[7] “Nothing is easier than to use the word, and mean nothing by it.” That’s what we’ve done to the word “God,” Newman said.[8] In our attempt to translate a rather wild gospel and a naturally radical faith into something decent and conventional, we have actually traded the gospel of Jesus Christ for tepid trivialities which neither convert, nor ultimately comfort, nor even in the slightest way challenge this beautiful and broken world as much in need of redemption today as it was on the day of that first happy fault, that tragedy of Eden. What is left when we remove the “signs and wonders” and the weirdness of our faith are simply anemic moral opinions to which, of course, everybody nods in agreement, but which once we walk out the door mean nothing. In the end, having tamed our exotic faith, we have even made our morality unconvincing, unbelievable, and unpersuasive. And so, a new and strident paganism holds sway even among many of us, all because our Christianity has become unrecognizable.
Now I bring all this up because one, I’ve been told to speak the truth. And also because of the gospel we’ve just heard. It’s the story of the Twelve “discussing among themselves…who was the greatest.” Of course, Jesus calls them out, corrects them, and sets a little child in their midst as an example for them to follow.[9] It’s a beautiful story, one that still speaks to us. I’ve preached upon it many times. But this is precisely the sort of story that gets whittled down into some little moral with about as much persuasive power as a fortune cookie. Reduced to some sort of thin exhortation to humility and service, the story serves as a form of moral and spiritual entertainment which ultimately does little to change us. That is, it becomes a mere moral suggestion at which we smile and nod, but in which there is no compelling power, no supernatural persuasion. The message simply becomes ineffective; it becomes “religious” talk. The disciples—if you read Mark’s gospel all the way through—never got it. There’s no evidence they were ever convinced that whoever wished to be first should be last. Why actually should you be humble? That actually is a very dangerous bit of advice. It sounds good, but you’ve got to survive, keep your job, get ahead in life, not get trampled. Being humble without a supernatural reason is not a smart thing to do.
But that’s precisely the reason for the disciples’ ignorance. They didn’t understand why Jesus was telling them to take the lowest place, to be like a child. That’s what is so important about the first part of the passage we heard. Jesus predicts his death and even his resurrection, but Mark tells us they didn’t understand what he was talking about; and what is more, they didn’t even want to understand—“they were afraid to question him,” it says.[10] And so they didn’t have a clue about why Jesus told them to be humble. They had no notion of the resurrection and how it trivializes death and every worldly power. They didn’t understand that, nor did they even want to understand it. And so they didn’t get it. They didn’t know why they should’ve embraced humility and the lowly weak form of the servant, ignorant of the power of the crucified. And that’s precisely what we preachers do when we try to tame the gospel on your behalf, when we try to be “practical.” We give you a morality that fails to persuade because we’ve taken away theology and the supernatural, the wild and exotic elements of Christianity. Asking you to be humble without telling you about the cross of Jesus is just stupid, and you’re right to ignore it. We preachers need to get better about preaching this wild gospel, this true faith, rather than some faint wispy processed imitation. There is a reason little of this is persuasive, and it’s because we’ve banished what makes all of this real.
Now—as I’m wrapping up—what does all this mean? Every year in RCIA when we begin to talk about morality, I tell everyone, “The Church knows why you disagree with her better than you do.” I say that intending to inspire a little bit of intellectual honesty and docility, of course, but also to suggest that behind the teachings of the Church, which you may not understand or enjoy, is likely a wisdom deeper than the ocean, certainly deeper than either you or I; and that if we want to have a true and actually valuable opinion, we would do well to open ourselves to that wisdom—that true, wild, theological wisdom and not any faint middle class imitation. We live in a Christian era—ironically so replete with resources—yet in which so many people, Catholic as well as Protestant, haven’t even the faintest grasp of basic creedal Christianity. We are reaping what we sow after a century of poor to horrible catechesis, after nearly a century of television. Yet folks are still strident in their opinions about what’s right and wrong, true and false; it’s amazing to behold such unsubstantiated confidence. The more I learn the humbler I’ve gotten; I don’t know how people come off so certain.
So, what does all this mean? Jesus tried to tell the disciples about his death and resurrection, but they didn’t want to know about it, and so they remained in ignorance. Saint Maximus the Confessor, that brilliant late father of the Church—he lost his tongue and his hand for the faith—he said once that he who knows the cross and the tomb knows the reasons of things.[11] The Church has a rather strange, unpopular and to many an unbelievable gospel. And many—even so-called disciples—don’t want to know about it. Many preachers assume you don’t want to know about it. And so, we remain in ignorance and impotence, wallowing in a Christianity that isn’t really. It’s something else.
So, the questions for you and for me are simple. Do you want to know? Or do you want to keep this tamer faith, this decent and less disturbing faith? To be honest, I myself haven’t decided. I am caught between a very human fear and what I fear is the call of God. I fear what Amos the prophet said, that, “The lion has roared…who can but prophesy?”[12] Please, friends, listen to Jesus, or nothing else matters. But do you want to know? Amen.
[1] The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain, 38
[2] William Dalrymple, From the Holy Mountain, 4
[3] Ibid., 54-63
[4] Thomas of Celano, The First Life of St. Francis of Assisi 6.15
[5] See Robert Louis Wilken, The Christians as the Romans Saw Them. Also, Augustine, Letter 136 passim
[6] E.g., Exodus 7:3; Acts 2:22 passim
[7] Søren Kierkegaard, The Present Age, 47
[8] John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University, 28
[9] Mark 9:33-37
[10] Ibid. 9:30-32
[11] Maximus the Confessor, Chapters on Knowledge 1.66
[12] Amos 3:8
© 2021 Rev. Joshua J. Whitfield
