of reminds me of a new book, Religion for Atheists.12 Alain de Botton wrote it, a Swiss-born now Englishman and self-proclaimed atheist. I’ll admit I haven’t read the book, but I did read the opinion piece he wrote for the Wall Street Journal13 and the book review Aengus Woods wrote for NPR.14
De Botton’s central thesis is that secular modernism has resulted in a loss of a sense of community, which he believes is something the great religions of the world managed to create very well. So he means, by his own admission and in his own words, to “steal” from religions the practices that create community. While leaving behind the belief systems that he finds absurd and that he assumes most people guided by common sense would also find absurd, de Botton would like to see a flowering of agape restaurants, for example, wherein people who are strangers might eat together so to become friends.15 Rich and poor, young and old, smart and simple, senator and janitor—all would be welcome, would sit shoulder to shoulder, and would feast.
Incidentally, this is quite a switch from what I’m used to hearing, that people want spirituality without all that religion. Here’s someone who wants all that religion but without the silly spirituality. I have to say it’s refreshing. I’ll admit it’s also irritating. De Botton is going to let common sense be the guide for building a commonly held sense of community.
But the problem, which the NPR book review points out very well, is that common sense isn’t so common. Everyone thinks they’ve got it, and that some other people might have it as well. “[Y]et most of us can usually identify large chunks of the population who conspicuously lack it,” writes Woods. “To make matters worse, in any projected breakdown of global common-sense distribution, we can’t even agree on which folk constitute the haves and [which] the have-nots. However, one thing is always certain: I myself possess it. Definitely. Absolutely. No question.”16
Woods continues, “This conundrum of common sense is what makes a writer such as Alain de Botton so attractive and so infuriating. He is a master of the well-heeled, chatty and above all reasonable tone. . . . But scratch the veneer, and one quickly finds myriad competing common senses screaming to break free.”
Here is one of the competing common senses that scream in my mind to break free: when I gather with strangers at an agape meal: whose voice is authoritative? Whose sense and sensibility will we adopt in common? Alain de Botton’s—so reasonable, so calmly assertive? Well, then I’m not interested. I’ve met educated white guys with a calmly overdeveloped sense of reason. They make me want to run screaming to my nearest women’s studies class.
But about one thing he might be right, though not as sweepingly so as his sweeping statement suggests. He writes, “Insofar as modern society ever promises us access to a community, it is one centered on the worship of professional success. We sense that we are brushing up against its gates when the first question we are asked at a party is ‘What do you do?,’ our answer to which will determine whether we are warmly welcomed or conclusively abandoned.”17 And this reminds me of what the disciples were arguing about as they walked along the way.
It’s surprising that they fall into this argument, isn’t it? An argument over greatness, over what is greatness and who among them will be deemed greatest—that this is where their conversation goes is surprising given that what comes before is Jesus teaching them about his own suffering and death. “The Son of Man is to be betrayed into human hands,” or more accurately translated, “is to be handed over, and the humans will kill him, and three days after being killed, he will rise again.”
This is one of three times that Jesus mentions his fate on the cross. Sometimes it’s said that he foretells it—his own crucifixion. This time it’s said that he teaches it. It’s a distinction that I’ll now perhaps make too much of. To foretell it is to tell me about something that’s to happen; to teach it is to tell me about something that I should try to do as well. As a follower of Christ, as a disciple to be disciplined in the way of Christ, I should live a cruciform life; I should form my living in the shape of the cross—self-giving, self-emptying.
And it is a discipline. It is something that needs to be taught to me, that I need reminding of and practice in—because it isn’t the human’s natural predisposition, or at least not the human’s only natural predisposition. We like power, and the power to be found in vulnerability is a little counterintuitive. We like glory, and the glory to be found in giving love is not as self-evident as the glory to be found in wearing pretty clothes, or living in a fancy home where you can throw parties that everyone wants an invitation to, or holding a job that pays you millions of dollars and where you get to employ lots of people and fire a few too.
The bitter envy, the selfish ambition that James mentions in this open letter—these are so common! It might not be so, as James writes, that we want something and do not have it, so we commit murder. It might not even be so that we desire something and cannot attain it and so we engage in disputes and conflicts. No, the reactions to such feelings might not be ours in such extreme. But certainly these feelings, so familiar to me, are familiar to each of us; and certainly they do pose a threat to our relating, to our participating in community. Otherwise, why write an open letter? If envy, if ambition, if competition, weren’t so commonly at work within us, if these are evils that afflict only a couple of people, then why not just write that one guy who has this thing called envy that seems to spoil his relationships; otherwise, why not just write that one girl who is out of the norm because of her ambition?
The disciples didn’t understand the teaching. They didn’t understand what Jesus was saying, and I can relate. Every time I’m to preach on one of these occasions when Jesus has spoken of what awaits him—something I’m to do a lot, since three times in the three synoptic Gospels he speaks of his own coming suffering, which means that three times a year outside of Holy Week the cross is there for us to wrestle with again—my initial thought is, “Oh, I’ve done this before; I’ll whip this sermon out.” But then I sit with the text, and with the formula to which it testifies—that the cross is God’s revelation of good news for us, that the Crucifixion is made a means of God’s grace, God’s amazing grace—and I realize that once again I don’t get it, that I need to start from scratch and figure it out anew. Why is the Crucifixion good news? Why does the cross save? How and why and from what does it save us?
The cross is good news because it means humans even at our worst are little match for God’s goodness—God’s love, God’s forgiveness, God’s peace. The cross is good news because it reveals that God’s glory is in weakness, God’s strength is in vulnerability, God’s might is in self-giving, God’s victory is in self-emptying, and God’s Christ is that guy—not some superstar but just some guy, some gentle, forceful, regular, exceptional guy for whom there is no place in this world of powers and principalities and death-dealing dynamics and might-makes-right, and so who must be expelled from it, yet only to return and to say for starters not this, “I’m back, and I’m pissed, and you’re gonna get yours,” but this, “Peace be with you.” And the Crucifixion saves because it reveals to us humans the power dynamics to which we are enthralled, a revelation that in turn gives us some measure of self-understanding and therefore hope for stepping out of such a downward spiraling. The Crucifixion saves because it lays bare the lie by which we largely live, that violence can and will save us from violence, which in turn gives us some measure of unblindess and unforgetting and therefore hope of ending cycles of violence. Finally, the Crucifixion saves because in it and through it and in spite of it, God has done something—something wonderful, something new (behold!), something miraculous—that plants in the earth a seed of peace, a seed of hope, a seed by which God’s Kingdom will grow even here.
