The Church of the Holy SepulchreJerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre is a place to inspire ambivalent feelings. First there’s the cognitive dissonance of approaching the physical location on planet Earth wherein our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ purchased our salvation at the cost of his own blood, while being assailed on all sides by hawkers of religious merch in what feels like the world’s oldest tourist trap. Then there’s the fact that this very church is the one that gave rise to the expression “the status quo.” That’s right: it’s not bourgeois complicity with the forces of late capitalism that gave us the status quo, but the bickering inability of Christians to share. A nasty squabble during—when else?—Holy Week in the year 1757 provoked Sultan Osman III of the Ottoman empire to freeze in time all the disputed claims on this church (and a number of other such sites) to force all the Christians to play nice with each other. The term status quo got applied to the arrangement in 1878. To this day, a Muslim holds the key to the church and unlocks it for the sacred rites of the Armenian Orthodox, Coptic Orthodox, Greek Orthodox, Syrian Orthodox, and Roman Catholic churches. (Who says Protestants have a monopoly on the church-dividing quarrel?) A little more comically, under the same status quo regulations, a five-rung wooden ladder has been leaning against the side of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre since at least 1728. Twenty-nine years was already a pretty long run for an immovable ladder, but with the sultan’s decision in 1757, its fate was sealed. The ladder is there even now, looking forward to its three hundredth birthday. But of all the things about the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to inspire ambivalence, to me the most ambivalent of all is its name. Maybe it’s not surprising that a disputed church in a disputed city would focus on the tomb part, the death and dying and burial part. The name of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre captures all too well an ecclesiology of the Holy Sepulchre. But still. If you actually believe the gospel message—as presumably the lion’s share of the worshipers at this church do, whether locals or tourists—then there’s something way more important about the site of this church than the fact that Jesus was buried there. Namely, the fact that Jesus was raised from the dead there! Who cares about the tomb? For the first three hundred years, Christians didn’t. One of the most striking testimonies to the truth of the resurrection is the fact that no cult sprang up around Jesus’ burial site. It didn’t matter, because the tomb was empty. Jesus got up and walked out. Even the most skeptical critics of Christianity are at a loss to explain this historically unprecedented disinterest in a religious founder’s tomb. It’s every bit as peculiar as the fact that a religion centering on a shamed, executed guru from the hinterlands took over the very empire that put him to death. It shouldn’t be called the Church of the Holy Sepulchre at all. It should be called the Church of the Resurrection. The Ecclesiology of the Holy SepulchreIt’s a little too easy, though, to get snide about monks descending into fisticuffs on Good Friday. The truth is this: life imitates doctrine. The so-called Church of the Holy Sepulchre tells all of us Christians a lot more than we’d care to know about our operational ecclesiology of death. At first glance, nothing could seem more right or fitting. We must die to ourselves. We must abandon our self-seeking ways and sacrifice everything to the good of the neighbor. We must decrease that they might increase. After all, isn’t this the way of the cross? Jesus died, not just randomly or uselessly, but for us and for our salvation. The New Testament itself points us in this direction. “Greater love has no one than this,
that someone lay down his life for his friends.”
—John 15:13 “I have been crucified with Christ.
It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.
And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God,
who loved me and gave himself for me.”
—Galatians 2:20 “You were ransomed from the futile ways inherited
from your forefathers,
not with perishable things such as silver or gold,
but with the precious blood of Christ,
like that of a lamb without blemish or spot.”
—I Peter 1:18–19 “Then Jesus told his disciples,
‘If anyone would come after me,
let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.
For whoever would save his life will lose it,
but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.’”
—Matthew 16:24–25 “For while we were still weak,
at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.
For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—
though perhaps for a good person
one would dare even to die—
but God shows his love for us in that
while we were still sinners,
Christ died for us.”
—Romans 5:6–8 This is the goal of the cross-shaped life: to let go of our own petty selves, to ask nothing in return, to give with no hope of receiving. The opposite of selfish is selfless. We must annihilate ourselves to become faithful bearers of the cross. To use the popular term for the ethic of selflessness, we must become altruistic. It all sounds unimpeachably ethical. It is, in fact, skúbalon: koinē Greek for “bullshit.” (Don’t blame me for the scatological language, blame St. Paul—just take a look at Philippians 3:8. You might also check out I Corinthians 4:13. But I digress.) Altruism is a sneaky charade of the Christian life. It’s a faith-killer and a church-wrecker and a soul-destroyer. But don’t take my word for it. To unmask the naked truth of human ethical motivation, consult a French existentialist. Or better yet, a pas à deux. Moral QuarantineFor reasons too obvious to state, Albert Camus’s novel The Plague has returned to the bestseller list in the past year. It’s uncannily prescient in its description of personal and group reactions to lockdown, as well as cascading misjudgments on the part of leadership regarding both fact and policy. But the most striking feature about it is what a lousy topic for a novel an epidemic is. A plague is a blunt instrument, arising out of nowhere and striking out at random. It defies the cause-and-effect logic that lies at the heart of narrative. Yet that was precisely its appeal to Camus, whose obsession was the human dilemma of demanding meaning out of a meaningless universe. While other philosophers leaned into the void and took the moral license that absurdity gave them, Camus fought back. He said: be human, be individual, be honest, be kind—even though the universe doesn’t give a damn. Even though the only way to fight the plague is to sacrifice all the things that make us human at all: our loves, our leisures, our bodily connectedness, our compulsive need to talk. When the plague strikes, it’s precisely our humanness that lures us into death’s path. In the novel Dr. Rieux, a physician who runs himself ragged treating the escalating number of patients within the locked Algerian city of Oran, exemplifies Camus’s ideal of breathtaking steadfastness in the face of the absurd. He is set in direct contrast to Father Paneloux, a Jesuit with inadequate pastoral experience who immediately invokes his right to interpret the plague. Paneloux proclaims from the pulpit, without batting an eyelash, “For plague is the flail of God and the world His threshing-floor, and implacably He will thresh out His harvest until the wheat is separated from the chaff.” For his part, Rieux remarks, “I’ve seen too much of hospitals to relish any idea of collective punishment.” The thing is, while Rieux rejects Paneloux’s conclusions, he refuses to draw any conclusions of his own, either. He gives medical advice only (largely ignored) but never presumes to tell anyone else what to do, not even when they want him to. He is no grandstanding “new atheist” bristling with the fundamentalism of unbelief. He’s just one very tired doctor who won’t give up. Why not? a certain Tarrou asks him. “Why do you yourself show such devotion, considering you don’t believe in God?” Here Rieux confesses his modest creed: objection to reality. To become a doctor was initially a thoughtless choice, but now Rieux has found meaning in his vocation, which is “fighting against creation as he found it.” As he tells Tarrou, “I was outraged by the whole scheme of things.” Tarrou objects, “But your victories will never be lasting.” Rieux: “Yes, I know that. But it’s no reason for giving up the struggle.” It’s only when Dr. Rieux and Father Paneloux together observe the agonizing death of a child—ironically prolonged by Rieux’s test of a drug that was supposed to help but did the exact opposite—that the Jesuit abandons his former certainty. He can no longer say that the plague is a divine punishment, not if it falls on a harmless little boy. In reaction to the horror he’s witnessed, Paneloux embraces his own kind of absurdist fatalism, though he continues to place it under the guise of faith. The second time he mounts the pulpit, Paneloux preaches a hidden, cruel, inscrutable God, whose love “is a hard love. It demands total self-surrender, disdain of our human personality. And yet it alone can reconcile us to suffering and the deaths of children, it alone can justify them, since we cannot understand them, and we can only make God’s will ours. That is the hard lesson I would share with you today. That is the faith, cruel in men’s eyes, and crucial in God’s, which we must ever strive to compass.” In this way, Camus makes something constructive out of the priest’s otherwise indefensible faith, by bringing it under the umbrella of the absurd. But the author’s admiration is greater for the aforementioned Tarrou, whose own devotion to the beplagued gets explained only toward the end of the novel. We learn that Tarrou, revolted by the death penalty, got tangled up in revolutionary activity designed to put a stop to it—and, in the process, committed violence against those who stood in the way of the goal. Tarrou perceived the contradiction only once his own hands were dirty. For Tarrou, the localized bubonic plague of Oran has become a metaphor of the human condition. “I know positively, yes, Rieux, I can say I know the world inside out, as you may see, that each of us has the plague within him; no one, no one on earth is free from it. And I know, too, that we must keep endless watch on ourselves lest in a careless moment we breathe in somebody’s face and fasten the infection on him. What’s natural is the microbe. All the rest, health, integrity, purity (if you like), is a product of the human will, of a vigilance that must never falter. The good man, the man who infects hardly anyone, is the man who has the fewest lapses of attention. And it needs tremendous willpower, a never ending tension of the mind, to avoid such lapses. Yes, Rieux, it’s a wearying business, being plague-stricken. But it’s still more wearying to refuse to be it. That’s why everybody in the world today looks so tired; everyone is more or less sick of plague. But that is also why some of us, those who want to get the plague out of their systems, feel such desperate weariness, a weariness from which nothing remains to set us free except death.” Tarrou doesn’t spell it out in so many words, but the cure is clear: quarantine. The microcosm of moral plague is solved by the same means as the macrocosm of biological plague. Harm to others can be avoided only by pulling back, keeping apart, breaking bonds, remaining alone. To be entangled with others is to infect them unto death—along with oneself. Later Tarrou remarks to Dr. Rieux that “what interests me is learning how to become a saint.” Rieux raises the obvious objection that Tarrou doesn’t believe in God, which Tarrou admits to be an obstacle. But he gets his martyrological wish anyway: shortly after the town is released from lockdown, Tarrou dies of the plague anyway. Even in illness he manages to set himself apart from wider human kinship. He certainly won’t be infecting anyone else now. Hell Is Other People…Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre were not especially fond of each other, though you don’t get the impression that “fondness” was a distinguishing feature of either man in any event. But one notion of Camus’s that Sartre could probably get behind was the benefit of quarantine. What better excuse to get away from undesirable company? Sartre’s longing for getaway, however, was not to exemplify human dignity and decency in the face of absurdity. Getaway’s appeal was to escape the clutches of those who make human dignity and decency impossible. In other words… other people. All of them. In his notorious play “No Exit,” Sartre depicts three people breathing plague on one another. Unfortunately, death can’t put them out of their misery, because they’re already dead, already in hell. Three seems to be the magic number for toxic humanity, just as it is for perichoretic divinity. Three makes for constantly shifting alliances, the impossibility of intimacy apart from prying eyes, jealousy and noise and constant imbalance. Of course, it doesn’t help that the three residents of hell starring in Sartre’s play don’t exactly possess the necessary virtues to foster a beloved community. Garcin is a philanderer who flaunted his misdeeds in front of his wife but proved to be such a coward that he was executed by firing squad for desertion from his army unit. Inèz seduced her cousin’s wife, resulting in a chain reaction of three suicides, Inèz’s the third and final. Estelle drowned the child of an affair, prompting the baby’s father to suicide as well. Charming company for eternity, indeed. Inèz cops to their true situation long before the other two. All of them expected devils, pitchforks, and flames; what they got instead was a comfortable sitting room—and each other. Not much badinage later, Inèz figures it out: “Each of us will act as torturer of the two others.” Despite a pact to keep quiet and not bug one another, they all prove incapable of doing a single good turn for the sake of another. Estelle confesses, “I never could bear the idea of anyone’s expecting something from me. It always made me want to do just the opposite.” But at the same time, she can’t even know herself unless she’s being admired by a vital man, which is why she tries to seduce Garcin—who alternately falls for her and is revulsed by her: “You’re soft and slimy… Like an octopus. Like a quagmire.” Inèz, for her part, has the unattractive advantage of brutal self-knowledge. “When I say I’m cruel, I mean I can’t get on without making people suffer. Like a live coal. A live coal in others’ hearts. When I’m alone I flicker out.” Which is why Inèz won’t allow Garcin’s self-delusions to stand. He insists that “when I chose the hardest path, I made my choice deliberately. A man is what he wills himself to be”—the existentialist credo if ever there was one. The only problem, he claims, is he died too soon to prove himself. Inèz doesn’t buy it. “One always dies too soon—or too late. And yet one’s whole life is complete at that moment, with a line drawn neatly under it, ready for the summing up. You are—your life, and nothing else.” Who needs final judgment? Life itself is the judgment. And it is harsh. By the time the play ends, the three damned have only just begun to torment one another. There’s no exit, not through the door they entered, not even through another casual murder. Estelle stabs Inèz but to no avail: she’s already dead! They are stuck with each other. Garcin sums it up in the famous final lines of the play. “So this is hell. I’d never have believed it. You remember all we were told about the torture-chambers, the fire and brimstone, the ‘burning marl.’ Old wives’ tales! There’s no need for red-hot pokers. Hell is—other people!” Under the circumstances, no one could disagree. None of these three is going to start the long hard slog of sanctification in the company of the other two. Quarantine would seem to be the only moral cure. Together, they just breathe more and more plague in each other’s faces. Yet even Garcin momentarily glimpses an alternate trajectory. Early in the play he observes to his two hellmates, “Alone, none of us can save himself or herself; we’re linked together inextricably.” Hell is other people. Unfortunately, so is heaven. …Which Is Why Christ Descended into HellThe strangest clause in the Apostles’ Creed is also the scripturally least supported clause, but we can hardly blame the Roman Christians way back when for working it in to their baptismal confession of faith. The tantalizing glimpses in I Peter about how Christ “descended into hell” point to a hope beyond hope. First we have the assertion in I Peter 3:18–20a that “Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit, in which he went and proclaimed to the spirits in prison, because they formerly did not obey…” A little ambiguous, you say? “Spirits in prison” could be glossed a lot of different ways! Yes, agreed. But in the next chapter we drill down deeper: “For this is why the gospel was preached even to those who are dead, that though judged in the flesh the way people are, they might live in the spirit the way God does” (I Peter 4:6). Even Garcin might get behind a promise like that! Jesus’ descent into hell is both the startling reality of and an astounding metaphor for God’s ability to crack open impossible situations. The descent into hell is the release valve for those who were unlucky enough to have been born too early, for those whose earthly circumstances overmastered them, for those who consistently refused the grace offered them. But for Jesus himself, the descent into hell was a practice run for an even greater trial. Because which of these two takes greater love and courage: To abandon life after you’ve been abandoned by your friends, enemies, religious leaders, political authorities, and even God? Or to return to life in the company of the very friends, enemies, religious leaders, political authorities, and God who abandoned you? It’s a miracle that Christ descended into hell. It’s a miracle the Christ rose again from the dead. And it’s every bit as much a miracle that Christ walked right back into the midst of the other people who comprised his own personal hell. You see it in each and every Gospel account. Even the spartan original ending of Mark (16:1–8), which doesn’t give us a direct glimpse of Jesus risen, does tell us where to find him. “But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going before you to Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you” (16:7). The final promise to be paid off in the resurrection is a reunion of the estranged. Matthew reiterates Mark’s account but with a twist of his own. He depicts the actual encounter on the mount of Galilee, which ought in every way to have been a joyful reunion. But even there, Jesus exposes himself to the risks of re-entering community: “And when they saw him they worshiped him, but some doubted” (28:17). Resurrection has not airlifted Jesus out of the vagaries of life among sinners, but delivered him right back into the heart of it. Yet he’s so determined to stick it out with them that his last words, the very last words of this Gospel, are: “And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (28:20). Luke alone gives us the story of the road to Emmaus, in which Jesus is not recognized by Cleopas and his companion. Nor did they understand a word Jesus said during his earthly ministry. Apparently even the risen-from-the-dead experience exasperation: “O foolish ones!” (24:25). Yet he proceeds to explain everything, again. When Jesus later appears to a larger crowd of disciples, he sticks his pierced and scarred limbs right in their faces: “Touch me, and see!” (24:39). This is not only the proof of his living body. It’s also a willingness to put his body back on the line in the presence of those who left him to be crucified. These are the very people he commissions to be his ambassadors throughout the world and recipients of his Spirit. Most poignant of all are the meetings in John’s final chapters. When he makes his appearance among the disciples behind locked doors, he offers peace, even while showing the hands and side they abandoned to death. But then he takes these frightened, hiding, lockdown disciples and puts an end to their moral and spiritual quarantine with his breath. He breathes on them. He infects them with his Spirit. There is no undoing this contagion, for him or for them. Death is no exit for anyone anymore. Some time later, Jesus reveals himself again to the disciples at the seashore. His self-revelation is not a one-and-done deal; he keeps coming back, waiting for them to return to him as fully has he has returned to them. This is where the most painfully fractured friendship of all is repaired. “Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these?” It’s a fair question, and although Peter is hurt to be asked three times in a row, what does he expect? He denied Jesus three times in a row. Jesus’ gift to Peter is the chance to right what he has wronged. And then the gift bursts out of the second dimension into the third: since Jesus loves Peter and Peter loves Jesus, now Peter also gets to love Jesus’ sheep—love them so much that he will undergo an analogous death to Jesus’. The Ecclesiology of the ResurrectionThere are lots of problems with “altruism,” including the inability of anyone to agree on a definition of it, much less whether it actually exists. (If you think ethicists are disputatious on this topic, you should see evolutionary biologists go at it.) But for the sake of the argument here, let’s suppose that altruism is a moral system in which the individual acts only for the good of the other, with no regard for the self, eschewing all returns and rewards because they sully the purity of the moral gift. That’s the usage in popular speech, anyway: doing anything you like or enjoy or benefit from is morally suspect. Only the dutiful execution of something you find distasteful purely out of regard for others achieves the lofty status of altruism, assumed to be the ideal. You could derive altruism out of the aforementioned passages on the cross. But that would be so much skúbalon. A Christian ethics based exclusively on self-sacrifice culminating in death might just result in the most self-absorbed moral system ever. (Nietzsche certainly thought so.) Because—the refusal of all returns and rewards is actually a refusal of the very others you thought yourself to be helping. You get to be great, you alone. You set everyone morally far beneath you with your gift. It’s the ultimate act of self-deception: narcissists masquerading as benefactors. And anyway, it’s not the whole biblical story, not by far. It was deliberately deceitful to quote Romans 5 up above, for example, and then stop short at the end of verse 8. (But hey, I’m no altruist, and the theological ends justified the rhetorical means). Paul actually continues: “Since, therefore, we have now been
justified by his blood,
much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God.
For if while we were enemies we were reconciled
to God by the death of his Son,
much more, now that we are reconciled,
shall we be saved by his life.
More than that, we also rejoice in God
through our Lord Jesus Christ,
through whom we have now received reconciliation.”
—Romans 5:9–11 Christ sacrificed himself to death for us—out of love—but the sequel is even more surprising: he lived again for us. He rose in order to be reconciled to the very ones who turned against him. He left the solitary stance of the noble martyr to reenter the company of the sinners who betrayed him. The resurrection is the bodily prerequisite and guarantee of eternal entanglement with one another. Forgiveness is its spiritual and social counterpart. Resurrection and forgiveness map onto one another, because together they form the condition for the possibility of the kingdom of God. Make no mistake: you can’t do resurrection alone. You can’t do forgiveness alone. You do them in company or not at all. No solo heroes or altruistic benefactors or selfless martyrs. No quarantine. No lockdown. Instead, the infection of the Holy Spirit drawing sinners into the company of Christ and one another until all are made well. “We’re linked together inextricably.” That’s the ecclesiology of the resurrection. The Church of the ResurrectionSpeaking of rhetorical trickiness… It turns out that, in Greek, the Church of Holy Sepulchre goes by another name in addition to this one. You guessed it: the Church of the Resurrection. Somebody, somewhere knew enough to shift attention away from the empty tomb and over to the risen and glorified community of forgiven sinners! And with that, we get a glimpse of a rare bird indeed: an ecclesiology that actually mirrors soteriology. If Christ died and rose again for sinners (soteriology), then the church is the place where those sinners are gathered to be put to death and raised again with Christ (ecclesiology). Such a church is a sepulchre for self-improvement projects, oneupsmanship, zero-sum competition, ideological purity, circling the wagons, recruitment for activism, and any other human endeavor that despises sinners. But for those who are already dead and entombed, the church of the resurrection is where the first dawning ray of new life pierces a dark and dreary place. There Jesus responds to our Easter alleluias with an acclamation of his own: Church is risen! Church is risen indeed. Alleluia!
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