God's Evolution - a meditation on Luke 23.42

The other day I was listening to the Taize song "Jesus, Remember Me." The lyrics are simply a repetition of Luke 23.42: Then he said, 'Jesus, remember me when you come in (into) your kingdom.' The "he" is one of the two men being crucified along with Christ. Tradition identifies his name as Dismas and in the Catholic tradition he is revered as a saint. (For those of you not familiar with the story, the two men being crucified next to Christ are both thieves. One of them, Gestas, mocks Christ while they are all three hanging on their crosses. Dismas, on the other hand, chastises Gestas for his harassment of Christ, proclaims that Christ is truly innocent, and then asks Jesus the favor given in Luke 23.42. Christ responds back to Dismas that he will indeed join him in his kingdom.)

It struck me that whenever I hear this passage, my mind usually stays focused on what is happening to Christ, and even the penitent thief's statement usually is a reminder of the faultlessness of Christ. I suppose this is from growing up in churches that emphasized the sinless nature of Christ as necessary for atonement. Anyway, I began to think about Dismas, the penitent thief in a new way. Even though the gospels list the two men crucified with Christ as criminals, we do not know the specific reason they were being executed. In Roman eyes, all three men, including Christ, were criminals. Dismas and Gestas could have been convicted of something very petty or very great. By modern standards, they could have all three been innocent or, at the least, not guilty of anything demanding execution.

I began thinking about the mental state in which the dialogue took place. (A little side note here - I am aware that one cannot take for granted that this exchange between Jesus and the thieves even took place. Certainly the author of Luke intended for his crucifixion narrative to provide a lesson for the early Christians. Recognizing this, I am attempting to put this very old lesson to new use. But back to the reflection.) Dismas is faced with not only the certainty of death, but the nearness of death. He knows that he is in his final hours and face to face with his end. Think about that - knowing that one's death - which remains in peoples lives often at the periphery of their thoughts, so distant that they often are oblivious to its certainty - is immanent.

Dismas is in the immediate presence of his death. He is faced with the inescapability of his death. Prior to this he may or may not of heard of Jesus of Nazareth. If he had, perhaps he had earlier on hoped for a miracle. But now, as he hangs from his own cross, there is no hope for a miracle. Christ cannot save him from this moment any more than Christ can save himself. If it is the case that he had never heard of Jesus, which is just as if even not more likely, he does not even have this hope to hang onto for a while before seeing it slip away.

What does he ask of Jesus? Remember me. He does not ask to be saved, only to be remembered. And what if this was a reciprocal request? Remember me, Jesus, as I will remember you, for here we are alone, dying a slow death, mentally grasping for hope and dignity as it all slips so quickly away. All we have in this movement is our sharing of it...our unity is in this destruction. There is no promise of anything after this, but let our final acts be the remembrance of each other as our mental faculties slowly slip away and we die.

This is, as I see it, an act of final desperation. Desperation not for salvation from destruction, but perhaps desperation for hope, even if it is only the hope of remaining human a bit longer, that the last thing should be something of worth. I read into Dismas' last words a persistence in being human, being that which defines our humanity from the rest of creation.

I think about these things primarily because I am convinced more and more that whatever God is, God must be revealed in all, in everything. And this means both destruction as well as creation, in death as well as in life. This is troublesome because it implies a "bi-polar" God of sorts. The God that is serendipitous creative movement is also serendipitous destructive movement. I feel that it is our place, precisely because of our distinctively human capabilities, to grasp onto and attempt to further the creative serendipitous side of God in order to become God's co-workers. God is, in this sense, evolving just as the universe and life is still evolving. We are on the forefront of that creative serendipitous movement. We are the tendrils reaching out, exploring new possibilities. It is in this sense, when I say that God is evolving, that I can better understand that God's kingdom, the kingdom proclaimed by Jesus of Nazareth, is in-breaking and yet still to come. Just as we are still working out our salvation "with fear and trembling" we must also remember that "it is God who is at work" in us (see Philippians 2.12-13). Our evolution is God's evolution. Our salvation is God's salvation.

Pondering "Holy" Destruction

First, some passages which are relevant to what I am thinking about these days.

“I have no words with which to portray the feelings of the heart when it receives this divine will in the guise of humiliation, poverty, annihilation…By just that which the senses lack is faith heightened, increased, and nourished; the less there is to human eyes, the more there is to the soul…Mary sees the Apostles fly, but she remains constant at the foot of the cross; she recognizes her Son in that face spat upon and bruised.”
- Jean-Pierre de Caussade

“God is not thought of as some being outside the world but rather as a particular form of creativity and ordering going on within the world, namely that serendipitous ordering which has given rise (among other things) to the evolution of life on planet Earth and the emergence of human beings, and which continues to sustain us and to move us toward a more profound humanization…And faith (or belief) in God will be interpreted essentially as commitment, in the face of the ultimate mystery of life, to this reality central to this particular vision of the world (rather than as assent to some quite dubious propositions about some cosmic person, as it so often is).”
- Gordon Kaufman

“Our falls into nothingness can be and must be trusted – we can learn to let ourselves fall, to let ourselves sink. Isn’t this what the seed does as it falls into the ground, eventually to sprout new life?”
- Matthew Fox

I’ve recently been reading Gordon Kaufman’s In Face of Mystery and also, at the suggestion of my spiritual director, Caussade’s Abandonment to Divine Providence. I am finding Caussade to be helpful but at the same time having some difficulty “translating” what he writes to better fit my personal understanding of God. I find myself agreeing with Kaufman’s working definition of “God.”

For a while now, I’ve been at peace with Fox’s elaboration on what he identifies as the via negativa – the path towards the divine through the negative aspects of existence such as pain, suffering, isolation, aloneness, destruction, and, ultimately, death. I have found myself benefiting from being able to view these things anew and, as is Fox’s intention, to be able to trust in these things. So, as I continue to construct my personal theology, Fox’s thoughts have been securely mortared into the hodge-podge structure that it is.

But here is the sticking point and the thing that has become my obsession lately. It is the immense amount of destruction that is integral to the universe. How does this fact correspond to or shape my idea of God? Like Kaufman, I believe that any theology, if it is to be of any use, needs to have as a conversation partner the findings of the empirical sciences. This is not to say that one has to be bound to the determinism or reductionism of the sciences, but that one cannot ignore the information they provide about the workings of the universe and ourselves. So, to restate the problem again, if God is, according to Kaufman, “the serendipitous movement which we discern in the cosmic and historical processes that have created human existence,” then what are we to make of all the destruction that has been part of this creative serendipitous movement? Let me make it clear that I am not concerned about the existence of destruction and death. I accept that they are necessary. But how does that necessity help modify this understanding of God. Specifically, I am concerned about the individual thing experiencing the necessary destruction.

If God is creative serendipitous movement, then does God somehow have to be found in the precise moment of destruction? Kaufman’s view, and he himself admits this, is found via reading back into cosmic and human history this movement. The problem is that this becomes a meta-utilitarian viewpoint in which the destructive presence in the cosmos is seen as beneficial precisely because it is viewed from the present. I suppose I could walk away at this point and say to myself, “O.K., I can trust this destructive presence because based on my looking back into the past and seeing the good that comes from it, I can rest knowing that any future destruction, including my own, will ultimately come to some good.” And that may be fine and workable. Nonetheless, I feel an inner urge to linger on this point and meditate upon it and explore it some more until I am fully satisfied.

What I hope to find is a way in which God is to be found in that precise instant of annihilation – that destructive moment. And I feel that it has to be something more than just a greater good coming from it in an event that occurs after the destruction. Let me give an example. If a hawk swoops down and grabs a sparrow and eats it, then obviously some benefit comes from it. The hawk is sustained to live for a while longer. But any redemptive act has to also be for the agent undergoing the suffering or destruction. There must be redemption for the sparrow. It cannot be only a posthumous benefit for something other than the victim. I am aware that certain process theologians address this issue by pointing to a redemption within God. But that only works if one accepts the process conception of God, which I am not 100% sold on. And this is not just an issue of theodicy. Rather than trying to justify God in the face of destruction, it is a search to see what implications destruction, so vital a presence, has for my always developing concept of God.