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The Rabbi’s Heartbeat
The evil operative within us resides in relentless self-absorption, in what Moore calls “our inescapable narcissism of consciousness.” Therein lies the source of our cruelty, possessiveness, jealousy, and every species of malice. If we gloss over our selfishness and rationalize the evil within us, we can only pretend we are sinners and therefore only pretend we have been forgiven. A sham spirituality of pseudo-repentance and pseudo-bliss eventually fashions what modern psychiatry calls a borderline personality, in which appearances make up for reality. Those who stop short of evil in themselves will never know what love is about. Unless and until we face our sanctimonious viciousness, we cannot grasp the meaning of the reconciliation Christ affected on Calvary’s hill. Humility, recovering alcoholics like to say, is stark raving honesty. Recovery from the disease cannot be initiated until the deadly denial dwelling in the subterranean personality of the drunk is exposed and acknowledged. He or she must hit bottom, arrive at the moment of truth when the pain it takes to hang on to the bottle becomes much greater than the pain it takes to let go. Similarly, we cannot receive what the crucified Rabbi has to give unless we admit our plight and stretch out our hands until our arms ache… Through his passion and death Jesus carried away the essential sickness of the human heart and broke forever the deadly grip of hypocrisy on our souls. He has robbed our loneliness of its fatal power by traveling Himself to the far reaches of loneliness (“My God, my God, why have you deserted Me?”). He has understood our ignorance, weakness, and foolishness and granted pardon to us all (“Forgive them, Father, they do not know what they are doing”). He has made His pierced heart a safe place for every defeated cynic, hopeless sinner, and self loathing derelict across the bands of time. God reconciled all things, everything in heaven and everything on earth, when He made peace by His death on the cross (Colossians 1:20). The Cross reveals that Jesus has conquered sin and death and that nothing, absolutely nothing, can separate us from the love of Christ. Neither the imposter nor the Pharisee, neither the lack of awareness nor the lack of passion, neither the negative judgments of others nor the debased perception of ourselves, neither our scandalous past nor our uncertain future, neither the power struggles in the church nor the tensions in our marriage, nor fear, guilt, shame, self-hatred, nor even death can tear us away form the love of God, made visible in Jesus the Lord. Listening to the faint heartbeat of the dying Rabbi is a powerful stimulus to the recovery of passion. It is a sound like no other.
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“Shout with joy to God, all the earth! Sing to the glory of His name: offer him glory and praise!” ~Ps. 66:1 |
