What in hell would Jesus Do? A deconstructive reflection on Holy Saturday

The post below continues the series of engagements with John D. Caputo's What Would Jesus Deconstruct?: The Good News of Postmodernism for the Church. Clark West engages the fourth chapter entitled "Jesus, the Theo-Poetics of the Kingdom, and Praxis."

Clark West is currently a Ph.D student in continental philosophy of religion and postmodern theology at Syracuse University. He began his wrestling with Derrida and religion over twenty years ago as an undergraduate when he stumbled into a class taught by Mark C. Taylor at Williams College. Remarkably, (to Taylor at least!) his errant ways led him back into the church, where he has served as an Episcopal parish priest for the last ten years.

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One thing that has struck me as I have studied with Jack Caputo for the past three years is how deeply Catholic a thinker he is. I mean this not only in the sense of his broadminded approach to the study of religion and theology, but in the more precise sense of his having been irreversibly marked by his early and intensive Roman Catholic upbringing. We often talk these days about lived religion and even theology being a kind of cultural-linguistic set of practices and disciplines that shape us in ways that are distinct and, hopefully, distinctively virtuous. Something that perhaps doesn’t come across in his more recent writing is how such ecclesial formation is something apart from which Professor Caputo’s life and work simply won’t, I think, make much sense. It is not simply that he is well-known among his students for his ability to quote the Scriptures (especially the Psalms, I have noticed), as well as Augustine, Aquinas and other Catholic luminaries by heart (and in Latin, no less!). Or how unmistakable is his deep and abiding love of the Church, which, as a good layman, he knows needs a heavy dose of challenge and resistance if its priests and prelates are not to lay hold of the very kinds of power which caused that gall-durned Reformation to happen in the first place!

Rather more important than these marks (wounds?) which an upbringing in the Catholic Church and its educational institutions have left on Jack, is, it seems to me, the way in which Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, through the liturgical drama of the church year and the regular celebration of the Eucharist and the sacraments, have shaped his own passionate affirmations of the chief theological virtues of faith, hope, and  love, all of which are directed properly toward both God and neighbor. These three virtues are ever-present in Jack’s thinking, and when we think of ‘the event’ I think we must acknowledge these very virtues as somewhat privileged instantiations. This means, of course, that the event should not be misunderstood as a once in a lifetime showstopper, but rather as the very shaping of a life lived in responsible attunement to the call of the neighbor, the call of God.

This reading of Jack as a deeply ecclesial and even liturgical thinker, I should say, is not one that is obvious, and I am not sure if Jack will approve of it (it is certainly not all of who he is as a thinker, thank heaven!). In some sense, such formation lies below the surface of his texts, which have moved away from the classical Catholic terrain of Aquinas and Meister Eckhart, through the complicated religious heritage of Heidegger, to reside, of late, mostly with secular, even atheistic French intellectuals like Derrida and Deleuze.

Yet from time to time, these formative influences rise to the surface, and when they do, I for one sit up and pay attention, for my sense is that they tap into deep passions and formative wrestlings Jack has had and continues to have with the tradition, places from which to grasp what is at the heart of his theological vision. One such surface ripple comes in Chapter 4 of his new book, What Would Jesus Deconstruct?, a chapter devoted to the question of what is unique to Jesus, when he writes, on pp. 82-3, that ‘to catch the sense of the life and death of Jesus, my advice is to linger in that moment—on Holy Saturday—and not to rush too quickly to Easter Sunday triumphalism.”

Since I read this line some time ago, and even before, I have so lingered, and in my remaining remarks, I would like to offer my own sense of what may be ‘stirring’ in this gesture toward that day in the liturgical year which, though often neglected, is deeply significant for the theology of many contemporary Christian thinkers, Balthasar being the most prominent.

One way to begin to think Holy Saturday is to ask, as Caputo has in this book, though with a slight tense change: On Holy Saturday, what did Jesus do? One answer, the traditional one, is that he descended to the dead, to hell, in triumphant glory to break down the door of Hades, liberate the patriarchs imprisoned in the limbo of the fathers, and parade his glory before the anguished faces of those condemned eternally to hell for their rejection of his now triumphant kenosis. But this is hardly the image one would expect Caputo, committed as he is to the weakness of God, to call forth!

Thankfully, it is not the only one. Balthasar offers a dramatically different picture, one of an utterly passive, weak Jesus, utterly given over to death, to the isolation and sufferings of hell, in absolute solidarity with the dead. Christ descended to hell not to liberate the righteous (Abraham and the patriarchs, on some readings), not in triumph, not to gloat at the damned(!), but in fulfillment of his kenotic love for humanity, a love that would stop at nothing to reach humans mired in injustice, human sin and despair. Anticipating the inexplicable human desire to flee God’s presence, Jesus’s descent, according to Balthasar, who here quotes Adrienne von Speyr, “leads the way to hell, and the sinner thus has him ‘in front of him and must go toward him. Thus the sinner can move toward God, albeit unawares or reluctantly.’” By entering hell in solidarity with sinful humanity, Jesus ensures that our own attempts to flee God and ourselves in despair (we might think here of Kierkegaard’s inclosing reserve) are met with the remarkable presence of “Another, who stands beside him, equally timelessly, and calls into question his apparent, pretended inaccessibility.” On Holy Saturday, in the midst of the church’s greatest confusion, despair, and self-doubt, Jesus reveals himself as the one abiding with us in our very dis-integration, death, and fear of utter abandonment.

This last image, of the utter chaos of Holy Saturday, when the disciples have scattered in fear and trembling, their hopes dashed and their dreams of controlling power evaporated, is one that is not without its small seed of hope. Von Speyr, remarkably, has suggested that there may well be a divine embrace of chaos, a risky gesture of hope on God’s part that things might yet work out, which is the kind of thing Caputo has advocated for in his chapter on creation in The Weakness of God. She writes of Holy Saturday that “God once fashioned the world from chaos, but man, through sin, imported a second chaos into it; now, when the Son dies for sinners, it is ‘as if God had let the world run backward into chaos, in order to refashion it from chaos at a deeper level.’”

It is a risky gesture of hope, frail and uncertain. Like Jesus’ last words to his mother and the beloved disciple from the cross, offering a new birth: “Behold, your son…Behold your mother.” On Holy Saturday, the church might have acted in anger, might have gathered armies to avenge their savior’s brutal and bloody death at the hands of terrorists. They might have turned on one another, or fled one another in self-inclosing guilt, anguish, and despair. It has happened. It will likely happen again. Jesus descends to hell in anticipation of the church’s own hellish anguish and its betrayals of Him, again and again, in a risky gesture of hope that we will see that this chaos is not without a solicitation to a new creation, a new birth, however fragile. He descends into each desperate heart and offers a garden of paradise and rich spices to the one dying in shame on hell’s cross. (See Jn. 19: 40-42, Sg. of Sgs 6: 1-3 and Lk. 23:43 for the sources of this image)

The great French poet Charles Péguy, such a tremendous influence on Balthasar, was a man who held to such risky hope against hope. A champion of the outcast and the poor, living in conditions that he thought were, quite simply, hell on earth, a socialist Roman Catholic who refused the sacraments out of devotion to his agnostic wife, a relentless critic of the clergy (Balthasar calls him Catholicism’s Kierkegaard) who was nevertheless a deep man of prayer, he befriended and was utterly loyal to the atheist Jew and Dreyfusard Bernard-Lazare, whom he said was “dripping with the word of God.’ (Péguy also wrote: “I side with the Jews, because with the Jews, I can be a Catholic in the way that I want; with Catholics, I couldn’t.”) His remarkable poem, Portal of the Mystery of Hope, which Balthasar reads as evoking the very essence of Holy Saturday, speaks of the spirit of the child as that which draws us out of our frantic compulsion to work and to assert our power and control even as we cannot deny our failures and our fractured sense of ourselves. Hope, Péguy writes, is a child, with ‘a gentle gaze that comes from paradise.’ As God hopes that we will not use our freedom to flee love, so we are called by the Christ-children who meet us on Holy Saturday to “sing songs that you never heard of and that they Invent as they go along, they sing all the time.” A child, too, speaks with greater intimacy than we can bear to hear of the sufferings of hell. In the face of this, she refuses to admit defeat, even attacking the justice of God’s hell with an even greater justice, that of love and hope.

Péguy is so bold as to say, and here Balthasar follows him, that God depends on us to keep alive the hope stirring in the Christ-child’s words, “Words which if it were not for us would lose their substance.” To find life again in words gone dead, Péguy once again asks us to listen to the vulnerable yet prophetic voice of the child: “These voices of paradise./ For their speech has a promise, a secret inward confidence./ As their young gaze has a promise, a secret inward promise,/ And their brows and their whole persons.”

I hope it will not be too bold for me to suggest that in this voice of Péguy, a voice of a child-like hope, I have sensed an inner kinship with Jack Caputo’s life and work, for which I am deeply grateful.

Comments

[anonymous]

"In some sense, such formation lies below the surface of his texts..."

There is nothing outside the text.

[Dave]

Just wanted to leave a comment to thank you for blogging this book. I received my copy last week, and I'm looking forward to reviewing these posts as I read it. I'll try to catch up before you're done so i can maybe leave more substantive comments. Til then: thanks!

[Bryne Lewis Allport]

Clark, thank you for inviting me to read your reflections. I found them very personal and moving. It is very easy to forget the heart when the thoughts are so engaging. A great way to approach the beginning of lent.

[Tim McGee]

Thanks Clark; that was very well written.
I understand the reasons for wanting to avoid a rush to the "Easter Sunday triumphalism," but without Easter Sunday, Holy Saturday offers no liberation. Christ came to "reach humans mired in injustice, human sin and despair," and to stand "in solidarity with sinful humanity," but if this is just a "risky gesture of hope" to make a "solicitation to a new creation...however fragile," then that seems a fall tragically short of the liberation from sin and oppression and gift of eternal life that Scripture proclaims. I'm not saying we should abandon a "Holy Saturday" spirituality at all, but only that the theology that sustains such a spirituality is one of liberation. To put it differently, it is only in light of the resurrection that the possibility arises to inhabit Christ's crucified flesh; and this possibility brings liberation precisely because Christ defeated the powers of sin, violence, and death.

You might be interested in J. Kameron Carter's essay on race and Evangelical theology in the Cambridge Companion to Evangelical theology. He uses Harriet Jacobs' slave narrative as a way of accessing a spirituality of Holy Saturday that overturns the "necropolitics" of modernity.

[Clark West]

Tim, thank you for your reflections, and for your reference to Professor Carter's essay, which is quite powerful, and I think quite close in spirit to what Caputo is saying. Yes, I am with you, liberation is crucial! I think I did not say that clearly or strongly enough.

When Carter writes "To live in the resurrection means not moving past the reality of living in Christ in his state of being dead" (192) I am in entire agreement. Carter's critique of american evangelical 'triumphalism' (Carter's phrase) is what I too am concerned with and a good part of what Caputo is critiquing in his book. I was struck with Carter's concluding his piece with this:

“The rush to the resurrection in evangelical belief, and perhaps in theological orientations that are not of American evangelical vintage though they too claim Christian orthodoxy, is often not ‘radically orthodox’ at all. Rather, it betrays a triumphalist passage beyond, and thus a violent overcoming of the world’s wounded flesh" (193)

That, I think, is exactly what Caputo means when he says we should avoid the 'rush to Easter Sunday triumphalism'. This is not to say we deny Easter, but that it it only by a genuine theo-political descent into the all too common experiences of Holy Saturday (Jacobs' description of her 7 year near solitary confinement is a potent 'repetition' of this descent) that we are able to 'live in the resurrection."

Thank you, Tim, for pointing me to Carter's work, which I was unaware of. Some years ago I took a number of courses in Black Theology (with Dwight Hopkins at the University of Chicago) and I really appreciated a renewed engagement with that remarkable tradition of liberation theology, which has deeply informed my own spiritual and theological trajectory.

Yours in hope,
Clark

[Tim McGee]

Clark,
Dr. Carter has a forthcoming book you might be interested in, called, "Race: a theological account," in which he traces the connection between modernity and racism, specifically as it is articulated around the question of Jesus' Jewish identity, and then tries to push Black theological thought to reflect on how racism is precisely a theological problem. He makes some gestures towards this argument on an article accessible at findarticles.com, "Redeeming Whiteness."

I read his paper on Evangelicalism shortly after I finished David Bentley Hart's book (Carter studied at Virginia with Milbank and Hart). It was a helpful and needed correction. The idea that living in Christ's resurrection now implies participating in his state of being dead is certainly, well, difficult to work out. But so is a triumphal procession of the cross.

One of the keys, I think, is that we have to follow Jacobs (and Carter) and maintain that this is no mere imitation or symbolic gesture but a recapitulation of--by way of a participation in--Christ's Jewish flesh. The concrete question is, then, how are we brought into the resurrection power of Christ's broken body?

Blessings,
Tim McGee

[Willy]

"He is risen"...eh?!

[Clark West]

Tim, Thank you again for the heads up on Carter's new book. I look forward to reading it. I like your way of putting your concern: the concrete question is how participation in the broken flesh of Christ can be liberative, rather than, say, a wallowing in suffering? I have some thoughts based on my years of pastoral experience, but I would love to hear what your own response to this concern would be. What do you think?

In hope,
Clark

[Tim McGee]

One direction we have to take the question is about what we have to leave in order to be brought into Christ's flesh. To be brought into Christ's broken, Jewish flesh entails stepping out of other orderings of bodies. Carter raises the question about what it would mean to be baptized out of whiteness. I think that is a powerful question, but one which I don't have a good answer to yet. I also wrestle with some of the economic aspects of it, and enjoy conversations with friends in intentional communities on that topic.

Recently, I reread Julian of Norwich's Revelations of Divine Love, and was amazed at how she brought sickness and illness into the very center of our participation in Christ. I find that, at least in the small group I lead, it's such a struggle to get people to see their whole lives as an effort to recapitulate Christ, and thus to abandon their lives, their sense of rights and entitlement--to count it all as a loss--in order to embody Christ.

[Clark West]

It is hard, Tim, you are so right, for us to let go to the false idols to which we desperately cling. I struggle on a daily basis, and always will, I suspect.

One of the reasons I respond so positively to some of Balthasar's and Von Speyr's Holy Saturday theology is because they teach me not to lose hope when I jump on the very train that is leading me away from God, away from others, and toward my hellish self (as one college prof said to me, we are 'selfish shellfish'--seeking to hide ourselves away where we can finally be all alone with someone who's finally got it right---me!). When Von Speyr writes that Christ's descent to hell means that this idolatrous fleeing from God has been anticipated by God, and that "the sinner can move toward God, albeit unawares or reluctantly"--well, that resonates so much that it makes me laugh out loud. How many times have I run away, straight into the arms of a loving God? (Psalm 139, at least on one reading of it, articulates how this can be frustrating as well as liberative--Won't God ever let me be!) I've lost count, so I don't despair when I see a friend, a foe, or an unfortunate clinging for dear life to 'death-bound subjectivity'.

God is just around the corner, down the hill and in the pit, and often its a matter of waiting patiently, not fleeing the impending death of myself or of my beloved. Sometimes, I don't even say a word, but try desperately to listen, breathe, pray. That may be a trial for me, and it has been, but I have encountered God's grace, however mysteriously and in secret, even in the final hours of night. And for me, receiving that is indeed, as you say, a struggle, a wrestling with the angel and a dying to myself. It's also been my deepest joy.

Yours hoping,
Clark