After Crucifixion. Craig Keen
If I held the opinion that Jesus’ attention to the poor in the gospel narratives is to be sublimated into a generic concern for other people (“aren’t we all poor in some sense?”), then I would have no problem at all. And on any but the heaviest and hardest days I would indeed say that all the students in all my classrooms are given before me by God to be served. However, as it turns out, there are in this present evil age men and women and children whose hunger is actual (if the word “actual” might for now be taken to gesture toward such a gnawing absence)—people like my mother and my father were, when they were hungry little children. To be poor is not to have a shortage of cash on hand, a paucity of consumer choices, a slow internet connection, unwieldy student or home loans, or too few toys. The poor are people, not especially good or bad, but more often than not ordinary people, whose life is being sucked out of them day in and day out, e.g., by the forces of what we so calmly describe as globalization. As long as I remember that God emptied the tomb of the crucified Jesus, as long as I remember that God made Adam out of the dust of the earth, as long as I remember that it is the body of Christ that is salvation, as long as I remember that the church is constituted by the work of the eating and drinking of the eucharist, as long as I remember that Jesus fed the hungry, as long as I remember that “the whole tenor of scripture” bears witness to God’s prevenient grace particularly for the poor—i.e., God’s preference for the poor—I cannot reduce them to one more item on a uniform list of those for whom we are to care. As long as I remember, it will follow, as surely as it follows that slaves are not greater than their masters (Matt 10:24–25), that we are to care for the poor in particular and above all. We are to care for the poor in particular and above all, because in the Jewish peasant, Jesus, God cares for them in particular and above all. This God’s grace is not an abstract “decision” to forego punishment for those who deserve punishment. This God’s grace is God’s movement out into the world to save it, i.e., to sanctify it. This grace of God is the Spirit of God, the Spirit that raised Jesus Christ from the dead. The Spirit here is explosive, holy life. She is the wind of a storm, the pounding current of a raging river. And God’s grace rushes particularly to the poor.113 We know that, because she rushed particularly to the poor man Jesus, laid out on a cold slab in a cold tomb. If we pray to enter into that grace, we pray that we will be carried on its current particularly to them, to people with names and faces, dirty, hungry faces, faces I know all too well. That is what I hear in Jesus’ call to the Rich Young Ruler, to Peter, and to me.
That, of course, means that they and I are to spend our resources directly for the poor. However, there is in Jesus’ command a specific question addressed to me and to people like me, a question that has specifically to do with the word-work of a theologian. Standing face to face with a poor man or woman or child, it seems so bloodless and distracted and insensitive, but I am a theologian and I am compelled to ask it right out loud: what does it signify for me, a theologian, a word-worker, to obey the call of Jesus to give to the poor?
In part it signifies that I am to hope for and remember the poor with my words. I am to give my thoughts away before people who are not hungry for the sake of those who are. I am to teach in the direction of the poor, unhanding my intellectual goods for them, calling my students to unhand their goods, and confessing my own unworthiness to take such words on my lips, praying that I, too, will hear the words I am given to say, that I will hear them and obey. But there is more to the call of Jesus than this. To turn to the poor in obedience to the command of Jesus is not to give them a hand up, to teach them to fish, to give them the business skills to begin the steady climb into the middle class. All that already trembles before the principalities and powers we call capitalism. To turn to the poor in obedience to the command of Jesus does not even require that one be other than poor. The poor, too, are called to the poor. And we—rich and poor alike—are called to stand in solidarity with them—without demanding that they cease being poor. Doing so is a means of grace not only for them, but particularly for us.114
Grace comes particularly where calculation has come to an end. And does anyone doubt that standing in solidarity with the poor without demanding that they cease being poor requires an act of trust, of hope, before an incalculable mystery? Not to go away grieving signifies that in the word-work I do I am to take up the task of Isaiah 6 and Mark 4, viz., to be situated like a surd in the pounding, clanging, beating, deafening din of that social-political-economic machine that makes people poor. It is to name the beast that devours them and with them to look it in the eye, unafraid. That is, for me to give my goods away to the poor is for me to face the freedom of the God who raised Jesus Christ from the grave, a freedom that does not need sound economic policies, that does not need the system of acquisition, private property, productivity, fixed and circulating capital, investment and return, commodification, supply schedules, derived demand, profit and loss, competition, division of labor, markets, wages, and debt. To give my goods away to the poor is among other things to bear witness to an economy of giving and forgiving, an economy of impropriety, an economy that remembers the hope of the resurrection of the Crucified. That is, to give my goods away to the poor is to live and speak and write before the mystery of God’s holy love, a love that comes as an unsettling holiness that will never be a line-item on an asset-management tally sheet.
Trinity, crucifixion/resurrection, church, the poor, i.e., Jesus, who loved the one he calls “Father” with his whole heart, soul, mind, and strength,115 and because of that would not maintain his personal integrity in the face of his neighbors116—this is the mystery I strain so hard to say, when I stand before a classroom full of the children of good people. My task, as a theologian, is to think it and say it again and again and again. That is what meta-noia quite literally signifies in particular in my particular case. My task is to think-after, in pursuit of, the way of God into the world, to think-after crucifixion. My task is to take whatever thoughts I can find and let them loose before a classroom or a reader, i.e., in the liturgy of the eucharist, the liturgy in which the broken body and shed blood of Jesus are manna, food that is to be eaten, not stockpiled.
It may be that one day Alzheimer’s Disease will have rotted away all of my thoughts and that there will be effectively nothing there that a professor might give and no professor there to give it. And yet I will not be alone in that place either. Among the wonders of the gospel is that Jesus is there as well—shining with the light of God’s glory. Still, as long as I have eyes to see, I am called on each new day to look for the small round things that God has placed on the face of the wilderness where I sojourn, to pick them up and eat them, to hold out in the freedom of grace the works they enliven me to do, and to say right out in public with the plagiarizing Wesley, “I come, Lord, to restore to thee what thou hast given; and I freely relinquish it, to enter again into my own nothingness. For what is the most perfect creature in heaven or earth in thy presence, but a void capable of being filled with thee and by thee; as the air, which is void and dark, is capable of being filled with the light of the sun, who withdraws it every day to restore it the next, there being nothing in the air that either appropriates this light or resists it? O give me the same facility of receiving and restoring thy grace and good works! I say, thine; for I acknowledge the root from which they spring is in thee, and not in me.”117
90. Stookey et al., “Old Coat.”
91. Anymore than this essay is an autobiography.
92. There is some circumstantial evidence that the first “Keen” of my clan was in fact a German mercenary soldier of the Thirty Years’ War who settled in New Sweden. He changed his name from Jürgen Schneeweiss to Jürgen Kuhn (from “Snow-White” to the compensatory “Bold”), which over time degenerated eventually to “Urine Keen.” Nonetheless,