This holy week, we celebrate the end of the Lenten season as we remember Christ’s deep (com)passion for humanity on the cross and in his resurrection. I particularly reflect on the beautiful reality of God’s incarnation, which reminds all of us of how radically God loves and desires the restoration of human beings and all creation.
The scriptures attest to a God who does not separate Godself from creation. God is not aloof, nor is God inaccessibly transcendent. Rather, this holy week, we witness the (com)passion of a God who joins Godself with all that God has created. This God plants gardens and shapes soil into living beings, erotically permeating God’s divine breath within creatures “mouth to mouth, nostril to nostril,” as theologian Norman Wirzba describes.1 Indeed, the incarnation of God in Jesus of Nazareth discloses the reality of God’s particular Jewish flesh, which is God’s own humanity and life with the soil and with creatures. Like human beings, God is also a dirt person who reveals how “creaturely reality is…to be in communion with God” and that God “abides deeply and desires to dwell intimately with creatures in all their struggles and joys by living in our flesh.”2 There is nothing more radically revolutionizing about our imagination of the human than the reality of God’s own dirt-flesh. In other words, God’s human flesh, fashioned within and indwelt by the same earth all creatures are made from, is God’s very communion with creation and God’s erotically intimate affirmation of creaturely life. In Christ, no creature can ever be desacralized but only affirmed because Christ’s life is, in and of itself, God’s resounding “Yes” to creatureliness.
Such is the crucial insight of Indigenous wisdom, as represented by Christian theologians like Randy Woodley, who writes in Shalom and the Community of Creation: An Indigenous Vision of how God’s original intention for all creatures is to live in harmony with one another (what some First Nations peoples call the “Harmony Way”), in porous love and vulnerable interdependence. This is a harmonious life rooted precisely in the soil itself, the very earth from which God crafted all things with God’s own hands and breathed life to animate it with God’s own breath. The dirt beneath us witnesses to a God whose abundant love overflows and permeates every aspect of creaturely life. As Willie James Jennings argues in a recent seminar, this is the crucial contribution of First Nations peoples to our modern understanding of the individual self in relation to other creatures.
Indigenous ways of being in and with the land represent a porous existence, a kind of creaturely living that is not separate from but indwelt by others, while also indwelling others. This radically open and inclusive existence is deeply self-insufficient: erotically intimate with other beings. This existence is very similar to the biblical Imago Dei or the creaturely icon of God’s triune perichoretic communion that is deeply interwoven, interpenetrated, interdependent, and thus creatively life-giving. While a sacred imagination of the human and of creation continues to be affirmed and maintained by Indigenous peoples in their wisdom, the modern western (secular) consciousness has only rejected this by reducing everything and anything, bodies and land, as commodities to be possessed. One needs to only look at the displacement of Indigenous peoples by settler colonizers and the transatlantic slave trade as prime examples of this “commodified” imagination of body and land that stripped creation and creatures of their God-imbued sanctity.
Hence, this holy week, we are called to live in life-affirming ways as followers of Jesus, who kenotically gave himself to others by struggling for the emancipation and liberation of the world from all forms of oppression and self-sufficiency. In this way, Jesus models a radical, love-permeating creativity — an artistry that “works for the good of others [and] the beautification of the world.”3 Jesus’ life reveals who God is for and in creation, as the God who created not only ex nihilo but also “ex amore,” out of love, for love, and in love that we might model the same radical, divine creativity toward others.4
Yes, may we seek this radical love toward one another as we liturgically move into the final days of this holy week — commemorating the incredible life-giving ministry which Christ provided for us with deep passion on the cross, and especially in his glorious resurrection that inaugurated the dawn of the new creation. May we seek Christ in all things, as all things point to Christ, who is the life-giving and love-permeating source that binds and joins all creation together in harmony. All glory and honor be to Christ, our Harmonia Mundi, the blessed “Harmony of the World.”
The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.
— 1 Corinthians 1:15-17 (NIV)
Norman Wirzba, This Sacred Life: Humanity’s Place in a Wounded World, 64.
Wirzba, 169-170.
Wirzba, 252.
Wirzba, 165.
What a stunning read. Your instinct for weaving together the best parts of a range of traditions is unmatched.