"Today You Will Be with Me in Paradise"

Jesus’ Seven Last Words, sayings offered from the cross, may serve as guidance for the spiritual life. You are invited to contemplate each saying during the seven Wednesdays of Lent and Holy Week.

“Jesus, remember me, when you come into your kingdom,” sings the Taizé chant. I often sing it as I drive to events in which this introvert is called upon to be an extrovert, this writer expected to speak or lead or counsel. It calms me, but it also reminds me who and what my work is all about. I believe I’m better at “selling” Jesus than myself. And God knows I have more inspiration to do so.

Of course “Jesus, remember me etc.” are the words of the “good” criminal who challenges the one who mocks Jesus as all three are crucified together. Jesus responds, “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise.” What a comfort to hear this straight from Jesus!

But none of us have to be on a cross to hear these words. We could just be having a bad day. We could even be having a good day. Paradise is available in the here and now, not just the sky by and by.

“I am standing at the door, knocking; if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to you and eat with you, and you with me,” the writer of Revelation  hears Jesus saying. This is a mystic’s vision. This was also the experience of everyday disciples on the road to Emmaus after the crucifixion.

Theologian Karl Rahner famously said that the Christian of the future will need to be a mystic. Being a mystic, then, is not “above our pay grade.”

To see beyond Jesus’ suffering, just as to see beyond our own, a hopeful vision is required. For the early Christians, that hopeful vision was to view Jesus’ sacrifice replacing the need for animal sacrifice, just as child sacrifice was replaced by animal sacrifice in the story of Abraham and Isaac.

Though these visions may not inspire us today, both could be considered theological advances of their eras. I explained this in detail in Coming Out as Sacrament. I also explained that both Roman and Jewish legal cultures of Jesus’ time expected a transgressor to offer some kind of expiation or sacrifice to make things right. This is the context for the understanding that Jesus served as that expiation.

Julian of Norwich believed that sin and evil had no “essence,” and that, rather than blaming us for sin, God pitied us for the pain it causes us.

Several times on this blog I’ve mentioned the crucifixion arousing in us that which at-ones us with God: compassion. Reading Julian I realize that the cross is equally an emblem of God’s compassion.

Contemplating a crucifix, she observes, “Thus I saw how Christ has compassion for us because of sin.” Translator Father John-Julian paraphrases Julian, “Christ en-joys the Passion, that is, submerges it in and converts it into joy.”

The cross represents a God who is sacrificially forgiving in reconciling the world.

Last week this blog reflected on Jesus’ first words from the cross, according to tradition, “forgive them for they know not what they do.”

In the case of the one crucified alongside Jesus asking to be remembered, Jesus goes beyond forgiveness to welcome him into his kingdom. That can happen for each of us in this moment. And how differently we will live, now that we are in paradise.

For those who would like daily readings for this week of Lent, click here and scroll down to the end of “Spiritual Stretching.”

I will be speaking this coming Sunday, Mar. 1, at the Georgia Mountains Unitarian Universalist Church 11 a.m. service in Dahlonega, GA, followed by a free workshop on the mystic Evelyn Underhill, “Becoming What We Behold.”

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Progressive Christian Reflections is entirely supported by readers’ donations. It is an authorized Emerging Ministry of Metropolitan Community Churches, a denomination welcoming seekers as well as believers.

Copyright © 2015 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.  

The Trouble with Oscar

A friend had a very old cat named Oscar. At age 22, Oscar died. My friend chose to bury his ashes in his front yard and plant a maple tree on his resting place. A cat that he’d never seen before came by and respectfully watched while he dug the hole, spread Oscar’s ashes, and planted the tree in his memory. The cat then walked away. Moments later, neighbors who had just moved into the neighborhood walked by and asked, “Have you seen our cat, Oscar?”

Not long after I was out running and heard a cat crying loudly, hidden on the sidewalk behind a recently-emptied trash bin. It looked unwell or injured.  I was headed home to shower and get dressed for work at a church I served as interim pastor. I don’t have time for this, I thought, thinking of the story of the Good Samaritan in which the lay minister and the priest ignored a beaten up traveler on their way from Jericho to the Temple at Jerusalem.

My vacationing neighbors’ cat had recently bitten me when we played while checking his food, water, and litter box.  So I was hesitant to pick up an injured cat that might be defensive, especially since I was dressed only in running shorts and shoes.

Home was not far, so I ran there, cleaned up, and returned in my car with water, tuna fish (my closest approximation of cat food), and my dog’s pain medication, leftover from a previous need. At first I didn’t see the cat, his having moved from the sidewalk.  At that moment, a neighbor happened to come out of her house on her way to work, and I told her about the distressed cat just as we found it again on a driveway.  The cat did not seem responsive either to the water or the tuna.

Lisa, the neighbor, thought the owners were out of town, but it had always been a neighborhood cat, left behind by the previous owners of the house, and many of the neighbors provided him food and water. I went up to the front door and found a note that the residents were out of town, a note which included a cell phone number, so I phoned and left a message.

It so happened that Lisa was a cat lover, owned a cat-carrier, and we shared the same veterinarian group, Ansley Animal Clinic. She offered to drop him off on her way to work and let the owners know.  Relieved, I went off to work myself.

A few days later, running in the neighborhood again, I wanted to find Lisa and discover how things turned out. I couldn’t remember which house was hers. Serendipitously, she emerged from her house once more, and I was able to learn the cat’s fate. He had been extremely dehydrated, and the speculation was that he had fallen into the trash bin a few days before and liberated by the refuse collectors the day I found him.  The vet gave him an IV to rehydrate him, and later that day, the owners retrieved their recovered cat. A small neighborhood miracle! And to think, I had not wanted to get involved!

Intending to thank the vet during my dog’s next appointment, I asked Lisa what the cat’s name was. “Well,” she said, “His owners call him ---, but all the neighbors call him Oscar.” I was so astonished by the name “Oscar” I totally forgot the other name.

Goosebumps all around. Yet another Oscar!

I believe we all have such stories to tell. They may or may not fit neatly into our theologies, but they surprise us with grace in a seemingly ungracious world. Toward the end of his career as a 20^th century Jesuit theologian, Karl Rahner famously wrote, “The Christian of the future will be a mystic or will not exist at all.”

According to Rabbi Lawrence Kushner, “A mystic is someone who has the gnawing suspicion that just beneath the apparent contradictions, brokenness, and discord of this everyday world lies a hidden unity.”

I couldn’t obtain a photo of any of the Oscars in this post, so for fun I’ve included one of the Abercrombie cats generated by college students that made the rounds on the internet and Facebook. 

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Progressive Christian Reflections is an unfunded Emerging Ministry of Metropolitan Community Churches, a denomination welcoming seekers as well as believers.

Copyright © 2014 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.