Participation

Being in Christ

David Lowry

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781666734904
  9781666791402
• eBook ISBN:
  9781666791419
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Systematic Theology & Ethics

The beauty of the world and our experience of human empathy and compassion collide with our experience of bitter discord between individuals, severe societal divisions, brutal oppression, war, and profound estrangement from our environment. All manner of rational analysis and proposed solutions have not solved these elemental problems, the basis of which is spiritual. This book focuses on the spiritual nature of participation. It is about participation in a humanity rooted in Holy Mystery, in God who is in all things. It is about what is essential to being human: the experience of transcendence expressed in faith, hope, and love. It is about "being in Christ." In part, it is a meditation on the apostle Paul's insistence that we participate in Christ in whom we find our true humanity and through whom we are transformed in our relationship to ourselves, others, and the world. Being rooted in Christ, we gain discernment and power for transformative action in the world as it is, with all its wonder, beauty, and brokenness. This book moves from the inner reality of participation in Christ to the outer reality of engagement with the world.

Being in Christ

The righteousness that I have comes from knowing Christ, the power of his resurrection, and the participation in his sufferings. It includes being conformed to his death so that I may perhaps reach the goal of the resurrection of the dead.

—Philippians 3:10–11, CEB

“Knowing,” “participation,” and “being conformed” are key words in the above passage from Paul’s letter to the church in Philippi. These key words are about participation. Righteousness (right-relatedness) comes from knowing Christ: We come to be in right relationship with God and others by participation in Christ. In Christ, we share in the power that raised Jesus from the dead. We participate in Jesus’ sufferings and are conformed to his death. What Paul writes about himself earlier in this letter expresses the intrinsic nature of this participation: “For to me, living is Christ.”38 Living in Christ, participating in his life, transforms the way we experience suffering and death and makes available the power that raises us to new life. Suffering, death, and resurrection are major themes in Paul’s writings and in the New Testament; when understood, we find these themes in the Bible as a whole. In one form or another, they are there in all expressions of human spirituality.

In this chapter, I reflect on Paul’s idea of participation in Christ and its implications for our lives today. Following a meditation on the above passage, I will consider how, for Paul, participation in Christ makes available the gifts of the divine life. Then, I will reflect on our identity in Christ, giving attention to various New Testament representations of Jesus as the Christ. We will see that these depictions of Christ also describe us, as we live “in Christ.” We recognize what, in the Human One, we are becoming.

Participation in Suffering, Death, and Resurrection

Suffering in Christ

Suffering at its most fundamental level is passive reception. There are circumstances that befall us—situations that bring pain, trial, and persecution—through which we must live. We simply must endure what is out of our control. We are being acted upon, and we cannot affect the actors. The Roman authorities took Jesus, taunted him, beat him, nailed him to a cross, and left him to die a public death as a criminal. His experience has become a symbol of a suffering humanity.

Again, at the root of suffering is passive reception. In its base meaning, suffering cannot be understood only as a negative experience. To suffer is to passively receive. So, Meister Eckhart, the German mystic (c. 1260–1328), says, “It was from His immeasurable love that God set our happiness in suffering, for we undergo more than we act, and receive incomparably more than we give.”39 Sometimes we are stopped in our tracks by crisis, illness, and intrusions, which we then must undergo. At other times, we decide to stop, be still, and wait upon God in order to receive what God has for us. Whether we stop ourselves or are stopped by external factors, God has something to give to us. God is present and working for our good whether we have stilled our souls on our own bed at home or they have been stilled on a hospital bed. Whatever has brought us to a position of passively receiving, even when it involves trials that have entered our lives uninvited, God is active in our lives for the building up of our true selves. Through our negative experiences, God often speaks to us most powerfully and works to deepen our humanity. That is why James writes, “Whenever you face trials of any kind, consider it nothing but joy, because you know that the testing of your faith produces endurance; and let endurance have its full effect, so that you may be mature and complete, lacking in nothing.”40

It is, of course, possible to suffer and not receive anything but bitterness and despair. Therefore, we must participate in Christ’s sufferings which involved Christ’s openness to receive from God, even in the midst of situations he did not fully understand. Jesus prayed for the cup of suffering to pass from him. He wondered if there was another way than that of crucifixion. But God did not give him another way, nor can we assume that Jesus came away from his prayer with greater understanding of what God was doing. It was not a nice, neat rationale for suffering that secured Jesus for what he must endure, but rather God and God’s will. The other part of Jesus’ prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane was: “Not my will, but yours be done.”41 In the face of the mystery of suffering, Jesus trusted God and God’s action.

As with Jesus, there is suffering that God will lead us into. Of course, there is also much suffering that is far removed from God’s will and is rather the consequences of our wrong actions. Suffering for the sake of justice is quite different from suffering for injustices we have perpetrated. “It is better to suffer for doing good, if suffering should be God’s will, than to suffer for doing evil.”42 Congressional representative and civil rights activist John Lewis liked to talk about getting into “good trouble.” Good trouble is still trouble, but we do not lose our humanity as a consequence of it. The suffering we experience for doing evil i...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgment
• Participation
• Being Human
• Being in Christ
• Being in the Spirit
• Being in Others
• Being in the World
• The Witness of Participation
• The Message of Participation
• Bibliography