Of Wooden Nickels and Railroad Tracks

A friend and I are struggling with the whole western/eastern notion of the Cross and of sacrifice. Will I ever get this figured out!? It’s SO hard to talk about, because the words slide around. I love the concrete imagery of the Church’s liturgical hymns. Here’s my own attempt at a couple concrete metaphors perhaps useful to explain. They are very poor in comparison with the Church’s hymns, but the liturgical language is so high! Heard in the services of the Church, it so easily passes over my head. Its very richness becomes undigestable.

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Talking about martyrdom (as the extreme) and sacrifice, giving up something…

Maybe it’s like plugging a wooden nickel into a slot machine where the odds of winning are 100% and the payoff is billions. Who wouldn’t “sacrifice” the wooden nickel!? And yet, we’re so fond of our wooden nickels! We don’t want to plop that wooden nickel into the slot because… why? Because it’s “ours”, we like it in our pocket, to rub our fingers over it, it’s weight and smoothness there. It’s a familiar, comforting presence, and we know we won’t get it back if we give it up. We’re attached to it, plain and simple! Besides, wooden nickels are “useful”. They “buy” you things in the game which deals in wooden nickels as currency, and these are the games we like to play. To give up that dang wooden nickel becomes a real sacrifice and a struggle!

Most of all, however, suppose that we, somehow, eventually come to the realization that all we have in our pocket is nothing but a wooden nickel. Even then, we just can’t believe our luck, or that the world could be sooooo good as to give us billions for a wooden nickel!

This is what we can’t wrap our minds around, how God could be that good, that He would be worth that kind of behavior (giving up one’s very life in the case of martyrdom). And the heart of the problem is our very misperception about Who God is because we think that what He really wants is “sacrifice”, understood in the ingrained, old, western way. We cannot help but be suspicious of Him. How the delusion goes in a circle!

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What about the sacrifice of Christ?

What Christ did is to, first of all, TAKE UP a human body (a human nature, body, soul, will, mind, an entire human existence, from the very beginning to the very end, from conception all the way through death, nothing whatsoever left out except sin). This, first of all, was a huge “condescension” on God’s part, so a “sacrifice” on His part to “come down from heaven”. The Son of God, the Word, consents to ally and unify himself with his creature permanently — and do it while he was yet fallen (“in his sins”). (Rom 5:8) “The uncreated becomes created…” as it says in one of the hymns of Annunciation.

Having taken up human nature, Christ goes through every single part of our life. This, too, is “offering” humanity (human nature) to the divine. Mary gives humanness to God (“her flesh”), which He then takes through every part of human life. By living through all of human life as both human and divine, Christ “offers” the human part continually to the divine part for healing and salvation.

It’s kind of like…. laying two railroad tracks through rugged, rocky, mountainous terrain. The one track is guaranteed perfect, the other track will always get messed up. But in laying the track down always together, the messed-up one will always be put exactly right!

The last step in the whole process is the final “offering” of the humanity Christ has taken up to God (the Father) for the healing even of death, the last enemy, the last separation, the last mountain. The cross-continental railroad finds its completion in meeting the track coming from the other side. In Christ, our life is joined at its end with eternity, with eternal life, with the far country.

The good to be gained is totally integral to what God does. Humanity gets taken up, through and through, into the divine, for its salvation; and salvation itself consists in reunion with the divine because that’s what Life IS. God IS Life. God IS Love.