Episode 9 — Creativity and Repentance: Law, Love, and Learning to Create Peace

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[00:00:00] January: The narrow way asks us to renounce our violence and stay tender in a hard world. And that’s gonna get you bruised. That’s gonna get you bloodied. That might even get you crucified. But when we accept that as our creative constraint, when we get curious about, "Hey, I wonder what it would look like to do this life thing in a way that does not create victims — of myself, of anyone else, of creation?" Hell yes, I think that way is bigger on the inside. Yeah, I do.

[00:00:31] Andrew: Yeah,

[00:00:32] January: I really do.

If you’ve ever wondered why a religion that proclaims unconditional love can feel so full of hatred, shame, and violence, you’re not alone — and you’re not wrong to want something more from Christian faith. I’m January Jaxon,

[00:00:53] Andrew: and I am Andrew McRae,

[00:00:55] January: and this is Theology Kills, a podcast about letting our shame and violence die so that life and love can thrive.

[00:01:07] Andrew: We want all our listeners to know upfront that there will be a significant portion of our episode today where we talk about the death of Judas Iscariot. There are two accounts in the Bible and one of those is a suicide. So if that’s not a conversation you want to listen in on, that’s perfectly fine. If you need to take breaks or step away, just, uh, take care of yourself. And if the conversation that’s coming stirs in you a need to talk to somebody, that’s good — if you wanna talk to people.

If you’re in the US, you can call or text 988, and there will be somebody to talk with you in English or in Spanish. Call or text 988, and there will be someone to talk with. We don’t wanna catch anybody off guard, so that is a conversation that we’ll be having a little later on.

[00:02:12] January: In early 2020, news of a novel coronavirus spreading through China felt distant to most Americans... right up until the moment it didn’t. When the first US case of COVID-19 was confirmed in Washington State in January, followed by a wave of outbreaks across the country, the illusion of normal shattered. Within weeks, schools and businesses closed, store shelves emptied, and streets felt eerily silent. Daily routines disappeared. The foundations we thought stable dissolved almost overnight.

Americans have a bad habit of trying to control change. When a relationship breaks up or a job disappears or, you know, a planet wide pandemic locks the world down, most of us go straight to resistance. We hate change. We wanna know how fast we can force life to go back to the way it was. And unfortunately, sometimes we manage it. COVID presented us with a creative challenge. We had a chance there to change the way we do culture. And yeah, some things changed. More of us work remotely. More of us take care to rest. More of us talk about mental health and emotional life. Those are good things!

But the structural things didn’t change. We are still living organized around inhumane productivity, unsustainable consumption, and frictionless convenience. We’re still trapped in an escalating rivalry between polarized political parties. We’re still pretending like our way of life isn’t subsidized by the suffering of people we’ll never have to look in the eye.

I hate to break it to you friends, but this is not what heaven looks like. If we ever want to see “thy Kingdom come on earth,” things are gonna have to change.

Because what else did we see in the pandemic’s upheaval? Local distilleries halted liquor production to make hand sanitizer when stores ran dry. Craftivists handmade masks to help keep their neighbors safe. Engineers and hobbyists turned 3D printers into supply chain stopgaps when official systems couldn’t keep up.

Some people blossomed creatively in the face of change. Others collapsed into a black hole of depression, nihilism, and Netflix binging because the routines they relied on to numb out were no longer available. So what made the difference? How come some people got eaten alive by the stress, while for others, the stress fueled art, music, invention, connection, and service?

At a basic level, your nervous system is constantly asking three foundational questions. First, am I safe? Second, am I loved? And third, what can I learn? The order here matters. We can’t get to the second question, let alone the third, until the answer to the first one is a yes. If your body doesn’t feel safe, it doesn’t matter how many opportunities are in front of you, you won’t experience them as possibilities. You’ll experience them as threats.

Think about the last time something startled you. Your muscles tightened up, your breathing got shallow. Your attention narrowed. Your body was doing exactly what it was designed to do, protect you by bracing against the unknown. In a real emergency, that kind of bracing is a gift. It creates structure under extreme conditions, like water freezing into ice. It holds you together enough to get you through what’s happening.

The problem is that, unlike ice, we don’t automatically soften out of that frozen state once the danger has passed. We stay braced long after we no longer need to be. The tension that should have been momentary hardens into a way of living. You can see something like this play out in one of the oldest stories in the biblical tradition.

After generations of slavery in Egypt, the Hebrew people fled into the wilderness under Moses’ leadership, but freedom, it turned out, was terrifying. They’d left behind the predictability of captivity. The vast landscape ahead of them seemed to hold nothing but hunger, fear, and uncertainty. So God gave these destabilized people the Law.

Somewhere around 1300 BCE, according to most biblical timelines, Moses climbed Mount Sinai and received the Mosaic Law, not just the 10 Commandments, but a detailed framework of 613 civil, moral, and ceremonial rules. These Laws weren’t arbitrary divine decrees. They weren’t given because God needed humans to behave in any particular way. God doesn’t need anything from us. The Law was a gift to a people who’d been enslaved for hundreds of years to begin — begin! — to teach them how to live as free beings.

This is what a liberated life looks like for you, it said.

The law provided boundaries that created a pocket of stability in the midst of a wildly unstable experience. It told the Hebrews in concrete visible ways, here’s how you know you are safe with Me. For a people emerging from generations of trauma, that kind of structure wasn’t a burden. It was a mercy.

It’s easy from a modern perspective to miss just how revolutionary this was. As theologian James Alison points out, The Mosaic Law was a massive disruption to the traditions of archaic religion that preceded it. In an ancient world where tribal gods demanded child sacrifice, where the powerful could exploit the vulnerable with impunity and where violence was often seen as sacred and divinely ordained, the law introduced boundaries.

The law introduced limits. It reined in vengeance. An eye for an eye was a ceiling, not a permission slip. It protected the poor, the widow, the orphan, and even the foreigner. The law was a giant step toward justice.

It wasn’t perfect, but it was progress. God was beginning the long work of reforming the human imagination, not by force, but by faith. A faith that taught the radical, subversive truth that your worth is not measured by power over others, but by your belonging to others. In other words, they helped people begin to feel safe again, not because their circumstances were secure, they absolutely weren’t, but because their identity was.

They were God’s people. They belonged to the maker of heaven and Earth. And within that belonging, the law’s boundaries offered structure that helped to make an uncertain life more livable.

But there’s a tension built into that kind of structure. What protects you in one season can begin to confine you in another. The Hebrews eventually made it through their wilderness. They settled in their promised land and they built cities, temples, traditions. The extreme environment of their desert travails faded gradually from memory, but the law did not fade.

The structure that once protected them became a cage that hardened their faith into legalism. When we start to believe the structure is what keeps us safe, we cling to it. The law gives shape, like ice gives water shape. It creates boundaries and holds things together. But structure can’t bring you alive. It can only keep you from falling apart.

The law was one chapter of Israel’s story. Not its end. It was a container that protected the seed of human trust enough that it could begin to grow. And it’s that trust, the faith that we are safe with the divine creator Themself, that gives us an existential answer to that question of, am I safe, and sets the Hebrews free to begin the journey toward the second question.

If the law answered the question of safety. Then Christ answered the question of love. After 1300 years of the law working its way into humanity’s DNA like yeast into bread, the incarnation is God’s definitive statement that we are not just safe with God, we are cherished by God.

Over and over, in the gospels, Jesus upends the established interpretations of the law. He heals on the Sabbath. He touches the unclean. He eats with tax collectors and sinners. He constantly affirms that the law was never the point. The love behind the law was, and he does this not to get rid of the law. He’s not trying to eliminate the structure. He’s fulfilling the structure’s purpose by revealing that its foundation wasn’t rules but relationship.

Where the law created boundaries, Christ crossed them. Where the law restrained vengeance, Christ absorbed it. Where the law protected the vulnerable, Christ became the vulnerable.

We see this shift most powerfully in the Sermon on the Mount. In that famous teaching. Jesus doesn’t reject the law. He takes it deeper. He says, you’ve heard it said, do not murder, but I say to you, even your anger matters. You’ve heard it said, do not commit adultery. But I say to you, even your desire matters.

He takes commands that people who’ve been following for centuries in very strict and particular ways and moves them from the external to the internal, from behavior to being. Why?

I find it hard to believe Jesus is interested in performative piety. On the contrary, he’s interested in transformation. In other words, change. And transformation happens when we’re secure in the context of love. The Sermon on the Mount isn’t a newer stricter rule book; it’s an invitation to trust that God knows exactly what a hot mess we humans can be, and God still wants to be with us. That’s what makes it possible for us to change, not fear of getting it wrong, but a love that forgives us even when we do.

Jesus melts their ice and says that what they need now is living water. But letting go of the rules feels dangerous. The religious leaders of Jesus’ time weren’t sociopaths. They were afraid the law had given them structure in a world that felt dangerously arbitrary. They relied on it for their sense of safety.

So when Jesus said, you’ve heard it said, but I say to you, it wasn’t just an abstract theological shift, it was a threat to the identity and psychological safety these people had relied on all their lives. We know what this feels like. It feels like your spouse of 30 years leaving you for their secretary. It feels like the unexpected death of a child. It feels like a global pandemic ending life as we knew it in the span of a few weeks.

Jesus shifting the focus of the law wasn’t just asking for a shift in an opinion, he was asking for a seismic reorientation of our lives. If faith, or trust, is the measure of righteousness, of our okayness with God, then rule following isn’t enough to keep us safe.

And it’s terrifying to have to admit that your safety isn’t something you can control by behaving right. Not with God or with anyone else. You have to just trust people and sometimes that trust will feel betrayed.

That kind of vulnerability will inevitably feel like a loss for those with eyes to see it though, this too is a liberation. Love frees us from the exhausting scramble for security, the need to prove, to perform, to protect our prestige. Without that love, even our best efforts toward change will remain distorted by shame and blame.

We’ll mistake perfectionism for faithfulness. We’ll confuse fitting in with belonging. We’ll settle for validation instead of transformation. But love changes all that. Love tells us that we already belong.

Here’s the thing about water. If it stays still in one place, it starts to stagnate. Love isn’t meant to stay neatly contained inside each one of us. It’s meant to flow back and forth between us.

When we have enough safety for our nervous system to relax out of hypervigilant threat scanning, and we have enough love to feel secure in our belonging, something amazing begins to happen. We stop reacting to our circumstances out of fear, and we start approaching our circumstances out of curiosity.

Now, curiosity is a risky business. There’s a reason we have that saying:Curiosity killed the cat. It isn’t a safe endeavor. Trying something new always risks being wrong. It takes us off the edge of our mental map and into here-be-dragons territory. It upends the status quo and threatens to toss us right back out into that wilderness from which the Hebrews were so desperate to be rescued.

Only when our fear has been quieted by sufficient trust and our security has been rooted in relationship rather than circumstance or performance can we embrace the hazards presented by change, not because of a blind Pollyanna confidence that it’ll all work out, but because we trust the bigger reality that forgiveness will be offered when — not if, when! — It doesn’t work out.

Scholar Rene Girard has said that Christian conversion is the discovery that we have been persecutor without realizing it. And if you hear that and some part of you goes, well, I’ve never persecuted anybody. I invite you to pause and think about how you spoke to yourself the last time you screwed up at something that really mattered to you.

What did that voice sound like? Did it sound like the compassionate forgiveness of Jesus? Or did it sound like shame and blame, like violence and persecution?

Conversion is that painful moment of, oh crap, I was trying to do the right thing, but man, I got this really, really wrong. We cannot admit that to ourselves. Literally, our brains will try to defend us against the truth of it unless we can trust that getting it wrong won’t cost us our safety and love.

So if the law reassured us that we are safe with God, and the incarnation of Christ Jesus proved to us that we are loved by God, where does that third question show up in the Christian story?

It’s my theory that the Christian answer to the question what can I learn went public with the Protestant Reformation. In the 1500s, Martin Luther looked around at the Church he loved and thought, this can’t be right. We’ve turned the good news of God’s love into a new system of exploitation.

Luther wasn’t trying to start a revolution. He wasn’t trying to split the church. He was practicing metanoia, which is the Greek word that usually gets translated as repentance in our contemporary Bibles. Luther was paying attention to the corruption that had crept into the church of his time, and he said, hold up, this don’t look like Jesus.

It was a moment of spiritual curiosity, a willingness to ask, what if we’re getting this wrong? What do we need to rethink?

Whatever we might think of Martin Luther today, we should acknowledge the bravery and creativity that took the willingness to look at the system you inherited, to honestly see the flaws that are there and to imagine something truer. Not because you hate what’s there, but because you love it. That’s divine.

Of course, if you know anything whatsoever about human history, you know, this doesn’t tend to go down very well. Luther might not have intended to fragment the church, but that was the effect it had all the same. Americans might be particularly egregious in the resisting change department, but we certainly didn’t invent it.

This is why it’s so crucial that we learn to engage in conflict with integrity because in a dynamic and interrelated social system, your change is going to change others and not everyone’s gonna like it.

The first of Martin Luther’s infamous 95 theses reads, “When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said repent, he intended that the entire life of believers should be repentance.”

Repentance isn’t a one-time decision for Jesus style of thing. It’s a slow and patient one inch at a time recreating of our lives. The heart of metanoia, the healthiest expression of human creativity, is the courage to keep growing.

It’s not shame. It’s not punishment. It’s transformation, but not transformation as a goal to achieve, transformation as a natural consequence of the love and freedom we receive from Christ.

When we’re no longer trying to earn love or prove ourselves. We finally have the space to ask honest questions. We can bring our full selves, our doubt, our longing, our imagination into the conversation without being afraid of getting it wrong. That’s what makes a life of repentance possible. That’s what gives us the power to ask, what can I learn?

Jesus tells a parable in Luke chapter 13 about a fig tree that isn’t bearing fruit for three years, it’s taken up space in the vineyard without producing anything, and the landowner is ready to cut it down so it stops straining resources from the other plants in the garden. But the gardener says, let me tend to it a little longer. I’ll dig around it. I’ll fertilize it. If it bears fruit next year, great. If not, then you can cut it down. Luke chapter 13 verses six to nine.

It’s an unsettling image because it holds that both mercy and urgency are real. God is patient. We are given time to grow, to respond to grace, but that time isn’t infinite. There is such a thing as too late, not because God is in any hurry to punish us, but because we are finite time-bound beings and there are real consequences to unchanged lives.

You don’t need me to tell you this. We’re seeing it on a global scale right now with the climate crisis. God has been inviting us to repent of our abusive and rapacious relationship with our planet for centuries. We have refused, and now the earth is telling us in no uncertain terms that we may have pushed past the point of too late to change.

Nevertheless, the invitation to trust in the faithfulness of God remains. What is possible from here that wasn’t possible until things started to fall apart?

Repentance has gotten a bad rap in popular culture. It’s become almost synonymous with humiliation and shame. I picture someone castigating themselves for a mistake, some celebrity issuing a tearful apology in front of cameras trying to win back public approval.

That version of repentance is about proving how sorry you are. It’s punishment disguised as piety. And if that’s what we think repentance is, then of course we avoid it. Of course we defend ourselves against it and double down on being right.

But what if that’s not repentance? What if that’s yet another manifestation of our desire to control, of trying to achieve forgiveness instead of receive it? Real metanoia, real repentance, isn’t about punishment. It’s about possibility. It’s not offered as an obligation. It’s offered as an opportunity. We aren’t warned to repent because we quote unquote “should,” but because repentance inducts us into flourishing:a more creative, more joyful, more meaningful way to participate in the world.

Why wouldn’t we want that?

Repentance is the invitation to realign your life with the bigger reality of God’s eternal unalterable grace. Not because you’re terrified of God’s judgment, but because you’ve tasted God’s divine fondness and have relaxed into its embrace.

I’m assuming that I’m not the only person in the proverbial room who cringes every time someone quotes Jesus, in Matthew, chapter four, verse 17, repent for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand. My mental picture is always of some hypocritical Bible-thumping revival preacher who’s figured out that making vulnerable people scared is a great way to fill his pockets with cash, or just get high on his own ego.

But that picture comes from culture, not from scripture. Metanoia doesn’t cast you down. It gives you a hand up out of hell and says, how can I help you do better tomorrow?

Matthew four 17 isn’t saying, get your act together so you can get into heaven. It’s saying heaven has come all the way to earth for you so that you can begin to experience the aliveness you were made for. Repentance isn’t a practice of getting it right, but of getting curious.

What if we approached our faith the way a scientist approaches a hypothesis? What if we start by steeping ourselves in scripture, getting to know the God revealed by Jesus, letting our imaginations be captured by his contradictions and complexities.

[00:25:06] Then form an idea: I think this might be what Christ is asking of me. Then we take that hypothesis out into the laboratory of our actual life. We test it, we watch what happens, we take in the data, and then we reflect. Did that action produce the fruits of the spirit? Did it generate more peace, patience, kindness, and self-control, or do I find myself anxious, rigid, judgmental, and disconnected?

If the results aren’t what we hoped, well, okay. In science, a negative result is almost as good as a positive result, because it’s all just information about what to try next. There’s no need for a spiral into self-condemnation. We just revise the hypothesis, ask forgiveness for missing the mark, and trust that it’s granted.

Take our questions back to scripture. Wrestle some more. Try again. Learn something. Grow. This is faith as an ongoing emergence, not a fixed state. This is living water flowing through us, between us, guarding us from stagnation. It’s a relationship with reality, which is to say with God, it’s about knowing that you’re safe enough and loved enough to risk the vulnerability of learning.

That’s the spiritual posture Jesus invites us into a again and again, not get it right or else, but come and see. What an adventure, yeah? Because what else is creativity, if not the courage to try something new without knowing how it will turn out? Because the world is still changing. We are still changing and God is still speaking.

The reformation couldn’t have happened if it hadn’t inherited its legacy of hope from the Catholic church. The Catholic church couldn’t have happened without the legacy of love it inherited from Christ. And Jesus the Christ couldn’t have happened without the faith he inherited from the Jewish people’s traditional law.

The questions our brains ask at the individual level are also the questions our species asks at the collective level. And God has been answering those questions for us for thousands of years. When we are grounded in spiritual safety and love, repentance stops feeling like a threat. It becomes a way of life.

It’s the thrill that bubbles up in us when we anticipate and trust in God’s word. I know the plans I have for you declares the Lord. Plans to prosper you and not to harm you. Plans to give you hope and a future. Jeremiah chapter 29 verse 11,

Things don’t look super prosperous right now. The future feels pretty damn uncertain. You’re not crazy if you’re looking around at the world and going, um, God, little help here.

But what we have before us is a choice about what to trust in. Do we trust our despair? Because it looks like everything’s falling apart and we feel helpless. Or do we trust that God likes us and wants something better for us? Do we trust that Christ is the one who will make that happen? And all we gotta do is make space in our lives to receive it?

What if God’s the one looking at us going, Hey, humanity, a little help here? I’ve given you what you need to flourish, but you gotta quit using it to make trouble instead!

Can we take God up on the offer? Can we imitate Mary here? Can we look around and ask, how is this pregnancy thing supposed to happen again? While also trusting that it’s God who will make it happen, not us.

That our job is just to grow like a fig tree into the full fruitfulness of our own true nature. Following Jesus doesn’t mean we get to live in a bubble world hermetically sealed against change. It means we’re empowered by Christ to face change without fearing it. To excavate the darkest, most violent depths of our own souls, to go all the way down to the Ground of All Being and shed everything in us that isn’t of God’s kingdom.

We have misused religion to avoid the very change it was meant to produce. Our world is suffering for it, and so are we. But it doesn’t have to be this way. When we root our identity, our existential safety in God’s eternal and unalterable love, we’re free to meet change, not as a threat, but as a chance to create peace in the midst of a world at war.

Wouldn’t that be worth learning?

[00:30:25] Andrew: Yeah, January, in your presentation you mentioned how during the pandemic, some people just blossomed, while others collapsed into, and I’m quoting you here, into “a black hole of depression, nihilism, and Netflix,” which I’m like, oh dear. Yeah.

[00:30:43] January: Definitely not speaking from experience here. I dunno what you’re talking about.

[00:30:49] Andrew: Yeah. Some people, as you put it, got eaten alive by their stress, and others, stress fueled art, music, invention, connection, service. So are you suggesting that the pandemic is a litmus test by which people can judge themselves and their own competency? Or better yet, judge other people? Because, ‘cause that sounds fun. Is that what you meant?

[00:31:14] January: That is a totally disingenuous question, sir! You know perfectly well that that is not what I was saying!

[00:31:21] Andrew: Yeah, I lobbed, I lobbed that one up there.

No, as I was thinking about asking this question, I was like, oh my god, this lesson has been given to me time and time again in church, in youth group. I bet I heard it from the pulpit too, during the sermon, but it was more like a youth event sort of thing, because it was an object lesson. And, and it got to be so like everybody knew it to the point that they wouldn’t even do the object lesson! They’d just—

Okay, so the lesson, they bring out like a 20 ounce bottle of some carbonated beverage and they would give it to the kid and they’re like, and you know, they call somebody, “Who on stage wants to drink a Coke?” And “Ah, me! me!” And they run up, okay, okay, so, oh, you can drink the Coke. And you go, “Oh, wait, wait, wait! Before you open it, I want you to shake it.”

And the kid’s like, uh, confused. No, no, no, no, no. If you’re gonna open it, you have to shake it really, really, really hard. So sure enough, you can see where this is going. He is like, okay, now you can open it and drink it. And the kid’s like, you know, looking around like, am I allowed to do this?

Whatever, open it. It goes everywhere. And the uh, ‘spiritual guide’ says, “Why did the Coke come out of the bottle?” And you know, the kid’s like, “Uh, ‘cause ya told me to shake it and it’s carbonated...?” He’s like, “No. Coke came out of the bottle because Coke was what was in the bottle.”

And it’s supposed to be this big thing that whatever’s in you is what’s gonna come out of you when you’re shaken up, when you’re thrown into stress and turmoil and trauma. What comes out of you is what you put in — and it’s always what you put in you.

And, and it hits! Like the whole audience is like — I mean it’s kind of funny, it’s cheesy, but it is just like, oh yeah, what comes out is what goes, you know, garbage in garbage out. Like it, it sounds right, but if you think about it, okay, if you think about, and I just, not till recently, like as a grown adult did I, like... this is awful! Can you imagine someone actually going through a

[00:33:14] January: Yeah.

[00:33:14] Andrew: traumatic experience, having this memory of like, oh my god, I’m about to be judged now more than ever.

[00:33:20] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:33:20] Andrew: Right? That’s, that’s what was being taught. I heard that so many times, to the point where people would be like, oh yeah, you know, the Coke thing? Or you know, what comes out? They stopped doing it ‘cause it was a messy, is a messy exercise and there’s cleanup to do afterwards and people are lazy. But yeah, it’s.

Well, anyway, so it sounds disingenuous this question of like, are you suggesting that the pandemic was a litmus test? But there are people that I’m sure taught that and used a bottle of Coke to get the point across.

[00:33:51] January: Ooof.

[00:33:52] Andrew: Sorry, I just had to expunge a bit of evangelical background there.

[00:33:57] January: That’s great. It’s perfect. Perfect.

[00:33:57] Andrew: I had to let that out. Uh…

[00:34:00] January: Somethin’got shook up.

[00:34:02] Andrew: Yes, exactly! Oh man. Yeah. Well, yeah. Yeah. It only came out ‘cause I put it in there. Uh, you guys can judge me for that.

[00:34:12] January: Did you though? Or did somebody else put it in there?

[00:34:16] Andrew: Yeah. Yeah. That’s such an obvious, like, is that true? Yeah. Is it true? Can you absolutely know that it’s true.

[00:34:22] January: Right?!

[00:34:23] Andrew: No! The bottle’s not responsible for the Coke! That was totally a factory that put, that put the Coke in the bottle. That was not the bottle.

[00:34:30] January: Turns out.

[00:34:31] Andrew: Yeah. Yeah. Actually, yeah. That analogy works so much better if you stop and think about what’s really going on. Oh dear! Our factories are pumping us full of this stuff and it’s gonna come out when we get shaken. Yeah.

[00:34:46] January: Yep. Yeah. I’m grateful to you for bringing that up because I really wanted to not give the impression that I am in any way condemning or talking down to anybody who did not manage to thrive in that environment.

I, that’s the last thing I want to be doing. If you were one of those people who got eaten alive by the stress, that’s ‘cause you didn’t have the resources to deal with it.

[00:35:12] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:35:12] January: We were all just trying to survive that horrendous, stressful circumstance. If you didn’t have the resources to rise above, that’s not your fault.

[00:35:22] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:35:23] January: You were thrown a curve ball nobody could possibly have imagined to prepare for. That’s probably not true. I’m sure somebody saw it coming, but anyway, my point is, it’s not your fault if you got eaten alive by depression and nihilism, and watching Netflix all day was what got you through it.

Okay, great. I’m glad that you found a way to survive.

[00:35:45] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:35:46] January: That’s the important part.

[00:35:47] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:35:48] January: There does not need to be any shade about how that happened except to notice that now that we’re on the other side of it — if you are on the other side of it, and not everybody is — just to notice whether that pattern of behavior or that habit is still serving you.

[00:36:04] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:36:04] January: Is still helping you get through the day, or is it holding you back? Is it hampering you? This is not about blaming anybody or shaming anyone for not being able to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and do better. That’s,

[00:36:19] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:36:19] January: that is absolutely not. This is about grieving that not everyone had the resources that I wish they had had to be able to meet that moment with creativity. To be able to meet that moment with a sense of adventure.

[00:36:34] Andrew: Yeah.

In the presentation, when you say that if the Law answered the question of safety, then Christ answered the question of love. I think that there’s a land mine here that we want to avoid, that could be problematic.

You and I are both Christians, and unapologetically so. This is the how and the who of how we met and meet God. It’s Jesus. We can say that and, and smile and not even need to blush about it. So, yeah. Welcome to Theology Kills. It’s a Christian podcast. If you haven’t figured it out yet, it is.

Still, I think we wanna avoid something that might get called supercessionism. And if you’ve never heard that word, you’re just like the spell check on my computer. But if you were raised “evangelical,” and I put that in quotes — I’m not talking about the good news, euangelion, I’m talking, if you were raised evangelical in the United States, you were exposed to this. And it didn’t need a label because when you got a taste of it, it was presented just as the gospel truth.

And it goes something like this:Judaism set the stage for Christianity. And hold on, that, that much is actually true and it doesn’t need a big label. It’s just the history of events. But supercessionism, this big label, says not only Judaism set the stage for Christianity, but it also says that that’s all that Judaism did, or ever does:sets the stage for Christianity, period, and then it was over. Anything beyond that is, is a divergence from what it was meant to do.

Now, I don’t think, I don’t think I wanna say that. I don’t think you want to say that, January. I’m pretty confident.

[00:38:22] January: Nope.

[00:38:22] Andrew: That’s,

[00:38:23] January: I categorically reject that. We would never say, today in contemporary society, that a person who’s given birth no longer has any life or purpose of her own, that her only role in the world was to bring this other person into the world and now she no longer matters.

I’m sure that’s been said at some point in history about women, and that’s gross, and we’re not saying that. I hope that’s really obvious, nine episodes into this podcast!

[00:38:51] Andrew: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:38:53] January: So, yeah. So it’s the same with Judaism, right? That just because it helped to bring Jesus and Christianity into the world does not mean for one minute that it has no life or worth of its own. It is a grandmother. It will go on growing and changing and contributing

[00:39:09] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:39:09] January: ever more gifts to its children and grandchildren.

[00:39:12] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:39:12] January: It has thousands of years of wisdom to offer the world. This is a legacy that is ongoing and alive on all fronts. It’s not a single linear progression of, this has purpose and then this has purpose and then this has purpose, and once that baton has been passed, then there’s no more purpose. No. No.

[00:39:33] Andrew: Yeah. No, well said. That’s, yeah, that’s a really interesting analogy.

[00:39:38] January: We’re cramming a lot of content into, I know that two hour episodes don’t really feel very small, but I promise it’s a small amount of space compared to the amount of subject matter we could be bringing to the table here.

[00:39:48] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:39:48] January: So all that to say that. Yes, I categorically reject this idea that Judaism happened, but then Judaism was the chaff that we were supposed to shed in order to become Christians, which is really the best thing.

[00:40:01] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:40:01] January: And that anything that happens after Jesus is also irrelevant, and we don’t ever need to grow past Jesus either because it was already perfect 2000 years ago. And, and, and like, no, no, no, no, no, no.

But yeah, no, I, I, despite the way that I’m framing things here as this is the progression of how Christianity has unfolded, it does not mean that I think that what came before us is somehow less than at all.

I don’t think that traditions that are entirely separate from the Abrahamic religions are less than. I’m confident that Buddhism has something to offer the world, that Hinduism has something to offer the world, that Navajo Diné culture has something to offer. Like, all of these things have important things to contribute to the world. That’s why they’re here.

[00:40:49] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:40:50] January: And I personally think that all of those traditions are safeguarding truths that are in our own Christian Bible, and we don’t know how to see them yet.

[00:41:00] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:41:00] January: We haven’t learned to recognize them yet. I think there’s gonna be a point down the road when we are very, very grateful to all of those traditions for safeguarding and cultivating the aspects that we weren’t yet mature enough to see.

[00:41:12] Andrew: Hmm. Yeah. And so, within a Christian context, it’s easy for us in our received tradition to see these moments, with Torah being given to the Israelites and Jesus’s message and the Reformation, but the process itself, as you said, it’s a human thing that’s going on. At least that’s the contention of what we’re saying, is that this is part of just human flourishing period, regardless of what religion you’ve received.

Hmm, how do I say this? Okay, one, the Exodus. Right? The gift of Torah. That’s number one.

Two, Jesus. The ministry of God incarnate! All right? These are, like, singular occasions in global species history, you know? I mean, if you’re a believer.

Three, Martin Luther. Is Martin Luther a singular, like, species — species? I can’t say species. Species! Singular species wide event? Because you do give us a 1, 2, 3. Exodus, Jesus, Luther. Are we supposed to have him on par with the other two?

[00:42:23] January: No, that’s a good point. I am using Martin Luther and the Reformation as an example of this transition from recognizing that we’re safe with God, to experiencing ourselves as loved by God. So he’s not the first person who did it, he’s not the only person who did it, he’s not some singular figure we should be holding up and putting on a pedestal. He is one example of this transition from the first two stages into the next phase of what that makes possible for humanity.

[00:42:54] Andrew: Gotcha. Yeah.

[00:42:56] January: The third stage in that transition feels like, oh shit! I’m getting this wrong. Which is the question, what can I learn? But I think when we’re tying it back to Girard and the assertion that Christian conversion is the discovery that we have been persecutors without realizing it.

[00:43:18] Andrew: Mm-hmm.

[00:43:19] January: That conversion is that moment where we realize, oh crap, we’re getting this wrong.

[00:43:25] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:43:25] January: That’s what Martin Luther was able to do. He was able to look at his own tradition and go, this isn’t Jesus. We’re getting this wrong. We’ve gone off the rail somewhere.

[00:43:34] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:43:35] January: And for him, that was a ‘we.’ We’re looking at it from 500 years in the future and we’re going, well, there was the Catholic Church and then there was Luther over here.

[00:43:43] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:43:44] January: Because for us, he’s separate.

[00:43:46] Andrew: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:43:47] January: But he wasn’t.

[00:43:48] Andrew: No.

[00:43:48] January: His experience was that he was within the Catholic Church and he was looking at his own tradition and going, we’re fucking this up. Like we gotta,

[00:43:55] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:43:55] January: we are literally enslaving people. This is not okay. We’ve gotta stop doing this. And so yeah, that ability to reflect on ourselves, on our own traditions, on our own cultures, and see the places where we are getting things wrong and allowing that to lead us into the question of, what can I learn here? What other ways might be possible?

[00:44:17] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:44:17] January: And that’s the point at which this opens up. But yeah, I did really want to avoid putting Luther on any kind of pedestal because he’s not the only example of this that has ever happened, even within Church history. He just happens to be the point at which it went global, if you will.

[00:44:35] Andrew: Yeah. And it seems to be implicit in the words themselves, or the events. Like, coming to know that you’re safe. It’s not like that’s a rollercoaster ride that you do once and you’re like, all right, do it again. I learned that I was safe. I wanna do that again. No, you, you just sit in that and dwell in it. If you’re safe, you’re safe. And it’s not like you need to do it again because you’re still safe. If you really felt it, you’re still feeling it.

[00:45:00] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:45:00] Andrew: And the same with being loved.

[00:45:02] January: Yeah.

[00:45:02] Andrew: It’s not like to know that you’re loved and be like, oh, that was great. See ya. I wanna do that again. I mean, there’s some kinds of love that might, that, that might come across that way, but not, that’s not the love that we’re talking, that’s not the love of Christ.

Let’s be clear. And so like, yeah, if, if you know yourself to be loved, it’s still there, but. Curiosity? Learning? That is something that will be an iterative thing.

[00:45:26] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:45:26] Andrew: It’ll happen again, and what I was so wrong about that, and I found out this.

[00:45:31] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:45:32] Andrew: Oh dear. What else am I wrong about? Or like,

[00:45:35] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:45:35] Andrew: what else can I find out? Let’s find something else out.

[00:45:38] January: Yep.

[00:45:38] Andrew: You can do it again. And it doesn’t detract from it. So the singularity of Exodus-Torah and Jesus-and-divine-ministry, like yeah, it makes sense that those are singular. Whereas, yeah, we’re offering Martin Luther as an example, but he’s certainly not the one and only, as you said, he wasn’t the first. He’s not the last, but he’s,

[00:45:57] January: or even necessarily the best. He’s just very well known.

[00:46:01] Andrew: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:46:01] January: Thank you for bringing that up. That is very important. Yeah.

[00:46:05] Andrew: One comment that’ll be long and ramble-y, I was not able to clarify this in my own brain completely, but it’s stemming from something — of course, yeah, of course it is — stemming from something James Alison said somewhere that I don’t even remember now, about if we lose sight of the fact that the Passion is a revelation, if we lose sight of the fact that it’s a revelation, if it stops being a revelation and is just an event or a thing that happened, then it can be idolized and it can be turned into, among other things, penal substitutionary atonement.

It can be this divinity practicing blood sacrifice because in this universe, blood sacrifice is a thing that works, and so here’s one instantiation of it, the perfect instantiation of it, Jesus’s blood, that’s no longer a revelation. You know what I mean? The entirety of that makes sense. Before Jesus, if you say, oh, and, and Jesus was the perfect one.

That’s not a revelation. Like if I tell you, I tell you there’s seven seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but season one was the perfect one. Like there’s innumerable people that are so pissed off at me right now, but I, I, you know, I didn’t, but I didn’t reveal anything other than my opinion. Right. There was no revelation.

It’s just, it’s just a thing that’s true that a lot of people can’t see, except for me for some reason, but it’s not a revelation. What I’m saying is if it’s a revelation, then it’s just like, everybody’s like, oh, you know, what am I trying to say?

Revelation. If we lose sight of the fact that the cross is a revelation, then we can condense it down into an object and/or experience that fits within our understanding.

[00:47:42] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:47:43] Andrew: If it’s a revelation, it’s fracturing our understanding.

[00:47:47] January: Yep.

[00:47:48] Andrew: Okay. The law is what makes you safe. Yes, and, the law is what communicates to you that you’re safe, and those are two different things.

[00:48:00] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:48:00] Andrew: The law can make you safe and does, and the law communicates to you that you are safe. If that message is lost and it just becomes the thing that makes me safe, and it’s not communicating “here is safety,” then you’ve missed the fullness of the law. And not long after that. It is something that isn’t, here are the limits within which we can be creative, take these rules and do stuff with them,

[00:48:28] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:48:28] Andrew: it’s here is the limit outside of which you are unsafe.

[00:48:33] January: Yeah, exactly.

[00:48:33] Andrew: This is communicating the opposite of you can be safe. You are in peril! Right? If you are outside the law, you’re in danger!

[00:48:42] January: Yeah.

[00:48:43] Andrew: That’s lost the communicative element, which I think has a corollary with the revelatory element. Love came down at Christmas. I think they’ve made songs about that. Yes. That’s Jesus. But Jesus should also communicate that you are loved.

[00:49:02] January: Mm.

[00:49:03] Andrew: And if somehow you should create some theology wherein love came down at Christmas, full stop. That’s the thing that happened, and you’ve lost the communicative, “You are loved,” that is, it’s gonna mess up Jesus being love. Right?

And the same with the Reformation. It allows us to learn something new, but it also communicates that guess what? 1500 years later we can still learn something new.

[00:49:42] January: Yeah.

[00:49:43] Andrew: We can still learn something new.

And if your reform theology tells you that there ain’t nothing new to learn, you’ve taken the event of a newness or a fullness of learning and you’ve discarded the message that you can still learn something new. And so, in all of these cases, it seems like, from law, to love, to learning, if we’ve lost what those things are communicating and just hold on to what they are, but we’ve lost the message, then we’ve tossed the baby out with the bath water.

[00:50:09] January: Yeah. I, I wanted to avoid the implication that just because I’m using the Reformation as an example, that Protestantism is somehow better than Catholicism.

[00:50:21] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:50:21] January: Or that either of them is better than being Eastern Orthodox or… right? Like we have all this fragmentation within the global body of the church, not just between religions, but within Christianity itself.

There are all of these different factions and perspectives, if you will. And I do feel like the Reformation was the point at which that diversity escalated exponentially. I think that the gospel had kind of gotten stuck in these ruts because only certain people were allowed to, or equipped to, read it and interpret it and God went, yeah, their imaginations aren’t big enough. How do we invite more people in?

[00:50:57] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:50:57] January: But the risk that I see is the risk of putting the reformation itself on a pedestal and putting Luther on a pedestal and saying, oh, this is what we should be doing and who we should be. Like, there were plenty of things wrong with Martin Luther. Can we talk about the antisemitism?

[00:51:13] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:51:14] January: Major issues. There is a reason that the Nazis had lots to work from when they were using his theology to shore up their anti-Jewish activities. So definitely, I don’t want to sound like I’m putting the person or the event on that pedestal and saying, this is what did it for us. No, it’s what it was communicating.

[00:51:36] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:51:36] January: Like we were talking about the other day. Jesus is the word of God. Jesus is the communication of God to us, and that communication is ongoing and unfolding in every moment of our lives for the rest of history.

[00:51:53] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:51:53] January: Heaven and earth will pass away. My words will not pass away. The material existence within which we are currently contained will eventually pass away. But God will never not be communicating with us that we are loved and held and part of something bigger than us.

[00:52:09] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:52:10] January: And we don’t have to idolize the very human people who have helped us get further down that road by being brilliant and insightful and stubborn and whatever else. We can acknowledge the good things that they contributed to the journey without necessarily getting stuck on them as the way that things should be done.

[00:52:32] Andrew: Yeah, no, absolutely.

[00:52:35] January: I gotta confess that I don’t have a lot of love for Martin Luther myself. I do think he was brilliant. He was absolutely brilliant.

[00:52:41] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:52:41] January: But he’s one of those people who’s so damn sure of himself that like, even when I actually do agree with him, I want to disagree on principle, just ‘cause he’s such an asshole about it.

But also, at the same time that it drives me insane, that is also what I want to see Christians doing in the world.

[00:52:59] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:52:59] January: Right? That’s what I’m doing with this podcast. Do I think I have the perfect explanation for Jesus? No, not in a million years. I’m sure! There’s so much that I’ve said in this season that’s just been bang out of order, right?

But it’s where my understanding currently is I can only speak from where I am

[00:53:20] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:53:20] January: in this moment

[00:53:21] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:53:22] January: and talk about Jesus from there. And that’s what I wanna be doing. I can’t shut up about this stuff ‘cause I’m too excited about it. And asking me to wait to talk about Jesus until I have the quote unquote “correct” thing to say.

[00:53:37] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:53:38] January: Nope. Sorry, I’m just not gonna, I’m gonna be as stubborn as Martin Luther right there. Nope.

[00:53:44] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:53:45] January: But yeah, we talked in an earlier episode about certainty being gift of the Holy Spirit, and I think it’s very specifically that certainty in Christ. Not in our own capacity, not in our,

[00:53:56] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:53:57] January: not in our own interpretation. If we have our head around something, it’s not God. Whatever it is that we’ve understood is not God.

[00:54:06] Andrew: Yeah. Right. Exactly.

[00:54:06] January: That’s not actually possible.

[00:54:08] Andrew: Yeah. No, that’s just, yeah, that’s,

[00:54:11] January: But I do want to be pointing in that direction because there is a communication happening and it is available right now to any one of us.

[00:54:20] Andrew: You want us to be pointing in that direction, meaning...? I, I hear you. If we think we’ve got our heads around something, we’ve understood it? That’s not God. Of course. Yeah, so well put. And yet we want to be pointed in the direction of getting our heads around something?

[00:54:37] January: Oh, no, that’s not what I meant at all!

[00:54:40] Andrew: Oh, okay.

[00:54:41] January: No, thank you for that. No, I meant that we wanna be pointing in the direction of Christ. That none of this is about us or our own understanding, or anything that we have to do necessarily.

[00:54:51] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:54:51] January: All of this comes from a relationship with Christ, a relationship with grace.

[00:54:56] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:54:57] January: That is the direction that I want all of this work to be pointing. If somebody has listened to this podcast and got oh, I don’t need Jesus. I can just do this all myself,

[00:55:05] Andrew: Ah.

[00:55:05] January: Like, I have miscommunicated horrendously.

[00:55:09] Andrew: Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I, no, I got you. And if we are speaking about Christ in ways that don’t add up, you know, at least we’re still talking about Jesus.

[00:55:17] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:55:17] Andrew: Yeah. As Christians, that’s a, that’s a valuable thing. Requires a bit of trust, I guess, to talk about something that you can’t fully explain. Means you’re trusting it to explain itself and, uh,

[00:55:29] January: Yes.

[00:55:29] Andrew: Jesus is not an “it.” This is a person.

[00:55:32] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:55:33] Andrew: And you don’t explain people

[00:55:34] January: Yeah.

[00:55:35] Andrew: to other people, right? You introduce people to other people.

[00:55:38] January: Yes. Exactly. I hope that is what this podcast has been. My hope is always that someone else will go read scripture and discover it for themselves.

[00:55:48] Andrew: Yeah, me too.

[00:55:50] January: And that’s a bit what’s happening in our Patreon which makes me very happy.

[00:55:54] Andrew: Mm-hmm.

[00:55:54] January: That we do have a Patreon community that we affectionately refer to as the Pod Parish who are our dedicated supporters, and that’s a space where we can continue the conversation, enjoy some fellowship around these topics, and explore what it means to live this stuff all together.

So we do a Q&A session once a month where we invite people to just throw their questions out there and we can all have a community conversation about that. And somebody on last month’s thread had this amazing question that I just thought was so, so good. And so I have to bring it into the conversation that we’re having here because it’s so apropos and she doesn’t know that this is coming down the pike.

So shout out Teresa. Well done you, asking a perfect question.

[00:56:40] Andrew: Yeah. So Teresa says, I’ve been thinking about your position that creativity, not correct behavior, is what brings us into proper relationship with God, others, ourselves. Could you describe how you see that aligning with the concept of the narrow way described in the Sermon on the Mount?

I suspect that the narrow way is like the TARDIS bigger on the inside than the outside. Ha ha. But it so often gets interpreted as correct behavior or in terms of unquestioning faith or a certain kind of self-denial. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

[00:57:17] January: I love this question so much, and as Andrew noted in our Q&A, this is now perpetually going to be the parable of the Wide way and the TARDIS way in our brains because that’s it’s, it’s too perfect.

[00:57:32] Andrew: No, yeah.

[00:57:32] January: Uh-huh. So predictably, I see the narrow way through the lens of Girard. I think it’s about the difficulty of living from peace in the midst of a world at war — living gently, while still surrounded by a culture that teaches us violence practically from birth, and all too often responds to vulnerability with wrath, contempt, or martyrdom.

That shit is hard. That shit is narrow. That is not an easy path at all.

[00:58:03] Andrew: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

[00:58:04] January: And yet, blessed are those who lack. Blessed are those who grieve. Blessed are the nonviolent. Blessed are those who ache for justice. Blessed are the merciful, the devoted, the peacemakers, because they’re the ones living from love instead of violence, and that is a blessing.

So earlier that week, I was listening to a podcast that talked about the role of renunciation in the spiritual life and how our worldly culture has sort of tried to renounce renunciation. This idea that you don’t have to give up anything, you can have it all.

But one of the things I pointed out was that any professional creative will tell you that good design involves constraints. You can’t have it all, not if you want something with meaning and beauty, and not just a jumbled, chaotic, muddy mess. It’s not, and anything goes endeavor.

And so the narrow way asks us to renounce our violence and stay tender in a hard world. And that’s gonna get you bruised. That’s gonna get you bloodied. That might even get you crucified.

But when we accept that as our creative constraint, when we get curious about:hey, I wonder what it would look like to do this life thing without exiling or dominating anyone or anything? What does it look like to live in a way that does not create victims — of myself, of anyone else, of creation? The creativity that becomes possible… hell yes, I think that way is bigger on the inside. Yeah, I do.

[00:59:39] Andrew: Yeah,

[00:59:39] January: I really do. And so I wanted to bring that into our conversation today because we have spent nine episodes now talking about all of these beautiful things that we receive from God:the peace and the joy, and the freedom. And all of those are good and wonderful things, but I really want to avoid turning this into some kind of prosperity gospel, “God just wants good things for you,” because there is all of this goodness that we receive and we get to enjoy. Absolutely. And then we get to go do something creative with it.

[01:00:11] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:00:11] January: And part of that creative process might be painful. It asks us to follow Jesus all the way to the cross without violence. And that renunciation of our violence is part of this repentance. And it’s not an easy choice necessarily. ‘Cause maybe what’s gonna happen is my crucifixion. Okay, how committed am I to this non-violence?

Renunciation is a flip side to falling in love with Jesus and becoming committed to this adventure of change and repentance in order to participate in this creation of the kingdom of heaven on earth. It’s not just about what we have to do better, it’s about what we need to put down, what we need to unlearn, what we need to renounce and seriously commit to giving up on. Yes, we’re gonna learn and grow, but we’re also — to the point of our podcast name! — gonna have to let some things die.

We’re gonna have to let some things go. And that’s that renunciation piece. And so it felt remiss to me that we would do an entire episode on repentance and not talk about renunciation too. I just, I wanted to offer that to kind of temper the conversation and keep this from just becoming about Christian self-development. ‘Cause that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about how do we live God’s way?

[01:01:29] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:01:29] January: Because ultimately that is bigger on the inside.

[01:01:33] Andrew: Yeah. Yeah. I, no, I, I, I, I love that image of the TARDIS and I was wondering if there was an inverted TARDIS. I haven’t watched enough Dr. Who to know whether there’s anything that’s giant huge, but once you get in it, you realize there’s just one thing that’s going on, and that’s it.

I think that could be a description of the wide way too, but, yeah. Yeah. I don’t know that I have anything to say unfortunately, other than, yeah, what a great image of a narrow way that’s just ever expansive on the inside. That’s, yeah. That’s really cool.

[01:02:05] January: I like your question too, though. This idea of the wide way is being an inverse-TARDIS that

[01:02:10] Andrew: Yeah.

looks like it’s got all of this freedom and choices and options and adventure, and then actually it ends up being extremely narrow and constricting and just leading to our destruction.

Yeah. Yeah.

[01:02:25] January: Misrecognition. There it is again. We have an awful hard time recognizing reality for what it is.

[01:02:34] Andrew: Yeah.

The renunciation of violence.

I, I think you and I both wanna say that Christian repentance will entail the renunciation of violence.

[01:02:44] January: Yes,

[01:02:45] Andrew: I want to talk a little bit in detail about what exactly is it that we’re talking about when we talk about violence? What is that?

[01:02:51] January: Mm. Mm-hmm.

[01:02:52] Andrew: Because it can be really easy, I think, to just assume, oh yeah, I know what violence is. Like, somebody gets punched in the chin or whatever. That’s violent.

[01:03:01] January: Yeah.

[01:03:01] Andrew: And I don’t know, do you have a definition of violence?

[01:03:07] January: I’m laughing because this is making me realize that we got all the way to the ninth episode of the podcast and never gave people a definition for that. We’ve been talking about for nine episodes. So way to call me on my, uh, obliviousness. Thank you for that. I appreciate it.

I think it’s very easy to get into this idea of it as just the physical act of injuring another person or even the emotional act of injuring another person. But I think it goes deeper than that. I am defining violence as the exile of someone’s subjectivity.

[01:03:39] Andrew: Mm-hmm.

[01:03:40] January: Which includes domination, it includes colonization, it includes any time that somebody’s personhood, somebody’s desires are being kicked out of the conversation. I would call that a violence, whether that’s mine or anybody else’s.

[01:03:53] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:03:54] January: Whether that’s the voice of the earth and creation being kicked outta the conversation and we’re just using that and abusing that, that counts too in my book as a violence. If there’s anybody that has to be cast out for this to work, it’s a violence. If there’s any part of myself that’s not allowed in the room, it’s a violence. There’s any part of the other person that I can’t tolerate and I need to fix, that is a violence.

And then there’s also forms where we end up throwing punches. But my definition of violence is much bigger than that. Much more rigorous, I hope. Much more difficult.

Is there anything in there that hits for you?

[01:04:34] Andrew: Yeah, that does. And I, I love that definition. We had two whole episodes on shame as internal violence and blame as external violence. And I personally, as far as somebody who’s trying to encourage people to learn language and increase their vocabulary — dictionaries are great for what they do, but that’s not how you learn vocabulary. You don’t actually

[01:04:50] January: Yeah.

[01:04:51] Andrew: understand the sense of a word by reading the definition. You can use it for certain research methods. But when it comes to understanding what we’re saying when we use the word violence, following along in context — I don’t think we’ve left anybody behind.

I doubt anybody’s gonna be totally surprised with what we’re gonna say, although I, I guess I wanna backpedal to what exactly is going on when we renounce something like violence. And specifically here in, in this episode is where we started using that term, I think. If I come up across something that is violent and I see it for what it is, and I say, okay, be gone in the name of Jesus, like. I renounce you in the name–.

[01:05:30] January: Mm-hmm. Sorry.

[01:05:32] Andrew: Yeah. That’s not… Divine nonviolence is so radical. It’s not actually about uprooting violence in and of itself

[01:05:45] January: Right.

[01:05:46] Andrew: but it’s actually uprooting the very influence that violence has had on us as persons that have lived our lives as humans that are a species. Violence has played a role, and the renunciation of it is not just this “be gone!” sort of thing.

I don’t know that Jesus is ever going to bother to insist that any conflict be done away with.

[01:06:16] January: Mm. Mm-hmm.

[01:06:18] Andrew: There’s a sense in which I understand the divine nonviolence to be something that transcends violence itself. It’s not the violence itself that’s being uprooted. Because in a very real sense, it’s a part of who we are. But it doesn’t have to be.

For those of you that endured violence, it didn’t have to be that way.

[01:06:39] January: Yeah.

[01:06:40] Andrew: For those of you that are undergoing it, perhaps now, it’s not the way things are supposed to be. There is no necessary violence, but it doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened or can’t happen. How do I clarify this?

[01:06:57] January: What’s coming to mind for me was back when you and I had a conversation about the fact that pregnancy is a receptive activity, but not a passive activity.

[01:07:07] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:07:09] January: And you are trying to find what’s the opposite of passivity and the conclusion you arrived at was invitation.

[01:07:16] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:07:17] January: I’m curious if you would agree that that is the way that God uproots our violence. It’s not by casting out the violence, it’s just by inviting everything in.

[01:07:30] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:07:31] January: Everything and everyone. Radical catholicity.

[01:07:35] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:07:36] January: And that by that act of invitation, there simply is nobody who’s outside it. There is nobody who has to be expelled in order for that invitation to include everybody, that those are mutually exclusive things. There can’t be anybody expelled.

[01:07:49] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:07:50] January: For it to be divine non-violence.

[01:07:53] Andrew: Yeah. I think there’s a reading of Luke-Acts that draws that out. It seems to be understood that Luke and Acts of the Apostles was written by the same author, and it’s a two-part book really. For some reason. John got stuck in the middle of it, but, yeah.

The same way that Luke ends with the Passion, Acts you’re mainly following Paul around. And it ends with him on a boat. And of course they run into trouble and the ship cap sizes and there’s some people that are wanting to flee and he makes this comment about, no, no, if anyone leaves, it’s not gonna work. Yeah, it’s been a while since I’ve read that, but there’s a very strong total inclusion in that story that if salvation comes to us, it’s coming to all of us. And if salvation doesn’t come to all of us, it’s not salvation.

[01:08:40] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:08:40] Andrew: The archaic sacred is based on this feeling of, oh, we almost lost it, but for that one who had to die otherwise it wouldn’t have worked. Like, oh, that was a close call. Yeah. The gospel stands in complete contrast to that. And yeah, I, I think divine nonviolence is very much an invitation. But there’s an almost absurd capacity to withstand violence and yet not participate in it.

[01:09:09] January: Hmm.

[01:09:10] Andrew: And the same way that I was saying before to like just folks personally or individually, if you’ve undergone violence that wasn’t necessary, that’s something to grieve. That’s not something to make sense of and say, well, made me a better person. Maybe you are a better person than whenever it happened, but it’s not the violence that effects our betterment.

[01:09:27] January: Yeah. God didn’t put you through that Hell just to make you a better person. Yeah.

[01:09:32] Andrew: Exactly. And I firmly believe, and I know you do too, January, you’re like, God didn’t put Jesus through hell just so that we could go to heaven. We put Jesus through hell.

[01:09:42] January: Yeah.

[01:09:43] Andrew: This was human aggression against God. The wrath of God, as I understand it in the Bible, is people hating God. Same way that the love of God is people loving God. And where do you see the wrath of God being poured out? You see it in the Gospels. You see it in the passion. You see it in people directing their hatred toward God.

And in the same way, like it didn’t have to be that way. God doesn’t need a blood sacrifice to forgive us. That’s not the God that’s revealed in the Bible. And yet the point being though the crucifixion was a very, very violent thing. This

[01:10:24] January: Yeah,

[01:10:24] Andrew: this act of atonement was very violent. We’re not gonna pretend that it wasn’t. We’re not gonna look at him and say, I renounce this because it’s violent—no! It’s there. It is a part of human history. It’s a part of divine revelation.

[01:10:40] January: Yeah, and being able to accept that that is part of us, and that is part of who we have been,

[01:10:46] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:10:47] January: that is Girard’s discovery that we have been persecutors. And owning that and integrating that reality into our self-conception and accepting forgiveness alongside it.

The two things hopefully go together. I mean, they don’t always, and I think this is where you and I got into a discussion of Judas.

[01:11:06] Andrew: Mm-hmm. Yeah. The understanding of Judas and what happened to him has been a problematic thing for me personally reading scripture since I encountered Girard. Girard gives an absurdly effective framework for reading origin myths to the point that like, I’m not a student of these, but I had a real problem with reading the first chapter of Robin Wall Kemmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass.

And by saying a real problem, I mean, I ended up having to put the book down. A few years ago, several people were reading it, were blown away by it. It was getting high praise from people I respect, and I started reading it. You know, I’m always gonna be glancing through the chapter titles and stuff. And I was like, okay, this is really cool.

Anyway, so there’s this amazing book I’m sitting down to read, and she starts it with an adaptation that she says comes from oral traditions, but it was a collection of Iroquois traditional tales. And, yeah, it starts wonderfully. There’s a woman falling from the sky and like she’s spinning around like a maple seed and the goose is there and it sees her falling. The geese all catch her ‘cause they can see she’s in trouble and they’re like, we can only hold her so long. And then the turtle shows up, she’s like, okay, she can hop on my back.

But the turtle’s back needs dirt ‘cause she has seeds, she has something to plant there. And so at somewhere at the bottom of the lake there’s mud. So like all these wonderful animals are going down trying to find it, but none of ‘em get far enough down until the muskrat is gonna try. And then the muskrat goes down and when it comes back up it’s, it’s dead. And they think, oh well you know, the muskrat tried its hardest. And then they look in its hand is some mud.

And so Girard, he’s sort of uber serious with mythology. He always zeroes in on the fact that if his theory is correct, the truth behind these myths is that there is a very real person who died. Right? This isn’t an abstract thing. Somewhere, how many thousands of years ago, a person died in the midst of a community that found a way to make sense of it in the telling of this story.

When a community turns on one of their own, it only works if there’s nobody that stands up for them. Otherwise, it just escalates into continuing violence, right? And so what the muskrat gets at — this little, tiny, fluffy creature — is that the one who ends up dead is the one whom no one’s gonna speak up for. And they captured that a bit with this image of a muskrat.

And anyway, it just sort of broke my heart. I never heard this story. But as soon as the muskrat got mentioned, I’m like, that’s the one that dies. And I’m so used to that being drawn out. When Robin Wall Kimmerer didn’t, it was just, it was very disturbing. I had to put the book down and I’m sure it’s amazing and it just, but you know, so it was my own hangup, right?

So I had to put that book down. When there’s a death that people just find a way to overlook. ‘Cause, wow! the community has really come through it, so yeah, that death, it just, yeah, it had to happen. Myth has to hide, it has to cover it up, otherwise it doesn’t work. And gospel is this problematic telling of the story of like, guess what? There it is. There’s a thing that’s not covered up.

[01:14:17] January: Mm. Mm-hmm.

[01:14:19] Andrew: Well, is there not a weirdly convenient death in the gospel telling when it comes to Judas? Is anybody really asking the question, why did he die? And how, how did he, what happened to him exactly?

[01:14:33] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:14:34] Andrew: Was it a suicide or did his body just fall apart? So anyway, this has sort of been a problem text for me since encountering Girard. Before Girard, I, it, I wasn’t hung up on it and so anyway, sorry. All that, all that to say is I’m really stoked about some of the conversation we’ve had so far, because I feel like you’re bringing a reading to this that is fully Girard and yet doesn’t overlook who Judas is and who he represents. And his death isn’t convenient at all. It’s just something to grieve, period. And that’s what death should be.

It makes me feel a little uncomfortable that we can just recount his story and be like, yep, well, got what he deserved. Had that reading scares me.

[01:15:15] January: Yeah.

[01:15:15] Andrew: I don’t wanna read it that way, but I’m not sure I know how. Yeah. How do you read Judas and his role in the gospel?

[01:15:23] January: I think this is hugely important because if we are celebrating any death and saying that person got what they deserved, we are missing the point of the Gospels. Yeah, and so the way that I read the Judas character is that I saw it as an expression of the internal scapegoating that we talked about going all the way back to Eve.

That it wasn’t the people around Judas who ganged up on him and killed him, but the parts of him that realized what he had done, and this is the distinction between him and Peter, right?

Because Peter has the same realization of, oh, shit, I betrayed the person I loved. But Peter somehow is able to get that and go, oh, there might be forgiveness here. There’s still possibility, even though I fucked up. Relationship is still possible.

Whereas Judas stands in judgment of himself and goes:this is unacceptable, I’m not worth living anymore. And goes and takes his own life. I think that’s an internal scapegoating that’s happening there.

[01:16:20] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:16:21] January: And it’s so heartbreaking ‘cause he’d been right alongside Peter the whole time watching Jesus forgive all of these people who’d fucked up?

Why does Peter get to be forgiven and have a future, but Judas goes off and hangs himself or just implodes depending on which version you read. The difference that I see is that Judas cannot let his own self-identity include the way that he screwed up. He can’t give that shame a foothold in his psyche. He has to reject it.

And his only solution to this is, well, if this is who I’ve been, if this is what I’ve done, then I deserve to die. That’s the only future that he can see.

[01:16:59] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:17:00] January: I will die on the hill that Jesus would’ve forgiven Judas too,

[01:17:04] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:17:04] January: if Judas had been able to receive that. And it grieves me incredibly deeply that he could not. And I don’t want that for any human. And if we’re standing on the sidelines celebrating the fact that, well, the bad guy got what they deserved, we need to reality check ourselves. There’s violence involved somewhere.

[01:17:25] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:17:25] January: We are exiling something. We are exiling somebody’s subjectivity. Judas was exiling his own.

[01:17:31] Andrew: Yeah. Yeah.

[01:17:33] January: And I’m saying that as someone who has lost an unfortunate number of friends to suicide. So I don’t wanna be in any way shaming the people who are stuck in this imagination and can’t see that future for themselves.

[01:17:46] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:17:46] January: Shame is a devastating wound and it costs lives. And that is a tragedy every single time.

[01:17:55] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:17:56] January: I just wanna be clear that it is a tragedy, including when the person has done something that we think was despicable.

[01:18:02] Andrew: Yeah, it is very much a tragedy.

There’s a stunning depth to the account of this one story. Well, we, we have two accounts, right? It’s one event, but we have two accounts.

Even though this is a single occurrence of suicide in scripture, and even though there’s only a couple verses that we have that outline how this suicide played out, there’s real depth to the story. Like, there’s not a lot there, to Judas’ death. It’s just like, bang.

[01:18:31] January: Uh-huh.

[01:18:32] Andrew: But thanks to the parallel accounts coming from two gospel authors, we can bring these together in a way that leads to a very profound analysis of what that loss of hope is for someone who’s led to suicide. And in order to get to that — January, you, you’re the one that brought this to my attention — in order to get to that we do have to make a detour and, and look at, the comments Jesus makes about old and new wine skins.

[01:19:02] January: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I spotted a parallel between a parable in the Gospel of Luke and Judas’ untimely death in Acts. And I think if we unpack that, and then compare that version of Judas death with the version told in Matthew, I think we get at something really important about what exactly is happening when Judas dies.

So would you be willing to read the Luke passage for us? This is chapter 5 verses 29 to 39.

[01:19:34] Andrew: yes. I can read the passage from Luke, but just to be clear:the episode of Judas’ death takes place in Matthew, the end of Matthew and at the very beginning of Acts. We’re reading a passage in Luke because operating on the assumption that the same person who wrote Luke also wrote Acts. And there is a very interesting word that’s used both in the beginning of Acts to talk about Judas’ death and, and in this passage here.

It starts with, uh, Jesus and he’s, he’s just called Levi to be a disciple. And Levi was doing his work as a tax collector and some Pharisees were complaining about that to Jesus’s disciples. And Jesus steps in, he’s like, yeah, it’s not the healthy who need the doctor, but the sick. He says, yeah, I’m not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.

The Pharisees said to Jesus, “John’s disciples often fast and pray, and the disciples of the Pharisees do the same but yours, eat and drink.” And he said to them, “Y’all can’t make the friends of the bridegroom fast while he is with them, can y’all? But the time will come when the groom will be taken away from them, then in those days, they will fast.

He also told them a parable. “No one tears a piece from a new garment and puts it on an old garment. Otherwise, they will have torn the new, and the piece from the new will not match the old. And no one puts new wine into old wine skins. Otherwise, the new wine will burst the skins, it will spill out, and the skins will be destroyed. Instead, new wine must be put into fresh wine skins. And no one after drinking old wine wants the new, for they will say, ‘the old is better.’”

[01:21:34] January: Yes. And so the way that I read that passage — and it kind of just hit me anew for the first time yesterday — I think that the Pharisees are looking at the text collectors and going, oh, those are the sinners over there. Those guys.

[01:21:50] Andrew: Mm.

[01:21:51] January: They’re, they’re the bad ones. We’re over here being correct, and they’re over there being glutens and drunkards. And so when Jesus says that line about, well, I didn’t come to call the righteous, it came to call the sinners. I think it’s very easy for them to assume that, oh, Jesus is talking about the tax collectors, but it’s actually the mercy that Jesus is showing to those tax collectors

[01:22:16] Andrew: Mm-hmm.

[01:22:16] January: that reveals

[01:22:18] Andrew: yeah.

[01:22:18] January: the actual sickness, which is the Pharisees who have received mercy from God and yet are refusing to show it to their fellow humans.

[01:22:29] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:22:30] January: They’re actually the sinners in that parable.

[01:22:32] Andrew: Oh yeah.

[01:22:33] January: I mean also the tax collectors, but Jesus is talking to the Pharisees with that parable of the wineskins.

[01:22:38] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:22:39] January: And so the point then becomes that when they’re criticizing him for doing things differently than the tradition has always done them. What he’s saying is, there’s something new coming into the world, and when you’ve been doing things a certain way for a really long time, it’s easy to insist that, oh, that way is better.

[01:23:02] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:23:02] January: Right? That’s the that line at the end about,

[01:23:05] Andrew: Yeah. Yeah.

[01:23:05] January: When you’ve had the old wine you don’t want the new because the old is better. Jesus is saying that what he’s doing is the new wine, and it’s not fitting in with what they’re doing simply because they’re not flexible enough to receive it. They’re too rigid, they’re too devoted to their old way. And again, like we’ve already talked about, this isn’t a criticism of, well, Judaism is bad, and then Christianity is good.

[01:23:28] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:23:29] January: No, no, no, no, no, no. This is a thing that humans do.

[01:23:35] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:23:35] January: All of us. Certainly if I was gonna point fingers at somebody for being a legalist right now, it would not be the Jewish folks. It would definitely be the Christians.

[01:23:45] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:23:45] January: Just saying, I’m pointing this at my own tradition here right now.

[01:23:49] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:23:50] January: There is a way that we become too rigid to receive — or even I think to perceive, since we’ve talked so much about misrecognition — we’ve become too rigid to even perceive the kingdom of heaven that is coming into being. And the result is a miscarriage of mercy, a lack of mercy being extended to the people who need it

[01:24:11] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:24:12] January: by the people who have already been given it. Those people have the mercy already.

[01:24:16] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:24:16] January: And the point of that mercy is that they’re supposed to extend it to others and they’re not. And for me, that connected so precisely with Judas. It was that verse 37 that jumped off the page at me where Jesus is talking about not putting new wine into old wine skins, or they will [1] burst, [2] the wine will spill out, and [3] the wine skin will be destroyed. Mm-hmm. There’s that three step movement and my brain went, wait, where have I heard that before?

So I ran to look up Acts chapter one, verse 18, and for those who don’t know, the book of Acts or the Acts of the Apostles is generally understood to have been written by the author of the Gospel of Luke. So it’s sort of like Luke Book two.

[01:25:06] Andrew: Exactly. Yeah.

[01:25:07] January: And so it’s the same writer in both cases. And in Acts chapter one, verse 18, it recounts the death of Judas Iscariot and it says that he purchased a field with the proceeds, the silver that he got for betraying Jesus. And then verse 18 says that he. Sorry, we’re getting gruesome here guys. I apologize.

[01:25:28] Andrew: Yeah. Yeah.

[01:25:29] January: So he falls headlong in the field and [1] bursts open in the middle, [2] his bowels spill out, and [3] the result is that he dies.

[01:25:40] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:25:40] January: Just like the wine skin was gonna burst open, the wine was gonna spill out, and the wine skin would be destroyed. The parallels there are not totally exact. It’s different words in the Greek for burst.

[01:25:52] Andrew: Okay.

[01:25:53] January: But it is the same word for the spilling out.

[01:25:55] Andrew: Mm-hmm.

[01:25:55] January: In both cases, I don’t wanna make too much of that because first of all, it’s just one word. Yeah. One word is not enough to make a pattern.

[01:26:03] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:26:04] January: And so it’s not like he’s repeating the sentence exactly from Jesus’s parable to Judas death. But it’s such an incredibly striking image that it’s hard to not put the two of them together. It’s that same three step movement, even if it’s not the exact same words.

[01:26:21] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:26:22] January: Judas is stuck in that rigid, sacrificial mindset, paradigm, whatever the word is that we’re using here. In Matthew’s telling of the gospel, Judas response to realizing that he has betrayed Jesus is that he goes and hangs himself.

[01:26:38] Andrew: Mm-hmm.

[01:26:39] January: Which is tragic enough all on its own. In Luke’s telling, in the Book of Acts, Judas displays no repentance whatsoever, like the Pharisees, he’s rigid. He’s done what he’s done. He’s not gonna reconsider it.

He’s just gonna go off and spend the money that he’s gotten. He’s gonna go pursue his acquisitive desire. We’ve got that Girardian element going on, and the result of this is that he does exactly what the wineskins did in Jesus’ parable

[01:27:11] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:27:12] January: where he bursts open, his contents spell out, and he is destroyed. As I was thinking about this, I was like, these two tellings of the Judas story sound like they’re saying different things, but they’re saying the exact same thing.

[01:27:27] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:27:28] January: Ultimately,

[01:27:28] Andrew: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[01:27:30] January: The only thing that Judas could see was the old way of doing things. And so when mercy and love and forgiveness poured into the world through Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection, Judas couldn’t contain it, and the sheer physics of that caused his death. The inflexibility broke him.

[01:27:50] Andrew: And are we saying he in particular, in the same way that the Pharisees couldn’t extend it, the mercy, the compassion to the text collectors, he couldn’t extend it to himself, right?

[01:27:59] January: Exactly. Exactly.

[01:28:02] Andrew: And that sounds like suicide.

[01:28:04] January: And that’s what I think the Matthew Gospel is

[01:28:06] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:28:07] January: emphasizing

[01:28:08] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:28:08] January: That he was unable to receive or respond to the forgiveness that Jesus was extending. And again, Peter also betrayed Jesus. So it’s not the act of the betrayal

[01:28:21] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:28:21] January: that made Judas the outcast.

[01:28:24] Andrew: No.

[01:28:24] January: ‘Cause everybody else did that, too. It was Judas’ inability to perceive or allow any other way of being than this sacrificial paradigm.

[01:28:36] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:28:37] January: This violent paradigm. And he turned that inward on himself and he sacrificed himself because he couldn’t see past the need for violence. And the point is the urgency of letting that forgiveness and that mercy change us; the point is to allow ourselves to be moved to repentance.

[01:28:56] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:28:57] January: To be flexible, to learn and change and grow as we are continually filled up with more and more of the wine of the spirit, right? To bring it all the way back to where we started with the merry arc.

[01:29:08] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:29:08] January: This positive arc of the creative journey. Her assertion that we have no wine, well we’re getting the wine, we’re being filled up with it. Are we gonna be too rigid to hold it? Is it gonna break us or can we flex?

[01:29:22] Andrew: Yeah. And Jesus’s ministry is commenced, if I’m remembering correctly, by the phrase repent or perish, right?

[01:29:32] January: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

[01:29:33] Andrew: That’s, that’s sort of a, an intense either/or. But I think that imagery, either-the-new-thing-or-destruction, is conveyed through pregnancy metaphors that we’ve talked about. Giving birth is something that goes one way.

[01:29:50] January: Yeah.

[01:29:50] Andrew: And it has to keep moving, otherwise it’s deadly for those involved.

[01:29:54] January: Yeah.

[01:29:55] Andrew: I think, I don’t know if you’ve talked about it in your explanation thus far, but with regards to the intestines being what spills out, why are we talking about bowels right now? What is that about?

[01:30:08] January: Yeah, I, I’m curious and I wonder if it’s not coincidental that when Judas bursts open that it’s his bowels that spill out. It’s his intestines that spill out. Because that bodily organ in first century Jewish culture was the organ associated with compassion.

[01:30:29] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:30:29] January: That is considered the seat of mercy. Your guts are considered the seat of your mercy.

[01:30:34] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:30:35] January: And so when Jesus is moved with compassion for somebody, that’s the English translation usually. It’s his bowels that are moved with compassion. That’s, that’s what’s actually in the Greek. The word is splanchna, or splanchnizomai, which I’m sure I’m mangling the pronunciation of. And so, yeah. So the fact that it’s specifically Judas’ mercy organs

[01:30:59] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:30:59] January: that spill out on the ground that are disintegrated in this way. I think that’s telling us something.

[01:31:07] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:31:07] January: That this is a miscarriage of mercy.

[01:31:10] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:31:11] January: Whether it’s toward himself in the gospel of Matthew or toward others in the Book of Acts. It’s the same miscarriage either way.

[01:31:20] Andrew: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I was really struck with this reading because yeah, it doesn’t, because, yeah, yeah, because of Girard, it’s like, okay, every time we tell the origin story, there’s gonna be a death. Right? And people are gonna gloss over it and make it seem fitting. And I was like, but like the gospel’s not supposed to do that. It’s what’s allowing us to read these myths, right?

[01:31:44] January: Uh huh,

[01:31:44] Andrew: There are folks having academic careers a hundred years ago or so, that were like, oh, we’ll de-mythologize the gospels, and just get at who Jesus is. We’re gonna look at the text. We’re gonna find out what’s real. But according to Girard, it’s the gospel that actually does the de-mythologizing. The gospel is what takes up the myth and says, okay, I hear everything you’re saying, and guess what?

[01:32:06] January: Yeah,

[01:32:06] Andrew: You don’t even have to look that hard. But guess what happened here? Somebody died and you’re just trying to make sense of it, and you can’t, so you papered over it. And I was like, okay, why did Judas have to die?

Now that question already, I’ve lost, I’ve lost the gospel message because I’m asking why did he have to die, right? I’ve already, I’ve already… I don’t know. I’ve stepped away from the gospel light as soon as I started asking it. But that, but I had it because I was like, the gospel’s supposed to be different. Like it’s supposed to… why? And so it was that kind of, why did our story of de mythologizing the myth have to have a death?

It didn’t have to.

[01:32:45] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:32:46] Andrew: It doesn’t make sense of death. It makes sense of the novelty, the newness of the life that’s arriving. That’s what it makes sense of.

[01:32:56] January: Yeah. And it keeps the death as just a death.

[01:32:59] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:33:00] January: Judas death doesn’t create a whole new world. Jesus is already resurrected. Judas death had nothing to do with it.

[01:33:07] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:33:07] January: It’s just a death and it’s just tragic and we should be mourning it.

[01:33:12] Andrew: Yeah. And yeah, so the gospel doesn’t have to make sense of it, and yet the gospel can incorporate it. It is a part of our gospel story. It’s not a necessary part to convey the gospel message. And yet it’s so unnecessary. It doesn’t even have to be eliminated from the gospel story.

[01:33:30] January: Yeah.

[01:33:31] Andrew: It can rest.

We don’t have to cover it up.

[01:33:34] January: Andrew:Yeah. I always talk about this reading of the parable that James Allison pointed out. I don’t know if he got it from Herbert McCabe or if it’s just his own, but the parable of the tiniest seed and grows into a shrub

Mm-hmm.

[01:33:46] Andrew: so big that the birds come. And he pointed out how, if you’re a tiny seed, birds are terrifying. Like they can just

[01:33:56] January: For real though.

[01:33:57] Andrew: swoop! I mean, they just swoop down and they don’t even think about it. And you’re done for, you’re gone. You’re just devoured.

[01:34:05] January: Toast.

[01:34:05] Andrew: Yeah. And yet the shrub has grown to the point where this thing of death and the ultimate end or whatever, it can just flutter around, keep doing its thing in your branches.

Like you are not at all perturbed by its presence. This thing that’s so deathly. It’s such a beautiful reading of that parable and to me it feels like the same sort of thing. The reading that you’ve offered me with Judas is allowing me to be that shrub where I’m deathly afraid of death being sensible and whatever.

Like this need to answer the question of why did he have to die? Like I was, I was terrified of it. Like I was a little seed that was gonna get swallowed up by a thoughtless bird that had better things to think about. And now, I don’t know, I feel a bit more like a shrub when I’m, when I’m reading the story, I’m like, yeah, yeah, that thing’s terrible. But it’s okay.

I mean, if it happens to fly by and, and rest here, there’ll be a place for it. If it happens to leave, I don’t care. That’s fine. Let the bird do its thing.

[01:35:05] January: Yeah.

[01:35:06] Andrew: A couple of episodes back, we were discussing how Jesus at Gethsemane and the ensuing crucifixion, the prayer he made and the death he lived… I don’t know how else to say it. He lived through that death without succumbing to rivalrous thoughts. I’m curious if there might be a parallel between what Jesus accomplished at the cross and what Judas endured as far as his death.

If we see that it’s just an external thing, the way to make sense of it would be like, oh, I guess God smited [sic] him, or something, like the uncomfortable reading that I’m trying to avoid.

But what you’re saying that it was an internal struggle for him. The violence came out through suicide, but his, his trouble, I believe was internal, like you say, his inability to see his shame as something that could be handled gently by someone who loved him.

[01:36:03] January: Yeah.

[01:36:03] Andrew: He could not imagine that.

[01:36:05] January: Yeah.

[01:36:06] Andrew: At least a part of them couldn’t. So yeah, maybe there’s some of that fractal thing going on where there’s the crucifixion scene and everyone turning against Jesus. In a sense, there was something like that going on just inside Judas head, I think when he passed.

If we can’t grieve what happened to that man, that seems like there’s something we’re missing with regards to what’s illuminated in the light of Christ.

But if we’re grieving Judas, is there some sort of flaw inherent to him that led him down this road? Is that… something tells me that’s not what we’re grieving, right? What is the object of our grief exactly when we’re grieving Judas?

[01:36:41] January: Mm. Mm-hmm. When we’re grieving this, we’re not grieving it as a, oh, how poor and benighted was this guy, and here’s me over here being so much superior and better. No.

[01:36:52] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:36:53] January: We’re not blaming Judas in any way for his inability to do better.

[01:36:58] Andrew: Mm.

[01:36:58] January: Judas is death is not an indictment of Judas personally and specifically. That would be the equivalent of victim blaming, and that is not what I’m trying to do here!

[01:37:08] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:37:09] January: Judas death is an indictment of the culture within which he exists, the social influences that crippled his imagination and rendered him unable to receive fully what Jesus was giving him.

He was hanging out with Jesus for all of these years. He was getting that social mediation from the son of God, but just like we talked about in the earlier episode with my Bridgeton story, where I had this revelation that, oh, all of this body shame that I’m dealing with, that’s not actually the truth.

[01:37:42] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:37:43] January: But I still couldn’t get out from under it.

[01:37:45] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:37:45] January: Because I existed in a social culture that was still telling me that that was the reality. And that’s what I think is happening to Judas as well, that he’s still in this culture of the Pharisees and the Zealots. He’s still in this mindset of acquisitive desire and sacrificial violence, that this is the paradigm that he is stuck in despite Jesus’s influence

[01:38:08] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:38:08] January: because the culture is louder. So yeah, Judas’ death is not an indictment of Judas. It’s an indictment of the rest of us that he was not able to receive what Jesus was teaching.

[01:38:19] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:38:20] January: We humans are doing this to each other. We are binding one another up and keeping each other trapped in shame and blame. And so if we’re gonna use IFS language, I see Judas as the victim of a legacy burden.

[01:38:32] Andrew: Hmm.

[01:38:33] January: Right? Grieving Judas as death properly has to include us putting down our own violence so that we don’t keep passing that legacy on to the people that we interact with

[01:38:44] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:38:45] January: and leaving it on the shoulders of the next generation. Our job as disciples of Christ is then to imagine and create a culture where there are no more Judases, no more imaginations trapped by the paradigm of death and sacrifice and relationship as transaction.

[01:39:06] Andrew: Yeah. No, that, at least to my understanding of the Greek tragedies, the character has some flaw inside them that is their own undoing.

[01:39:14] January: Mm.

[01:39:15] Andrew: And it’s just like, ah, it’s so bad. But yeah, with Judas, I did find it very moving to recognize that we’re grieving his failure to be able to imagine mercy.

[01:39:25] January: Yeah.

[01:39:26] Andrew: And when we say a failure to imagine, it can sound like a personal indictment in our culture today. But if you accept how mimetic people are, at least as Girard argues, our failures to imagine things say so much more about our environment than it says about us. Like the ideas that we can hold have to do with our culture.

[01:39:47] January: Yeah. And this gets into my notions of justice. As mediated beings, we are all so interconnected. I mean, the word that Girard used is interdividual that we imagine ourselves as discreet, separate beings. But there’s no version of me that was not profoundly formed and informed by the humans around me and the culture around us and the history that came before that.

Going all the way back to the beginning, you cannot separate any human being from the social influences that created them. So personal responsibility is a thing. Because there’s no other human, that can get inside my body and choose actions for my body to take. I am the only person who can do that. So I am responsible for the choices that I make about what I do in the world, and that’s a real thing.

And the reasons that I’m taking those actions, the reasons that those actions looked reasonable to me, the reasons that those actions were instilled as habits in me, those reasons all depend on the people that I grew up with, the family that I was born into, the culture that I was born into, the norms, the social mores of the day. All of these things have intersected to produce the way that I show up in the world in addition to the specific and individual choices that I’m making.

And what I mean by that is that I don’t think that justice ultimately can ever be separate from forgiveness. When the Bible talks about God’s justice and God’s vengeance and God’s righteousness, I really believe that what that looks like is forgiveness, because none of us had control over the influences that we got born into. None of us had control about what formed us before we were even aware that formation was happening. And if we blame people and commit violence against them and incarcerate them in a violent prison system for being the way that they were formed to be, we have committed an injustice and thank God we’re starting to realize that, but we got a lot of repenting to do on that front.

It feels very important to me that what justice looks like is forgiveness in the ultimate sense. I think that the reason that God is so forgiving is because that is what justice looks like, and it doesn’t mean just letting people off the hook, right? It doesn’t mean that there aren’t consequences for our actions.

It just means that, as you’ve said in previous episodes, there’s a next step we can take together. This is not the end of this relationship. I’m not gonna cut you off and kick you outta my life. I’m not going to eliminate your subjectivity in order to take my own next step over here where you won’t impact me.

[01:42:29] Andrew: Justice as forgiveness. I, I love what you’re saying there, and that certainly rings true to me. Can you imagine people that consider themselves justice advocates? And they’re in the middle of their advocacy, and you’re like, okay, okay you’re, ready to do justice advocacy. Ready? I’m doing it! Yeah, but you got ideas? I’m like, yeah, I got an idea. You’re forgiven.

[01:42:49] January: Hmm.

[01:42:50] Andrew: What?! Wait a second.

[01:42:52] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:42:53] Andrew: I’m on the right side of history, like I’m–

[01:42:56] January: yeah.

[01:42:56] Andrew: There’s certainly an acquisitive Doing state that just could not be in a position to hear a forgiving voice say, I forgive you.

[01:43:05] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:43:06] Andrew: And that that’s justice work.

[01:43:08] January: Or would be able to accept hearing a voice of authority say I forgive you to the other person.

[01:43:15] Andrew: Yeah. Yeah.

[01:43:16] January: Would I be able to hear that or would I–

[01:43:18] Andrew: No, yeah. But the older brother in the two brothers

[01:43:21] January: Yeah, exactly.

[01:43:23] Andrew: that both wanted to be treated like servants. The older one, he didn’t wanna hear forgiveness.

[01:43:28] January: Yeah.

[01:43:29] Andrew: Like there was a next step for the younger brother, That couldn’t be right. It couldn’t be just.

[01:43:34] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:43:35] Andrew: Yeah, justice looks like forgiveness. And I can see that in two ways. Like to act justly, to enact justice, means we’re gonna be on the receiving end of forgiveness and we’re going to be forgiving,

[01:43:47] January: Right.

[01:43:47] Andrew: and perhaps the two are inseparable. I think there’s a parable about that. Maybe we’ll look into it with the unforgiving servant.

But if that’s what it takes for justice, how do we prepare ourselves to be forgiven? How do we prepare ourselves to forgive? Forgiveness doesn’t come naturally, does it? I mean, I don’t know. Maybe we have a spiritual nature by which it does come naturally. Maybe for capital S Self, yes. But for a lot of our parts, forgiveness is not instinctual. I will say that.

[01:44:19] January: Yeah. And I mean that has to do with our biology. Again, we have hard wiring in us that starting around four years old, you start to hear kids complaining that like, oh, they got something I didn’t get. That’s not fair. We have a sense of justice as early as that.

So spiritual practices that can help us to mature that capacity, because it’s not like we wanna give up on what’s right and wrong. We’re not trying to get rid of that in ourselves. No, that’s a beautiful thing. That we can tell when something’s not right and we desire to make it right,

[01:44:53] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:44:53] January: that’s a wonderful impulse!

[01:44:55] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:44:56] January: The ways that we go about that can often be very toxic and violent. That’s where we wanna make the change, not in getting rid of our sense of justice, but maturing it to make sure that it’s God’s justice and not just our personal emotional catharsis. That’s where Girard says the danger is.

[01:45:13] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:45:13] January: So one of the practices that can help in that regard — and I have saved it for a later episode because I don’t know that people would necessarily wanna start here. This is a pretty intense daily practice. If you’re just getting started, it may be more than you’re capable of committing to on a daily basis.

So I recommend starting with some of the practices from the earlier episodes. Start with the Letters from Love, or something like that. But if you feel sturdy enough to start to actively reflect on “Where am I being violent, where am I participating in these systems?” and you wanna make a daily practice of that, there is a spiritual practice that’s called the Daily Examen, and that is E-X-A-M-E-N, not INE, and it comes from St. Ignatius of Loyola, who was the founder of the Jesuit order in the Roman Catholic Christian Church.

The way that Ignatius founded this practice is to step into gratitude, remember that we’re connected with God, express our thanks for all that we’ve been given, and then reflect on our day:starting from when we got outta bed all the way to the evening and getting back into bed and reflecting on our behavior, reflecting on how we felt throughout the day, reflecting on the ways that we showed up to other people.

And as we do that reflection, most of us have a lot of inner critics that want to judge what we did throughout the day and oh man, I failed here and I failed here, and I failed here. Or we’re so defended against the imagined shame of failure that we’re just like, no, I did this right and I did this right, and I did this right. And we aren’t open to hearing where we needed to do better at all.

And so I love the daily examen as a practice of reflecting on where was I violent today? Where did I exile someone’s subjectivity? Where did I look at another person and see a problem to be fixed instead of a human to care for? I think it’s superb for that.

And at the same time, I think we need a little something extra to help us set the stage so that the practice can reach us as deeply as it needs to. And so there’s an extra practice that I tack on to the examen that comes from neuroscience, and the goal is to try to get back into the brain state in which we are prepared to relationally connect with another person. Where we are open, we are curious, we are receptive, right? To go back to our Heroine’s Journey.

We have to help ourselves a little bit to get into that state because if we try to do the examen when we are goal oriented and we are trying to achieve an end, the examen can end up being a stumbling block that we resist, I think.

[01:48:12] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:48:12] January: And so Chris Coursey has four questions that I think are really helpful to ask before we start asking the questions of the examen. In his book The Joy Switch,

[01:48:25] Andrew: Mm.

[01:48:25] January: he talks about relational mode and enemy mode.

[01:48:29] Andrew: Hmm.

[01:48:29] January: If you try to relate to another person from enemy mode, you’re just gonna see them as an obstacle.

[01:48:35] Andrew: Yeah. Yeah.

[01:48:36] January: You’re gonna be right in that Girardian rivalry mode.

[01:48:39] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:48:39] January: At that point. It can be very, very, very dangerous if we get stuck in enemy mode and we don’t ever swap back to what I would call friendship mode.

[01:48:48] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:48:49] January: I think that we have friend mode and we have enemy mode. And he has four questions that he uses to try to help people identify when their brain is, I’ll just say not in friendship mode.

[01:49:00] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:49:01] January: I’ll put it that way. When your brain is not in friendship mode. He says, if you answer yes to any of these questions, your friendship mode is offline.

[01:49:09] Andrew: Okay.

[01:49:10] January: Number one, I just want to make a problem, a person, or a feeling go away.

[01:49:16] Andrew: Yeah. Yeah.

[01:49:16] January: And right there with that first one, I’m like, well, that’s 98% of the time for me.

[01:49:23] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:49:24] January: I’m rarely trying to make a person go away, but a problem or a feeling? Oh my God, constantly.

[01:49:31] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:49:32] January: And that I think gets straight to the heart of what I’m talking about when I talk about the exile of someone’s subjectivity

[01:49:39] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:49:39] January: as a form of violence.

[01:49:40] Andrew: Violence.

[01:49:41] January: Like this, this is a violence. If my only attitude toward that is make it go away,

[01:49:47] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:49:47] January: that’s the beginning of violence, right? That’s seeing the other party as an obstacle. So, yeah, I laughed at that one. So number one, I just want to make a problem, a person or a feeling, go away. Number two, I don’t want to listen to what others feel or say right now.

[01:50:03] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:50:03] January: Number three, my mind is locked onto something upsetting. I just keep circling and obsessing about something that’s activating me.

[01:50:12] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:50:13] January: And four, he doesn’t put it this way, but the way that I translated it was, I “just can’t” with blank right now. And fill in the name of somebody that you usually like.

[01:50:23] Andrew: Mm.

[01:50:23] January: So like, “I just cannot with Andrew right now. Could he just finish a sentence please?!” Right? We’re friends! If I’ve got that thought in my head, I am not in friendship mode.

[01:50:34] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:50:35] January: And I know it.

[01:50:36] Andrew: Yeah. Yeah.

[01:50:37] January: So, yeah, I thought those were really, really, really handy questions to be able to flag for ourselves when we are in something other than friend mode.

[01:50:48] Andrew: Okay.

[01:50:50] January: Those four questions come from Chris Coursey in his book, The Joy Switch, which is designed to help people get their brains back into friendship mode when we’ve fallen into that trap of seeing another person as an obstacle, or as an impediment to whatever our agenda is.

[01:51:06] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:51:07] January: It’s got some really excellent neuroscience based body techniques for people to use to help to calm down their nervous system. And that’s really great and I love that.

But I think I would be a little bit hesitant to recommend it blanket to people. This is one of those guys where you can really tell what his narrative frame is, and that all of the neuroscience is gonna get shoehorned into this frame.

[01:51:33] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:51:34] January: And if you’ve got any religious or spiritual baggage, that frame might not work for you at all. It’s clearly very churchy.

[01:51:41] Andrew: Yeah. Yeah.

[01:51:43] January: So, he’s referring to brain science that is absolutely spot on, and the exercises are great. But it feels like there’s a degree of moralizing in there that I’m not necessarily prepared to endorse or recommend.

[01:51:56] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:51:56] January: But I was really curious if we could connect this practice of getting into friend mode with the Daily Examen in order to remind our nervous systems that we are safe with God before we start to go looking for things that we need to confess and ask forgiveness for. Because if we push ourselves straight into, well, what’s wrong with me? I suspect that our parts are gonna be pretty defended against wanting to have to admit that we’ve done anything wrong.

And so when we come into something like the Daily Examen where we’re deliberately gonna be looking for what went well, but also where did I fall short here? Where did I need more of God’s help to show up in a Christlike way to the people around me?

I think if we’re gonna do that kind of reflection, it will feel safer to our nervous system. It will build trust faster, I think, if we take steps to come back into friendship mode.

[01:52:54] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:52:55] January: Um, back into parasympathetic rest and digest before we attempt to do that work. I’m just curious! This is, you know,

[01:53:01] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:53:02] January: I’m running an experiment here. This is my process of learning. I’m inviting y’all into it.

[01:53:06] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:53:07] January: Come and join me and see whether this works out or not. Let’s find out together.

And so if you need to do some relational connecting with another person, or you need to do some IFS parts work and step into Self energy, maybe you need to do something to take care of your body, maybe you need to go get a cozy blanket, some soft slippers, a big mug of warm tea, things that can help calm your system down and reassure yourself that you are safe.

If you are safe! And if you’re not safe, don’t be doing this practice! You’ve got bigger priorities. Don’t try to force yourself into a sense of safety. That literally won’t work.

[01:53:48] Andrew: Yeah. Oh, totally.

[01:53:51] January: But if you can remind yourself of the safety that actually does exist, when your body and your brain think it doesn’t, that can help, I think, really optimize the effectiveness of a Daily Examen practice. And so then once you feel a bit calmer, once you feel open, once you feel curious about yourself and other people, then you can start to ask these questions that Ignatius developed and they can be particularly transformative if you do this practice over time.

So then for a step one, think about the most unambiguously pleasant thing that happened today. I think it’s really easy to jump to the assumption that nothing pleasant happened today, especially if we’re in stressed out mode. That can be the first thought.

I, I would invite us to think a little bit more deeply if that’s our first reaction. I think that things will come to mind if you sit with it in silence a little bit. But on the off chance that it doesn’t, on the off chance that you really just had a completely shit day and everything was terrible, it’s totally okay to bring to mind a past happy memory for the purposes of this exercise.

Just start with something that was unambiguously pleasant. And again, I’ve said this elsewhere, but you can just use the last great meal you ate, the best glass of wine you ever had, whatever, just something that your nervous system recognizes as, oh, this was a good experience.

So that’s what we’re looking for to start with. And then to use our imaginations to step into that memory. Do you have something that comes to mind for you from your day today?

[01:55:30] Andrew: I mean, food is so easy. Yeah. There was a cherry fritter on the counter, and it was just open season for anybody and I pounced, yeah. the cherry fritter was unambiguously pleasant. I will say that.

[01:55:49] January: Good. I like it. So start with something like that. Start with a positive experience and use your imagination to step into that experience.  Notice as many sensory details as you can in this memory. What do you hear? What do you smell? What’s the quality of the light? What’s the temperature like? Can you feel a breeze on your skin, or is everything still? How heavy or light does your body feel in that moment? Is there anyone else there interacting with you or are you alone?

Imagine you have a remote and you could just hit pause on the scene, take an observation around, notice what you’re feeling in your body, notice what emotions are happening for you as you remember that scene.

We’re looking for the difference between thinking the words “cherry fritter” and the experience of actually eating a cherry fritter, right? Those are not the same thing. We wanna be in the experience and not in the concept.

[01:56:53] Andrew: So the um, the unambiguously pleasant moment that I was sort of landing on was, actually, it wasn’t the Cherry fritter, it was just drinking water. It’s a hot day. I’m on top of a tractor that’s hot.

[01:57:06] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:57:07] Andrew: I mean, middle of the afternoon as hot as things can be, and I am sweating, and I just take a long drink of water.

[01:57:14] January: Okay. So notice the details and then ask God to show you where God is in that scene. God is already there. God is everywhere before you’ve gone there.

[01:57:24] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:57:24] January: Okay? So there’s nowhere you could go that God isn’t. Ask God to stand next to you and look at your life. Look at your scene.

[01:57:33] Andrew: Okay.

[01:57:34] January: And then, some of that tension can start to soften a little bit. And so then as you start to feel your body relax, then we can turn to that next step of looking back at our day and walking through what happened from the time that we woke up to the time that we went to bed.

[01:57:52] Andrew: Now, can I pause you again and ask clarifying questions?

[01:57:56] January: Yeah.

[01:57:56] Andrew: So I start with the one that is pleasant, and then I work my way through all the others in order or do I single one out at some point to pray from? And do I single out the one that was pleasant or do I single out the one that was not pleasant?

[01:58:11] January: So we are going towards selecting one to pray about. In terms of what that one is, I wouldn’t dictate to you one way or the other.

I mean, I don’t know what God’s gonna have for you in that moment. So I am, gonna offer some suggestions here for steps, but if they don’t resonate for you, or if this isn’t relevant to what happens to you when you actually do this practice, okay. Depart from the script. You have a blanket permission slip.

[01:58:37] Andrew: Hmm. Okay.

[01:58:38] January: My inclination is always to select the one where I’m like, oh man, I really, I really biffed it there.

[01:58:44] Andrew: Mm-hmm.

[01:58:44] January: I really need some help with this. Please help God. But it can be a moment of confusion, to go all the way back to the first episode and my standing and watching Theodore from the fourth-floor window.

[01:58:57] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:58:57] January: That is a moment that I could invite God into and say, what would you have me do here? What would following Jesus look like in this moment? Give me some guidance. But it can also just be gratitude, right? If you just really enjoyed the heck outta that water and you just wanna say thank you, great. Stay in that. The point isn’t what we’re talking to God about.

[01:59:16] Andrew: Mm-hmm.

[01:59:16] January: I don’t think ever, I think it’s just the point that we’re talking to God.

[01:59:20] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:59:20] January: And we’re engaged in that friendship.

[01:59:24] Andrew: Yeah. Okay. Well, no, I was just struck by the moment when I was drinking the water was, I’d gotten other chores and things done out of the way, but I was just trying to get a little mowing done, which is, I got way more of that to do than I’ve got time for. And so I’m just like, oh, I’ve gotta put in a few hours every day. I just gotta do that.

[01:59:41] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:59:42] Andrew: So it was a moment of get it outta the way, like it was enemy mode that got me to

[01:59:48] January: Yeah,

[01:59:48] Andrew: grease up the tractor and the mower and get out there. Like, that was the mode I was in. But I, I stopped and just refreshed myself. And so when you said, where was God in that moment, it also so happened that there’s this giant strip of storm that just manifested itself just north of us and rolled across us. And um, I mean, you look on the forecast that does the lightning strikes,

[02:00:14] January: Mm-hmm.

[02:00:14] Andrew: it was just like all lightning strikes. That was just, it. Like everywhere! So you can imagine the clouds and stuff going on and

[02:00:22] January: Yeah. Yeah.

[02:00:23] Andrew: So anyway, it just occurred to me that that was where God was, this giant storm that was just about to dunk the entire landscape with all this water. It just came down in sheets. But yeah. Yeah. I don’t know. There’s some kind of connection there that I don’t wanna move past too much.

[02:00:38] January: Hmm.

[02:00:39] Andrew: I was getting water and there was a whole lot more than me about to get, get some water. I don’t know. That was neat.

[02:00:49] January: Literal fountain of living water.

[02:00:51] Andrew: Yeah.

[02:00:51] January: Hmm. What in particular about that felt like God to you? Just the connection of you were feeling refreshed and the water was gonna refresh the land too, or was it more than that?

[02:01:03] Andrew: Yeah, there was more. Mom gave me a call to tell me about, how scary the radar looked.

[02:01:10] January: Hmm.

[02:01:10] Andrew: And I was not unaware of, obviously, I mean, I was outside. I could see, I could see the sky. Like I knew, I knew it was coming, but yeah, I don’t know. So it wasn’t just drinking water, it was like, yeah, somebody cares about me, is checking in on me.

[02:01:24] January: Hmm.

[02:01:25] Andrew: That’s nice. There was a place to park the tractor. There’s a place to go in, there’s a home. Yeah, God wasn’t just in the storm. I don’t guess it was. It was a big storm, but yeah, God was bigger than the storm.

[02:01:41] January: Hmm. So reflect on the day. Invite God to accompany you through that reflection. Notice what your body feels. Notice what your heart feels. Notice your emotions that come up. And then pick one moment from the day that stood out for you and pray about it.

And this is one place where I will freely admit that I get hung up because I, I don’t know what to tell people about what that means. I’m six years into this Christian thing, and I’m still not entirely sure I could tell anybody what prayer is.

[02:02:16] Andrew: Yeah. Yeah.

[02:02:18] January: I still am not sure. I know that asking for help definitely feels like prayer to me. But so does expressing thanksgiving, and so does sitting in silence and simply enjoying the world as it is for a moment. All of those things feel like prayer.

Back in my DJing days, five hours on the dance floor, that was absolutely prayer for me. I never said a word. It was just allowing my feelings to move through my body. But that was, that was me and God on the dance floor, and I didn’t have radar on anybody else.

[02:02:52] Andrew: Yeah.

[02:02:52] January: That was prayer for me. So whatever that looks like for you, and maybe there’s half a dozen different things that it looks like for you. It doesn’t have to be the same thing every day. Fine. But notice and pick something that you want to pray to God about from your day. And I will give you time to actually do that here if you want.

[02:03:12] Andrew: Okay. I’m sorry. I gotta — there are three different videos to Kanye’s Jesus Walks and, the first one, it looks like an MTV-ish kind of thing. And it’s good. It’s a good video. And the second one you run across, it’s just the most whacked-out shit.

The third one is so good. It’s one of the best videos I’ve ever seen. It’s all black and white. It starts with Kanye getting outta bed. He’s just getting off a mattress on the floor. and he picks up this wad of money. He’s got a big roll of money and he puts it in his pocket and he starts walking outside and, he goes through the house and in the kitchen there’s stereotypical Jesus just sitting there at the kitchen table, like not doing, not doing nothing.

And Kanye leaves and Jesus sees it. And he’s like, oh shit. Like, He doesn’t say, oh shit, but his face says, oh, what, what’s he up to? And he goes running out the door, He’s like, oh no. Oh no. Where’s he going? And he’s with him the whole way. And so all this stuff happens. It’s so great, but like it does the daily examen. It revisits, moments in the day. And it’s like, where was Jesus — Oh! We might have to put a show note. Oh no. Oh no, Kanye!

[02:04:29] January: That’s fantastic. I did not expect this podcast episode to include Kanye West. I have to confess. Plot twist.

[02:04:35] Andrew: Oh man. Yeah.

[02:04:38] January: Amazing.

[02:04:38] Andrew: Oh no. Sorry, I, yeah, this is what you get for showing me a video like 20 years later on but it was, oh, it’s so good. Sorry. Okay, so, we were about to pray.

[02:04:54] January: I am just gonna stay quiet, so you let me know when you’re done.

[02:05:02] Andrew: Okay. Wow.

[02:05:05] January: Am I allowed to ask what you noticed yourself feeling? You can say no.

[02:05:09] Andrew: I, yeah, I don’t know what I was feeling. It was pleasant. It was unambiguously pleasant. Maybe it was the lightning thing that got me thinking about electricity, but I was thinking about all the, like electricity that’s firing inside the tractor, its engine and stuff and then mechanical bits and pieces that are spinning and like the internal combustion it was like all these separate systems of energy, very mechanical because it’s a tractor.

But then I was like, I’m cutting down shrubs and stuff, with this mower and yeah. So I was just thinking about the water and all the plants, just slowly being sucked upward. The way plants just pull stuff up through their roots and there was like these pockets of energy kind of stuff. There’s just so much going on… so much.

And, for some reason, it stirred a memory of, I kind of think of it as an anti-mystical experience. Uh, I used to work at a factory that makes onboard computers for cars and stuff, and I had this moment one time where I was like, could see down the hallway, I could see the factory floor, I could see the way out. And it was just like all these people were there doing their jobs.

I wasn’t a big fan of this job. And I was like, oh, what am I doing here? And then I was like, I, it doesn’t make any difference if I’m here, somebody else will be here. And then I was like, it doesn’t make any difference if anybody is here, there’ll be somebody else here.

[02:06:30] January: Mm.

[02:06:31] Andrew: And there’s this weird switch where it wasn’t the machines that were the machines, it was the people that were the machines. Like,

[02:06:37] January: Yeah.

[02:06:38] Andrew: completely replaceable. And then I had this felt presence of like, whatever the people do, it doesn’t matter. This stuff is just gonna keep getting made like these little component widgets are just gonna keep popping out the end of this line and getting boxed up and put onto 18-wheelers. And it felt really dark.

[02:06:58] January: Yeah.

[02:06:59] Andrew: The people don’t matter; they’re incidental to the spirit that was working there.

And so there was a sharp contrast between what my brain was doing with all these different systems, mechanical and biological, and like my own anatomy and water and, but like the tractor parts and the plant parts and everything. Even though there was a mechanical portion to it and the mechanical bit was like it is seven foot mower, two sling blades — it can cut down a lot — but these trees are not gonna be bothered by the mower. So as much like

[02:07:32] January: And even the mowing that you were doing was for the sake of supporting life.

Andrew:Exactly. Yeah. It was improving the pasture. There was gonna be more grass for the cows instead of all the weeds and shrubs. But anyway, it wasn’t dark like the factory floor encounter. I didn’t know where to place God, but it seemed like God could be anywhere and everywhere.

Mm-hmm.

[02:07:52] Andrew: And it felt good. I don’t, I don’t have any specific like feelings, but it was, it was a nice sequence of thoughts.

[02:08:01] January: Hmm.

[02:08:02] Andrew: I didn’t know where the thoughts were going, but it wasn’t troublesome and it was pleasant to imagine God being anywhere and everywhere.

[02:08:10] January: Mmm. So yeah, once you’ve done the reflection stage and found something to pray about for a while, then the last final stage of the Examen is to look forward to tomorrow. Think about what you know you have to expect, where the gaps are where you might not know what’s gonna happen, and just ask God for help to be the hands and feet of Christ in that moment when you arrive there.

[02:08:36] Andrew: Cool.

[02:08:36] January: How was the exercise for you overall?

[02:08:39] Andrew: Yeah, I don’t know. I didn’t have any specific thoughts, particularly with the, with the end of where Jesus would show up, where God could be. But I liked the exercise of just like whatever I can imagine, however mundane, God can be there… even at a Theology & Peace board meeting. Yeah.

[02:09:04] January: That’s right. We do have that tomorrow, don’t we? Yeah. So it is the sort of thing that does take dedication and I mean, I’m not gonna tell you not to do it one off. If you only have one day to do it, great, do it. Anytime you do it is better than a time you didn’t. But I kept it back for one of the final episodes because it can be easier to engage in a daily practice like this if you’ve already tried some of the earlier things that we’ve recommended and built up a habit of practices.

[02:09:31] Andrew: Yeah.

[02:09:32] January: This is a bit more of an advanced technique. It’s still pretty simple. But it does take time and attention and most of us don’t feel like we have much of that to spare.

[02:09:42] Andrew: Yeah.

[02:09:43] January: And so it might be easier to take on an examen after you’ve already had some experience of how life changing some smaller practices can be.

[02:09:52] Andrew: Yeah.

[02:09:53] January: You might find you have more motivation toward engaging in a more rigorous practice. But it is a thing that does help to train our nervous system out of enemy mode. To come back to our Girardian focus here, that the practice of a daily examen on a regular basis and practicing training our attention toward, here are the moments when I fell into the trap of seeing another person as an obstacle

[02:10:21] Andrew: Yeah.

[02:10:21] January: instead of as a friend. We have this beautiful thing called neuroplasticity so we can build the neural pathways that help us stay in that recognition more readily. And the more that we build those neural pathways to recognize God’s presence with us, to recognize when we have stepped into obstacle mode.

I’ll call it obstacle mode instead of, instead of enemy mode. That sounds a little bit less antagonistic.

[02:10:48] Andrew: Yeah.

[02:10:49] January: Yeah. So to come back to where we started the conversation of this episode, in those moments when we get shaken up,

[02:10:56] Andrew: Yeah.

[02:10:57] January: if we have engaged in a practice, like a Daily Examen for an extended period of time, then in those moments when we hit the stress, when we hit the trauma, when we get shaken up, it’s that peace that comes out instead of

[02:11:11] Andrew: mm-hmm.

[02:11:12] January: Whatever our, our first violent impulse is.

[02:11:15] Andrew: Yeah.

[02:11:16] January: Does that make sense?

[02:11:17] Andrew: Yeah.

[02:11:18] January: And even if it doesn’t totally protect us a hundred percent of the time — which nothing is ever going to do that. ‘cause we’re still humans. We still have this hard wiring that makes the violence possible. And we still exist in a culture that pushes us in that direction. So it’s gonna happen, we’re gonna fall out of it.

[02:11:33] Andrew: Yeah.

[02:11:34] January: But then if we’ve trained our brain to come back into it more quickly, more readily, we can recover much faster. We can make repair with a person if we hurt them much faster. And that also helps to interrupt and even prevent the escalating cycles of violence.

[02:11:52] Andrew: Yeah. Yeah, no, the, I was recalling what we talked about at the beginning and yet what I hear you saying about the Daily Exam and practice is that. While we’re not in the least responsible for all that ends up inside of us, it doesn’t mean we’re powerless to contribute to what is inside us.

[02:12:10] January: Yes.

[02:12:10] Andrew: We can

[02:12:12] January: Exactly.

[02:12:12] Andrew: actually put stuff in the bottle. Just because it’s in the bottle doesn’t mean we put it there.

[02:12:16] January: Yeah.

[02:12:17] Andrew: But it doesn’t mean that we don’t get to put stuff in the bottle. We do.

[02:12:21] January: Yeah.

[02:12:21] Andrew: That part of it’s still true. The guilt mongering, we can do without that part, but the potential to participate in our own formation. Like I, I, I think that just is what it means to be alive and a human life especially accentuates this participation thing,

[02:12:37] January: Mm-hmm.

[02:12:37] Andrew: .n a way that I, I can’t really put words to, but yes.

[02:12:41] January: And imagine a bottle that’s so full of peace that when they try to pour violence in, it just doesn’t work. There’s nowhere for it to go. ‘Cause we’ve put in the effort to, cultivate something else.

[02:12:53] Andrew: Yeah.

[02:12:54] January: Regardless of what we got handed, whatever was in that bottle before we became aware that it was a bottle. Right?

[02:12:59] Andrew: Yeah.

[02:13:00] January: There was stuff in there when it was handed to us.

[02:13:03] Andrew: Yeah.

[02:13:03] January: But now we have a choice about what to fill it up with. I think that actually helps me to understand the Christian talk about this big fancy word kenosis, which usually gets translated as self-emptying. I don’t think it’s our personhood that we’re supposed to empty out. I think it’s the stuff in the bottle that we got handed.

[02:13:25] Andrew: Hmm.

[02:13:26] January: The rivalries that we inherited from culture, the formation that happened to us before we knew that formation was happening, that’s what we’re emptying out to make room for God.

[02:13:37] Andrew: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

[02:13:39] January: Well I think that sounds like just about the perfect place to start wrapping this episode up. ‘Cause our original plan was that this was gonna be the final episode, but we ended up with an incredibly gorgeous exegesis of Hosea. And especially that particularly famous passage that Jesus quotes that says, I desire mercy and not sacrifice. Hosea 6:6.

[02:14:03] Andrew: Yeah.

[02:14:04] January: And you had an absolutely beautiful interpretation of that book of Hosea leading all the way up to

[02:14:12] Andrew: Yeah.

[02:14:12] January: that line. And you’re, you’re gonna close us out for Season One by bringing that to the table and I’m really excited people to hear it ‘cause I think it’s something powerful.

[02:14:21] Andrew: Yeah.

[02:14:22] January: So there will be one more surprise episode to finish out Season One of Theology Kills. Stick around for it. It’s gonna be worth waiting for.

[02:14:35] Andrew: You’ve been listening to Theology Kills a podcast about letting our shame and violence die so that life and love can thrive. Your hosts are January Jaxon and Andrew McRae, and Season One was written and produced by January Jaxon.

[02:14:51] January: Our theme music is “Things To Do In a Day” by Simon Lepine.

[02:14:56] Andrew: Theology Kills is exclusively listener funded. If you’d like to support our work or go deeper with practices, bonus content, and community conversations, join our Patreon at patreon.com/TheologyKillsPodcast. You can find everything we’re making at www.theologykills.com.

[02:15:15] January: That’s everything we have for you today. Thanks for listening, take care of yourselves and each other,

[02:15:21] Andrew: and we’ll see you next time.