The Immovable Resistance of Love

Beloved in Christ, 

Rowan Williams’ book, Christ on Trial, has long been a source of enormous comfort in times of great pain or challenge in my life. I first read it many years ago and return to it often at times when the world feels like it does in these past weeks. 

The book is a series of meditations on the stories of Jesus’ trials. Williams reflects at great length on the way in which Jesus is almost entirely silent in the face of the massive cruelty and injustice he faces. He does not speak up to defend himself. He does not put up a fight. He simply meets what he is facing with pure and deeply grounded love. 

It can appear to us, as it surely did to his first disciples, to be maddeningly passive. And yet, Jesus offers the world and us liberation, something worth our whole lives, precisely by refusing to act as one more competitor in the constant quest for dominance and victory. God meets us in Jesus by offering us a wholly new and different way of engaging: on the terms of God’s love rather than our normal terms of fighting our way to the top. Williams puts it this way: “So it is that Mark’s Jesus at his trial becomes a revelation of where God is . . . God is the reality that, simply by being what it is (or who it is), establishes that violence cannot fill up the whole space of the world . . . the 'worthwhileness' of God is not in the promise of safety, the possibility of escape from the world; there is only the recognition here and now of God’s glory in the freedom that appears when the insane violence of the world meets immovable resistance” (12-13).

As we  continue to face the world’s insane violence,  as we sit with the injustices and pain that remain so present—the pain that last week’s Supreme Court decision will cause for so many people in our country, the anger and helplessness we feel as we watch one mass shooting after another—it is important, always, always important, to speak and to act, to do all we can to make the world look something more like God’s reign of love and justice. But as followers of Jesus, our burden  and duty is never success or victory, but witness. We are not called to be the immovable resistance of love. God in Christ is that immovable resistance. Our job is to let go enough for God’s spirit to take over our whole lives and beings, so that all of our speaking and acting grows from the true source of freedom: not our efforts and our goodness, but God’s love. 

Like all of you this week, I am angry, weary, and afraid, and I have far less reason to be those things than so many among us who are particularly vulnerable in this moment.  I don’t have words that will ease that pain and fear. But I know and I believe, deeply and with all that I am, that regardless of the outcome, regardless of what does or does not happen in the months and years to come, it matters that we stand as a community, that we use who we are and what we have in order to bear witness to God’s better way of love. In the face of so much bad news right now, as you carry that on your already weary shoulders, I hope you can spend some time standing with Jesus at his trial, yoking your soul to the immovable resistance of his perfect love, so that we can continue to act, and speak, and bear witness together, until love is finally and fully done, on earth and it is in heaven. 

Grace and peace,

The Right Reverend Craig Loya
X Bishop
Episcopal Church in Minnesota