Joy for the Donald, Hillary, and Kim K

It was hard to let go of Twitter last night and allow the world roil on in its own way without my attention and amazement. The instantaneous nature of news is such blessing–if by blessing I’m allowed to mean the opposite of blessing–until it’s time to go to bed. So of course my dreams were troubled by that vast sweep of windswept hair and those enormous pouting defiant lips. But it’s Sunday, and on Sunday I write about Jesus.

You might remember that even Jesus endured the ups and downs of public opinion. On Palm Sunday when his donkey ambled into Jerusalem everyone was frantically and unthinkingly on his side. The streets were crowded with joy–well, more like temporary, politically induced happiness. The kind of emotion I try to help my little Sunday children distinguish from joy.

The difference between happiness and joy is important, else how does any person endure the catastrophic shifting feelings of the crowds between Palm Sunday and Good Friday? And really, only one person endured it, in its totality, and so only that one person might be said to understand the nature of joy. If you take the trouble to examine Caiaphas, and the crowds, and Peter, and Judas, and the servant of the high priest, and Pilate, and everyone surrounding Jesus as he walks through his passion, it is Jesus himself who will show you joy. It’s not the word, of course, that you associate with unjust trial and crucifixion. You don’t look at Jesus before Pilate, and Jesus being scourged, and Jesus hanging on the cross and have the word “joy” work its way towards the center of your vision. But that’s what it’s about. That’s what the cross Is.

I mean, imagine losing everything. Imagine being poor Kim K and having some millions worth of jewels stolen. Of being the Donald, and facing down the incoherence of the GOP who knew who he was, and didn’t have a problem with it, until Friday. Or of being Hillary in 2008, sure of the world’s approbation, only to lose it all to a man. Or maybe bring it closer to ordinary loss–the unremarked upon flattening of Haiti over the weekend by the weather, the usual death of nameless children in Syria and Yemen, the ordinary degradation that women endure all over the Middle East, the starving of the working poor who have nothing to begin with so there is nothing to lose.

And then imagine finding out that God himself is aquatinted with your loss. Imagine wandering through the garden in the cool of the morning, weeping inconsolably because you’ve got nothing left, and bashing into a man who you knew was dead, you saw him die. There couldn’t have been any mistake. And yet there he is, telling you to stop crying.

“Why should I,” you sniffle, “I’ve lost everything.” And the man standing there asks, “Did you really? Did you really lose everything?” Or was what you had before not that great. What was it that you lost? This mortal life? This world’s approval? This world’s money? Your own body?

If you stop your crying and look at that man, you will see that he has an actual body. Not a caricature body, not a shadow, not something adjusted and shaped by some miracle Doctor. He stands there, the cool dawn breeze blowing his much better looking than Donald Trump hair in a body that cannot die again. A risen body. A body that cannot be broken or destroyed or suffer.

And that’s quite amazing. Because the fear and pain of loss is entirely because death is just around the corner. And once you’re dead, even metaphorically, that’s the end. Except not. Jesus dying undid the incredible devastation of death. When he died death itself could not hold onto him. And so, there on the cross, the deep suffering of loss was undone, unraveled, and joy took its place.

There isn’t any of our suffering that approximates Jesus’ suffering. You could keep accounts of all of the bad things that have happened to you and it would be a single drop in the weight of suffering that Jesus endured on the cross. And so your joy, when you find that he isn’t dead, and that you yourself are going to live, forever, will not come close to the kind of joy he possesses. But a little drop of it isn’t so bad. And really, the farther you fall, the greater the rescue, the more sweet the joy.

On Monday in Holy Week we pray, “Almighty God, whose most dear Son went not up to joy but first he suffered pain, and entered not into glory before he was crucified: Mercifully grant that we, walking in the way of the cross, may find it none other than the way of life and peace; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord…” Life and peace, that is the substance, the foundation of joy. If you discover that someday not so far distant you get to have your life, and you don’t have endure trials and tribulations any more, wouldn’t you be overcome by joy?

This incredible news is for everyone. Even our two presidential candidates and all the people who made them possible. And for me, and for you, and for Haiti, and for everyone. And now maybe you’d like to go to church and hear more about this God, whose death gives life to the world.