Three years ago, I was engaged in what felt like a fight for my soul during Lent. By the end of the season, I hadn’t exactly lost my soul, but I did self-sabotage, inflicting on the people who loved me disappointment and, for those especially close to me, considerable pain. To commence Lent that year, I preached an Ash Wednesday sermon, directed primarily at myself, in which I suggested that this season of repentance and fasting is about choosing the road to joy. The wager of the Christian life, I said, is that the way of Jesus is better than other ways a person can live, and that this way is better even though it is the way of the cross—whatever it is one relinquishes in obedient self-denial is nothing compared to the immeasurable joy of fidelity to Jesus. We fast from bread, not only to remember than man does not live by bread alone, but also to experience unalloyed the joy of the bread of heaven.
I have been thinking about that sermon I preached, which I believe more fully today than I did when I first wrote it. At the time, it was aspirational. I was playing the part of the father whose young and foolish son has asked for his share of his eventual inheritance so that he may venture off into the far country and squander his riches on dissolute living: “Don’t go,” I pled with myself. I think I could preach that same sermon today, no longer playing the part of the longsuffering father, but as the humiliated son who has returned from the far country, preached now to that part of my soul captured by the resentful brother who is outwardly obedient but inwardly also in his own far country, prodigally burning through his spiritual inheritance. “Don’t lose sight of what you have right here,” I might say to that part of my soul. “Come home.” Lent is, in a word, the prodigal son’s long and penitent walk back to the joys of home—or, as the case may be, the ugly process of the older brother remembering how good he has it.
Jesus promised that the pure in heart would see God, but this purity of heart, what Kierkegaard astutely described as undividedly willing the Good, remains spiritually aspirational. The two brothers, the one who stays and the one who goes, the one who says he will obey but does not and the one who says he will not obey but nevertheless does the will of his father, remain bound together in my soul, harshly judging one another and wrestling for dominance. Fighting over where I should be and how I should handle the riches I’ve inherited.
Christians have struggled with this problem of a divided self since the first days of our faith. Saint Paul famously wrote about his failed attempts at self-mastery and the division of his will, his habit of doing the very thing he does not want to do. In the end, he asks in exasperation, “Who will rescue me from this body of death?”
Paul’s answer is the cross. In being joined to Jesus in his death, we put to death the body of death—that is, we put to death that self who would kill us—so that we may be raised with Christ to new life. There is the “old man” and the “new man,” and the old man is put to death and the new man is Jesus, who makes of us new men and women. Luther, following Paul, suggested that the life of the Christian consists of daily “drowning” and putting to death in baptism that old man.
But there is an apparent dissonance between what we might call the compassionate picture we find in the Jesus’ parable of the prodigal son and the picture we receive from Paul (which might originate in Jesus’ call to take up one’s cross), which is an invitation to sentence a part of oneself to bloody execution. If we understand the repentance of Lent primarily in terms of punishing that part of the self that has wreaked havoc in our lives, it strikes me as more difficult to believe in the credibility of the way of the cross as the way of joy. In other words, is there a way to reconcile the picture of the prodigal son’s long walk home to his welcoming and longsuffering father with the picture of taking up one’s cross and consenting to crucifixion with Jesus?
The apparent irreconcilability is, of course, what feels like the irreconcilability of the love of God and the wrath of God; and this difficulty, in turn, mirrors the irreconcilability within ourselves of that self who has yearned for the Good and the self that has settled for lesser pleasures. We can’t hold it together. We want to believe either that God is just love, by which we mean uncritical affirmation, or we want a God of merciless justice (usually for our enemies). Likewise, we want to treat ourselves either only with compassion and no judgment, or with harsh judgment that renders us incapable of receiving God’s love for us.
It occurred to me very recently that the flaming sword that the Lord places outside of Eden to prevent Adam and Eve from reaching the tree of life is also an epistemological sword: we can neither return to our original innocence in practice, nor can we even know ourselves as having been innocent. Edenic innocence is a home to which we may not return, even theoretically. Any tree of life which we might once have been able to touch is now out of reach. We failed to deny ourselves the pleasure of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and suffered God’s judgment—expulsion into the far country of human history and all its tragedy. But there is another garden. In Gethsemane, Jesus offers himself to God: “Not my will, but yours be done.” Which is to say, as Barth observed, Jesus makes of himself that prodigal son who carries the riches of heaven into the far country and squanders his wealth on us sinners. He plants in this far country a new tree of life, his own cross, and offers its fruit in the bread and wine of his body and blood. The flaming sword of God’s judgment tells us that there is no other tree of life available for us than the cross: the way home is the way of the cross. It tells us that we are not permitted to know ourselves apart from the old man whom we must hand over to Jesus’ cross, and in this sense the flaming sword itself symbolizes the cross, which is the only way God provides for us to be reconciled to ourselves and welcomed home.
The old self whom I must put to death with Jesus is not one I have to treat with disdain rather than compassion. It is Jesus and not me who was first to take pity on this old self, and who placed himself in total solidarity with that old self—and it is exactly that old self whom Jesus promises to raise to new life in the new self. The way of the cross is the way of joy because it is the promise of peace between these two brothers who are at war within me. The fasting of this season is not punishment, but freedom from the pigs and slavery of the far country, and the anticipation of the banquet that awaits us at home—the joy of communion with the Lord in whom we inherit the riches of God’s grace and life.