Letting Go of Walls

Editor's Note:

• Dr. Arthur Chute McGill was a renowned professor of theology at Harvard, and an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ. Four years ago, shortly before his untimely death, he delivered a paper at the First International, Ecumenical Congress on The Meaning of Human Suffering. He was suffering himself at that time as he spoke of "letting go of walls."
• A question was posed to him afterwards: "You have spoken about tearing down walls and being vulnerable. I guess I need more of a description of that."
• Dr. McGill answered: "When we suffer, there's still much to be done and still much which we may do. So being vulnerable means that while you're doing something and while you're being open, there is the invasion into your life of other suffering... In my situation, I must say that the experience of vulnerability was downright exhaustion... it was necessary to be open to exhaustion, and not succumb to "I'm being subjected to suffering! How outrageous! Where is my escape?" If you could only know ahead of time what's going to be vulnerable in you, you could take all the precautions. But you never know and it's the element of surprise and dismay which I'm addressing. I'd like to encourage the sense of "yes, I can do it, not because I've got energy, but because I'm here, and even though I don't have much energy, I'm here and I've been put here, and there are others here who would have their humanity confirmed by my love... I'm very concerned that there has to be the letting go of walls if we love, and if we love at all, we let go of walls so as to reach; we also let go of the walls which protect. In other words, we become vulnerable."
• His presentation was on the vulnerability and the 'letting go of walls' exemplified in Jesus in his sufferings. The relevant portions are quoted here with some minor editing.

When Jesus said: "Father, into your hands I commit my spirit." His act of commitment was not in His mind a means for the realization of some other purpose, of some plan or hope. In itself it was the final and decisive act. He gave himself into His Father's hands, with a trust in His Father that reached beyond His own knowledge, beyond His own expectations, beyond His own grasp of His Father's purpose.

The reason for this is two fold. On the part of Jesus, extreme suffering so debilitated Him that He could no longer proceed on the basis of Himself. Suffering may so violate a human self that it cannot maintain its own psychic energy. It is driven into helplessness. If Jesus was genuinely subject to affliction at the crucifixion, that helplessness was His condition also.

The second and much more important reason pertains to the status of God. It is not just that God is the decisive context whirh obtains for Jesus during His crucifixion, as in all the moments of His life. God is the context in relation to which Jesus did not need and did not use any reliance on Himself. He passed over all His own strengths and virtues and knowledge and hopes, and gave Himself into the care of His Father. When the New Testament writers see Jesus' taking on suffering and death in terms of His obedience to His Father (Mk. 14:36; Philp. 2:8), we must not reduce that obedience to the mere conforming of His outer behavior to God's requirements. His obedience involved the inner conformity of His self to His Father's status as His Father, that is, as the one who established Him and nourishes Him and cares for Him. Therefore, in His extremity, as in His daily life, He trusted His Father to the point of committing His whole self to the Father. The inner content of obedience is trust (Heb. 11:8).

We can now see the bearing which Jesus' words ~as on the question of suffering. Jesus may be seen as actualizing the way in which we may become authentically and fully human. To be a person means committing ourselves into God's care, means not trying to assert our own control over ourselves or our situation or our neighbors. It means living without maintaining a wall around ourselves. But the accounts of Jesus' crucifixion make perfectly clear what it means to live without a wall: it means letting oneself be vulnerable, be open even to destructive activities.

This is what takes precedence over the removal of suffering. In other words, the gospel perspective radically challenges the view which prevails among the Western middle class today. What primarily destroys our personhood is not suffering, but rather our way of holding ourselves behind a wall. If you love, if you commit yourself in trusting, if you open yourself in receiving or expend yourself in giving, then the walls which you hold around yourself must go. But in a world where the rule of God is not yet complete and where a demonic powerfulness still moves at large, this abandonment of walls means the acceptance of suffering. What emerges from the accounts of Jesus' crucifixion, then, is that sin and not suffering is the much more critical evil. Or to put this in somewhat different terms, suffering is primarily evil, not by causing immediate distress, but by provoking us to build a protective wall around ourselves so as to avoid suffering. This wall may indeed protect us from this enemy, but it also prevents our self-commitment to God or to our neighbors.

But why should things proceed in this way? Why should precedence be given to the removal of sin and not to the removal of suffering? Why should we be called to let go of the walls around us, before we are freed from the forces which torment us? Why must commitment to God involve our becoming vulnerable, not just to God and the good, but also to demonic evil?

At one level we can see this in terms of a comparison between the power of God and the powers which bring suffering. If it were the case that, in order to be God, God had to remove suffering, the reverse of this statement would also be true: suffering had to remove God. Whenever powers would work to produce suffering, God would there be excluded.

In such a belief there is operating just that sharp dualism between the good and suffering that prevails in the middle class today. That dualism implies that God cannot be God, that God has no place wherever suffering is present Wherever tormenting forces operate they are all powerful. They wholly dominate. The only way for God to qualify their enormous power is by obliterating them altogether.

What emerges from the accounts of Jesus' passion is a very different notion. God exercised God's power and Jesus was able to keep letting go of all walls around Him, thereby stepping into vulnerability, even while the evil forces worked their dreadful suffering. Normally in human experience nothing provokes us to hold onto walls around us as much as fear and suffering. Yet even while he was afflicted at many levels, Jesus did not resort to walls. He maintained His openness to God. Even under that physical and psychic torment he continued to exercise what he exhibited as full humanity. He did not "fall" into the belief that His humanity could really operate only in affluence, security, vigor, and happiness.

Therefore, the dread of suffering as being somehow final and ultimate, as that before which humanity is totally "nothinged," becomes misplaced. Suffering has its destructive power, but that power is relativized by God's power to nourish and maintain our humanity even in the midst of suffering.

We can understand the failure of dualism in another way. If the removal of suffering had to be the first and most important thing, then the fundamental human attitude would be the fear of that evil. One often gets the impression that much work today against suffering is primarily motivated by fear. "Love" often becomes simply a name used when fear prompts us to work on behalf of others. In such cases help may be given, but it is not affection for victims which informs this help. It is primarily the dread of suffering.

The kingship of God is not grounded on fear, does not authorize fear, and does not call for a love that is essentially a form of fear. In the passion, therefore, Jesus was not controlled by fear and did not attribute to destructive forces a power comparable to God's. This comes through in that Jesus conformed to the will of His Father and therefore maintained His refusal to defend Himself with wall, even at the expense of being vulnerable to terrible suffering. The forces which inflict suffering are really evil, yet even in its most extreme action, evil is not able to exclude or overwhelm the work of God.

There is a second activity alongside of trusting in God which the gospel accounts indicate in Jesus during His passion. This is the activity expressed by the saying in Luke 23:24, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do, or by John's way of seeing Jesus' death as His decisive act of "handing over" His life to humanity (John 19:30). John used the word here of which the noun form is translated "tradition." In spite of the presence of suffering, Jesus also refused to place a protective wall between Himself and those humans who crucified Him.

The removal of walls between people and the vulnerability that results are a striking theme in many of Jesus' teachings. Love your enemy, turn your other cheek to receive the blows of others, have "compassion" and accompany those who suffer even into their sufferings. Jesus seems to be warning us that we cannot be with any of our neighbors authentically without suffering. If we wish to avoid suffering, we must keep all of our neighbors at a distance, observing them, relating to them, even helping them, but holding off so as not to share with them in their actual suffering. As Jesus truly joined us in our agonies, He directed us to follow the same course with one another. In the passion where he joined us in our suffering, Jesus exhibited what "com-passion." or suffering with, really means.

Suffering normally forces us to self-preoccupation and self-pity. Then we are tempted to give up trying to reach beyond ourselves and to maintain our responsibilities. The wall of self-absorption takes us over. Jesus' direction to others is that they break through our wall, not just by their doing outer actions which enter our suffering lives in order to take us out of suffering, but by their actually sharing in the same suffering with us. For, in terms of the most important consideration, humanity is not genuine when it gives help from behind a wall that preserves it from suffering. This only makes the sufferer feel hopeless so long as he or she suffers. The helper serves merely to exhibit the conviction that there can be humanity only where suffering is avoided. For this reason passing assistance or strength from those who are well to those who are afflicted is a crucial Christian work, but it is not the primary form of love. In love, getting rid of walls is primary.

This bears directly on the ways in which we impose suffering on one another. Middle-class Christians sometimes believe that those who are affluent and healthy and effective are the ones who may deliver others from suffering, may liberate them from victimization. But do those with affluence or health or efficiency prove to be less cruel, less brutal, less pernicious than others? Not at all. Affluent and effective people seem to inflict even more suffering than other groups. For the problem before us is not enough, even with Christian motives, to stand on that healthy side of the dualism.

The reason is clear: affluent and effective people still enclose themselves behind walls. At their deepest levels they live as isolated selves in isolate societies. When they help the afflicted, they imagine that they are reaching beyond their own kind to "the unfortunate." They do not believe that they can live humanly with and for others while suffering.

Because the training in "com-passion" leads us into living without walls, it knows no limits. One thinks here of the suffering of infants or of the mentally deficient who cannot undel8tand speech. Are they not cut off from the reach of compassion? Does not their suffering lock them within an isolation that compassion cannot cross? Does not Jesus' well-meant diagnosis that the decisive move is to remove walls collapse at this point?

The primacy of God becomes in practice very obscure in such cases. How can we know if our compassion ever reaches the infants or the mentally retarded? We believe that it does; that is, we believe that even on this frontier our humanity is not without meaning.

The work to relieve suffering and to deliver people from it is critically important and receives the full emphasis of Jesus. But it is not primary. First live openly, live to receive and to give, live so that you do not have to identify yourself in terms of what you are and have and do over against others, live by sharing even the agonies of suffering. When the separative walls are removed, when we have learned to suffer with and to let our commitment to others be stronger than our fear of affliction, then we may give our help with love and not out of fear. Then the passion of Jesus shapes and guides our own existence.

Books on the Passion of Jesus Christ

• Boomershine, T., MARK THE STORYTELLER, Union Theological Seminary, N.Y., 1974. (a critical investigation of Mark's Passion and Resurrection narrative.)
• Bourke, Myles, PASSION, DEATH AND RESURRECTION OF CHRIST, Paulist Press, N.J., 1963. (a doctrinal approach) Moore, Sebastian, THE CRUCIFIED JESUS IS NO STRANGER, Seabury Press, N.Y., 1977.
• Murphy, Richard T., DAYS OF GLORY: The Passion, Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, Servant Books. Ann Harbor, Mich., 1980.
• Padovano, A., EDEN AND EASTER, Paulist Press, N.Y.
• Collins, Fancy, Flick, THE CROSS TODAY, Paulist Press, N.Y., 1977. (current theological reflections)
• Wansbrough, H., SCRIPTURE FOR MEDITATION-THE PASSION, Alba House, N.Y.
• Goodier, A., THE PASSION AND DEATH OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST, St. Paul Editions, Staten Island, N.Y.
• Moltmann, J., THE CRUCIFIED GOD, Harper and Row, N.Y., 1974.
• Lacomara, A., THE LANGUAGE OF THE CROSS, Franciscan Herald, Chicago.