Every time I write, Mrs. Rusch, my 8th Grade English teacher, hovers over my shoulder, scanning my work to find each and every dreaded Undefined This.

Her antipathy for the Undefined This has so shaped my writing that decades later, after a couple of perfectly appropriate parental editing requests, each Undefined This in my daughter’s papers found a definition before they were handed over to me, because otherwise Else knew the report would be returned with This-es circled in scarlet red, a la Mrs. Rusch.

What is an Undefined This, you ask?

An Undefined This is a ‘this’ that dangles in a sentence, one that has no clarifying noun to help the reader understand the very thing the writer is referencing, and that therefore forces the reader to do the author’s work.

Boy, do I wish that Luke and Paul had had Mrs. Rusch for their 8th grade English classes.

In their retelling of the Last Supper, each of them have a bothersome Undefined This, one that we hear every single occasion when the Eucharist is shared: Do This.

“Do this in remembrance of me,” we hear, words that hover in our ears even yet today, on the heels of Maundy Thursday, Commandment Thursday.

So we lean in, totally at the ready to do…whatever it is that needs doing…and…we’re still sort of leaning in.

So it could be breaking bread and drinking wine. Like, that would be the obvious thing, of course: it is the retelling of the Last Supper, after all.

But as we hear from Paul, “Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me,” suggests that the “this” here is something other than drinking, something in addition to the drinking.

Which would be…

Well, could be giving thanks: Paul begins this passage by saying “For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, ‘This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’” Same thing happened when he took the cup: he gave thanks.

I mean, the meal is called the Eucharist, after all, which literally means the Good, or the Great, Thanksgiving.

Luke isn’t far off from Paul’s take here: “Then he took a loaf of bread,” Luke says, “and when Jesus had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to them,” and so on and so forth.

So in each case, the “this” could be to give thanks.

But it could also be that the “this” of “do this” is to give thanks, and to eat bread and drink wine. Like, Do This is Do Both of These Things.

Trouble is, Paul doesn’t stop there.

He goes on: “For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.”

So the “do this” could refer to giving thanks, and eating bread, and drinking wine, and proclaiming the Lord’s death until he comes.

“What,” I can distinctly hear Mrs. Rusch say, peering over her vintage ’80’s glasses, “do you exactly mean, Luke and Paul?”

These Three Days, also called the Triduum, might collectively have Paul and Luke’s back, and all our backs in these holy days in the Church, and frightening days in our nation.

~~~~~

Because we are in the throes of these holy three days, I’ve been thinking about the word ‘kenosis.’ It’s not one that just casually gets dropped into a conversation on the daily, so no troubles if it’s new to you.

It’s a Greek word, and means ‘to pour out,’ or to ‘empty’ oneself.

Typically, it was used in ancient circles when talking about a liquid, but theologians use it to talk about Jesus ‘pouring himself out’ for the world, or giving himself up for the love of the world. It’s not a huge flex for us, because of the passage in Philippians 2:6-8, in which Paul says, “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God,

   did not regard equality with God

   as something to be exploited,

but emptied himself,

   taking the form of a slave,

   being born in human likeness.

And being found in human form,

   he humbled himself

   and became obedient to the point of death—

   even death on a cross.”

I am here to say that these are words that would behoove a certain President to review and reclaim, but there’s a good chance that they were left on the clippings floor before he published a Bible bearing his name, rather than the Lord’s.

But here’s a thing new to me: New Testament Theologian Dr. David Fredrickson informs me that ancient peoples believed that when you fell in love, your insides, well they turned to liquid. We probably can detect traces of that sense even now, like “You make my heart melt,” say, or “I’m a puddle around you,” or “I want to dissolve in you.”

But here’s the kicker: one word for love in ancient Greek is ‘eros,’ which is way more familiar to us than ‘kenosis,’ but which, I just learned, in its form ἐρᾶσαι also means to pour forth, even to vomit.

Insert mind-blown emoji here, I tell you what.

So yeah, we moderns, when we hear about the word ‘eros,’ we jump to eroticism, or the erotic, which is there, sure, but it’s not only about that.

The late theologian Paul Tillich he was onto this truth.

Now, I realize that not everyone is a fan of Tillich (I’ll never forget interviewing with Dr. Stanley Hauerwas once, at Duke, before the opportunity to earn my Ph.D. at Regensburg Germany came up; he said, “If you come here, there’s one thing you need to know: the way we say ‘Sonofabitch’ around here is to say, ‘Paul Tillich!’” Allllrighty then….)

But as for me, I like Tillich, and I think Tillich has some wisdom for us in these days, including, of all things, his views about erotic love.

In his book Eros Toward the World: Paul Tillich and the Theology of the Erotic, Alexander C. Irwin explains that Tillich’s understanding of erotic love has to do with an appreciation of and desire for the inherent beauty, truth, or mystery of something or someone. (ETtW 6).

As far as Tillich is concerned, then, you can have an erotic feeling directed toward a whole range of possibilities, including but not limited to “other humans, to ideas, to natural objects and those fashioned by human skill, even to the divine source of all being,” (ETtW 13).

In other words, erotic love pulls us into participation with that which is beautiful, in an attempt to bond with it, and to create more of it.

Think, for example, of art.  The creation of beautiful art, and the appreciation of it, inspires joy, contentment, and peace.

Think of the delight and thrill of a microbiologist studying a cell under a microscope.

Think of a scholar who has just discovered a new idea.

Think of a canoer floating on the still and quiet waters, settling in to hear the birds, see the moose, catch the fish.

Think of friends, reconnecting over coffee or wine.

And, of course, think of shared love, expressed in either a tender touch as one passes a lover in the kitchen on the way to the fridge, or in the rousing and arousing tussle on the bed.

Each of these examples has to do with an understanding of the Self, and an understanding of the Other, which leads to a mutual understanding built on respect, curiosity, and a quest for the beautiful.

Here’s a great line from Irwin’s book, “Essential eros connects us to the world, rather than cutting us from it,” (52).

That’s not only great; it’s timely.

This administration wants to cut us off from one another, from other countries, and from the groundings of even our basic teachings of faith.

The powers that be seek to cut us off even from the gift of empathy, which quite literally means to be “feeling in” something or someone.

There is no ‘outpouring’ of love encouraged by this regime. There is only the damming up or drying up of it.

But erotic love is built on exactly the opposite: the appreciation and dignity of relationship and the recognition of beauty in relationship.

Much to the chagrin of this administration, erotic love also jars us into a recognition of that which is not beautiful, or of the absence of beauty.

That is, “knowing” (itself a Hebrew word, ‘yada,’ used in Scripture for sexual intimacy, as in “Adam knew Eve,” but which also conveys a deep desire to comprehend, appreciate, embrace something or someone) knowing of the significance and sacredness of beauty in the Other, we are moved not only to notice and value beauty, but to nurture it where it is not found, or where it is endangered.

In this way, erotic love poses, as Irwin says, a ‘threat’ to systems of domination, of exploitation, of injustice.

And it is threatening to live with this sort of love as our mandate—Do This, whatever it means, is a commandment, apt for Maundy Thursday and the rest of the liturgical year too, but it’s a frightening one.

We dare not forget that even Jesus was afraid, and he was crucified for being the very sort of threat that faithful Christian teaching and living pose to the present regime.

See, it’s not acknowledged enough: it’s scary to pour ourselves out for the sake of another.

It’s scary to live kenotically: to be vulnerable, and vulnerable for the sake of the vulnerable.

And it’s therefore scary to be a Christian right now.

Living kenotically, erotically for the world is exactly the thing that can get a person into trouble with this administration, for they are about strength and intimidation.

Make no mistake: they are Rome.

Following Jesus always threatens Rome.

The thing of it is, it’s not only scary to be staring down Rome these days, it’s offensive as well.

It offends Christians to be thrown into a life of fear and intimidation by those who want to forcibly dam up love.

Christians are ticked off.

I found it helpful, then, in a chapter on “The Erotic in Feminist and Womanist Theologies,”that Irwin makes reference to feminist theologians such as Sölle, Lorde, and Heyward, each of whom in their unique way connect the “work of love” with the “power of anger,” (ETtW 135).

These theologians see erotic power as intrinsically subversive power, subversive to the politics and patterns that exploit, that demean, that threaten…the politics and patterns of today, that is.

Here’s, then, another angle on the erotic: the more that we appreciate the beauty and the integrity of the other, the more we respect the gift of their individuality, and therefore of diversity writ large, and therefore the more that we dedicate ourselves to the protection and the fostering of it.

That’s why this administration is coming down hard on the ways of love, because love reveals the ways that God’s world is not reductive, not selective, not for the privileged, not for the few, but is radically and thoroughly expansive.

For God so loved the entire world that the Godself was poured out for it.

Once you absorb this love and this truth, actually, you discover that by participating in erotic, kenotic love toward the world, toward nature, and toward people—all different and distinct from oneself—you can’t help but to experience tremendous joy by way of pouring out the divine love you’ve soaked up.

See, in Tillich’s thought, the opposite of joy isn’t pain, but is detachment and apathy.

That’s the present administration. The opposite of joy. Detachment and apathy.

Erotic love, though, erotic, kenotic love is exactly not that: rather than detachment, it is attachment; rather than apathy, it is empathy; rather than cruelty, it is compassion, rather than sameness, it is vibrancy in motion.

And here, you see, here is where we find the strength of these days.

Here you see the contradictory beauty of a theology of the cross at hand: precisely where there is grief, there is the possibility of hope; precisely where there is abandonment, there is the possibility of connection; precisely where there is fear, there is comfort; precisely where there is ugliness, there is beauty to be rediscovered.

And on this Good Friday, let us be reminded that precisely where there is death, there is resurrection promised and to be had.

Erotic and kenotic love, then, is protest love, it is engaged love, it is joyful love.

Resistance to Rome?

Yeah, it’s scary, but it can also be beautiful, and affirm beauty.

Which, believe it or not, returns us to the Undefined This of Maundy Thursday.

What does the Do This mean?

I’m more or less in the All-Of-The-Above camp.

I think it means: Give Thanks, and then Break Bread and Drink Wine, because when you do that, you also Do This: you proclaim, and you specifically proclaim the Lord's death until he returns, and of course there's no point in proclaiming his death without proclaiming his life of love, mercy, forgiveness, healing, and welcome, which anyway you'd have to do if you are doing any of this "in remembrance" of him in the first place.

“Do This” is thanksgiving, bread, wine, welcome, revelation, promise, sending, and enacting love all wrapped into one.

And if you do do this—proclaim his life, and his death, and that he's coming again—then you're simultaneously proclaiming and inaugurating a new way of being that upends the old way of being.

You aren’t just inaugurating, but you are incarnating kenotic, erotic, love.

https://learn.elca.org/jle/the-kenosis-of-christ-in-the-politics-of-paul/

https://lsj.gr/index.php?title=ἐράω&mobileaction=toggle_view_desktop

https://a.co/d/iOO31f1

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