REstory 4: Reweaving What’s Been Unraveled
Reorientation to expanding "salvation"
Imagine you’re apprenticed to a tapestry weaver, and one day the master calls for your help. She is standing in front of a large, nearly finished tapestry depicting some important scenes from your community’s history. You assume that you’ll be helping complete the weaving, but instead, she asks you to help her undo some of the work that’s already been done. She begins to loosen and pull out some of the densely woven yarns, and she needs you to hold the heavy threads in your arms while she continues to remove certain ones. You might feel alarmed or confused or dismayed. Is this really necessary? It has taken so much work to get to this point — does this mean that some of that time has been wasted? Wasn’t it good enough the way it was?
The weaver sees your concern, and she listens to all your questions. While continuing to work with the threads, the master explains that the image portrayed in the tapestry needed to be adjusted, she reassures you that nothing is wasted, and you continue with the painstaking work. Then, eventually, after so many hours of holding heavy loose threads in your aching arms, with your help she begins to slowly and carefully weave them back into the tapestry. You realize that the scene pictured in the tapestry is turning out different. The weaver is using the same yarns, but she is weaving them together into a different pattern. As the ache in your arms and back releases, you can see that the reweaving work is shaping a different scene in the tapestry that highlights different aspects and emphasizes parts of the story that had been hidden before.
And you start to admit to yourself, “Wow, this is better — it is more true and more beautiful.”
So far in our REstory series, I have shared how at the beginning of cross-cultural ministry, we realized that what we had been given as “the gospel” would not make sense to our friends in a different country and culture. As we researched what we had been taught (variations of “believe that Jesus is the Son of God who died to pay the price/take the punishment for your sins so that you can go to heaven (or not go to hell) when you die”), we learned that wasn’t the gospel but one atonement theory from church history.1
As we kept researching, we realized that both 1-insisting that Jesus reveals what God is really like, and 2-centering the Resurrection in our understanding of the “good news,” meant that we were looking at a different story. Both narratives use scripture, but in the larger New Creation narrative, the same threads are being rewoven into a different overall picture.2 As sections of the rewoven tapestry come into focus, other sections also get reshaped. We start to realize that Story A (where God has to be appeased with a blood sacrifice) sounds more like ancient pagan assumptions and not like Jesus. We’re invited to think again about Jesus’s crucifixion in light of a more robust understanding of Resurrection. If God-in-Jesus has inaugurated the defeat of death with life, in a way that includes our in-Spirited loving participation, then what is Jesus’s death by crucifixion for?
For many of us, that central scene is one that may feel untouchable, but it may be the one in the tapestry that requires the most attention. I will sketch here the beginning of reweaving our understanding of the death of Jesus. First, Resurrection-as-the-end-of-Death is good news, and the only way to get there is through death; death must be endured in order to be healed. Second, it’s also about power. Jesus did not bow or bend to the expectations of those in power at the time; his inclusive love saw the oppressed at the margins and said “these folks have it made; they will be first to recognize my realm.” The provocative love of God that Jesus demonstrated and proclaimed was offensive to those in power, and they killed him for it. Third, as we’ve already described in the past few posts, crucifixion shows us what to do; we are meant to imitate Jesus’s suffering-in-order-to-love by the way we risk to love others. Fourth, suffering redefines what we think a deity is supposed to be like. The suffering of God-in-Jesus is meant to show us the humility of a God who is willing to suffer lynching at the hands of humans in order to defeat death. This God is willing to suffer a violent death, forever declaring solidarity with victims and survivors of violence.
This is a lot of reweaving! Each of those points listed above could be their own essay (and probably will be in the future), but for now we’re doing big-picture assumption-adjusting work. When I have these conversations, people often ask, “wait, so what IS the good news?” How should we describe the reweaving of our understanding of “good news” that we are seeing before our eyes? Many of the same threads have been used, but the scene that now appears on the tapestry is telling a different story; how should we summarize the new shape of what we are seeing? Here is one working “gospel summary:”3
The creative God of Israel continually pursues living among humans!
The God of Israel has acted faithfully in Jesus to enter death, defeat it with life, and train us in a new way to be human: becoming new creatures who are learning to take risks on loving God, neighbor, and enemy. Because the Spirit of God inhabits our bodies, we are already participating in God’s New Creation with every act of love we do.
In our early years of exploring a larger narrative for our understanding of what God is doing in the world, we were able to start reading scripture with new eyes. I will write more thoroughly about the Bible in a couple weeks, but in the early stages, we went back to the gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) asking ourselves “what did Jesus say the good news was?” To our surprise, instead of the “gospel” we had been taught, Jesus’ proclamations were overwhelmingly followed by announcements and invitations to apprenticeship in a different kind of kingdom that was available right then. When we reread Acts and the New Testament letters looking for the “good news,” the resurrection was a much more weighty theme than had been emphasized in our earlier years.
As the tapestry I received was rewoven, the texture and depth increased; even some terms expanded beyond their definitions I used to know. “Gospel” was a political term these first century writers provocatively stole from the empire.4 The word “heaven” in first century Greek also meant the skies, the atmosphere, the location of the stars, paired together with “earth” (“heaven and earth”) to refer to the entire created world, and the realm where God is — all of which is larger than the limited definition “where my soul will escape when I die.”5 And the biggie, of course, is salvation. As we’ve already mentioned, “salvation” is much more than avoiding hell after death. In Greek, the words that are translated into the English words “save” and “salvation” have a much larger scope of meaning: rescue, deliverance, healing, liberation, and preservation.6 Going even further back, the main Hebrew verb for “save” or “deliver” is connected to a root meaning of “to be capacious, spacious, sufficient, live in abundance.”7
From the perspective of responsible scholarship, examining broader word meanings from the first century (and earlier) is not a mic drop to end a conversation but only the beginning of opening the door for reinterpretation. Once we trust that reinterpretation is a good idea, then we can continue to learn the broader contexts to assist us in this reweaving project. All of this points to the possibility that the narrow definition of salvation that we were given is not ancient, but much more recent in the past few centuries, and so rather disconnected from the earliest Jesus followers.
I’ve been on this growing research journey for almost two decades, steadily readjusting the threads of the big picture I had been given. Accessing wider wisdom from church history and from theologians in our era leads to learning how other groups of Jesus followers have woven those threads differently. It’s also important to mention that for many people this is deeply emotional work. We were surprised at how many rich resources were available, and every deep resource we encountered added to a growing sense of “why am I just now hearing about this?” Many people I hear from have expressed a sense of betrayal or feeling lied to: “Why didn’t my minister (or elder or teacher or parent or professor) tell us about this?”
The work of undoing our inherited assumptions requires deep humility and courage. When our community claims to give us Fully-Arrived-Certain-Truth that turns out to be partial truths (and some not-truth), some people feel embarrassed or foolish or angry or disillusioned. That reaction is really normal. Disillusionment is usually thought of as sad; whenever we have lost trust with what we thought was true (or the people who told us those things), we might find ourselves in the “condition of being dissatisfied or defeated in expectation or hope.”8 And yet most of us would say that we want to be dis-illusioned; we don’t want to stay within an “illusion” any longer than we have to. We want our perception of reality to match actual reality as much as possible, so we want help leaving any illusions we’ve been stuck in.
In my experience, growing out of a too-small story with God isn’t fast or easy; it’s more like a crock-pot than a microwave. But the invitation is still to Go Out In Joy. God will save us out of our small stories and deliver us into wider, healthier interpretation. As we start to see a truer, more beautiful scene being rewoven into the tapestry, the deep joy of reorientation steadily and eventually grows larger than the discomfort of disorientation.9 My hope is that we can summon enough trust in the possibility of future joy to help us cultivate the endurance needed to hold the loosened threads while a wider witnessing community shows us how to reweave them.
© 2024 Ladye Rachel Howell. All rights reserved.
A summary of the history of “atonement theory” is coming up next week!
Reweaving the threads of a tapestry into an adjusted picture is just one metaphor for the epistemological work of rearranging the parts into a different, adjusted whole. Similar metaphors include rearranging the stones in a mosaic to make a different picture or realizing you’ve been given the wrong puzzle box top for the puzzle pieces you’ve been given.
This is a work in progress. I want to resist “nutshelling” the gospel this early in a reorientation process, but summarizing is part of how we learn, and we need to replace the bad summaries of Story A. Many folks were given a 1 or 2 sentence “gospel” summary or elevator pitch that they were told to offer not only to friends and co-workers but also to strangers in the grocery store or sitting next to them on an airplane (and then felt guilty for never wanting to share that story).
See Richard Horsley’s books Jesus and Empire and Paul and Empire.
See Bauer and Danker's Greek/English Lexicon, p. 737-39.
See Bauer and Danker's Greek/English Lexicon, p. 982-86.
See Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew/English Lexicon, p. 446-47.
Though the disorientation might not completely disappear, especially if you’re in regular conversation with folks still insisting on Story A.
I feel grateful that my "disillusioning process," though painful when it came to how it played out in community, was gentle and mind-blowing as it related to the beauty of God and what we have in him. I always have a hard time explaining in a logical way how I see things differently now, and especially struggle to do so succinctly and especially with reference to a bigger picture of Scripture, history, language, and scholarship. It has been something I "know" but seeing it explained so well and as a "bigger, better" version of the story is so helpful for having conversations about it.