Category: Spiritual Formation

An Odor of Decay

An Odor of Decay

This is the final post in a three-part series on the mortal human body in two classic works of literature: Homer’s Iliad and Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. Though the topic may seem morbid, it grants an opportunity to reflect on God’s continued care for “this earthly tent” even after death, and to reclaim The Great Books as conduits for Christian formation.

Now… allow me to share something I don’t like about the handling of this subject in the Iliad, and how Dostoyevsky helps.

An Odor of Decay

One of the more brilliant and poignant moves by Dostoyevsky in The Brothers Karamazov involves what happens to the body of the saintly Elder Zosima.

Zosima is, in many ways, the voice of Christian love within the work. And as he nears death, many expect some great miracle to accompany his soul’s departure. Perhaps the corpse will smell of lavender and be miraculously preserved. Perhaps the heavens will portend some sign of triumph and approval. Perhaps (like Elisha) his remains will work great wonders to convert the scoffers and the skeptics.

But none of this transpires.

Dostoyevsky patterns this part of The Brothers Karamazov on the traditional Russian construction of a saint’s life (zhitie), where a holy person’s relics perform signs or withstand decomposition.

Yet shockingly, for Zosima, his corpse almost immediately emits a terrible stench of fleshly corruption: an odor of decay that sets in far faster than normal.

To quote the KJV in its description of Lazarus: “He stinketh.”

The scene was so scandalous Dostoyevsky had to beg his publisher not to censor it, and he implores his editor to leave in the more jarring Russian word for “stank.”

The expedited smell of rot causes some to declare Zosima a false teacher. And the combination of rumors and self-righteous gloating from his enemies drives the story’s hero, Alyosha Karamazov (Alexey), to question his faith, reach for a glass of vodka, and head off to visit a woman of ill repute (Grushenka) who has designs on debauching the young monk.

From Homer to Dostoyevsky

I bring up this strange happening because I find it to be a helpful counterbalance to a trend I spoke of previously (here and here) in Homer’s Iliad.

In Homer, the gods always dole out special treatment in who gets cared for both before and after death. Great warriors and the sons of deities get extra care and preservation, as when “Apollo pitied Hector, and kept his body free from taint.” Meanwhile, the rest of us rot.

When a spear is hurled at the mortal child of a god or goddess, it gets bumped off course by a nepotistic divinity. But it never clatters harmlessly to the sand. It always skewers some poor schmuck standing just behind the target.

Life still feels like that sometimes. The powerful and privileged get special treatment. And they have special resources to keep them “well preserved” despite the fact that death still comes.

But not with Zosima.

So why does Dostoyevsky tell his story this way?

Why does the saint emit an odor of decay in The Brothers Karamazov, whereas Homer keeps his main characters lemon fresh until the funeral pyre is lit?

The answer, I think, has to do with Dostoyevsky’s own wrestling match with faith and doubt in a world where God’s presence isn’t always discernible. And it hows his tenacity to cling to resurrection hope even when “the gods” don’t provide proof of their affections.

The Other Alexey

The epigraph for The Brothers Karamazov is a quote from John 12:24:

“Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.”

It is, in many ways, the key that unlocks the entire novel.

Though Dostoyevsky names his hero Alexey Fyodorovich, the ghost of another Alexey hovers over the story’s most painful questions: the author’s three-year-old son (Alexey Fyodorovich), who died just before the book was written, of the epilepsy inherited from Dostoyevsky.

In many ways, The Brothers Karamazov is a father’s raw attempt to work through crushing grief and anger while refusing to relinquish gritty Christian hope. “Unless a seed falls into the ground…,” you can almost hear him reciting as he hammers out his tale of fathers and sons, faith and doubt, death and longed-for immortality.

If the problem in Homer is that the gods intervene too much (and too capriciously), the worry in Brothers is that God might not exist at all, or that he has much to answer for in creating a world where children suffer, die, and then decay.

There is a reason why Job was Dostoyevsky’s favorite book of Scripture.

Bow and Kiss

I’ll teach through Brothers this year in a special class on Christian worldview, offered in the OKWU Honors College.

The goal is to examine some of the biggest human questions through the lens of deeply Christian work of literature—which, when read slowly and discussed deeply (without smartphones or chatbots to give our brains “the odor of decay”), has the capability of forming us more fully in Christ’s image.

So back to the question: Why does Dostoyevsky make his saintly elder stink in excess of nature?

No answer is given.

But several clues are important.

First, Zosima’s last act before dying is to bow and kiss the earth (the place where seeds must fall and decompose in order to bear fruit).

Second, upon going to the alleged prostitute (Grushenka) in his bitter grief, Alexey and the woman do nothing unseemly. Instead, her compassion over Zosima’s death and Alexey’s lack of self-righteous judgment of her past end up transforming both characters—so that neither is ever the same. (Dostoyevsky clearly wants us to notice that this spiritual “fruit” would never have sprung forth except from soil fertilized by the “miracle” of Zosima’s premature decay.)

Third, when Alexey goes next to stand vigil by the Elder’s body, the passage being read over the casket is John 2: the wedding feast at Cana. Here, wine is miraculously made by Christ from water. And what is such wine? It is the product of expedited(!) fermentation that—in John 2—causes the disciples to put their faith in the Messiah.

Thus, even decomposing matter is transformed into fertilizer for an unexpected harvest that far exceeds the single seed.

Conclusion

What I love about Dostoyevsky’s treatment of the mortal human body is his gritty ability to hold together resurrection hope with a world that still smells with the odor of decay.

Whereas Homer’s vision is both formulaic and fatalistic (special people get “preserved” but none get resurrected), Dostoyevsky’s mind is open to surprises that are simultaneously more painful, mysterious, and hopeful.

“Bright sadness” is the paradoxical description that is often used.

Or to steal an oft-quoted line from the Nicaraguan poet Ernesto Cardenas, they tried to bury us, they didn’t realize we were seeds.

Hello friends. Please subscribe on the homepage to receive these posts by email. This is especially helpful since I’ve decided (mostly) to uncouple the blog from social media. Thanks for reading. ~JM

Are all sins equal before God? (part 1)

Are all sins equal before God? (part 1)

About once a year in my theology or Bible classes, a student will say something like the following: “But as we know, all sins are equal in God’s sight.”

In response, I’ll often ask: “How do we know that? Can you think of any passages that support the claim?” In what follows, we usually discover that the phrase “As we know” is substituting for any solid evidence from Scripture or tradition.

This realization need not be belittling. In fact, the chance to rethink our unexamined assumptions can be one of the great joys of learning, even for professors.

The Bible never states that all sins are equal in God’s sight. Several passages teach the opposite. And in the end, both common sense and church tradition corroborate the biblical witness. More importantly, the sooner we acknowledge this, the sooner we can avoid a subsequent move that sometimes does great harm, especially to victims of abuse.

Grace is real. God is just. Sin is serious. All are sinners. But none of those facts leads to anything like the equalizing of, say, child abuse and coveting thy neighbor’s goat.

Theologian Beth Felker Jones has written well on this subject over at her Substack (here), where she traces the unfortunate myth to a Protestant desire to avoid certain medieval Catholic assumptions about mortal and venial sins, penance, and a web of other questions. It’s a great post, though I can’t seem to review it now behind the Substack paywall.

My focus is slightly different.

I’d like to work quickly through the points I laid out above to show why it’s time to retire this evangelical cliché:

  1. Scripture never says it.
  2. Scripture frequently teaches the opposite.
  3. Common sense and church tradition corroborate the Bible.
  4. There’s a hidden danger in the myth, especially for victims of abuse.

To keep things short, this post deals only with points 1 and 2.

JESUS CONTRA EVANGELICALS

In the interest of being fair, I’ve tried to wrack my brain for any passages that might challenge what I’ve said above. But upon inspection, none pass muster.

Case in point: What about Jesus, when he links inner attitudes (of, say, lust or hatred) to outward actions (like adultery or murder)?

“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matthew 5:27–28).

From this passage, we learn that outward acts flow forth from internal ruminations. Both lust and adultery are serious and sinful. And indeed, one springs from the other like a plant from a seed, or a birth from conception (see also James 1:14-15).

Hence, we should care not just about our external actions, but about the inner habits of the heart that birth them. (In fact, this isn’t new: the Ten Commandments warn not only against theft but coveting—which arguably is what leads to theft, adultery, and sometimes murder.) What Jesus says is crucially important. But he never says, “All sins are equal.”

Elsewhere, he teaches quite the opposite.

In the texts below, Jesus links the seriousness of certain sins (and the level of their accompanying consequences) to the amount of knowledge or opportunity possessed by those who reject the way of truth and obedience.

  1. Matthew 10:15: When sending disciples to preach and minister to some of their own people, who know God’s word and yet rebel against it, he proclaims that “it will be more bearable for Sodom and Gomorrah on the day of judgment than for that town” (Matthew 10:15).
  2. Matthew 11:22: He then says something similar when decrying the lack of repentance in the Jewish towns of Chorazin and Bethsaida, where many miracles were performed: “But I tell you, it will be more bearable for Tyre and Sidon on the day of judgment than for you.”
  3. Luke 12:47-48: More starkly, Christ tells a parable about some unwatchful servants whose punishments are proportionate to the knowledge they had of their master’s will. Their unwatchfulness is the same, but their culpability and consequences differ:

“The servant who knows the master’s will and does not get ready or does not do what the master wants will be beaten with many blows. But the one who does not know and does things deserving punishment will be beaten with few blows. From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked.”

  1. John 19:11: Finally, when standing before Pontius Pilate, Jesus again demonstrates that while the Roman Governor is guilty of rejecting truth and (indeed) murdering an innocent man, he does so with more ignorance and less premeditation than do others. That’s no plea for Pontius Pilate, but it does mean, “the one who handed me over to you is guilty of a greater sin.”

In short, Jesus is clear that while repentance is required from everyone, not all sins are equal in culpability or accompanying consequences.

What’s shocking, then, is not that Jesus sees some offenses as more egregious in God’s sight than others (that’s just common sense if God is just), but that he focuses on the sins of callous self-righteousness coming from religious insiders (scribes and Pharisees), who while having ample exposure to the word of God, still reject their Messiah and his way of peace and justice, even while they exploit the vulnerable.

Thus, prostitutes and tax-collectors flock to him, and theologians plot his murder.

Once again, Christ calls all to repentance, which is the only right response to any sin. But his talk of “millstones” is reserved for those who prey upon the “little ones” (Luke 17:2). And his most famous fire and brimstone parable is about a rich man who ignores a beggar underneath his table (Luke 16:19–31).

This makes me wonder: Is the evangelical myth about all sins being equal less about Protestant vs. medieval Catholic minutiae, and more about Christ’s way of weighing our offenses?

BEYOND JESUS

The same goes for the rest of the New Testament.

Paul is perhaps clearest of all that all people (except Jesus) are sinners (Romans 3:23), and that sin’s wages are ultimately death (Romans 6:23).

James likewise argues that to break one part of the law makes one a lawbreaker. Hence, there is no place for boasting in anything apart from Christ, in whom “Mercy triumphs over judgment” (James 2:10,13).

But as Miroslav Volf points out:

From “All are sinners” it does not follow that “All sins are equal.” [. . .] The aggressors’ destruction of a village and the refugees’ looting of a truck and thereby hurting their fellow refugees are equally sin, but they are not equal sins; the rapist’s violation and the woman’s hatred are equally sin, but they are manifestly not equal sins.

The world of equal sins is a world designed by the perpetrators.

~Exclusion and Embrace, p.82

In this last line, we begin to see the hinge-point between the biblical truth and why it matters in our daily lives.

More on that next time.

Hello friends. Please subscribe on the homepage to receive these posts by email. This is especially helpful since I’ve decided (mostly) to uncouple the blog from social media. Thanks for reading. ~JM

The right kind of secrets

The right kind of secrets

There’s a scene near the end of Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan in which Captain John Miller (Tom Hanks) finally locates the long-lost James Francis Ryan (played by a young Matt Damon). Damon’s character is in shock, after learning that his three brothers have been killed in action.

After years apart, he struggles to visualize their faces. So Hanks’ character suggests a trick he uses to recall his old life before the war:

Well, when I think of home, I… I think of something specific. I think of my, my hammock in the backyard or my wife pruning the rosebushes in a pair of my old work gloves.

Ryan tries it, and a risqué story follows about the brothers before they left for war. When the men stop laughing, he asks Captain Miller, “Tell me about your wife and those rose bushes.”

“No. No,” Hanks’ character replies, “that one I save just for me.”

THE SECRET PLACE OF THUNDER

I thought about that scene as I read John Starke’s book, The Secret Place of Thunder: Trading our Need to Be Noticed for a Hidden Life with Christ.

Starke’s claim is that we have entered an age of “performative individualism.” In this context, every moment of our lives—traumatic events, acts of service, sitting down to read a book—is curated for the gaze of others, usually online. (And as I type that, “curated” feels like one of the sadder words in our cultural lexicon.)

The vehicle is social media, but the driver is an age-old longing to be noticed, affirmed, and validated. Cue Ron Burgundy: “Hey everyone! Come see how good I look!”

“We have internalized the idea,” writes Starke, “that the markers of ‘being okay,’ of having an admirable life and enviable success, are primarily visible.”

Pics or it didn’t happen.

Ironically,

A deep loneliness comes for those who live off a curated image. … We can have many followers but few friends, lots of comments but no communion.

YOU HAVE RECEIVED YOUR REWARD

Into the performative rat race, Jesus offers a word of warning: “Beware of practicing your righteousness before other people to be seen by them” (Matthew 6:1). To do so is to have received your reward. God is interested in virtues done in secret—not because the homeless get less if I vlog my service at the local soup kitchen (though they might, if I’m preoccupied with my smartphone), but because I do.

Starke notes that in this passage Jesus doesn’t warn against flaunting our wealth, our power, or our giftedness; he warns against trumpeting our virtues: praying, fasting, giving to the poor.

And in our day, the “virtues” includes a kind of performative vulnerability: “I cried for hours… and then I wrote this.” (Use code #vulnerable for 10% off.)

I’ve thought a lot about what this means for ministries and Christian non-profits that manage online spaces, especially since sometimes what seems required for “marketing” often sounds like what Jesus told us not to do. I don’t have easy answers there, but it deserves some thought.

THE RIGHT KIND OF SECRETS

In the end, let me be clear about what I’m not saying: It is obviously beautiful and good to share our lives with one another, including certain deeply personal moments. It is also wrong to label every act of online sharing as “performative.”

My point is more limited and unique to your own life and personality.

It comes down to this: We need the right kind of secrets. Not the kind that fester and metastasize because we refuse to share them with the right person in the right place: the addiction, the struggle that needs community to heal. Rather, we need the kind of secrets that retain their beauty and formative power precisely because they are known only to God, us, and perhaps those closest to us.

To share those things (whatever they are) may be to cheapen and commodify both us and them. As in the famous double slit experiment from quantum physics, the act of (constant) observation changes us, and not always for the better. In that way, the old indigenous taboo is right: the camera has the power to steal part of your soul.

I’m not sure what that looks like for you; and I don’t pretend that it looks the same for all of us.

Still, the longer I live in a performative age, the more I side with Jesus and John Miller: “No. No… That one I save just for me.”

Hello friends. Please subscribe on the homepage to receive these posts by email. This is especially helpful since I’ve decided (mostly) to uncouple the blog from social media. Thanks for reading. ~JM