Love and the Liberation of Flesh
Economies of enslavement must be ended by love | Easter 7, Year C
God is love. It is a beautiful idea and a central tenant of Christian faith. But love has a problem. It can easily be lost in the world of sentiment, of mere emotion—a feeling with no flesh. Flesh, however, is how we know the world; it is how we relate to others. For all our culture’s dreams of disembodied connections, all life in creation comes down, eventually, to a body. The screen on which you read this is made of things from the world, mined and manufactured. The servers that carry the binary code that carries these words across the networks of data exists in a place. The data centers are dependent on the elemental energies of sunlight and water, whether in stored form through fossil fuels or more directly captured through solar power.
For love to be known on the mortal end it must be embodied. God, as love, seeks to be known and such knowledge requires a body. This is what John’s gospel has told us Jesus’s life was about from the beginning—Jesus is the embodied word whose end is to bring God’s love into flesh. This truth is reflected in the passage from John’s Gospel assigned for this final Sunday of the Easter season. Drawn from Jesus’s final prayer over his disciples, Jesus prays to the Father that “the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.” This loving word made flesh again seeks incarnation. From the body of the incarnate one Jesus, we move to the body of the believers, the church, and each is a means of making known the love of God.
To live an embodied love can get you in trouble. Talking of love is all fine, but when it takes on flesh, it can challenge the basic economies of our lives. Wendell Berry addresses this problem in his essay “Word and Flesh,” where he says that “only love can bring intelligence out of the institutions and organizations, where it aggrandizes itself, into the presence of the work that must be done.” It is love that takes talk and ideas and helps them take root in the concrete particulars of the world. As Berry continues, “Love is never abstract. It does not adhere to the universe or the planet or the nation or the institution or the profession, but to the singular sparrows of the street, the lilies of the field, ‘the least of these my brethren.’”
Love’s adherence to the particular, its care for the small, seemingly insignificant lives of the world, will put it at odds with the abstractions by which we seek to avoid responsibility. Berry quotes George Orwell, who wrote of colonial politics that, “All left-wing parties in the highly industrialized countries are at bottom a sham, because they make it their business to fight against something they do not really wish to destroy. They have internationalist aims, and at the same time they struggle to keep up a standard of life with which those aims are incompatible.” For Orwell, the political activists and theorists of his day had not yet faced the consequences of liberating the poor of Asia. In a similar way, Berry echoes Orwell by saying, “We all live by robbing nature, but our standard of living demands that robbery shall continue.”
The only answer is an ability to live with less, to enter a different form of economy and ownership that allows for the robbery of nature to stop. For this, Berry writes, “We must achieve the character and acquire the skills to live much poorer than we do. We must waste less. We must do more for ourselves and each other. It is either that or continue merely to think and talk about changes that we are inviting catastrophe to make.”
It is in the book of Acts that we find the liberation of love enfleshed. In an place where the economy was dependent upon enslavement and exploitation, the first Christian church found the obvious response to be a sharing of resources—a common life of joint ownership. But God’s love in flesh doesn’t stop there. In our reading from later in Acts this Sunday we will find Paul freeing an enslaved girl from a “spirit of divination.” The result is that the people who claimed ownership over this girl were robbed of the means of economically exploiting her possession. As a result, Paul and his traveling companion Silas are thrown in jail.
This has been a repeated pattern through Christian history. Those who have learned the liberating love of Christ, turn to liberate others through it. Such freedom is never merely spiritual, for no earthly creature is mere spirit. The loving freedom of Christ must find its form in flesh and that embodied love will challenge the economies of exploitation and the standards of living on which they are dependent.
How do we embody this liberating love? That is the question our scriptures this Sunday call us toward. In his commentary on Acts, Willie Jennings points us toward a possible answer in the story of Lydia that was the Sunday reading last week. In that story Lydia, a wealthy business woman, believes the gospel and immediately responds by offering hospitality to Paul and his friends. “Ownership aligned with discipleship is possible,” writes Jennings, “but only under the conditions witnessed by Lydia and not the owners of the slave girl…Only those willing to open their lives, their homes, and their possessions for the sake of the gospel can escape the seduction of ownership. Only those whose ownership tips the economic balance away from enslavement might inhabit a form of ownership that follows Jesus.”
Most of us are caught in an economy with which we do not agree. And I imagine plenty of us, myself included, own more than enough with much that enough having been achieved through the exploitation of the earth and the poor. The question I’m left with is how can my ownership tip the “economic balance away from enslavement.” It is a question whose answer will require knowledge and intelligence, but more so it will take love and embodiment.