The Gethsemane of the Monks

From: Real Clear Religion

The eminent evolutionary biologist Martin Nowak has just published SuperCooperators, a book offering his theory of why natural selection may paradoxically favor altruism. The Harvard scientist's insight is that evolutionary success is not simply a matter of "survival of the fittest," but also in some cases requires co-operation -- which is to say, a degree of self-sacrifice. Put another way, Nowak argues that the values taught by Jesus Christ are encoded within human biology.

It's a provocative idea, but I don't think it can adequately account for how Christ ended his life. To suffer and die for one's family and friends is understandable. But for strangers? That's harder to conceive. And beyond that, to forgive one's killers, even in one's dying breaths? To do that requires something far beyond mere biological instinct, or rationality. It requires a superabundance of altruism. It requires a love so pure it cannot be explained.

The mystery of this kind of love is what Christians confronted Easter weekend. It began in the garden of Gethsemane, when Jesus sweated blood in agonized anticipation of his arrest. The Gospels tell us that Jesus, in his terror, asked God to spare him the cup of suffering, but "not as I will, but as you will." In this account, Jesus wishes to be spared from his passion, but not if it means going against the will of God.

The story then moves to his trial, scourging, and crucifixion on Good Friday. "Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do," Jesus said as the life drained from him. The narrative ends with the resurrection of Jesus on the third day, the miracle of all miracles, which, in Christian belief, won eternal life for all who unite themselves to him.

It is a breathtaking story, even if taken as myth, but it's also one whose familiarity in Western culture has drained away much of its transformative power. The tidy, Sunday School answers we grew up with fail to convey the radical significance of the Passion. Sometimes, we have to experience this old story in new ways to make it live in our moral imagination.

Paradoxically, literary archvillains, from Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor to Flannery O'Connor's murderous Misfit, have a better grasp of the Jesus they reject than many of us who call him Lord. They realized how the bizarre tale of the God-man who loved so fully he accepted an unjust death and renounced vengeance.

Jesus, said the Misfit, "thrown everything off balance. If He did what He said, then it's nothing for you to do but throw away everything and follow Him, and if He didn't, then its nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can ... ."

So says O'Connor's escaped convict, who understands better the cost of Christian discipleship than many of us disciples of Christ, who live our religion as ideas to be understood by reason rather than mysteries to be embraced with self-sacrificing love. Religious truth is the kind of truth that can only be fully known by living it out. Despite what we say and think, we live as if the last Christian died on the cross.