All Saints’, Dorval
April 7, 2023
I read a lot of young adult fantasy, a genre which has been exploding in popularity, creativity, and variety over the past couple of decades. Some of it is lighthearted and funny, but some of it falls into the subgenre called “grimdark” – which is exactly as it’s described: unrelentingly grim, and offering the opposite of happy endings. Grimdark fantasy describes people coming face to face with the most extreme possible situations, and explores how they respond.
There’s one grimdark author, whose fourth book I just read, who seems to be making it her trademark that her protagonist never actually survives the denouement of the plot. Her characters are forced into corners where the only possible outcome involves choosing death, choosing to sacrifice themselves because the alternative is even more intolerable. It’s a bold move in literary terms, defying the expectation that the viewpoint character will still be around to narrate the ending even if that ending isn’t stereotypically happy.
Why do these characters make these choices? Because oppression has left them with literally nothing to lose. There’s nothing to live for – not love, not family, not work, not politics – because every aspect of their futures has been systematically taken from them by the world-spanning, murderous systems that they face, and their deaths are the only way those systems can be defied.
“He was despised and rejected by others … upon him was the punishment that made us whole … who could have imagined his future? For he was cut off from the land of the living, stricken for the transgression of my people.”
It occurred to me, contemplating these extreme grimdark endings, that there were more than a few resonances with the Crucifixion. Jesus going to the cross certainly seems, like an outside observer, like someone with nothing to lose, forced into a corner where a violent, painful death is the only way out.
But of course Jesus had everything to lose. Jesus was God. As we heard in the Passion reading from St. Matthew on Sunday, Jesus said during his interrogation, “Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels?”
Jesus had everything to lose, and yet he became as one who had nothing to lose. In solidarity with that mass of humanity across the centuries who have had nothing to lose, who were simply crushed under the weight of poverty and oppression, Jesus chose to empty himself and took the form of a slave, becoming obedient unto death, even death on a cross.
We like to talk about the Crucifixion as though Jesus was a tremendous threat to the powers that be – and indeed, in some of the grimdark books, the self-sacrifice of the one with nothing to lose does make possible the major change that is unattainable by any other means.
But what if Jesus did not in fact present any kind of real challenge to the power structures of his day – not to the religious authorities, and especially not to the staggering, world-spanning might of the Roman Empire? Jesus was one off-the-wall prophet among many, in a backward, backwater province – what if the Crucifixion was just those powers getting rid of another annoying rabble-rouser rather like a horse flicking off a bug with its tail?
Having nothing to lose doesn’t necessarily mean your death will mean anything, or change anything. A lot of the time, it means the opposite.
But, of course, as always, the joke is on the powers that be.
Whether Jesus was killed because he was an active threat to the Empire, or whether he was simply one of the thousands crucified for not much reason at all other than having been in the way when the Roman boot came stomping down – the result was precisely the opposite of what Empire wanted and expected.
Jesus had everything to lose, but for our sake, he became as one who had nothing to lose. And it is in that space, where the one who has nothing to lose gives up self and life for others, that miracles happen.
“The righteous one, my servant, shall make many righteous, … Therefore I will allot him a portion with the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong; because he poured out himself to death, and was numbered with the transgressors; yet he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.”
So how do we respond to the God who died as one with nothing to lose? Because let’s face it, most if not all of us have plenty to lose. Our lives (when the power isn’t out) are materially comfortable. We have loved ones who care about us. In general, we manage to move through the world without too much dissonance.
We don’t all need to turn into self-immolating grimdark fantasy heroes. Jesus did that for us, after all. But we do need to acknowledge that if we’re looking for Jesus, he is much more likely to be found among those with nothing to lose, because that’s where the miracles happen, and where we find out what happens after the final, wrenching self-sacrifice.
Amen.
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