This transition came at the perfect time for me and my family. I was wrapping up my first year of full-time teaching, a year that had proved rather difficult for personal, familial, communal, ecclesial, and financial reasons. I’ll spare the gory details except to note that a move away from a deep community in the affordable Midwest to the isolation and expense of the Bay Area, coupled with the need to temporarily rehome our beloved dog, the inestimable Professor Argyle P. Woodford, was taxing. It was bad enough that I’d decided to give it another year, after which, if things had not markedly improved, I would leave academia and find something else to do with myself. Taking on the editorship cannot account for all of the improvements that came to our life at that crucial moment, but it did play a role. My wife’s employment clicked into place with a job she loves, we were able to move into a place that would allow us to keep a dog — thus ending the exile of the “Avignon Pup-acy” — and so on and so forth. Editing Covenant was an ingredient in salvaging my career and my family’s overall wellbeing.

And what a ride it’s been. Working as an editor has joys and frustrations that only those behind the editor’s desk can truly appreciate. To see the wind catch the sails of an excellent piece, or to watch a promising but not ready for primetime essay go through iterative growth until it’s ready to see the light of day and make its important contribution, are eminently satisfying. Similarly, the opportunity to foster public discourse, to help give shape to vital conversations affecting the life of my church, the Communion of churches of which it is part, and, beyond both, the wider church catholic is a high calling and a great honor. I’ll leave the frustrations to the side. It is a part of the editor’s calling to bear those in silence, in deference to the platform and the authors, though I do metaphorically give anyone else who’s done this work a knowing look and say, “real ones know.”

There are so many moments of which I’m proud from my editorial tenure, during which time Covenant published 1,440 essays. We published our first genuinely interreligious essay, a Muslim reflection on the Blessed Virgin Mary. We tackled such hot topics as how churches were weathering the storm of the COVID-19 pandemic, or protests concerning police brutality, or how to approach the questions of race and racism. While my political commitments are decidedly leftward (I sometimes joke about how frustrating it is to live in California and have all these liberals to the right of me), I hope that we’ve published a fair representative spread of outlooks and perspectives on these issues.

One of the particularly cool things about editing Covenant is that one day I may be working with and publishing work from theologians of the highest stature within and beyond our Communion, and then the next, featuring the work of a faithful parish priest, or a layperson whom no one has ever heard of. While we are not singular in this regard, I do think we’re relatively unique in having that sort of range in what we offer and from whom.

Relatedly, as I look back, one of the themes of my time as editor is an attempt to broaden our scope. While The Living Church and Covenant have a (largely earned) reputation for conservatism, this is only a partial truth. Our ranks are not monolithic, and a considerable part of our mission is to eschew partisan factionalism and instead foster open and authentic dialogue within the church and the Communion, and beyond. In keeping with this mandate, I have sought to feature authors and essays that move beyond our perceived party line, sometimes to the consternation of those who’d like us to just be a bunch of conservative Episcopalians — no Catholics or progressives welcome, thank you very much! In general, though, I have judged this broadening to be well-received, and at the very least worth the cost of sometimes fraught receptions.

During my five years at the helm, we have also expanded our roster of regular contributors, with a particular eye toward diversity (racial, gender, and geographic), and now boast authors from Africa, Asia, the Middle East, the Pacific, and, of course, the Canadian, American, and British core that one would expect when dealing with Anglicanism and the Episcopal Church.

I have not shied away from controversy in the role, attracting umbrage from all points along the political and ideological spectrum. While there was a time that I’d have said that if you’re being attacked by both the left and the right, it’s a good sign you’re doing the right thing, I don’t necessarily subscribe to that notion any longer. It’s possible to be so wrong that even folks who disagree on most else can clearly see it. However, I have tried to operate with clarity within the mission of The Living Church and Covenant. We face fraught, vexing, and divisive issues, and the only faithful way forward is to find a way forward together, forgoing schism or coercion, and instead walking in the way of communion, of charity, and of persuasion. Our conservative reputation notwithstanding, in the end our mandate and mission is not to be conservative, but to help all Anglicans — and, beyond Anglicanism, all Christians — of whatever party persuasion to hold one another fast, even amid our disagreements, for the sake of that unity for which Jesus Christ prayed, that unity for which he died. I know for a certainty that I’ve not always gotten this right during my editorship, but I take comfort in knowing that this has been my consistent aim.

And now, consistent with that aim, the time has come for me to hang up my editorial hat, and to mix the metaphor by passing the baton to my successor, the Rev. Dr. Calvin Lane. Cal is a fine church historian, and brings a depth of pastoral wisdom, gained through years of parish ministry, into the mix. When I spoke with him about the realities of the work involved in editing Covenant and heard his vision for how he’d like to see this online journal develop, I was confident that I’d be leaving the publication in worthy, competent hands.

For all things there’s a season, and the season for me to edit Covenant is drawing to its close. Having given five years to the endeavor, I’m satisfied with what I’ve done, and I think I’ve done just about all that it’s in me to do. As I’ve reached middle age, I’ve had the growing conviction that life is all too brief. The promise of the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come notwithstanding, there’s a truth that we only get this one life. There are other tasks, callings, and responsibilities that I want to devote myself to, and allowing Cal to take the reins will free precious time to do so. I’m so grateful for the time I’ve had to do this work, and I’m so hopeful for the time that remains to me to work on other things.

Orate pro me, amici.

This essay is excerpted from the introduction to Ruptured Bodies: A Theology of the Church Divided, and is posted by permission of Fortress Press, an imprint of 1517 Media.

I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one…so that the world may believe that you have sent me.

 — John 17:20–21

When you come together as a church, I hear that there are divisions [schismata] among you; and to some extent I believe it. Indeed, there have to be factions [haireseis] among you…

— 1 Corinthians 11:18–19

Never has any organization been so content to act against the express wishes and instruction of its founder as the Christian church. Any number of books could be written about any number of failures of the Christian community to be what it says it is supposed to be. This book is focused on one, which, apparently, has beleaguered the church since its inception — the reality of divided Christians. If Jesus intends the church to be one, suggesting that upon this unity hinges the credibility of the Christian message, and if the churches are content to exist in anything less than full visible unity, then their very existence is a performative contradiction of the entire basis of the Christian faith.

This incongruity hardly seems to register within Christian consciousness, though. Our divisions are often acknowledged, even lamented, but they persist. Ecumenical dialogues, which aim at the proximate end of differentiated consensus in the service of the eventual end of reunion, continue, issuing joint documents and celebrating new convergences, but that reunion always eludes us, receding like the horizon. No matter what doctrinal issues are determined to be no longer church dividing, the churches remain divided. And despite this, the churches continue with business as usual. Division may be regrettable, but it hardly constitutes a crisis. Or so it would seem.

The problem, though, is that continuing with business as usual allows us to imagine the church as existing in some sort of integrity, when in reality, the churches are sick unto death.[1] The problem of division is not simply a failure to live up to our best ideals, nor a mere inconvenience or embarrassment, not a disjunction between theory and practice. It is, instead, existential, preventing Christian faithfulness in the world.

Sickness Unto Death, The Wounds of Division

That divided Christians cannot be faithful is a strident and likely stringent claim, no doubt calling for any number of qualifications about relative faithfulness, and the ambiguity of how best to proceed in an already-established state of division. In other words, even if the divisions we have inherited were inexcusable, is it not better to carry on with what faithfulness we can, rather than resign ourselves to abject infidelity? Yet here I resist those qualifications. Not because they are not valid, but because they are all-too-readily available, and because we can ill afford to blunt the force of squarely facing the wounds of our divisions. Christians are well aware of the relative fidelity they can enact. The problem is that its relative character is not clearly seen because the damage wrought by division is glossed over. More needs to be said than that division precludes fidelity, but not at the expense of saying less. The problem is that so often in our desire to say the more we do indeed say less: pointing to the favorable cholesterol levels in a body ravaged by cancer.

The Word Made Trivial

By their divided existence, the Christian churches trivialize the Christian faith. Several vectors of approach are available here, and we shall traverse a few. The entire witness of the New Testament assumes the unity of the church, where it does not command it. Paul exhorts the churches to unity (e.g., Rom. 12:3–21; 1 Cor. 1:10–17; 12:1–31; 2 Cor. 13:11; Phil. 2:1–4; 4:1–3; Eph. 4:1–13). The other epistles and the Apocalypse presume such unity, with no imaginative space for division. This being the case, no Christian can claim fidelity to Scripture’s authority while they flout its call to unity. This is especially pertinent, given how not a few of the church’s divisions have been in the name of biblical fidelity. My own Anglican Communion is currently being rent by divisions, and while the presenting issue is the full inclusion of LGBTQ persons and couples, schismatic Anglicans will insist that the true issue is not sexuality, but biblical authority. And yet by breaking away, they abandon the authority of Scripture, which proscribes division.

The Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed stresses the unity of the church as an article of faith (along with its sanctity, catholicity, and apostolicity). To confess the Nicene Creed in a state of division, then, is to contradict the creed. One cannot be doctrinally orthodox in a divided church, because one’s very existence-in-division is a denial of credal faith.

Of course, not all Christians accept the authority of Nicaea and its creed. (Some will affirm its trinitarian affirmations, but on a basis other than the authority of a general council, others would eschew credal formulae altogether.) Similarly, not all Christians understand Scripture or its authority in the same manner. But Jesus, in the words quoted in the epigraph of this introduction, indicates his desire that the church be one. Questions about the role of Scripture and creed in Christian life notwithstanding, can one plausibly claim to follow Jesus while ignoring, even flouting, his express wishes? What could it possibly mean to be his disciples, or to confess him as Lord when his desires mean so little?

The problem compounds, though, for its effects extend beyond individual or even corporate faithfulness. If the teachings of Scripture, creed, and Savior have become optional, then they are also trivial. What does it matter how the church preaches and teaches, or how Christian people order their lives, when so basic a matter is dispensable? The risen Christ commissions his apostles: “make disciples of all nations…teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you” (Matt. 28:19). On what basis can an invitation to become Jesus’s disciple be extended when following his commands is flagrantly rendered trivial?

In a state of division, the churches are reduced to one option among many. Would-be followers of Christ must then select among the offerings, leaving the churches to squabble over market share. Brand awareness and niche appeal come to overshadow the gospel message or conviction. Even in the emerging post-denominational Christianity, or in earlier eras of evangelistic cooperation or missionary comity agreements, the need to select one church among many perdures. And if one’s joining a church is a matter of selection among options, then the church itself is also reduced to one option among others: a matter of preference, rather than of principle…

Deadly Feasting

Jesus’s dying bequest to the church is the eucharistic banquet, which remains a feature of the common life of all mainstream Christians, though with differences in emphasis, frequency, understanding, and practice. Dom Gregory Dix’s The Shape of the Liturgy famously ends with a meditation on how faithfully Christian communities have carried out the injunction “Do this in remembrance of me.” Whatever else we might do, or neglect, we keep the eucharistic feast. Our divided state, though, risks transforming the medicine of immortality into deadly poison.

From Henri de Lubac’s Corpus Mysticum onward, it has been well-established that the primary referent of the eucharistic “body of Christ” is not the real presence but the church, and that this ecclesial dimension of the sacrament was occluded as debates over the manner in which Christ is present in the sacrament constricted theological focus to the elements. Though the meaning — or, in some quarters, the truth — of the real presence has been and remains a site of controversy, we need not delve into it here, for Paul’s injunction to the Corinthians, while compatible with — and gesturing towards and assuming — a theology of eucharistic presence, does not depend on one.

Writing to the Corinthians, Paul laments that their eucharistic assemblies have nothing to commend, because they do more harm than good. Divided as the Corinthian church is by factions, they cannot even really be said to be eating the Lord’s supper (1 Cor. 11:17–20). By celebrating the Eucharist in a state of mutual disregard, the Christians of Corinth eat and drink unworthily, and, so, are “answerable for the body and blood of the Lord” (1 Cor. 11:27). To participate in the meal “without discerning the body,” is to “eat and drink judgment against” oneself and can lead to illness and death (1 Cor. 11:29–30). The context demands an ecclesial referent to the warning about discerning the body. A chapter earlier, Paul had written that the community is “one body” because all eat of the “one bread” (1 Cor 10:17), and, of course, the present instructions turn upon the problem of factional and exclusionary practices within the community’s celebration.

Christians divided among themselves court divine judgment when they celebrate the sacrament, and this for several related reasons. Such celebrations contradict the meaning of the meal, which is the unity of Christ’s body. The Eucharist is meant to effect ecclesial unity (1 Cor. 10:17), so a celebratory context of willful division falsifies and resists the divine initiative for it. Similarly, the Eucharist commemorates the death of Christ, by which he reconciled divided humanity to one another and to God (John 11:52; Eph. 2:11–22). A divided Eucharist, then, makes mockery of the death whereby humanity has been redeemed. How shall we escape the dread judgment when we are “crucifying again the Son of God and are holding him up to contempt” (Heb. 6:6)?

Once more, the dissonance barely seems to register, much less the grievous danger facing the church. Division is not merely embarrassing or inconvenient, but blasphemous and deadly. Perhaps in our division, fasting and lament ought to be the order of the day, though this seems to be a prospect no one can quite countenance. Similarly, churches will pronounce upon the validity of their separated siblings’ sacraments, but the possibility that none of our Eucharists are valid is too threatening to stomach. Yet, given the Pauline injunction, it might be better if our Eucharists were invalid, for at least then the deadly effect might be ameliorated.

But it is the position of this book that, for the most part at least, our Eucharists are valid, and that this ought to fill us with foreboding and dread. For in a divided church, it is impossible to receive the bread of heaven and the cup of salvation without in that very act eating and drinking judgment upon oneself. And does not the sorry state of the church present its own empirical verification of the Pauline warning. We are sick unto death, and, in some quarters, nigh “falling asleep.”

For folks interested in more, I’ve posted a slightly longer, and different excerpt on my SubStack.

[1] This is compounded in ecumenical contexts where, rightly, the churches learn to recognize one another as church, and to celebrate the ways that God is at work in those communities with whom they are not in full communion. The ecumenical task could hardly proceed if our starting point were to note all the ways that our dialogue partners have gotten it wrong and are distorted. As chapter five will show, it was not until this lens was put away and replaced by one of mutual recognition that division could be seen as the problem that it is and reunion become a goal.

Copyright 2024 by Fortress Press, an imprint of 1517 Media. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Email copyright@1517.media or write to Permissions, Fortress Press, P.O. Box 1209, Minneapolis, MN 55440-1209.

We’ve also got some new things afoot at Covenant, and, more widely, The Living Church, though to tell you as much is rather anticlimactic in the wake of the gift of the Holy Spirit. Nevertheless, it is worth noting.

After months of work, we are set to debut a new, redesigned website. Not only will it look better than ever, it will also be considerably more user friendly (God willing).

One feature that I’m particularly excited about is the ability to subscribe to Covenant!

Over the years, I’ve gotten quite a few requests from readers who either wish that we had a subscription feature, or who have misremembered us having one and wish to renew their subscription. Now I’ll no longer have to sheepishly reply, “Well, actually we don’t have the capability to do that…”

Now you can just sign up and have every day’s Covenant essay delivered right to your inbox. Please, let me encourage you to do so.

In the meantime, allow me to give you a bit of a programming note for this week. Launching the new website is a pretty significant undertaking, one which involves a non-zero chance of technical snafus needing our attention and leaving us begging your patience. In view of this, and in view of the tremendous gift of God’s Spirit, there won’t be any new material published on Covenant this week. Instead, I’ve gone into our archives to find edifying material about Pentecost and the Holy Spirit, which will be running every day this week. Including today.

I hope this trip down memory lane proves edifying. We’ll resume our normal programming on Monday May 27.

For centuries the Christian Church has labored under a sign of its own contradiction. Springing from a Jewish matrix and centered upon a Jewish savior, sentDr. Eugene R. Schlesinger reviews “Crucified: The Christian Invention of the Jewish Executioners of Jesus.” by the God of Israel, we have drunk deeply from anti-Jewish, anti-Semitic, supersessionist waters. The blood libel, which accuses the Jews qua Jews of Christ-killing deicide, has given rise to all sorts of horrific mistreatment of these our elder siblings. And while, after the Shoah, most Christian churches have repudiated anti-Semitism and many labor to dismantle the supersessionism whereby Christians believe they have replaced God’s chosen people, we have yet to squarely face this baleful legacy. With this volume, J. Christopher Edwards, professor of religious studies at St. Francis College in Brooklyn, helps those with ears to hear to begin doing so.

Crucified: The Christian Invention of the Jewish Executioners of Jesus prosecutes its case — accurately distilled in its subtitle — forcefully across five chapters accompanied by four excurses, which move in a roughly chronological order from the events of Jesus’ execution at Roman hands, through the first centuries canonical accounts, to the second and third centuries, and into the period of imperial toleration and embrace. Edwards specifies that he operates with a decisively limited scope: at issue is not “the accusation that Jews were simply involved in the events that led to Jesus’s arrest and subsequent execution … it is a history of the specific accusation that Jewish actors crucified Jesus.” This circumscribed meaning brings clarity to the claims, and highlights the egregious character of the blood libel, but leads to some unpersuasive argumentative turns that come at the expense of occluding the more fundamental problem.

Edwards’s narrative traces a trajectory by which Christian narrations of the Passion gradually occlude Roman involvement, highlighting Jewish culpability even to the point of depicting Jesus’ death as occurring not just at the instigation of his fellow-Jewish opponents, but at their hands. The claim is that “early Jesus followers came to the realization that if they were to have any hope of successfully settling and evangelizing within the Roman world, they could not enshrine a narrative wherein the central figure of their movement was executed by Roman soldiers under the direction of a Roman governor for political crimes against the Roman state.”

As the Gospels progress chronologically — from Mark to Matthew to Luke to John — Edwards discerns increasingly sympathetic treatments of Pilate and increasingly acrimonious depictions of the Jews. Thus, Pilate’s act of washing his hands is endorsed by the evangelists, who really did mean to depict him as innocent of Jesus’ blood, a blood called down “on us and on our children” (Matt. 24-25). He goes so far as to claim that Luke depicts the Jews as the crucifiers through identifying them as the antecedent of the pronoun they in Luke 23:26, 33, when Jesus is led away and eventually crucified. During this period, we also see the emergence of a corporate attribution of guilt to the Jewish people, and an “ontological continuity” between them and all subsequent generations of Jews, such that the same Jews who killed Jesus also oppose his church.

Much of this material is frustratingly unpersuasive. Simply put, the suggestion that Luke depicts the Jews as Jesus’ crucifiers stems from a tortuously strained reading, since the narrative consistently highlights Pilate’s involvement, including his bonding with Herod over the matter of Jesus’ trial, has other state prisoners executed by the they, places a centurion at the scene of the execution overseeing matters, and culminates with Pilate granting custody of the body to Joseph of Arimathea. And while it is possible that first-century Christians attempted to ingratiate themselves to Roman citizens and authorities by softening the depiction of Roman figures, it strikes me as rather implausible, given the history of persecution at Roman hands that lasted until the imperial toleration.

This rhetorical overreach is really too bad, because the tradition of corporate continuity of guilt, which, as Edwards consistently notes, is “the most dangerous aspect of the overall accusation,” and it can be seem emerging during this time. One could have conceivably built an argument that early Christian texts amplified blame for the Jews as instigators of Jesus’ death, noting that even if they didn’t drive the nails they were still constructed as culpable, and that this inaugurates a venomous legacy leading to untold Jewish suffering. But this is precisely what Edwards has elected not to do.

Christians accusing Jews of directly executing Jesus is outlandishly wrong, yet, as later chapters show, it did indeed occur. As the narrative progresses, moving beyond the New Testament documents to later Christian texts, the argument becomes more persuasive and effective. Here we have Christians stating that the Jews killed Jesus, and, in later centuries suggesting that because of this, vengeance ought to be taken upon them. Some of the extracts reproduced, particularly from Irenaeus, Lactantius, and the Six Books Dormition Apocryphon, are bracing to read. Yet, by narrowing the scope to this claim, I fear Edwards has left largely unaddressed the besetting sin of Christian anti-Semitism. After all, most Christians recognize that it was the Romans, not the Jews, who killed Christ. Yet even among those Christians who have repudiated the blood libel traditions, anti-Judaism and supersessionism run rampant. In other words, Christians don’t need to believe the egregious claim that Jesus was killed by “the Jews” to partake of or perpetuate antisemitism.

Edwards is right to call us to face this troubling history, and indeed to hold our tradition accountable for its sins against our elder siblings. As he notes, “Anyone so moved to revere the writings of the church fathers [as in the Nouvelle Théologie, Radical Orthodoxy, or Evangelical infatuations with Orthodoxy] must also acknowledge that most of these writings maintain the canonical accusation … and … evolve it in several dangerous directions.” We do not honor our forebears by giving them a pass in this regard. Instead, we honor them by pursuing fidelity to the gospel they sought to proclaim, even if haltingly or in contaminated manners. Until we reckon with our history of anti-Semitism and supersessionism, that faithfulness will elude us. Hence, despite whatever flaws I may find in Crucified, I still greet it with gratitude as a genuine service to Christian churches in our striving for fidelity.

As with all of the Christian life, Lent calls us not to superficialities nor to self-inflicted misery, not even to discipline as an end in itself, but to the new life freely given to us by God in Jesus Christ and his Holy Spirit. Lent, like the whole of the Christian life, calls us to conversion. Our evangelical coreligionists are right to emphasize conversion. They go amiss only insofar as they construe it as a punctiliar event and not a lifelong journey. Some of us have moments of conversion that we can remember, many of us do not, but none of us have been converted in so final a sense that we’re done with it. Our conversions will never be complete until we reach the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. Lent can serve as a yearly reminder that the journey is not yet complete, an invitation to reembark upon it, just as these catechumens are. (And if we have no catechumens in our contexts we ought to ask ourselves why that is. To some extent this is beyond our control, but I would venture that in a plurality of such situations, we’ll find a dearth of evangelism. “How are they to call on one in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in one of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone to proclaim him?” (Rom. 10:14)

But I’m not here to scold. In fact, such scolding ranks high among the distortions of Lent that I hope we’ll avoid. Instead, I hope to show us a better way. And to that end, I share a few passages from one of my theological mentors.

I have endeavored to think alongside the French Jesuit Henri de Lubac for the last 11 or so years. I was initially enamored of him due to his reception within Radical Orthodoxy, but my study of de Lubac has led me to a rather different understanding (one of the best refutations of Radical Orthodoxy’s reading of de Lubac is Jordan Hillebert’s Henri de Lubac and the Drama of Human Existence). Beginning with a doctoral seminar in 2013, I have been captivated by the recurring theme of humanity’s incorporation into the life of the Trinity through the cross and resurrection of the incarnate Christ, which shows up throughout de Lubac’s œuvre. He was hardly a systematic thinker, and he wrote about a dizzying array of topics, so this theme is, perhaps, easy to miss. Certainly I found very little mention of it in the English-language scholarship on him. At the same time, I found it unmistakably present, and not just in passing, but as a central theme of his thought.

Pulling upon that thread led to the eventual publication of my own contribution to Lubacian studies, Salvation in Henri de Lubac: Divine Grace, Human Nature, and the Mystery of the Cross. (Along the way, I discovered that while Anglophone scholarship more or less overlooked the theme of trinitarian incorporation, Francophone literature was replete with it.) I’d initially wanted to call the book Mysterium Crucis (mystery of the cross), because it is that mystery and our coming to share in it that looms so large in my account of de Lubac’s theological vision. The marketing department at the University of Notre Dame Press was of the opinion that opaque Latin titles weren’t particularly good for attracting readers, though. And they’re probably right about that, but I was left a bit wistful.

In any case, that original title comes from the concluding section of de Lubac’s first book and manifesto, Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man (which, by the way, is the best entry point into his thought, in case anyone is interested in learning more). There he writes:

Wherever a Christian’s meditations may have led him, he is always brought back, as by a natural bias, to the contemplation of the Cross. The whole mystery of Christ is a mystery of resurrection, but it is also a mystery of death. One is bound up with the other and the same word, Pasch, conveys both ideas. Pasch means passing over.  It is a transmutation of the whole being, a complete separation from oneself which no one can hope to evade. … If no one may escape from humanity, humanity whole and entire must die to itself in each of its members so as to live transfigured in God. … Through Christ dying on the Cross, the humanity which he bore whole and entire in his own Person renounces itself and dies. But the mystery is deeper still. He who bore all men in himself was deserted by all. The universal Man died alone. … This is the mystery of solitude and the mystery of severance, the only efficacious sign of gathering together and of unity: the sacred blade piercing indeed so deep as to separate soul from spirit, but only that universal life might enter. (pp. 367–68)

This passage reprises and forms a bookend with a celebrated passage from Catholicism’s first chapter:

He incorporated himself in our humanity, and incorporated … it in himself … In making a human nature, it is human nature that he united to himself, that he enclosed in himself, and it is the later, whole and entire, that in some sort he uses as a body…Whole and entire he will bear it then to Calvary, whole and entire he will raise it from the dead, whole and entire he will save it. (pp. 37–39)

That repeated phrase whole and entire is what I want to stress for us in the context of thinking about our Lenten conversion. And I wish to do so along three vectors. First, that to which God calls us in Christ is all-encompassing, far surpassing any of our efforts at ascesis, from the most trivial to the genuinely heroic. God’s invitation to us to join in God’s very life — to share in the Son’s eternal place within the Trinity — is simply speaking beyond our capacity for attainment. We are hindered from this not only by our sins, but also by our finitude. Salvation is far more than the forgiveness of our transgressions. It is an absolutely supernatural reality, such that even if we had no sins to be forgiven, still we would need the grace of God to attain it. Thus, our conversion must be total: whole and entire. Nothing that distracts or detracts from God can remain. And our Lenten self-discipline can be a tiny little exercise in such pruning.

This brings us directly to the second vector I would traverse. We are called not to renunciation per se, but into the fullness of life. By God’s grace, given in Christ and the Holy Spirit, we are invited to pass whole and entire into the reality of true, universal, limitless life. As the Collect for Fridays reminds us, the “way of the cross … is none other than the way of life and peace” (BCP, p. 99). Our renunciations and self-denials are not the denial of ourselves, but the clearing of the way to a far greater self-affirmation than what we’re capable of by nature, an affirmation given in its fullness in Jesus Christ, who has taken up our humanity whole and entire so that he can bear it whole and entire into the fullness of his own divine life.

Finally, we come to the third vector: while we are all called upon to die to ourselves, while humanity itself, whole and entire, must die to itself, in the end, “The Universal Man died alone” (Catholicism, p. 368). This dying unto eternal life is reproduced in each of us, sacramentally (Rom. 6), morally (Gal. 2), and, ultimately, physically (1 Cor. 15), but it has been accomplished definitively — whole and entire — in Jesus’ own death and resurrection. He alone is our salvation, and we are drawn along in his wake.

And so, as Lent drags on, and our motivation perhaps flags, or perhaps we lose sight of the wherefore and why of this season and its journey, let us once more fix our eyes upon Jesus, the pioneer and perfector of our faith, and let us run the race that remains before us, not only for the remainder of these 40 days, but for the remainder of our lives, knowing that ultimately the race is already won — whole and entire.