His History Has Become His Shape

The apostle Paul once wrote that even though we have known Christ Jesus according to the flesh, we now recognize him thus no longer. That’s more or less what he wrote to the Corinthians. And it raises a question worth contemplating on a Saturday evening: what does it mean to recognize somebody according to the flesh?

Let me apply it to myself first. If you asked me to tell you who I am according to the flesh, I would give you a timeline and a set of places. Where I was born and on what date. The names of my parents and my siblings. Where I went to school, what sports I played, what instruments I excelled at. Which celebrities I gravitated toward and what subject I majored in. And then finally, who I married, what kind of family I raised, what kind of career I had. That is my life according to the flesh. That is the Wikipedia page.

Jesus has such a life too, and that is precisely the one Paul says we no longer recognize. There is something about the life of Jesus that transcends the Annunciation in Nazareth and the birth in Bethlehem and the three-year ministry through Galilee, Samaria, and Judea. There is something truly alien about who Jesus is. And at the very same time, he is our dearest and closest friend and companion, uniting all humanity in anything but an alien embrace.

Notice how thin the fleshly résumé actually is. If your own life “in the flesh” had been different — if you had been born on a different continent, in a different century, given a different name, born a different gender — then everything on your page would change. Every fact of it. And yet something would remain that is unmistakably you. Whatever that something is, it is not the résumé. Paul is telling us that we have been reading each other, and reading Jesus, off the wrong document, off of chronology and the record history keeps.

Let me take you into science for a minute, because there is a group of scientists working on this same problem without knowing it. They call it assembly theory.

There are researchers right now searching for life — but not life as we know it. They are looking for life in some form very different from the way it emerged here on earth. And to do that, they have had to stop describing life by its “earth-unique” ingredients. Carbon, water, cell membranes: those are earth’s local accent, not the language itself. So, they have proposed something far stranger and far more interesting. They define life as any object that requires information to specify its existence.

Read that again slowly, because it is a beautiful definition. A rock doesn’t require much information. You can get a rock more or less by accident. But a hummingbird, a cathedral, a sonnet, a person — these require an enormous amount of information to specify, and that information had to be assembled, remembered, and passed along. The more information an object requires, the deeper the history behind it, and the more alive it is. That’s how they think about the subject.

Which leads to their second move. Being alive isn’t binary. It isn’t that you’re either alive or you’re dead with a wall between the two. It’s a spectrum. And the measure of how far along the spectrum you sit is how much else can be constructed out of you. The more that can emerge from a given life, the more alive that life is.

Their third move is the one that unsettles people. They don’t locate the fundamental unit of life in a cell, or even in an individual collection of cells that makes up one human being. They locate it in the information behind all of us — the lineage that runs back through parents and grandparents and further back than anyone can name, propagating itself across space and time. You and I are the latest branches. We happen to be at the tip right now, and because we’re at the tip, we assume we’re the only ones who are alive.

And here is where they arrive at something close to repentance. These scientists, with their telescopes pointed out and their microscopes pointed in, admit they do not exactly know what they are looking for. They are not even confident they would recognize a different kind of life if it were sitting in front of them. So, they’ve concluded they have to confront the problem of what life is, head on, before they go hunting for life of another kind. If we don’t solve our own origins, they say, how will we ever know when we’ve seen someone else’s?

I recently sat in on a conversation with a half dozen people studying the origin of life — not from the standpoint of Genesis but from the standpoint of science — and the six of them reached a conclusion I will tell you about here. They said that as scientists they need to be able to recognize the alienness in themselves before they can recognize what is truly alien.

They don’t believe first contact will be a physical encounter like the movies depict. They think first contact will be an explanation. A collective understanding of what it means to be us and what it means to be something other than us. And they believe that on the day that understanding arrives, nobody will use the word alien anymore. They intend to think about other life in the universe the way we ought to think about other lives here on earth. Someone born in a different century, on a different continent, in a different body, is not an alien. There is something more foundational than the lineage that describes a life in the flesh different from ours.

Then they said one more thing, probably the best of all because it led to this blog. They imagined that one day, life forms will express their unique history and experience by slowly growing that history into the physical shape and features their body manifests to the world. The past becomes visible. What you have lived through becomes what you look like.

Now why is the “Physics Pastor from the Santa Cruz Mountains” telling you about assembly theory and first contact? Where is all this leading?

It’s leading where every discussion I ever have leads. It’s headed to the foot of the cross.

The reason we no longer recognize Jesus in his fleshly life, as Paul wrote to the Corinthians, is that the life he has always had is the one defined in eternity by the cruciform shape it carried from before the Annunciation. Scripture says as much — the Lamb slain before the world began, foreknown before the foundation of it. Good Friday was manifested in our history, on our planet, on a particular hill outside a particular city, on a Friday with a date. But it was nothing new to God. Calvary was not God’s emergency response to a problem he hadn’t anticipated. Calvary is what God has eternally looked like, finally showing up somewhere we could see it.

Now take those scientists’ definitions and lay them over that hill, over Golgotha.

Life is any object that requires information to specify its existence. There is something tremendously alien about a God who is crucified, and at the same instant it is the least alien thing in the universe, because it is the object that produces all the information there is. This is the Word made flesh, and Word gets the capital letter because Jesus is every word, all the information spoken out of the mouth of God. And Jesus in his crucified condition holds all of it. Nothing is held back behind his back. There is no hidden God standing off to the side with a different agenda. The whole information of God is on that cross.

Being alive is not binary but a spectrum. His existence on Good Friday is not one or the other, because he is encompassing the worst kind of death and the greatest kind of life and the entire distance in between. Dead and alive stop being enemies there. They stop being polar opposites. Just as in the beginning, when light emerged and was divided into light and dark, the Light of the world is filled with his own opposite and is not diminished by it.

The more that can be constructed from a life, the more alive it is. Then this is the greatest life of all, because it is the one from which every other object in the universe is constructed — black holes and elementary particles and the mountains, oceans, and you and me. Which gives us the strangest sentence I know how to write, and I mean it as flatly and as literally as I can: the highest concentration of life in the universe is a corpse on a Roman cross. The fundamental unit of life is the crucified God who is both dead and alive.

And the fundamental unit is not the individual but the lineage. Of course it is. That’s why Paul stops recognizing anyone according to the flesh. You are not finally your résumé; you are a branch on a tree, and the trunk of that tree is a cross, and its root system runs back before the foundation of time.

So, when we look around at a world we don’t understand — when we can’t account for our own behavior, or the insanity of how human beings treat one another, or whatever we just saw on the news. When we’re trying to make sense of quantum mechanics and scratching our heads because it is the spookiest thing we have ever studied. When we look the other direction, out into the heavens, and stand awed by the violence and the magnitude of an exploding star or a black hole. In every one of those cases, we are looking at something we will not recognize until we identify the cruciform stamp on it.

Because there has never been anything spookier, or more insane, or more violent, or more awesome than a God in an excruciating condition. Once you have seen that, you cannot help but see the whole world through the eyes of that God.

The scientists were right about the method and will eventually identify the object. Unless we confront the problem of the crucified life, and confront it head on, we are not going to understand anything about our own lives — lives that so often feel alien to us and alien from a loving God. But once we recognize the cross-shaped love of God in our thoughts and words and deeds, and in our neighbor’s, and in everything we scroll past on the phone — once we have that nailed down and held firmly in front of the mind’s eye — then and only then do we realize there is nothing alien here at all. It is stamped through and through with the mark of the Creator of the universe.

Our first contact with alien life is not going to be a landing. It’s going to be an explanation of what happened on Good Friday. And God will not seem alien to us then. He will be sitting smack dab in the middle of our life, however wonderful or however wretched that life turns out to be.

And that last thing those scientists imagined — that a life will one day grow its history into the shape of its body — they were describing the resurrection and didn’t know it. He kept his wounds. He rose and he kept them, and he showed them to his friends in a locked room, and they were how his friends knew him. His history had become his shape.

So will ours. Each one of us, with our own unique history and our own unstable pile of experiences, will manifest with body and mind and spirit the particular crucifixion life we have been carrying all along. The shape of our bodies will express the features of the crucified life of God that belong to us and to nobody else.

You are not alien to him. You never were. The history of you is becoming the shape of you, and that shape is crisscross. God bless and good night.