A play in which Christ is seen through negative theology. Jesus goes through primary narcissism, subjective destitution, death, and then becomes more of a presence to the world in his absence, than when he was alive. 
 
The script starts out before the Garden of Gethsemane. Jesus is distraught. Mary has divulged that his biological father is some unknown man. Jesus had really thought he was special, and that he could do a better job with the humans than his Father had. But being human, has taught Jesus the tendency mankind has to create big others, including himself. He is now facing death, and the fact that all he had, was a grandiose idea of who he was. 
 
Act 1: Cognitive Dissonance Rising
 
Jesus: But mom, you told me God was my father. 
Mary: I know, son. After what happened, believing this was how I survived.
Jesus: Claiming to be God is a felony, Mom. I’m in real trouble here. I could die.  
Mary: Just because God is not your biological father, doesn’t mean you aren't special son. 
Jesus: Stop it mom. Your favoritism has clearly not helped. I finally understand why Joseph has been so critical of me all these years. All I’ve developed is grandiosity to cover over my fragile ego, and the truth everyone has disavowed, including myself. 
 
Act 2:  A Silent Call
Jesus flees. A few of the disciples follow him. Jesus grumbles all the way to the Garden of Gethsemane. 
 
Jesus: Disciples, my soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. Go. Sit by the tree. I need some time alone. But don’t fall asleep. Keep watch. 

Jesus looks around as if they may have been followed, then wanders off into the garden and collapses over a stone. 

Jesus: If it is possible, take this hour of suffering from me! 

Silence

Jesus experiences acute shame. For years he had preached about the truth setting people free. But what did he know? What lived experience did he have? His life had been cushy up until now. Cared for by a crew of others, including women who got very little recognition. Tormented by the absence of his godship narrative, Jesus weaves his fingers into his hair and pulls. Blood trickles down his cheeks and drips onto the stone. In the abyss of his destitution a presence insists from the absence. Jesus bows his head, but he is wiser now, and it’s nothingness that still greets him. 
 
 
Act 3: The Nothingness that Insists
Frustrated, Jesus gets up and finds the disciples asleep. Not appreciating their lack of attention to his safe keeping, his old ways return. Narcissistic rage fills him.

Jesus: Could you men not keep watch for one hour? Geez, the spirit is willing, but the body is weak, eh? 
 
For a second time, Jesus stomps away to despair. Being fully human, he does not want to die this way. 

Jesus: If it is not possible for this cup to be taken away unless I drink it, may your will be done. 

Jesus still hopes that God's will has something to do with sparing him from what he is about to endure. Some kind of Deus ex machina. You laugh, but haven’t we all prayed this prayer in our uncertainty?  

Silence greets him again. He gets up and finds the disciples sleeping again. He goes away for a third time. Still nothingness. When he returns, he finds the disciples snoring. This time he wakes them by shouting. 

Jesus: Are you still sleeping? Enough! The hour has come. Look, the “Son of Man” is betrayed. Rise! Let us go! Here comes my betrayer. 
 
Judas appears. Having seen through his guru’s narcissism, he had outed Jesus to the high priest. Judas and the soldier had talked pop psychology all the way over to the garden. 
As they arrive, Peter, the populist steps forward and chops off the soldier’s ear. Jesus is appalled. The last thing he wanted was violence. He had thought he was ushering in the Kingdom of Heaven. This seemed more like hell. 
 
Act 4: Subjective Destitution
 
Jesus is arrested and now stands trial. None of the usual things he says to wow the crowd help him. Instead, his ego lands him in a worse predicament than the time he was almost stoned. 

Pilate: Are you the King of the Jews?
Jesus: (trying to be witty) You, have said so. 

In this moment Jesus becomes conscious of his egoic voice. In particular, the way in which it helps him elude the silent one. This endows him with a still voice that makes him tremble. He feels under a gaze from which he cannot hide. Humiliated, and lacking respect, he is afraid and filled with dread. 
 
Act 5: Power in Powerless
 
Caesar commands the soldiers to flog Jesus, but not kill him. 

During the flogging, Jesus cries out. The nothingness he experienced in the garden greets him again. This time it translates as a call. A voice which says nothing but insists as pure injunction. The voice is silent, but one he cannot silence. It commands nothing specific of him, and offers him no guarantees. He acquiesces to the absent presence. The pain he feels transforms into heat. 
 
Crowd: Crucify him! 

Jesus picks up his cross. The x which marks the spot of his splitting from primary narcissism to subjective destitution, weighs heavy on his back. Jesus recalls the week prior, when this same crowd celebrated him as their King. Now, they deny and damn him. How ironic he rode into the city on the very day the people chose their so-called spotless lamb for Passover. What lamb is perfect anyway? Nothing is without flaw. Math, science, God and Jesus Christ. All imperfect and necessarily so. Humans like to pretend there is such a thing as wholeness and completeness. Toxic people and those who are not. They cancel, they crucify. They focus on centering and never decentering. Excess and rarely lack. They stare at the stars and never the holy and necessary separation of the space between.
 
A soldier picks up a hammer and nails.  

Between the punctures, Jesus ponders. Is this the word became flesh? Not just me being human, but the lived experience of subjective destitution? 
 
Soldier: King of the Jews! 
 
The soldier fastens the sign INRI above Jesus. 

Jesus: Forgive them. They know not what they do. 

How foolish he had been to think authority on earth could be bent. He now knew he would have to go to the depths. He would have to be negative Jesus. Enacting something like giving someone enough rope to hang themselves, only with grace and freedom, and not judgment and condemnation.  

Jesus: My God! My God! Why have you forsaken me! 

His cry, the death of his prior reasoning. The death of his big other. In awe, he closes his eyes so he can see, then hangs his head before the nothingness that was key.
 
The soldier pierces Jesus’ side to make sure his body was dead. 
 
Act 6: A Presence in the Absence
 
At the tomb, Mary M perceives the gardener as Jesus. She, like so many of us, sees her loved one in the face of another. 
​
Jesus: Do not cling to this version of me. 
Mary M: But …
Jesus: For the Holy Spirit to come, I had to physically leave. 
 
Later, Thomas ignores Jesus' body, and peers into the hole in Jesus’ side. Does he see the liminal space that holds the key?

Jesus: I leave with you the Holy Spirit. 
​
At this point in the story, the question to ask is, how are we living? Under some big other god clinging to Jesus? Or filled with the Holy Spirit that subjective destitution brings?
 
Act 7: The Uncanny Paradox 
Through the gaze of the crucifix, people have resurrected Christ for over two millennia. In so doing, Jesus has become more of a presence to the world in his absence, than when he walked the earth. Why is it that some of us cannot look away? Is Christ's story, our story? The apostle Paul said, “Go. Live out your death.” Is this what is meant by the word became flesh? Not incarnation, nor physical resurrection, but the lived experience of subjective destitution? If so, Godspeed. 

​A ritual to symbolize the death we are all living
 
The room remains dark
All enter in silence
 
 
The Collect
(Everyone)
 
Nothing lives
Nothing binds
Nothing saves
 
 
The Liturgy of the Word
(Facilitator)
 
John 20:17
Jesus saith to her, touch me not; for I am not yet ascended.
 
For centuries religion has taught God and Jesus as perfect and without sin. And that Jesus, if touched by Mary, would become tarnished and spoiled. Modern biblical scholars interpret these same words as something more like, don’t cling to me. This differentiation is important.
Have you ever lost someone? And after they are gone, has their presence ever met you in their absence? And has this presence at times felt more real to you, than their physical presence ever had? Perhaps at the tomb, this is the presence in the nothing that lived. That what Mary experienced was a proximity, without a physical presence.
 
 
(Everyone)
One only touches the infinite
from a finite position.
 
 
(Facilitator)
John 16:7
But very truly I tell you, it is for your good that I am going away. Unless I go away, the helper will not come to you.
 
According to this passage, in order for the Holy Spirit to come, Jesus had to physically leave.
This was hard for the disciples to accept. From that point on in history, churches went from a temple with a torn curtain to a steeple. Our drive to imagine big others beyond the veil, and to erect a phallus is much stronger than our ability to tarry with alienation. But the Holy Spirit creates a new social form. A networking not based on physical presence, but rather, alienation. A form of nothing, that binds.
 
 
 
(Everyone)
We ask, what does a church without a steeple look like?
 
 
 
(Facilitator)
 
Matthew 27: 45- 47
Now from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land until the ninth hour. And about the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me!”
On good Friday we learned that radical theology, it is not no God, but the death of God.
The casting of our voice into the nothingness, that is God. A guttural cry into the place where all our beliefs suffocate and die.
In that moment when Christ called out, did a big other he imagined come crashing down? To comprehend the nothing that saves, one must realize how an ideology can never save. That in reality we need salvation from what we have believed was our salvation. A church without a steeple seeks this salvation from salvation.
 
(Everyone)
Oh Nothingness, we repent. We surrender our lives to your insistence. There is no big other that is going to come and save us. Grant us salvation from salvation.
 
 
(Facilitator)
 
Many religions promise wholeness and completeness, while atheism offers determinism. Both are clever ideologies to help us disavow shame and alienation.
A more radical theology discovers a truth in the contradiction between theism and atheism. It does not wish to return to the womb. Nor does it disavow. It comes to understand that we are cursed or blessed epigenetically in the womb before we are birthed onto a bed of nails. This theology tarries with the fact that our wish for singularity is not all its cracked up to be.
Our modern world has seen the symptom of religion as a problem, and rightly so. But atheism torn down the structure only to realize the efficacy of our religious symptoms as a solution to our problem. You might ask, how else are we to survive? Perhaps the emancipatory move is to feel our shame, allow ourselves to split and in so doing, become more aware of how our symptoms hold us together. To enjoy these symptoms and not use them to bypass our shame and alienation. This, in death of God theology is grace.
 
(Everyone)
Our religious symptoms are not the problem. They are a solution to the problem. It’s not about overcoming them. It’s about enjoying the nothing that lives, the nothing that binds and the nothing that saves. When our rituals lose their meaning, we must let them go. New wine cannot ferment in old wine skins. From the nothing that insists, let us make new wine and ferment this wine in the skins of old until the church explodes. 
 
 
(Facilitator)
 
Go now: wait and work for the coming of nothing. In the religious places prepare a crooked path for the nothing that insists. Lead lives of holy godlessness, strive to be decentered, and speak freely of the big other’s inexistence. And may the nothing that insists gather you. May the absence of any physical resurrection bring you a presence in an absence; And may the Holy Spirit network a new life within and around you. Go in pieces to love and serve your fellow human beings. In the name of nothing, we pray.
Amen