A Zen Christian TestimonyThe Gospel of the death & resurrection of Christ just might be the ultimate Zen koan.
Scripture ReadingRomans 5:20-6:22The law came in so that the trespass would increase; but where sin increased, grace increased all the more, so that, just as sin reigned in death, so also grace might reign through righteousness to bring eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. Should we continue in sin in order that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who died to sin go on living in it? Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin. For whoever has died is freed from sin. But if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. The death he died, he died to sin, once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.Scripture ReflectionWhen I first encountered this passage years ago, I was more familiar with the language of Zen Buddhism than Judeo-Christianity. The idea that we have a “body of sin” struck me as a familiar idea. The Buddha taught that the “self” is illusory, a composite experience comprised of five aggregates (skandhas) formed by karma — a Sanskrit term not unlike in meaning to its Greek etymological cousin, hamartia, which is translated “sin”. The five aggregates are: form, feeling, perception, mental formations, and consciousness. One of these karmically-produced aggregates, mental formations, also produces karma — just as St. James taught that sin is produced when a person is tempted by the thought-forms of desire. When sin matures, it leads to death (James 1:14-15), just as karma leads to death according to Buddhist teaching. The goal of Buddhist practice is to clearly discern that there is no “self” beyond its five aggregates, and realize that the true nature here is Buddha-nature (tathagatagarbha) — the highest attainment, nirvana (not just a great band), isn’t far away from this realization. The Zen approach emphasizes not making too big a deal out of this process, the goal, or the goal-setter: “If you meet the Buddha in the road, kill him.” (Rinzai). And here in St. Paul’s letter to the Romans, I thought I saw a similar pattern: a connection between the “body of sin”, the body of the wisdom teacher — in this case, Christ — and the death of the teacher, all to the end of realizing the communion between teacher and student by the latter’s attainment to the goal of the teaching. But Paul speaks of something Buddha did not: resurrection from the dead. He teaches that those who die in communion with Christ also rise with him in resurrection. And he speaks of this dying and rising as if it is something we can actually do with our time here on earth. As a student of Zen, I was struck by this as if it were a koan — a Zen riddle whose contemplation leads to spontaneous enlightenment, or “sudden insight” as it is also called. Contemplating the death and resurrection of Christ affected me in this way; it is why I chose the Christian path, or rather, it chose me. In this passage, St. Paul presents sin and grace as the respective counterparts of death and life — not just any life, but eternal life. The Resurrection and eternal life of Christ reveals God’s boundless grace — so much so that Paul entertains the idea that one may sin all the more so that grace might abound. He does not deny that one may; only that one should. I’ll return to this controversial statement. First: what is grace, that it might be antithetical and even antidotal to sin in the same way that the resurrection answers death? As a Buddhist, I was familiar with the idea that the Buddha-nature, though ineffable and inessential in essence (“form is emptiness, and emptiness is form” — so goes the impoverished English translation of the Heart Sutra), is ideally manifest in a constellation of “perfections” or virtues (paramitas). The realm of existence itself (dharmadatu) is permeated with Buddha-nature — and yet finds its highest expression in the virtues of the virtuous person. The “energy” quickening the paramitas is prajna — wisdom. In Christian mysticism, the analogue to the paramitas are the virtues; the divine energies, particularly as embodied in sophia (the Christian East’s name for wisdom), might correspond to Buddhism’s prajna. And for Eastern Christians, the divine energies are exactly what grace is. So much can be, and has been, written about the esoteric dimensions of these concepts. As a student of Zen, however, I was trained to take it at face value and keep it simple: in the Zen school, all these ideas taken together yield the ethos that a life of drunken foolishness is no less blessed than a life of monkish austerity, for all is resolved perfectly together in the “unborn” Buddha-nature (Bankei). This is the secret of prajna, wisdom, which leads to true virtue. St. Paul is saying the same thing: a life of sin is perfectly resolved in God’s grace revealed in Christ. “Shall we sin so that grace shall abound all the more?” Again, he does not deny that we may, only that we should. Neither Buddhist nor Christian sages recommend vice; they rather insist that the one enlightened by wisdom cannot help but be wisdom’s lover, and bear the fruit of wisdom. “Wisdom is justified of her children,” said Christ, posturing himself as wisdom’s spouse. And he too taught about wisdom’s moral paradox: God in his loving wisdom sends the sun to shine and the rain to fall on the just and the unjust, judging no one. Jesus died for sinners to reveal this truth. To “die” with Christ, then, is to reveal the same truth: the non-judgment of God, and his boundless grace for all, austere religious and drunken fools alike. This non-judgment is the nature of grace. It is the divine precedent of God’s mercy which triumphs over the divine judgment proclaimed by Christ: “men love the darkness more than the light” (Jn. 3:19); nonetheless, God gives the light in greater abundance than the darkness, which cannot overcome the light. My Zen studies helped me understand what Paul was saying here about the virtues and the life of virtue: neither can be attained for their own sake. The discriminatory attitude which yields to desiring good over evil is legalistic; it leans on one’s own understanding; and necessarily has its roots in the primordial tree of the knowledge of good and evil, what Buddhists might call dualism. The “virtues” thus conceived are illusory, and they are the stuff of Law, apart from which we might otherwise live — but when such a “commandment came, sin sprang to life and I died.” (Rom. 7:9). The Law is holy; the commandment is holy, righteous and good (Ro. 7:12). But it does not bring life, only death — specifically, the “sentence” of death for the convicted sinner. This is true of all of our cherished opinions about what is right, what is wrong, what is good, and what is evil. All such opinions are condemnations; condemnation is death. Life, however, comes from grace. Grace does not discriminate between sinner and saint. This is the secret of wisdom, from which true virtue arises. Therefore, as hard as it may be to believe, the life of virtue cannot begin without forgoing our concepts of virtue, even as we cannot live by grace, but only, rather, fall from it, when we seek to be justified by the Law (Gal. 5:4). We must therefore not miss St. Paul’s bold teaching that, though a life of sin is not recommended, grace does indeed abound all the more in sinfulness. This is no anecdotal aside; this is the heart of the Gospel of grace. That Christ died “under the Law” reveals how we too must “die in Christ”: he was sentenced to die as a convicted sinner. We too are called to have this relationship with the Law — we should not consider ourselves above it, but convicted by it. To invoke good and evil, in other words, is to immediately become guilty. This is the nature of discrimination, and discrimination is the operative principle of our cosmos of multiplicity, beginning with duality: “The Tao begets One. One begets Two. Two begets Three. Three begets the ten thousand things.” (Tao Te Ching 42). We cannot escape this mode of existence. Should we strive for the justification of virtue, therefore, discrimination swallows us up all the more. Buddhists call this the cycle of rebirth — that is, the endless regeneration of multiplicities stemming from one’s own acts of discrimination. Hence, we are, as Paul taught, “dead to sin”. It is not a choice; it is a fact we either accept or not. St. John of the Cross minced no words describing acceptance of this fact as “the dark night of the soul.” We cannot pretend, then, that resolving the duality of life entails a triumph of good over evil. It doesn’t. That is the koan of the death and resurrection of Christ. We must instead live with and within the tensions between “good and evil” because they are the myriad threads of the web of life with which we are bound up; we are all sentenced to death, and will die convicted by this accusatory web of endlessly interconnected cause and effect. It is not us who can be called “good” in this arrangement, “unloveably evil” as we are and without exception loving darkness more than light, according to the reckoning of Christ (Jn. 3:19) — and the Buddha as well, perhaps. It is God who is good because he loves the unloveable. The more unloveable the world is, the greater his Love is revealed to be. This is the meaning of “where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more.” We need not fight to overcome this, or bewail how unfair it is. Fairness pertains to justice; divine revelation teaches us that though justice will prevail over injustice, it will not prevail over mercy. Mercy is that blessedly “unfair” hope hidden in the infernal “unfairness” of death — the hope of the resurrection. Mercy is the realm of the Resurrection; love is the Resurrection’s substance in a very real and Biblically explicit way: to be resurrected is to be born again; is to be born of the Spirit; everything born of Spirit is Spirit; God is Spirit; and God is Love. In short, to be resurrected is to be love. This profound doctrine stretched the limits of everything I’d ever learned from Zen Buddhism. It struck me as infinitely more sublime than the Buddhist formulation of nirvana. Am I saying that the goals of Buddhism and Christianity are different? I can’t say that; I can only say that how the Buddha articulated the goal of his teaching, or at least my understanding of it, paled in comparison to the insight that leapt out of the Bible at me as I drank in its mystagogical words. My personal experience has led me to endlessly advocate that any sincere student of Zen or eastern wisdom might seriously consider whether the Gospel of the death & resurrection of Christ just might be the ultimate Zen koan. It was for me.
Song Meditation: “You”
Inspiration has struck!This Holy Week I found myself writing and recording companion songs for the journey, from the Triumphal Entry to the Resurrection. You can find all these brand new songs here:
ICYMI: New Album “Hymns & Homilies” Out NowI invite you to download and listen to my album, out now: “Hymns & Homilies” — an eclectic collection of songs for worship and musical sermons. This is not your grandaddy’s Christian music. Name your price — your support for my work of music ministry is a blessing!
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