THE WAY OF THE LIMINAL JESUS AS THE CHRIST
Like other Galileans, Jesus was liminal and marginalized. But he was different from other Galileans. In spite of the demoralizing effects of marginalization, Jesus was able to exercise the creative potentials of his liminality for God’s end in creation. The realization of the reign of God is the actualization of God’s end in creation. It should be noted here that Jesus did not exercise his liminality’s creativity for some general purposes; rather, he did so for the specific purposes of bringing about on earth the reign of God. According to the New Testament, Jesus was both the embodiment and bringer of the reign of God.1 Jesus’ life and ministry were not devoted to the fulfillment of some anthropologically conceived creativity of liminality but, rather, to the utilization of liminality’s creativity for God’s own purposes for created existence. Theology in this way assigns a specific direction to the general potentials of liminality.
LEAVING HOME: JESUS’APPROPRIATION OF LIMINALITY
Scholars believe that Jesus’ years of youth were probably quite uneventful and that he was settled in a household of a modest socioeconomic status. But sometime in his late twenties, perhaps around 28 C.E., Jesus left home and his close family to lead a self-consciously liminal and marginalized life.2 The event of Jesus’ leaving home is seldom discussed in studies of the historical Jesus. But for Asian Americans, many of whom are immigrants or the children of immigrants, Jesus’ departure from home is significant. The Gospels also make it clear that this was not just a casual event in Jesus’ life.
For Jesus, leaving home, as it would be for any one in his circumstances, was an act with grave consequences. In his day the Galilean household was the primary place of socialization, where a person’s social roles and their meanings were both learned and played out. Identity did not exist apart from a person’s household, kinship relations, and village. For Jesus to leave his household, therefore, was to be cut off from the place that had given him his identity. Leaving home meant going out of the structure of one’s life. It meant entering a wilderness, a liminal space.3
Why did Jesus leave home? Was he not already liminal as a person living in Galilee? We must here make a distinction between “objective liminality,” on the one hand, and “subjective liminality,” on the other. A person or a people may be objectively or de facto liminal (“objective liminality”), but may not be subjectively and personally aware of it (“subjective liminality”). A person in a liminal situation may not be existentially aware of his/her liminality for different reasons. He or she may be refusing to face up to it and thus denying it, or his or her personal circumstances may be such that he or she is kept away from becoming personally aware of it. Galileans were objectively liminal but they were not necessarily personally aware of the liminality of their social location. For a Galilean to be personally and thus self-consciously liminal, he or she had to appropriate it, that is, make it his or her own self-conscious reality. Many Galileans, including Jesus, probably were at least vaguely aware of their liminal and marginalized situation. But they may not have automatically attained a sharp and clear consciousness of their social predicament, or may have simply ignored the situation and lived without paying it much attention. My suggestion, therefore, is that Jesus left home in order to appropriate the Galilean liminality as his own personal reality. Leaving home for Jesus was an act of owning his Galilean liminality. It was a drastic act of leaving structure and an act of accepting a sharp personal awareness of his Galilean liminality.
In a recent study on Jesus and the kingdom of God, Norwegian biblical scholar Halvor Moxnes uses Victor Turner’s concept of the three stages of social process (separation, liminality, reincorporation) in his analysis of the formation of the earliest Christian groups. When Jesus called his disciples, according to Moxnes, Jesus asked them to leave their household without immediately promising them a new place into which they could be reincorporated. The earliest traditions about Jesus (Q, Gospel of Thomas, and Mark), Moxnes points out, have Jesus calling his disciples to separate themselves from their households without entering a new household, thus leaving them dangling in a liminal space. Moxnes describes this liminal space entered by Jesus and his disciples as “a location that is not yet defined,” “no-place,” an “in-between position,” a space of the “dislocation of identity,” and a “zone of possibilities.”4
Mark’s later reinterpretation of the material in a narrative form does show that Jesus offered his displaced disciples and other followers a new and radically different household, as a representation of the reign of God. I shall return to the topic of this new household with God alone as the Father. Moxnes’s point that is important here is this: according to the earliest traditions about Jesus, he left home and entered into a liminal space before he began speaking about a new household for himself and for his followers. Jesus also expected his followers to experience this stage of liminality before an alternative place of belonging was presented to them. Jesus made this demand rather sharply: “Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me” (Matt. 10:37).
The episode of Jesus’ rejection in his hometown confirms his new location in no-man’s land. As Jesus tried to teach in the synagogue in Nazareth, the people of the town “took offense at him.” They took offense because Jesus had left “his place” in his household and in his town. He had gone beyond and out of the limits of his proper place. The town was no longer obligated to confer upon Jesus the honor that a community or social structure would bestow upon its members. He was no longer acceptable within this place. Jesus simply says, “Prophets are not without honor, except in their hometown, and among their own kin, and in their own house” (Mark 6:1–6). Jesus does not contest the town’s scorn. As Moxnes puts it, “he had broken out of the mold and will not be limited by the place defined by his lineage and household. He opts to stay out of it.”5
As discussed earlier, Galileans were living in a liminal situation because of their geographical location, political predicament, cultural diversity, and religiously peripheral situation vis-à-vis Jerusalem. Galileans were also marginalized and oppressed socioeconomically, religiously, and in other ways. Galileans’ personal awareness of their objective reality of liminality and marginality would have varied in degrees depending on their individual circumstances. Jesus’ perspective was that those who would respond positively to the radical new reality of the reign of God had to become personally aware of their liminality by leaving the comforts of their households. Jesus demanded that his disciples become self-consciously liminal although they already were objectively in a liminal predicament.
As we noted earlier, Galileans certainly must have been at least vaguely self-conscious of their liminality because of their objective situation. Galileans’ vague but real awareness of their liminal situation may indeed be one factor behind the male disciples’ willingness to make such a quick and radical departure from their homes. Simon Peter, James, and John, when called by Jesus, “brought their boats to shore, … left everything, and followed him” (Luke 5:11). Levi the tax collector, when called by Jesus, “got up, left everything, and followed him” (Luke 5:28). Their liminal situation had already made them open and free enough to respond quickly to Jesus. Their departure from their households undoubtedly made them even more acutely aware of their liminality than they might have been before. Such a radical liminality, a freedom from the existing structure of society, is what Jesus adopted as his own situation and demanded that his followers do likewise.
Now, why did Jesus not call women to discipleship the way he called some men, although the scriptural witness points to many women who followed him, some more closely than others? The situation must have been different for Galilean women. Perhaps the answer is that women in Galilee in general were more acutely liminal and certainly more painfully marginalized than men, by Galilee’s own patriarchal culture as well as outside forces, and that many Galilean women were already subjectively conscious of their liminal and marginalized predicament. Therefore, they may not have had to leave their household as men did to become acutely conscious of their liminal and marginalized situation.6
Women who were closest to Jesus were indeed those who were more acutely liminal and marginalized than most Galilean women. Mary Magdalene was a single woman without any settled abode and of an ill repute. Mary and Martha in Bethany were unmarried women living with a brother. Ross Kraemer points out that “few women in the early Jesus movement appear to conform to the most socially acceptable categories of virgin daughter, respectable wife, and mother of legitimate children”7 They were not child-bearing women. Some are said to have been widows. As Moxnes puts it, “the women we glimpse in the gospel narratives appear to be prototypes of the ‘irregular’ women … in nontraditional roles, and therefore already in marginal positions.”8 I would add that these women were not only “already marginal” but also acutely aware of their liminal and marginal status in society. It would not have made much sense for Jesus to demand that these women leave their households in order to attain a personal awareness of their liminal and marginal predicament. When Jesus met his women followers, they probably already had left their usual household structure to follow him. The women followers of Jesus were at the forefront of all of Jesus’ followers in their awareness of their social location.
JESUS’ EXERCISE OF THE CREATIVE POTENTIALS OF HIS LIMINALITY
Jesus’ Openness to the Father’s Will
To be liminal is to be out of the structure in which a person usually functions, and, therefore, to be freed at least temporarily from what governs a person’s thought and action. To be liminal is to be open to new ideas and new ways of doing things either individually or as a society. It is to be more ready than usual to consider new and different possibilities.
The openness of Jesus’ liminality was a God-centered openness. Jesus in every way, including his openness, was governed and shaped by the reign of God and what God is doing through that reign. Thus, his openness was primarily openness to the will of his Father. This God-ward direction of his openness saves it from chaos. But this direction does not make his openness narrow; rather, it makes it radical. Jesus’ openness is not restricted by anything other than God’s will. Jesus’ liminality, then, means his radical freedom from any and all creaturely principles.
Jesus’ openness to God gave his liminality content. The God to whom he is absolutely loyal and open is the God whose nature is forgiving love, unlimited compassion, and graceful justice. Jesus, therefore, was steadfastly open to whatever is forgivingly loving, unlimitedly compassionate, and gracefully just.
Jesus’ absolute openness to God’s will is clearly discernible in his relation to the Father as witnessed to in the Gospels. Whether or not he could bring about a “miracle” of healing, and whether or not someone was going to have faith in him or not, Jesus believed was up to the Father’s will and not his own. When a centurion in Capernaum showed a great faith, Jesus was “amazed” (Matt. 8:10). When Jesus was in Nazareth and found himself unable to do any “deed of power” except in a few cases, he was “amazed at their unbelief” (Mark 6:5–6). To be amazed by something is to be open to what is beyond one’s own control.
Jesus’ openness to his Father brought him the most agonizing moment of his life. In the garden of Gethsemane, Jesus prayed, “yet, not my will but yours be done” (Luke 22:42). Jesus was open to his Father’s will to the point of death.
As we noted above, Jesus’ openness to his Father also meant his freedom from anything other than his Father’s will. Jesus shows this freedom in his unhesitating willingness to cross all human-made boundaries and barriers to embody his Father’s forgiving love to fallen creation. To speak in anthropological language, Jesus’ liminality freed him from all human-made structures and roles. He was free to move beyond the existing social and religious structures, rules, and restrictions.
Jesus crossed the boundaries of the purity code set by the religious establishment. He did not hesitate to stay overnight in chief tax collector Zacchaeus’s house in order to “seek out and to save the lost” (Luke 19:10). By crossing the border and leaving behind the purity-code structure, Jesus was able to communicate to Zacchaeus God’s forgiving love and unlimited compassion. Jesus let Mary, Martha’s sister, sit and discuss theology with him, something that women were not allowed to do (Luke 10:39). Jesus crossed the boundaries between different peoples when he spoke to the Syro-Phoenician woman, a Gentile, and when he had a lengthy theological discussion with the Samaritan woman at the well (Mark 7:24–27; John 4:7–30). Jesus angered the Pharisees by allowing his disciples to pluck heads of grain and by healing a man with a withered hand on the Sabbath. In his answer to the Pharisees, Jesus relativized their Sabbath laws by asking them, “Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the sabbath, to save life or to kill?” (Mark 2:23–28; 3:1–6). When the Pharisees again complained to Jesus that his disciples violated the “tradition of the elders” by eating with defiled or unwashed hands, Jesus pointed out to them there is something more ultimate than their laws about proper eating, something which would make them free from those laws. Jesus said, “You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition” (Mark 7:1–8). Thus, Jesus’ freedom was a freedom from everything other than the loving God and a freedom for the sake of the loving God.
Jesus’ Liminality and the Emergence of Communitas
The second creative potential of liminality is its power to generate communitas. Before discussing Jesus’ exercise of this potential on the basis of the Gospel records, a review of what communitas means is in order. Communitas, according to Victor Turner, can emerge between two or more persons when they are in a liminal situation—that is, freed from social norms, social roles, and hierarchy. Liminality is “the dimension … in which men [sic] confront one another not as role players but as ‘human totals,’ integrated beings who recognizantly share the same humanity.” Communitas is the response to “the desire for a total, unmediated relationship between person and person,” and is an “expression of men [sic] in their wholeness wholly attending.”9 Communitas is an egalitarian and intimate communion between two or more human beings who completely respect and accept each other in all their otherness. I take what Turner says about communitas as being quite close to what is generally meant by “communion” or even “loving communion” and use these terms interchangeably.
Jesus’ communitas with individuals. The “atmosphere” of Jesus’ encounter with other liminal persons in the Gospels certainly indicates the relationality of communitas. Since communitas involves two or more persons, Jesus’ exercise of his liminal creativity in communitas naturally involves the liminality of both Jesus and the persons who experienced communitas with Jesus.
A good example of Jesus’ communitas with single individuals is his encounter with Zacchaeus, a chief tax collector, mentioned earlier. Zacchaeus’s profession placed him between the Roman Empire and the Jerusalem authorities, on the one hand, and the marginalized Galilean peasants, on the other. His social location was liminality and marginalization. Jesus called him by his name and stayed at his home, ignoring the jeers by the crowd. Jesus seemed to be totally at ease with this socially ostracized person. Zacchaeus, for his part, exercised his own liminality and was thereby free enough to climb a tree to see Jesus and respond promptly to Jesus’ self-invitation to his home. The whole episode exudes an atmosphere of mutual acceptance and being at ease with each other.
By crossing all human boundaries, Jesus met Zacchaeus in their mutual liminality, and experienced communitas. To be more accurate, Zacchaeus experienced a loving communion with God in Jesus. In and through this loving communion with God in Jesus, Zacchaeus experienced an unconditional acceptance and forgiveness by that God and became a new man.
Without the work of the Holy Spirit in both Jesus and Zacchaeus, this transformation would not have occurred. But liminal space between Zacchaeus and Jesus was a means of grace. Liminal space was a necessary but not sufficient condition for Zacchaeu’s life-changing experience of communitas with Jesus. So communitas between Jesus and Zacchaeus was more than an ordinary communitas. It was a redemptive communitas in which God’s infinite love was expressed. It was a redemptive communion in which Zacchaeus experienced acceptance by God, the Creator and Lord of universe.
A word is necessary here in regard to the Holy Spirit before continuing. The Holy Spirit, as noted earlier, is the eternal communion of love that emerged out of the liminality between the Father and the Son within the Trinity. In this way, the divine love, which is the essence of God, “became” the eternal communion between the Father and the Son, namely the Holy Spirit. The emergence of communitas from the liminality between Jesus and Zacchaeus is a temporal repetition of the eternal emergence of the Holy Spirit within the Trinity. In this way, the believers are taken into the communion between the Father and the Son. As the temporal repetition of the third person of the Trinity, the communion of love that emerges from the liminality between Jesus and believers is the power that will build the redeemed community on earth and is the constitutive reality of the redeemed community itself. In this way, God’s infinite love, the essence of God’s own being, is repeated in the temporal communion of the saints.
Jesus’ communitas with his followers as a group. The category of the “followers” of Jesus is a difficult concept to define. John P. Meier arranges the overlapping clusters of followers into three concentric circles: (1) the outer circle of the crowds that followed Jesus in a physical sense (with a varying degrees of sympathetic attitudes); (2) the middle circle of “disciples” or adherents who followed Jesus in a spiritual and physical sense; and (3) the inner circle of the twelve, chosen by Jesus to symbolize his mission to the twelve tribes of Israel. Associated with the middle group are also those who remained at home and supported Jesus.10
The twelve were with him, as well as some women who had been cured of evil spirits and infirmities: Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out; Joanna, the wife of Herod’s steward, Chuza; and many others who provided for them out of their resources (Luke 8:1–3). Mark records that at the time of Jesus’ crucifixion “There were also women looking on from a distance; among them were Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James the younger and of Joses, and Salome.” Then, Mark adds, “These used to follow him and provided for him when he was in Galilee; and there were many other women who had come up with him to Jerusalem” (Mark 15:40–41).
Many women traveled with Jesus and the other men, apparently had meals together, and in other ways acted as a group. In a society where women were viewed as inferior to men and did not openly mix with men, the gender-integrated nature of Jesus’ followers was unusual, to say the least. The men and women followers I am focusing on here are the inner circle of twelve, the middle group, and some of the third circle, the crowds. All these groups of Jesus’ followers had one thing in common, in addition to their interest in Jesus. They were all “displaced persons,” out of the ordinary structure of society. The twelve were all relatively young men who had left their households and everything they had. The middle group primarily consisted of marginalized and thus liminal persons: the sick, “sinners,” and tax collectors. Those among the crowd who physically followed Jesus for a short or longer time were also most likely poor peasants who were both liminal and marginalized. Their encounter with Jesus in their common liminal space must have given rise to communitas among them.
Communitas and Jesus’ table-fellowship. Nowhere is the role of liminality in generating communitas more clearly evident than in Jesus’ act of joining for meals with socially disreputable and marginalized persons. The Pharisees asked Jesus’ disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” (Matt. 9:11). This practice of Jesus earned him the name “a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners” (Matt. 11:19). This accusation, which probably came from the Pharisees, is aimed at Jesus’ willingness to transgress the purity codes that prohibited Jews from socializing with impure persons, such as sinners, the sick, and tax collectors.
Eating is an activity in which people open their mouths and acknowledge their finitude (that is, dependence upon food and water) and thus an activity that exposes their vulnerability. For this reason, when people eat, they generally want to be with friends with whom they feel totally accepted and comfortable. Those who joined Jesus at meals undoubtedly felt totally accepted by him.
Jesus’ compassion and love for liminal and marginalized persons moved him to be together with liminal and marginalized persons. Jesus’ own liminality and the liminality of the marginalized persons whom he befriended brought them together in their common liminality. And this shared liminality was the means through which God’s loving communitas with human beings was made possible.
Communitas, the new family, and the reign of God. Recall that the actual experience of communitas, according to Turner, is “immediate” and “spontaneous” and, therefore, transitory.
In human history, attempts have been made to preserve “spontaneous communitas” on a more or less permanent basis by codifying its features in a system of ethics and law. In order to preserve the original experience of communitas, groups would withdraw from the mainstream of a society into a voluntary separation. As Victor Turner explains, however, spontaneous communitas or the actual experience of communitas cannot be routinized or organized. But communitas inevitably gives way to structure.11
According to Turner, communitas and structure are in a dialectical, not antithetical, relationship. Human beings, in order to survive, must return to structure. Individuals who have experienced communitas can return to structure with communitarian values and can both try to practice them and also work to infuse those values into the structure. In this sense, communitas has a transformative function.12
Now if one cannot live in liminality alone, what structure did Jesus offer to his displaced and homeless followers? The structure he offered them was modeled after the most important social structure in Galilee, namely, family and household. Jesus offered them the new family of God, a family in some ways like the natural families they had left but in other respects very different from them.13 And the new family of God for Jesus was the imperfect but proleptically real embodiment of the reign of God. In this new family the values of communitas that Jesus and his followers experienced together, probably again and again, were to be practiced.
The new family of God was constituted not “by birth” but “by doing the will of my Father.” A crowd sitting around Jesus told him that his mother and brother were asking for him, and he responded, “ ‘Who are my mother and my brothers?’ And looking at those who sat around him, he said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother’ ” (Mark 3:31–35).
This new structure is a family with brothers and sisters, but also is very different from their natural families. First of all, there is no father. Jesus said, “Call no one your father on earth, for you have one Father—the one in heaven” (Matt. 23:9). Jesus is not denying the plain fact that people have biological fathers. What he is saying is that the new family of God is not going to allow even a trace of the patriarchal subordination and dehumanization of women. Men and women are all siblings of equal dignity. Second, this new family has no hierarchy. Jesus said, referring to the status-oriented scribes and Pharisees, “They love to have the place of honor at banquets and the best seats in the synagogues, and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces, and to have people call them rabbi.” Jesus also said to his disciples and other followers:
But you are not to be called rabbi, for you have one teacher, and you are all students. And call no one your father on earth, for you have one Father—the one in heaven. Nor are you to be called instructors, for you have one instructor, the Messiah. The greatest among you will be your servant. All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted. (Matt. 23:6–12)
The members of the new family are all students with one teacher. A question rises at this point: In Jesus’ portrayal of God as “the Father,” a male figure, is he not still perpetuating patriarchy? Moxnes argues that when Jesus “used the father image, it was primarily the aspect of the father who provided for his children and protected them, not the father as an authority figure.” And the image of father did not necessarily encourage male supremacy in the group but, rather, put all “young men, older women, and children—into the same category as dependents in the household.”14
Another question arises: If Jesus’ followers now belong to the new family of God, does that mean that they are no longer liminal? They now have a new sense of belonging and a new identity through their participation in the new family of God. However, the reality of their liminality and marginalization as Galileans would continue. In fact, because of their new identity as members of God’s family, their marginalization would become intensified, as the fleeing of male disciples from the scene of Jesus’ crucifixion indicates. The experiences of liminality could also occur within the life of the new family of God, as it must have occurred at Jesus’ last supper with his disciples.
Jesus’ Liminality, His Prophetic Ministry, and the New Community
The third aspect of the creativity of a liminal person is his or her being at the periphery of the structure of a society and his or her ability to look at the structure with a critical perspective. Jesus used his liminal and thus critical perspective in carrying out his prophetic ministry. Jesus conducted his ministry in a context of imperial domination. The village peasants of Galilee where Jesus lived were suffering from extreme forms of economic, political, and religious oppression and exploitation at the hands of the Roman rulers and their representatives as well as the religious-economic power of the Jerusalem Temple.
A liminal, marginalized, and oppressed Galilean himself, Jesus reflected the miseries, frustrations, and protests of his fellow Galilean peasants in his actions and teachings. Jesus’ ministry inevitably expressed the convictions and sentiments of the common people in response to the dominant and oppressive center.
Jesus as the incarnate Son of God, however, did not just reflect the conditions of the people. He was inaugurating the coming of the reign of God, and was building a new communion or community, a new family or household of God. In other words, Jesus’ prophetic criticism of, and resistance to, the oppressive powers were meant to serve to heal and restore as well as build human community, particularly his new community as an initial realization of God’s reign. Jesus’ primary purpose was to actualize the purpose for which God created the world—namely, to repeat the inner-trinitarian communion in time and space. Jesus’ resistance against the oppressive powers was not for resistance’s sake, but for the sake of the reign of God.
Jesus’ healings of the sick and crippled not only restored their physical integrity but also represented a protest against the Jerusalem Temple’s purity injunctions, which had declared certain persons as “impure” and not to be touched. Moreover, Jesus’ healings also restored the social relations of the sick persons. With their health restored, the healed persons could now be publicly accepted members of communities. To put it differently, the restoration of their communal life was also a part of the healing of sick persons. Bruce Malina and Richard Rohrbaugh have observed: “Illness in antiquity was a social as well as a physical phenomenon. A person with a disease or deformity was socially as well as physically abnormal. Healing therefore required re-establishing relationships as well as restoring physical health.”15
After restoring the sight of a blind man in Bethsaida, Jesus, according to the Gospel of Mark, “sent him away to his home” (8:26). One day when a paralyzed man was brought to Jesus by his friends through the roof, Jesus first says, “Friend, your sins are forgiven you” (Luke 5:20). And then Jesus says, “ ‘I say to you, stand up and take your bed and go to your home.’ Immediately he stood up before them, took what he had been lying on, and went to his home, glorifying God” (vv. 24–25). In both cases, the cured persons are said to have gone home. Being forgiven and being physically cured deliver a person from “impurity” and restores him or her to the community. Many women “who had been cured of evil spirits and infirmities,” most prominently Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and Susanna, joined the fellowship of Jesus’ closest followers (Luke 8:2–3). Healing physical illnesses leads to the restoration of community.
Jesus taught his followers to protest against the oppressive powers without getting caught in the cycle of violence. Jesus’ teaching in Matthew 5:38–41 is a good example of how Jesus urged the oppressed peasants of Galilee to practice nonviolent resistance. Jesus says, “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, do not resist an evildoer” (vv. 38–39a). Jesus appears to forbid any kind of resistance at all. William Herzog comments, however: “Jesus was attempting to stop the spiral of violence that a violent eye-for-an-eye approach would perpetuate.”16
Herzog’s view is that although Jesus was against violence, he did not teach a passive stance in face of unjust acts. Jesus says in Matthew 5:39b, “But if any one strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also.” Herzog comments, “Assuming the assailant is right-handed, the blow was a back-handed slap, a demeaning blow delivered by a social superior to a social inferior.… Jesus recommended that the victim not accept the insult, but offer the other cheek, which would force the assailant to strike him with the palm of his hand, a gesture asserting his basic humanity and social standing.”17 The “eye-for-an-eye” approach would only escalate violence. To turn the other cheek offered an opportunity to break the cycle of mutual retaliation as well as a way in which one could assert one’s “basic humanity as well as social standing.”18
In verse 40, Jesus says, “And if any one wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well.” Here Jesus is referring to the cruelty of a creditor and the entire system that oppresses peasant debtors. If a Jewish man gives his cloak, the second piece of his clothing, he becomes naked. By surrendering his cloak, the peasant exposes the truth of the oppressive system. This again avoids violence without being totally passive.
In verse 41, Jesus says, “And if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile.” Roman soldiers had the legal permission to force people to carry something for one mile. The victim’s act of going another mile would put the oppressor into a problematic situation and expose the injustice that the subjected people had to endure. Again, violence is averted but the dignity of the victim is asserted. The victim’s assertion of the dignity of his or her humanity, by implication, also affirms his or her right to belong to a community.
Up to this point, my focus has been on the life and teaching of Jesus Christ within the framework of his exercise of the three creative potentials of his liminal social location. The events of Jesus’ death and resurrection are, however, so pivotal in the Christian understanding of the meaning of Jesus Christ that I will discuss them as particular events. But these two events are not discrete. They are integrally related with, and are parts of, Jesus’ life and his public ministry. His death and resurrection cannot be properly understood apart from that life and ministry.
The death of Jesus was not an accident or an isolated incident. When persons in a liminal situation exercise their liminal creativity by being single-heartedly open to the will of God, by forming an “alternative community” that challenges the status quo, and by being prophetically critical of the oppressive practices of the center, they become intolerable to the center and will inevitably be repressed or destroyed by the center. Jesus became intolerable to the religious and political authorities in Jerusalem.
Jesus did not seek his death. But he certainly risked death by living the kind of life he led, speaking and acting on behalf of the marginalized and against the unjust practices of the dominant center. Given the character of Jesus’ public ministry, his death was inevitable, and he seems to have known this inevitability (Luke 17:25). Jesus embodied with single-heartedness the infinite compassion of God for the lost, the despised, and the weak. His death was an inevitable consequence of such a life. The meaning of Jesus’ death, therefore, is directly connected with his life and ministry. Jesus is the Redeemer of fallen creation not just because of his death but because of the way he lived his life, which includes his death.
In his death, Jesus acted the same way he lived his life—embodying God’s love and justice. As the christological hymn in Philippians puts it, “he became obedient to the point of death” (2:8). Just as he did in his ministry, Jesus on the cross was exposing, judging, and resisting the injustice of the oppressive center. And it was the power of God’s love that enabled him to live the kind of life he did and also empowered him to endure the violence of the cross.
The marginalization by the dominant center that Jesus endured throughout his ministry reached its extreme point in his crucifixion. But Jesus still exercised the creative potentials of his liminality for the values of the reign of God.
Facing death, Jesus was open to his Father’s will. On the cross, Jesus let his extreme liminal space generate communitas, and this fact needs particular attention. On the cross, Jesus’ liminality reached its greatest depth. Being at the edge and “in-between” could not be more severe and poignant than it was in his death. Jesus hung in the “noman’s land” between his friends who abandoned him and his heavenly Father who he felt had forsaken him.19 His ties with his Father who sent him and with the fallen world that he came to save were both being torn up. Only such a radical liminality, of course, could give birth to a radically new reality.
The liminal space that Jesus on the cross opens up and enters into is not an ordinary liminality for a number of important reasons:
1. First of all, Jesus’ liminality on the cross is a liminality he enters in spite of the demoralizing marginalization to which he was subjected. The intention of the marginalizing forces was to marginalize Jesus to the point of death and destroy him. But Jesus had an intention of his own, and his intention was to use the liminality that accompanies marginalization for the redemption of humanity. So liminality, for Jesus, did not get suppressed and buried under the demoralizing, humiliating, and dehumanizing effects of marginalization. So Jesus opened up and entered into his liminal space on the cross in spite of his suffering brought about by marginalization. In opening up and entering his liminal space, Jesus on the cross was resisting and indeed being victorious over the intention of the marginalizing forces that would immobilize and destroy him.
2. Jesus’ liminality on the cross is an infinite liminal space because it is a liminal space that the incarnate Son of God lets himself into. The liminal space of the cross is a space that comprehends and embraces the entirety of fallen creation. In this liminality, God is not only open to but invites the totality of God’s broken world.
3. Jesus’ entrance into his liminal space on the cross in spite of the effects of marginalization means God’s entrance into and participation in Jesus’ liminality and suffering, and, through him, in the suffering of fallen creation. As Jürgen Moltmann and others have pointed out, God out of God’s love for humanity participates in their suffering. Moltmann has gone so far as to say that the Son suffers the pain of being abandoned by his Father, while the Father suffers the pain of grief in losing his Son on the cross.20 Wonhee Anne Joh has, rightly I believe, criticized Moltmann for being rather preoccupied with the trinitarian meaning of God’s participation in human suffering at the cost of not paying sufficient attention to humanity’s participation in the cross.21 My own discussion of the human beings’ participation in Jesus’ liminality corrects the problem at least to a certain extent.
4. This liminal space is not a space in which Jesus the Son of God and some human beings enter together at the same time. This space is brought about by God’s gracious love of marginalized human beings because of which God in Jesus resisted and rejected the dehumanizing structures in the world. The liminal space opened up by the cross of Jesus is brought about by God’s compassion for people who offend the authorities. In this infinite space of liminality, all the dislocation people experience, all the thresholds people are pushed to, the depth of uncertainty that finite beings experience, and the suffering of all living beings are to be comprehended.
5. The liminal space of the cross is the infinite space the loving God opens up in Jesus. Therefore, those who enter this space will not fully comprehend the meaning of the prior presence of Jesus in this space unless they understand him in connection with all the liminal spaces he opened up in the process of loving and healing marginalized human beings during his public ministry in Galilee and elsewhere. The One whom those who enter this space encounter is not just Jesus who is being killed on the cross but is the Galilean Jesus who loved Mary and Martha, Peter and Andrew, who was criticized for eating together with sinners, and who stayed in Zacchaeus’s house overnight.
6. All liminal spaces generate communitas of the persons who are in those spaces. Those persons who enter the liminal space of Jesus and encounter him will also experience communitas with him and with each other. But there is much more. Those who enter Jesus’ liminal space experience communitas with Jesus as the loving communion with the God who out of infinite grace forgives sinners and accepts his unacceptable children and as the God who grants them the ability to live a new life. The human phenomenon of the emergence of communitas out of liminality is used here as a means or a form in and through which something that is infinitely higher than common communitas is communicated. Out of the liminality of Jesus on the cross comes, by the work of the Holy Spirit, the redeeming and transforming communitas with God Godself.
7. The liminal space of Jesus on the cross is an invitation to all people to come in and experience the redeeming and transforming communitas with God in Jesus who is already in that liminal space. By opening up this liminal space out of God’s love of God’s children, God has taken the initiative. But God’s act of reconciling with fallen humanity is not a one-way street. Human beings must enter that space. I shall return to this point in the following chapter.
One should not fail to note that those who were the first to be with Jesus in the liminal space of the cross were “Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James the younger and of Joses, and Salome, … [as well as] other women who had come up with him to Jerusalem” (Mark 15:40–41). These were among those who experienced communitas with Jesus during his pre-crucifixion and resurrection period. Communitas with Jesus in that period, we might say, was a prelude or foretaste of the full redeeming communitas they experienced with Jesus on the cross. And the resurrection of the crucified Jesus confirms the eternal validity and power of the fully redeeming communitas with Jesus on the cross. Present also in that liminal space with Jesus were the centurion and one of the criminals being executed next to Jesus. These persons experienced the redeeming communitas with God in Jesus in that liminal space, and provide a continuity between Jesus’ communitas with his close followers during his ministry, on the one hand, and with his communitas after his resurrection, on the other.
THE RESURRECTION OF THE CRUCIFIED JESUS
Jesus really died and was buried. Therefore, only God the Creator of the universe could bring Jesus back to life. The grief-stricken Father raised his beloved Son from the dead in the power of the Holy Spirit. Connecting God the Creator to the resurrection points out the truth that the raising of Jesus was the death of death, and this overcoming of death was necessary not only for the eternal life of individual believers but, more ultimately, for the accomplishment of the end for which God created the world—namely, the repetition in time and space of the beauty of the loving communion within the inner-trinitarian life.
The fact that the resurrection was the resurrection of the crucified Jesus means that the One who is raised from the dead is Jesus the Galilean, who lived and gave his life for the embodiment of God’s forgiving love, unlimited grace, and loving justice. The power of God’s love, in other words, is the ultimately real and the ultimately powerful reality, and death will never be the last word. The violent, demoralizing, and dehumanizing powers of the marginalizing centers of this world are finally judged and overcome in the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus.
The resurrection of Jesus Christ, however, did not simply endorse Jesus’ ministry prior to his death, nor is the resurrection simply the annulment of the power of death. As Moltmann has pointed out, the resurrection of the crucified Christ has to be seen as having an “added value and surplus” over against the death of Jesus.22 The resurrection of Jesus was also an event in which Jesus became the “first fruits of those who have died” (1 Cor. 15:20). The risen Jesus is the first fruits of the eschatological new creation in which “God will wipe away every tear from their eyes” (Rev. 7:17). This complete realization of the reign of God has begun in Jesus in a decisive way. Thus, those who are united to this risen Jesus through their faith are to begin leading a completely new existence. Through Jesus’ resurrection, the ultimate significance of death has been cancelled. But while leading a wholly new existence, death still remains as something that Jesus’ followers have to face. The coming of the world where death will be no more for human beings is yet in the future. In the meantime, those who are united with Christ live from Christ’s resurrection—that is, with a hope and yearning for the future and with an ever-increasing resistance and protest against the powers of death and injustice that still remain in the world.
Paul says that Christ was raised “for our justification” (Rom. 4:25). How is justification related to Jesus’ resurrection? For one thing, Jesus’ resurrection confirms the forgiveness of sins brought about through the cross of Jesus. But Jesus’ resurrection does more than take away the sting of sin which is death. Salvation by Christ is not just the “cancellation of sin,” but a new righteousness, an entirely new existence. If we were reconciled with God through Jesus’ death, “much more surely … will we be saved by his life” (Rom. 5:10). Justification is not just an imputation of the remission of sins but also the reception of “eternal life.” Jesus’ resurrection is not merely the restoration of the original creation but a further increase of the repetition of God’s glory in time and space. Through Jesus’ resurrection, therefore, his believers enter an entirely new life in which they work for the final realization of God’s love and justice in this world.
The resurrection of Jesus confirms that the love of God will have the final say in the world. But this hope should not set a Christian on a triumphalistic path. There are still resistances to God’s love and to God’s building of loving communion in time and history. And the ultimate realization of this love in all aspects of life does not appear in the usual historical development. But still the Christian hope is in the love of God, as Walter Kasper puts it, “a love which has made its appearance eschatologically and finally in the death and Resurrection of Jesus; a love to which henceforth all that is future belongs, and belongs underivably.” Kasper continues, “Hope of that kind permits of no historical speculation, but certainly invites historical practice. The belief that love persists for ever (1 Cor. 13:8) means that only that which is done of love will endure for ever and is lastingly inscribed in the condition and growth of reality.”23
Now, one may ask: What does Jesus’ resurrection mean for his liminality and marginalization? As noted above, Jesus’ resurrection from death confirmed that the marginalizing forces in the world are not the ultimately real powers, and that the extreme form of marginalization, namely death, is proved to have no ultimate power over the life-creating power of the loving and compassionate God.
For Asian American believers who have united with Jesus in his liminality and communitas, however, their social liminality and marginality in the United States have not been changed by their Lord’s victory over the marginalizing forces. Their empirical, social situation remains the same as before. But the resurrection of Jesus in another sense has changed everything. Asian Americans who are united with Jesus are now united with the resurrected Jesus, and need not be afraid to face the disorienting and bewildering experience of liminality. They also need not be demoralized by their marginalization by the dominant white society. Dehumanizing marginalization has proven to be impotent in Jesus’ victory over death. Asian Americans need not be afraid to resist the evils of injustice, or to cross borders and boundaries to communicate God’s forgiving love and unlimited compassion to the weak and the oppressed in society. Asian American Christians know that it is God’s love that has already overcome all the marginalizing forces, including death, and that only God’s love of us will endure forever.
THE EXALTATION OF JESUS CHRIST
After appearing to his disciples, the resurrected Jesus was taken up “into heaven” (Acts 1:11) to be seated “at the right hand of God” (Rom. 8:34). Jesus the Galilean who is the incarnate Son of God now entered the “dimension” of God to share in divine power (Rom. 1:3f.) and divine glory (Phil. 3:21). From this position of power, he intercedes with the Father for us (Rom. 8:34) and protects us on the day of God’s judgment (Rom. 5:9). God the Father will not rule the world except through the spirit of the incarnate Son who is at God’s right hand. Jesus gave all to the Father and to fallen humanity in his life and ministry. Jesus gave all to the Father and fallen humanity on the cross. In raising the crucified Jesus from the dead, God accepted all that the incarnate Son was and did. In bringing the incarnate Son to his side, God completed God’s acceptance of the incarnate Son and what he did.24
The exalted Jesus intercedes for us with the Father. The exalted Christ also continues his earthly ministry now as the exalted Lord in the power of the Holy Spirit. He continues to move the world in the direction of accomplishing God’s end in creation. With divine authority, the exalted Jesus guarantees that he himself, and not the power of death and evil, will have the final say at the end of history.
It is of utmost importance to remember the corporeal nature of the resurrection. If the historicity of the resurrection is taken seriously, then the corporeality follows from that. As an actual historical man, Jesus of Nazareth is inconceivable without his body. What Paul calls soma pneumatikon is the genuine body, which is entirely directed by the Spirit of God. So the whole person of the Lord is finally with God. Sitting “at the right hand of God,” the exalted Christ has the divine power of judgment at the end of this world, which is the power to protect those united with him against death and judgment.
That the exalted Jesus is now in God’s sphere, however, does not mean that he has no contact with the world. Precisely the corporeality of the exalted Lord means that he continues to be with the world. Now he is with God in the divine sphere; therefore, he is with the world in a divine way and that means in a totally new way. In Walter Kasper’s words, “Jesus’ permanent and yet new way of being for us and with us is most clearly expressed in the Eucharist, where Christ gives himself to us and communicates with us.” Christ is now with us in “a new divine way.”25
That the exalted Jesus is with us also can only mean that the community of Jesus which is still on earth has an eternal dimension; Jesus’ community is tied up permanently with the exalted head of that community. The seemingly fragile community of consciously liminal and marginalized Asian American followers of Jesus has the exalted Lord as its head and leader. This tie of the Asian American church with the exalted Lord is its eschatological future and divinely guaranteed promise. And that promise is the source of Asian American believers’ courage to live in awareness of their liminal space and the source of endurance in their struggle against marginalization.