Easter 5 A

When Jesus, in John 14, says “I am the way,” I think we are invited to see what he says in parallel with other explorations of “the Way” like Dharma (धर्म), Tao (道) or Torah (תּוֹרָה).

In all these examples of “the Way” we find the understanding that there is an underlying structure to the fecundity and flourishing of things that is also the structure of the self. Such an underlying structure also gives shape to society. In Christianity such a structure takes shape around the metaphor of “the kingdom of God”. In Torah, the Way becomes an Exodus-like path to Law as a characteristic of a free society. The Way is a dynamic journey to liberation from unjust structures, from worlds like the worlds of Pharaoh and Robert Mugabe. In this lesson, however, the focus is on the actualisation of the self. The one who believes in Jesus (verse 12) will do what he does. The implication of this text is that if we follow the Way we become like Jesus. We, too, make the Father visible. The Father dwells in us, too. We, too, are able to say “I am.” Christ ‘Я’ Us. This kind of thinking is central to the Gospel of John from the beginning (John 1.12) to the end (John 21.15-17). The Word becomes our flesh and dwells among us in our discipleship, in what we do.

I find it interesting that Carl Jung says “Christ is our nearest analogy of the self and its meaning” (“Christ, a Symbol of the Self”). And I find it immensely helpful in today’s world to look at “the Way”, shrouded in metaphor as it is in the Gospel of John, in terms of the process of individuation as described in Jung’s work. For Jung, individuation comes through a process of integrating consciousness and the unconscious that discovers the self as an undivided whole. Consciousness alone is exclusive, selective and discriminating, and thus only part of the meaning of the whole person. The true self, whole and complete, will include the unconscious as well. While consciousness and the unconscious are often in conflict, and the ego-consciousness in its effort to remain loyal to what we call “reality” will swallow or suppress the unconscious, or, to the contrary, the unconscious psyche will disrupt and impair consciousness like an unwelcome intruder bent on creating chaos, the process of individuation is “a course of development arising out of the conflict between these two psychic facts” (“Consciousness, Unconsciousness and Individuation”). The healthy individual is one who can acknowledge the truth of the whole self, even the bits one would like to bury and forget.

There is a funeral prayer in the United Reformed Church’s Service Book that says

Reconcile us through your cross to all that we have rejected in ourselves, that we may find no part of your creation to be alien or strange to us, and that we ourselves may be made whole.

The prayer goes on to say

Help us to confess any hurt, and wrong we feel we have done to A . . ., and help us to know that we are forgiven, even as we hear your words: ‘Those who come to me, I will not cast out.’

Here in the Church’s liturgy we have the concern for integration and wholeness that is envisioned in the process of individuation, but also in the gospel call to confession, which is also an acknowledgement of the whole person, not a denial or suppression of what Jung calls our “shadow” but an awareness and acknowledgement of it. We speak in the presence of grace of what we can otherwise barely acknowledge in ourselves. Notice, moreover, that the prayers I have cited are for ourselves the worshippers at the funeral service. While at a funeral service we are unavoidably collectively aware of the one who has died as a whole person (warts and all”, or, as Jung would say, “animus/anima, shadow, and so on, and all), and our awareness is, in the best instances, buoyed by grace, worshippers are encouraged to have this same gracious awareness about themselves as whole persons. That is what the act of confession and the assurance or pardon are all about, after all, and such self-reflection helps us face our own dying as whole persons (persons whose lives include death).

Jung says “It is . . . well to examine carefully the psychological aspects of the individuation process in the light of Christian tradition, which can describe it for us with an exactness and impressiveness far surpassing our feeble attempts, even though the Christian image of the self—Christ—lacks the shadow that properly belongs to it.” The problem, Jung says, is the doctrine of the Summum Bonum. To a Protestant theologian’s assertion that “God can only be good,” Jung says Yahweh could have taught him a thing or two. As for Jesus, I recall growing up with those saccharin images of a clean, innocuous, unsullied Christ so dominant in suburban America as to serve for a kind of mascot for the middle class and reinforce the pressure to bury the dark side of human nature below acknowledgement, at great cost to our social, domestic and individual mental health. Everyone knows what the pressure never to acknowledge failure can do to a marriage and to individual minds.. The same pressure is experienced in society as a whole. Urban sociologist Richard Sennet, in The Uses of Disorder, describes the post-war American flight to the suburbs as a flight to a clean space where the richness of human diversity is less important than the desire to avoid pain by creating an order of living that is free of diversity and so free of conflict. Similarly, Gibson Winter, in The Suburban Captivity of the Church, tells how the post-war suburban building boom meant “exclusion from the central city and confinement to the iron cage of conformity” where local churches became “the instruments of middle class conformity rather” than a reconciling force in racial, class and ethnic diversity. This is the kind of social pattern that accompanies an inauthentic image of Christ and gives me a feeling of revulsion every time I have to sing a hymn with the word “sweet” in it.

Similar psychological pressure to deny the dark side of the self occurs in politics and international relations. Richard Hofstadter, in his classic essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” describes a mode of social behaviour motivated by “social conflicts that involve ultimate schemes of values and that bring fundamental fears and hatreds, rather than negotiable interests, into political action.” The fear of the other is a projection of unresolved fears lurking within the fragmented self.

But the image of Christ in scripture is the image of the one who is “not put off by the affliction of the afflicted” (Psalm 22.24), who was “numbered among the transgressors” (Isaiah 53.12), who was made by God “to be sin” (2 Cor 5.21), who “emptied himself, taking the form of a slave” (Philippians 2.7). The very doctrine of incarnation that is described as the descent of God into our humanity is, in ordinary human experience, the acknowledgement of the wholeness of one’s own humanity as it is described in these references, an acknowledgement that, in the process of individuation, is not at all easy to make but is the very heart of the journey described here as “the Way”. This is the incarnational journey Paul calls us to make when, in Philippians 2, he challenges us to have the mind of Christ and do what he did in embracing the life of the condemned as his own. I would say the mystery of the incarnation is something very like the mystery of individuation, the challenge to become a whole person.

Furthermore, the journey of discipleship that is largely a journey acknowledging failure in a culture only honouring success and a journey confronting the consequences of denial on the path toward wholeness is similarly a journey illuminating the dynamics of individuation. The goal of integration is characterised in the apostolic experience of Christ’s resurrection (= Paul’s conversion, Peter’s call to carry on the work of Christ).

Doesn’t it add immense significance to this teaching about discipleship, by the way, that it is presented in the context of anticipating the death of Jesus as their leader? The significance is twofold. In the first place, in this journey toward integration we call “the Way” death and life cease to be opposites but become integrated in the person who learns how to live by “emptying” himself in this way (Philippians 2.7 again). The Gospel of John plays with this paradox of death as life in the ambiguity of the phrase “lifted up: “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself" (John 12.32). “Lifted up” refers equally to crucifixion and exaltation.

In addition, as the gospels tell the story of a journey toward integration that takes place within religious and political conflict that closely resembles conflict experienced in the process of individuation discussed above, the end of the story intensifies the fundamental paradoxes that have operated throughout the story. Jesus is crucified between two thieves. For Jung, this can mean, on the one hand, the collapse of the ego caused by the uncontrolled irruption of the dark side of the self, or the ego's submission to a higher and more spacious part of the self that is given the final word. In either option the ego seems to be "defeated", but the one option is the story of failure and the other the story of victory. Karl Barth described the crucifixion of Jesus between two thieves as a community that defines the first church—the kind of community Jesus intended, the company he wished to keep. In the eyes of the world it looks like failure. As the trajectory of “the Way” it is victory, it creates a new world that is unlike Caesar's world, and we are invited to do what Jesus did, finding our integrity in similar community.