On Class Fairies and Resurrection

Thus says the Lord,

“I am about to create new heavens
and a new earth;
the former things shall not be remembered
or come to mind.
But be glad and rejoice forever
in what I am creating;
for I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy,
and its people as a delight.” Amen. (Isaiah 65:18)

This morning I want to try to explain what it means to say that Jesus died to save us, and describe the shape of the Resurrection in our lives. There will be very little that is original in what I am about to say and I hope nothing unorthodox, although the WAY in which I say it may seem unusual to some. Here, I will borrow an insight of James Alison, who argues cogently that Jesus saved us by becoming the equivalent of the “Class Fairy.”[i]

You all know what I mean by the “class fairy.” In my elementary, middle and high school years in Indiana, his name was Michael Clark. Michael (never Mike – that would have been far too butch) was a little guy with glasses. He didn’t quite lisp, but there was a certain hurried, superior, smarmy tone to his voice, as in “I don’t know what you are talking about.”

Michael was smart, but he couldn’t throw a baseball to save his life. He sang well enough, but walked with a little swish. It was actually painful to watch him run. He never caused anyone any harm, yet he was the kid who got pushed around on the playground, was always picked last when choosing teams, and was forced to endure whispers of “faggot” – or worse – when he walked down the halls.

I realized early on that Michael served a very important purpose. He occupied the place of shame in our social world so that the rest of us could feel normal and acceptable. He reinforced our sense of being right and good by defining for us what it meant to be bad and terminally “uncool.” We needed Michael very badly. Our sense of identity and security depended upon him.

While I never teased Michael to his face or threatened him like some others did, I quietly mocked him and treated him with contempt to reinforce my own sense of belonging to the “in crowd.” Being class fairy was a kind of impurity, and I didn’t want to be tainted by association. I didn’t want to get anywhere near the place of shame that he occupied.

“Now, nobody goes voluntarily into that space of being cursed,” observes Alison. “The person who is put there feels all the pain and shame of ostracism, of being cast out, of loss, of different forms of death. It feels like being destroyed, and that’s exactly what it is. There is absolutely nothing redeeming about such suffering, pain and loss: the identity which the group is giving that person is one of nothingness and death. Any of us would do anything we could to avoid such a fate, including making . . . sure that it’s someone else who occupies that space in our group, and if that fails, then we are pushed kicking and screaming into that place and are destroyed by it.”[ii]

I was certain that if I were to be under the same curse, occupying the space of shame in which Michael lived, I would die. As far as I was concerned, Michael was dead. He was socially dead and on his way to literal death. After all, who could survive under such conditions?

So things were left there when we graduated from high school. I was sure I’d never see Michael Clark again. Fast forward eight years. I’m finally making my first tentative forays into accepting myself as a gay man, albeit a very closeted one. I’m in a gay bar in Chicago and who do I run into but Michael Clark. I’m nearly speechless with surprise (and shame at being discovered); oddly enough, he doesn’t act the least surprised to see me.

But what really astonished me is that, while I’m all tied up in knots with fear and shame, he is completely relaxed and welcoming. Not only does he not throw my hypocrisy in my face, or hold the past against me in any way, he doesn’t even seem aware that I’ve done anything wrong: all that is forgotten. Instead, he is excited to invite me into becoming someone entirely new, free to occupy the place of shame in which he has been living with a complete sense of peace, freedom, and even joy.

I thought the place of shame was a tomb and that I would find Michael Clark’s dead body there. But the tomb was empty. Here he was, standing in front of me, happily employed raising money for a nonprofit and happily married to his hunky blond husband! More than that, while I had fled from the place of shame to Chicago, Michael was just visiting. He and his husband had bought a house on the same block where he had grown up in our hometown. He was no longer defined by the place of shame; in fact, he was redefining it in light of the new creation that he was becoming, someone loved and loveable with a tremendous capacity for compassion and forgiveness.

Thus says the Lord,

“I am about to create new heavens
and a new earth;
the former things shall not be remembered
or come to mind.
But be glad and rejoice forever
in what I am creating;
for I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy,
and its people as a delight.”

Now, what I want to suggest to you is that God comes to us in Jesus to willingly occupy the place of shame. Rather than being the one who justifies our normal way of creating human identity and morality with good and evil being defined over against each other so as to set up insiders vs. outsiders, pure vs. impure; rather than offering blessing and curse; rather than being a god who requires sacrificial victims; God comes to us in Jesus in solidarity with outsiders, the impure, society’s victims, as one who protests the usual way of constructing human identity and security at the expense of others.

In his life and death, Jesus reveals to us that with God there is no curse, only blessing; no condemnation of sinners, only forgiveness and the opportunity for new life; no sacrifice, only mercy. By occupying the space of shame freely, without fear or resentment, but peacefully, gracefully, and openly, Jesus demonstrates the vulnerability of God. Through his death on the cross, Jesus saves us by making it possible for us to see that our vulnerability can give rise to compassion and therefore healing; our vulnerability doesn’t have to be the source of fear and shame giving rise to rivalry, violence, and death.

God comes to us in Jesus to transform the space of shame, so that it no longer need define us as insiders and outsiders, which is a nice way of saying oppressors and victims. In his Resurrection, Jesus takes the form of the forgiving victim, allowing us to acknowledge the mendacity of our dependence upon class fairies to give us meaning by showing us our complicity in the mechanism of curse, yet without condemning us. The Resurrection takes shape in our lives as we come to accept this forgiveness and no longer seek to define ourselves over against anyone or anything; accepting instead the identity that God is giving us as a people loved just as we are, just because we are and not in terms of anything else.

As we come to participate in this new identity that God is creating, our former way of life, formed by the space of shame, is forgotten. It doesn’t hold any power over our imagination. We are too busy delighting in what we are becoming, too preoccupied with the joy of sharing in God’s great project of healing the world, to be defined as, or over against, the class fairy.

This was the great gift that Michael Clark gave to me, good Catholic boy as well as class fairy that he is: the sense that just maybe I could occupy the space of shame with Jesus, and transform it from the inside out into a place of creative and compassionate potential for becoming human, becoming vulnerable as God is vulnerable. Maybe the place of shame, of crucifixion, could actually lead to Resurrection.

Thus says the Lord,

“I am about to create new heavens
and a new earth;
the former things shall not be remembered
or come to mind.
But be glad and rejoice forever
in what I am creating;
for I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy,
and its people as a delight.” Amen. (Isaiah 65:18)

[i] See, for example, James Alison, “the place of shame and the giving of the Spirit” in Undergoing God: dispatches from the scene of a break-in (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 2006), pp. 204-209.
[ii] Ibid, p. 204-205.