“There is a husband and a wife. The husband committed adultery and came to me about it. It was possible for a confession to his wife to occur, and for there to be a true period of anger. But that was the beginning of a drama that ended with honest forgiveness and repair of a marriage. The preparation, the ministry in this place, laid the foundation for that man to come and talk, and for him and his wife to have the language of sin and forgiveness. And it was there for them when they most needed it. That is how I define success in the pastorate.”
The speaker is Walter Wangerin, Jr., for more than ten years the pastor of a small church in inner-city Evansville, Indiana. It is characteristic of Wangerin to view the reconciliation of a marriage in the terms of a drama. To him, all of life is dramatic and significant. Novelist Walker Percy has worried that people of the present are terminally nice: without conviction, void of passion.
Wangerin is a bones-and-blood antithesis of Percy’s terminally nice man. He is gracious, to be sure, but first and foremost charged with passion. Faith, story, ministry—all these things strike deep in Wangerin. Even as he speaks of them privately, behind the closed door of his office, he cannot help acting out the excitement straining at the well cap of his imagination. Any question, it seems, may promote a gusher. He leans back in his chair and hoists his feet onto the desk. He paces the room. He kneels. He puts a hand over dark eyes and clamps his temples. He modulates his voice with the intensity of Olivier at a command performance and uses rich, old, full-bodied words such as “mercy” and “unto.”
Wangerin has an easy and natural eloquence that has ripened with years of paying attention to words. As a child he read slowly, subvocalizing or silently sounding out each word (with Dostoevsky, “even those blamed Russian names”). It taught Wangerin the limberness of words and the rhythm of sentences. His adult life has been consumed with writing and speaking, as a radio announcer, a college professor of English, a novelist, and a preacher.
He has written several books, the most highly acclaimed being 1978’s The Book of the Dun Cow, a fantasy novel that won an American Book Award. His latest book is a diverse collection of essays, parables, and stories, Ragman and Other Cries of Faith. The Book of Sorrows, a sequel to the Dun Cow, will be published this spring.
Less visible than the writing, but undertaken with equal intensity, has been his ministry to the 200 members of Evansville’s Grace Lutheran Church. Television is the “cool” medium, and large, comparatively impersonal churches are part of a mass society; but for Wangerin, Christ is first of all “the truth you can hug.” “I cannot imagine ministry apart from relationship,” he says, and so finds the electronic or large churches personally unthinkable. When he preached at Grace, he stood and moved in the aisle, physically touching his parishioners.
Not surprisingly, Walter’s stories are populated with warmly characterized individuals: a boy afraid his mother will abandon him, a lunatic woman, a dying man who will not leave his living room chair. To read these stories is to care for the people they describe. It is to see that their author knows firsthand about service to Jesus when there is no wealth or health, and that he knows about the true riches of God’s creation and redemption. And to read them is to want to look that author in the face, to close his office door and provoke him to speak—something we did last October while Wangerin was still in the thick of his parish work.
In January of this year, Walter left the pastorate at Grace Lutheran, devoting himself “for a time” to writing and speaking. He especially plans to speak often at ministerial conferences. “I’m not quitting my ministry, but putting it on a new level—going out to present a face with my thoughts to pastors.”
Walter Wangerin was born in Portland, Oregon, the oldest in a family of seven children. His father was a Lutheran pastor and educator, and the Wangerins moved often, both in the United States and in Canada. Walter was shy, he says, and “had no ready means of entering society.”
My brothers were good at sports and used that to make friends. But I wasn’t good at sports. I had strong legs but they weren’t necessarily coordinated. In Canada, at the middle-school track meet, they always gave me the 100-yard dash. That was the garbage-can thing: “Those who can’t do anything else, let them run.” I would always come in last. Much later I tried to play baseball, and one guy hollered as I ran around the bases, “We don’t mind if you carry the piano when you run—just don’t stop to play it.”
I was much more comfortable with reading and writing. We had a bookmobile that came nearby every Saturday afternoon. I delivered papers. A good Saturday would be to finish delivering the papers, come home, pick up my books due, and walk to the bookmobile. In a Canadian winter, it gets dark early. It might have been only 4 o’clock in the afternoon, but the darkness was good because the bookmobile was lighted and the smell of books was very warm. It had the effect of the smell of fire, good hearth fire.
I would take four or five books home and eat supper, and then off came the dirty, stinking clothes, and I got into the bathtub and read for two or two-and-a-half hours. I left the warm water on, just barely: drip, drip, drip.
It was a natural progression from reading to writing. Someone else had written words, I’d write words. It was similar to children watching their parents take care of babies, then playing with dolls. I learned to type in third grade, at a Lutheran school in North Dakota. I remember typing stories on a little, beat-up German portable. I have this memory: Before my eyes is the story, and sitting inside the bathroom, on the other side of the door, is my mother. Every time I wanted to read a story to her, she had to go to the bathroom. I guess she didn’t want to hear the story. But that was okay, I read it through the door.
At age 14, after having lived in Oregon, Washington State, Illinois, North Dakota, and Canada, Walter entered a preparatory school for the ministry in Milwaukee. But upon finishing high school and college in the Lutheran parochial system, he decided he would be a writer instead of a pastor. The next step was Miami University at Oxford, Ohio, for graduate studies in literature.
At that point I don’t think I had a faith in God through Christ. I didn’t doubt the existence of God, but I saw no reason to be in relationship with him. As I look back on it, I see that I was involved in faith even then, that I was involved in faith even when it finally came clear in my head that God wasn’t important to me. In fact, I had taken a stride toward recognition of faith. I had stridden out of ignorance. I had thought I was a Christian because I had performed the rituals, because I had such wonderful knowledge of the faith. But I didn’t trust in God. I had stepped toward faith because I had come to be honest: God had not been significant in my life for a long time. I had a fine intellect, and I trusted it to be my creator. I had to fail and I did. Now I look back on that time and I say it was as painful as dying, and it wasn’t good. At the time, I said, “My God, this is as painful as dying,” and thought I was.
I began to suffer a deep loneliness that had no end, so deep that I could not name it unto other people. I had moved into a small town, Oxford, in which I knew no one. I lived alone in a one-room, efficiency apartment. I was at a secular school where I was fearful I wasn’t going to be smart enough. The banging of the radiator in the room where I lived was the only sound there. It snowed early that year. I quit going to church. All those things did it to me.
I tried things that were very natural. I made friends where I was. It didn’t help. That was confusing, because I thought loneliness meant that you needed community. I decided I was lonely because I couldn’t explain my parochial school past to the people in Oxford. It had no meaning to them.
So I went back to friends at seminary in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Again and again I went back to them. And yet, even when I was with them, I sensed pain, a separation. Then there was my class, the people I had spent seven years with in school, and most of them were at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis.
In winter, I got in my little Volkswagen in Ohio, and I drove all the way through Indiana and Illinois, and into Missouri, to see my class. I went to chapel, and a guy got up and preached about a Lutheran who had died a hundred years ago on that date. I was just hollow. As I drove back, I was past despair into desolation. I wondered, “What is this loneliness that my own class can’t fill it?” It was snowing. You know how close the windshield of a VW is to the driver’s face. It’s inches away, and these were great flakes showing up in my headlights. I drove all the way back to Ohio with snow attacking my face, falling lightly and then all of a sudden shooting toward the window. And I took it personally, which is strange. All those snowflakes were attacking me. It became symbolic of what I felt like in the world. I remember writing a poem after that: “Suddenly winter will have at you all in the dip of a small snowflake.”
Paralysis came in the spring. I had four papers to do and I had oral examinations. To say it very briefly, I couldn’t do any of it. I was teaching a class, and I would wake up in the morning and wouldn’t get out of bed. There were people who depended on me, but my being saw no purpose even in going to that class. I really believe all of this was because I had become my own creator, but I was incapable of creating myself. I was the prodigal son who had gone away with my gifts, without realizing that the Giver is infinite and the gifts are finite. I had gone through my gifts, and the world wasn’t going to love me.
At that point I began to pray. I hardly even knew I was praying. It was a two-word, impassioned prayer, going on always, “Love me, love me, love me.” A terrible prayer to have to pray. Finally I said, “All right, there is a God, and God is the Infinite.” That’s how God comes to us first: impersonal rectitude, impersonal infinity. This was the terrible thing about God; he was infinite and I was finite. But my desires, my will, my dreams, all were infinite. This was the image I had in my head that made me honestly hate God: God could be sleeping, and all he had to do was turn over in bed and let his arm fall out, and it would brush me and nearly kill me. Because it was God’s very being that condemned my being. If he wasn’t there I could pretend infinitude, because my dreams were infinite.
But as I say, I had four papers. I had to complete them within a few weeks in order to maintain my stipend, and without it I couldn’t afford school. It looked impossible. Who was “I”? “I” was a good graduate student. That was the only “I” there was, and it had failed. I was walking out of town and came across some sheep. I hated them because they were sheep. Someone had been quoted in Time magazine saying that all Christians were sheep. And when I read it I said to myself, “That’s true.” Now I saw the sheep and I hated them. My impulse was to run at them. Their bland faces and scared eyes were looking at me. I knew I could get at them, and I hated their weakness. At that moment a farmer in overalls came through the woods behind me and he clucked at the sheep, and they instantly forgot me. They turned around and followed the farmer. I no longer had power over them. I remembered Jesus’ words, “I am your shepherd.”
It was that that made it click for me. I didn’t fall down on the ground and worship God or anything, but I said in my heart, “You take it.” I suddenly didn’t have to pass the classes or anything. That I didn’t have to do anything was grace, although I didn’t know it at the time. And when I didn’t have to do it, I wrote the papers and passed the exams.
Eventually Wangerin landed at the University of Evansville, where he taught literature. A local pastor persuaded Walter to work as his assistant. It was in association with that assignment that Wangerin came to know Grace Lutheran Church, and finally to receive the call to pastor Grace full-time.
I began to work with Grace part-time in 1974. The church had lost its pastor, was reduced in number, and had an income of $8,000 a year. The members were thinking of closing it. They came to us and asked if we would shepherd them through a two-year period in which they would decide what to do about the church.
It’s a lovely thing to begin a ministry where the church is fearing dying. If you are about to die, you are willing to be baptized. You are not bound by all the old ways you did things. There can be death and resurrection.
I was about 30 years old, but scared of the inner city. If ever I had thought of being a pastor, I had thought of doing it in a rural parish where I could go into a corner and write and no one would care. But my fear and the church’s dying were good partners. It meant that I had to keep my eyes open and learn from everything that was happening. They were willing to try new things. So we worked well together. We became significant to each other.
After two years the question for Grace came clear: It was not so much “Should we exist?” but “Why should we exist here?” Why on this corner, in this neighborhood? People could go to a different church and meet Jesus. The whole issue of the Word and sacraments, which is important to Lutherans, was not our issue. No one would be deprived of the Word and sacraments if Grace ceased to exist. We had to make it a very specific question. This would be good for any church to do. The trouble is that even if a church does it, it is not under the gun and won’t do it with the same passion. Someone should hold a gun to your head as a church and say, “Why are you here?”
Grace Church, we decided, is here to serve the poor and the needs of this neighborhood. We recognized that we had resources in the congregation. We should stay here because there were talents and abilities in the church. We also had contact with the neighborhood. We had watched other churches move out. But not black churches—they were stuck here. The black churches could grow in importance, but they were stuck here. The white churches could move to the suburbs and care less and less for this area.
The members of Grace decided to keep the church alive, and they called me as its pastor. I asked myself then and have thought often about it since: What does it mean to be a pastor? In every denomination, ordination is special. Even those denominations that don’t call ordination a sacrament elevate certain individuals to represent certain things for them. Remember the Nazirites from the Old Testament. In Numbers 6, there is a law for the Nazirites. They lived differently from the rest of the population of Israel. They didn’t cut their hair, they ate certain ways, and so on. Their existence among Israel imaged Israel to itself. Israel was to be a people separated from the rest of the world and special. And so the Nazirite walking by was like the flesh-and-blood declaration of the personality of Israel itself.
We say in the church that the church is the body of Jesus Christ. Saint Paul meant that now, if you seek the flesh-and-blood body of Jesus Christ, you see it in the flesh-and-blood body of the members of the church. So, in effect, within the world the church images Christ. Even as Adam and Eve were made in the image of God, the church is made in the image of Jesus Christ. The church is the visible image of the invisible Lord.
Within the church are individuals who image the church to the church. These people are the pastors. They are those who are singled out as special—special in terms of preaching the Word in less liturgical communities, and special as dispensing the sacrament in more liturgical communities. There isn’t a church or community without there being special individuals who are responsible for special priestly functions or prophetic functions. They become significations or signs of the presence of God. And that means an awful lot.
The most dramatic way I can declare the presence of God to the people is by being something. And that’s what I mean by imaging: sometimes to hug the people and sometimes to be the severe morality that they’ve got to get around. So I’m not talking about me being moral; that goes without saying. I mean that sometimes I must demand morality of them and be ashamed of them. That is the worst part of the pastorate. I hate having to force them on to a morality when they should be doing it on their own. But I need to be ashamed of them. I don’t mean in front of the entire congregation. I mean face to face. And I don’t have the right to be ashamed of anyone until first we love each other. I can’t come in like a prophet or like some beady-eyed preacher and consign someone to hell. That’s easy; that’s nothing. We’ve got to love each other before my shame means anything at all to that person or will call that person unto shame.
That’s imaging Christ. That’s bringing them into the drama with their Lord, because Jesus can be ashamed. It’s hard for him to tap them on the shoulder and let them look into his face and see the shame there. So it has to be in the human face. I come and I am ashamed until they are as well. And out of their repentance I have the ability to do another thing, to say, “God forgives you.” My face shows forgiveness, and that makes real or images forgiveness. People know that God accepts them for what they are. But I just heard their sin, I just heard something terrible about them, and they expect the preacher to turn away from them. But I don’t. I still love them. I image what is the source of my love, which is Jesus’ love.
Following the success of The Book of the Dun Cow, Walter’s reputation spread. He was asked to teach at colleges and seminaries and, inevitably, invited to pastor larger churches. But he stayed at Grace Lutheran.
I could never envision a call apart from these people. And now I say that I could not envision a parish ministry apart from these people. My whole concept of parish ministry is shaped and colored by their shapes and colors. I couldn’t get into it except that there was flesh, and I can’t now imagine it apart from the flesh that I know, if that makes any sense at all.
It took me a long time to get to know these people. For me, it’s exhausting to be that open. You have to know not only the parishioners, but their extended families, in case of a crisis. Early on at Grace, I got a call from the hospital. A young woman in her twenties was dying. I walked into the hospital room and I recognized her grandparents because they had been in church. Her mother I barely recognized: she had been at church once or twice. The young woman was in intensive care, and the hospital was working to save her life. I walked in, and her husband was at a desk with his head down. He lifted up his head—a total stranger to me except that I saw the fire in his eyes. And the father, whom I had never met, was also there. I walked in and I was supposed to do something. I felt cheap and tiny. I didn’t know if I had the right to touch them or to read a Bible passage or pray or talk about the football game. I sat for four hours in pain and kept saying to myself, “Never again, never again. Never am I going to walk into a crisis situation and not know these people.”
So a large church? No, never. Even when I preach, I’d much rather preach to these people in a small building, where I can touch them. Sometimes I’ve been frustrated and thought about going back into teaching. I’ve gotten feelers from other churches. But I always concluded, this is it.
The people of Grace Lutheran have made me understand Isaiah 53, the Suffering Servant passage. We in the Christian community say that finally it applies to Jesus. And I look at these people, especially the older ones who are close to dying now, and I see them to have suffered and to have baptized suffering itself into something effective and good. Not only did they endure without bitterness, they endured with love. When their suffering was baptized—black folk, I’m talking about black folk underneath racism—when they endured and loved anyway, they not only baptized their suffering, they baptized those who hurt them.
Of course, not all of those who hurt these people would hear forgiveness. But if they would, if they had the heart to hear forgiveness, it was there for them. I just saw the capacity there for it and then I understood Jesus, the suffering Servant: “By his stripes we are healed.” In that sense they ministered to me: they preached, they interpreted Scripture to me. They offered me a theology out of their gut, out of their black skin.
They also ministered to me and my family as community. I think pastors fail when they do not allow their parish to forgive them, when they are not vulnerable before the parish and will not indicate they need forgiveness. That’s the wonderful thing about telling stories on yourself. I don’t mean when you’re in the midst of it, not when you’re actually involved in some kind of sin or terrible thing; you don’t want to suck parishioners into the middle of a storm. But after it’s done and passed, the dear thing is that they come up and forgive you. You have given them the ability to communicate the grace of God to you. And that effects community.
Finally, they minister to me because two of my children are adopted and are black. Matthew and Talitha have a sense of their blackness not from me, but from the black people of Grace.
Soon enough, Wangerin was involved in aspects of the ministry that were less appealing, but necessary. Those included jail visitation and occasional sessions at the city council, to plead the case for neighborhood poor.
When I go to jail, I’m scared. I’m scared of the guards. And it stinks in there. The prisoners are dangerous. I don’t mean that they’re going to cut me, although sometimes that’s the case; most often it’s not. I mean they are emotionally dangerous. They play the feint game, dangerous games that suck the emotion out of you. The easiest thing in the world would be for me to go in there and preach a sermon, in the worst sense of that word: give them a formula and leave myself out of it.
“You must believe in this, Jimmy,” I could say. Say “you must” and I’m free. Throw the formula out and it’s between Jimmy and God. But the prison demands me. Above all, prisons and hospitals scorn formula. They show how flat formula is. It doesn’t work. So what’s left? Me. Relationship. In other words, it’s not the formula that stands between Jimmy and God, it’s me who stands between Jimmy and God.
The beauty of fiction, of stories, is relevance. Fiction sets up truths. It sets up truths and allows the freedom of response. Pontius Pilate looked Jesus square in the eye and said, “What is truth?” Pilate couldn’t see it: Jesus was the living truth. Pilate had the answer, and the answer was flesh and blood. He could have put his arms out and hugged it. We repeat Pilate’s error. We don’t want to put Jesus in front as a living thing. But that’s how it is and that’s what story allows. It allows Jesus to be there as a living thing, standing and gazing into our eyes.
Working here gives me a perspective, but not one I’m happy to have. It’s a painful perspective, that human nature is not in its essence good.
I don’t just mean that across the street there lived a woman to whom men went regularly in the evenings. I don’t just mean that I walked out of this church several years ago and was propositioned by a prostitute, until she found out I was a pastor. I don’t just mean that—that I see the downside of human nature because a woman propositions me or because I see a man on the side of the road vomiting blood, I mostly don’t mean that.
I mean that I look from the downside up at the systems of the world: governmental systems, economic systems, class systems. From the topside down they look good, they comb their hair very well. From the downside up it doesn’t look as good. I want not to see that. I would rather not see the sin of those systems because it makes my life and the life of my children a most mortal thing, a most haphazard thing. I would rather not see from the downside up because then I see how powerful evil can be. I would rather not see from the downside up because I know many of the people who are participating in it. I like them. I don’t want to be a prophet. I hate to be a prophet. I would rather just like my country peacefully, in this city. I really would rather just like it instead of love it.
So there are all kinds of reasons why I would rather not see from the downside up, and I know that apart from this place, this church, I would see it from the topside down. I would see its combed hair, its fine dressing. I’m not saying that those things aren’t true, that they are merely hypocritical. From the topside down, you do see the truth. It’s just that it goes to the surface. It doesn’t exist down in the dregs, down below. Here, I’m forced to keep the perspective of Jesus. I’m forced to see the world the way that Jesus saw the world and not, in my sin, to lose that vision. That’s another reason why it is terribly, terribly good to be here.
The Book of the Dun Cow is filled with natural imagery and has as its main characters a rooster and a dog. So, as his readers might guess, Wangerin doesn’t spend all of his time in the city. Several months ago he was in the Cascade Mountains. Some fellow campers asked him to tell stories.
I had a manuscript with me and started reading it. I got three-quarters of the way through the manuscript before we had to break it up. There was an American Indian woman there. She came up to me, crying, and she gave me some reasons why that story spoke to her, why she identified with it. Then she said, “I sat and I watched the hawk. I watched the hawk circle in the air above your head as you told that story.” She gave me a stone, which she called an Apache tear. It was a black, smooth, and translucent stone.
So I think of the hawk and what the hawk has to say. Or, more particularly, what animals have to say about the nature of God unto us. And how few of us with civilized eyes can read the hawk. This Indian woman read the hawk. She saw something that I believe was the truth, and she changed it into words and tears and a stone in order that I might be able to understand. This is not a metaphor I am telling you. This is the truth. God speaks to us in these animals, and the native Americans know it. That’s not them making up a false religion. That is them hearing the word of God through a hawk or through a bear or a wolf. We don’t see it and don’t listen to the animals, and so a great amount of the word of God is lost.
I don’t mean the Word, capital W, Jesus Christ, but the word, small w, communication from the Creator unto his dear created. God is not nature. But he dwells in it, and nature gives him praise. When the hawk circles as the hawk was taught to circle, it is praising the God who created it and who set that law there for it. Some of us will say, “I am going to shoot the hawk,” and think we have triumphed. Others say, “I have no time to watch the hawk.” Others of us have time but no feeling to read it.
We who do not hear the voice of God in creation and in the animals, we may come to the truth of Jesus Christ, but we do so by a narrow ladder. We don’t hear all that God said first that ended in the name of Jesus. On the other hand, the native American—or a friend of mine, a Zimbabwean who was not all of his life Christian, but was a so-called primitive—these people came to Jesus Christ by a mountain, not a thin ladder.
After the success of The Book of the Dun Cow, Walter was often asked to speak on university campuses. There he found a curious thing. The students regarded writer Wangerin as a priest; they had less respect for the pastor Wangerin.
When I go to the campus as a writer or storyteller, I am a priest, by which I mean a mediator. They look to me to give them peace. “Tell us a story,” they say, and they sit down like children. And when I tell a story I mediate between their anguish and bewilderment to some sense of peace or understanding. I bless them. I give them forgiveness. I give them life again.
When I go as a pastor, I come on the campus as someone who, they believe, thinks he has all the truth. My truths are considered to be definitional, to put boundaries on reality, and those definitions not only lock reality in but lock the students out. The students are kind to me, but they assume I know nothing. They assume I’ve had no experience. If I go as a writer they assume that I’ve gone through all the torments, all the anguish a prophet should go through and, I mean, I’ve suffered. And not only have I suffered, but I’ve survived in order to write, and I’ve come to some sense of hope because writing is always putting disorder into order.
It makes me sad for pastors who don’t have the alternative of speaking as a writer. These perceptions make me angry at the churches and previous pastors who have projected this kind of image, the image that they’re not really involved in life. It gives to pastors an air of never having seen that people have sexual parts, that people shoot drugs.
On the other hand, it also makes me angry that, on the college campus, sin is considered to be the real world. What those students are doing is revealing how they view God and goodness. It’s as if they are saying, “Goodness is in itself a plausible philosophy, which, under different circumstances, we might consider. But the world itself is not good.” That saddens me for what it reveals about these people: that they do not know what the cross means, what Jesus saw from the cross. He experienced the real world from the cross: more foulness, more filth, and, if that’s what reality is, more reality, more dog eat dog, more dog eat God than they can even begin to imagine. If they put Jesus anywhere else besides on that cross, they have the wrong Jesus.
I do not in the name of Christ first see one who is triumphant and is standing with one foot on cloud and one foot on earth. Now, as Saint Paul says, Christ is highly exalted. But that exaltation did not precede his bodily suffering and death. I get very uncomfortable when I see churches speak Jesus’ name merely in triumph, merely as a trumpet blast to use in identifying their Christianity as something that always must win victory according to worldly terms. I’m uncomfortable with Christians and Christian systems or communities that believe they are of God because they are happy or because somehow or another they are triumphant in the world’s terms. To love God means to suffer. Christ is not Christ except that he suffered on the cross, and Christ cannot be followed in triumphalism. Triumphalism says, “No more sickness, only health.” And the Christians who believe it put themselves behind protective laws and protective cars and houses and protective theologies, and they do it all in the name of Jesus. Then they say, “I am saved by the triumphant Jesus.”
But Jesus hung on a cross and he calls us to take up our crosses, he calls us to service. I become passionate about this. Why? We evangelize the world. On the one hand is the Christian who bears the cross on his back and looks broken, and is scorned by the secular world. On the other hand, someone stands up straight and smiles and is rich and protected and announces that you do not need to hurt. To whom shall the world go? To the one who says God wants us to prosper, that’s the one. And what angers me is that when the world goes to that one, it leaves Jesus.
The gospel is the word that Jesus transfigured suffering so that we can witness unto the world the powerful message of Christ. After Jesus, suddenly suffering was not futile anymore. It was extraordinarily important. Jesus didn’t say we would not suffer. He said, “You will suffer but I will go before you.” And he gave an example of how to suffer. Read the Gospel of Mark and see with what dignity he allowed the spit and the whip. He was an example. He goes before us, which means that wherever we are, he is there too. “Remember what happened to me,” he says. There was a resurrection. For Jesus, the resurrection is in the past. But for us the resurrection is in the future.
