Being Re-Membered

Remember.

It’s a strange word.

Remember. RE-member.

On one level it’s a word about what we do with our minds. We re-call or re-visit a promise we made, a memory we cherish, or a task we need to accomplish.

But on another level, it’s a word that means to put something back where it belongs. If you take the word at face value, it could even mean the gruesome task of the surgeon who reattaches an arm or a leg.

That’s some of the most brutal, ugly work one can do. Sewing skin. Restoring blood flow. Repairing nerves. Connecting tissue.

It’s funny then, in a terrifying kind of way, that Jesus takes a piece of bread on the night we call Holy Thursday and rips it, saying, “This is my body; do this and remember me.”

First of all, if you saw something like that, there is no way you would forget it. He ripped it. Bodies are not made to be ripped. The language used there implies “torn from their sockets.” [1] There’s no forgetting that. Even if it was just an illustration. Which it wasn’t.

It was a scary time then. It’s a scary time now.

So much feels dis-membered. People are being ripped away from their families, many are having their life’s work torn from their shoulders, and the rest of us are walking around in our houses aimlessly trying to find the security that was wrenched from our grasp by googling how to make a face mask from an old pair of jeans.

There’s been a lot of talk about grief, and that’s appropriate. But what a lot of us are dealing with first is this feeling of being “torn from our sockets.” Our very bones feel like they aren’t speaking the same language any more, and any movement seems to invite pain and danger, even ones that a month ago were considered easy or normal.

COVID-19 has revealed a lot about us in that way. Negatively, we’re tempted to a way of life where anyone or anything can be the enemy. There’s no way of knowing. So we cope the best we can by numbing ourselves with Netflix, scouring the internet for answers, blaming others for doing too much or too little, and generally just trying to move around with a soul that feels like it went skateboarding with no pads or coordination.

Positively, it seems we all might be coming to terms with the fact that we are all more connected than we thought. Turns out, even our very breath affects those around us.

Thinking too long in this way is scary for an independent, Roth IRA invested, Westerner because it means we don’t stand alone on our own merits. But the flip side of that is we don’t stand alone on our own merits.

Isn’t that the gospel? What if this virus is showing us that we were already sick before it came on the scene? What if what we are grieving now is not just all the ways we feel torn and ripped from our way of life, but all the ways we are now beginning to see that we allowed our way of life to tear us apart from each other? To say nothing of God.

To that end, Jesus invites us to the painful and brutal process of re-membering. Of reattaching ourselves to things that matter.

But this is not outpatient surgery. It’s no small thing to reattach an arm. Much less a soul.

And the truth is many of us won’t want to do it. Judas didn’t.

Remember that Judas was with Jesus for years. He saw miracles and storms and crowds. He heard parables that stumped religious geniuses. He heard Jesus speak to a dead man who became alive. He heard demons leave their tormentors with only a word. He heard the greatest teaching and the best thinking.

In spite of all that, there he sits. Mind made up. The God of the universe, whose hands shaped the curvature of the mountains, now caresses and cleans the feet that will soon walk out of the door and betray him for the rough equivalent of $600.

But as Judas sits there, he doesn’t look evil. His head isn’t spinning around and he isn’t spitting green vomit. Instead, sitting there, he looks, strangely enough, like us. Like you. Like me.

Maybe then, as we are re-membered, we might not just ask, “How did Judas end up here?” but also, “How might I end up there?”

How might I have traded the most beautiful and holy things for mere dollars and cents? How might I have seen and heard the work and the word of God and turned away?

This is a great and terrible truth: that if I haven’t been Judas yet, I will be.

Times like this reveal where we put our hope, and I’ll just speak for myself, but sometimes we find it isn’t where we thought we left it.

This one fact might cause you to jump up off the operating table, but don’t.

It’s there we also re-member this Jesus not only washed Judas’s feet, but he called him friend. And not in an ironic way. He meant it. Even then, I think, Jesus wanted to pull Judas close. To graft him back into the fold. To return him to himself and to others.

This is what Jesus does with his other betrayer, Peter. Both Judas and Peter betray. But only one believed that Jesus could put him back together – that Jesus could re-member him.

Medical terminology refers to this painful process of limb reattachment as re-planting. Like a tree half ripped loose from the earth by a storm, life can flow again through even the most damaged limbs if the roots are restored soon enough by someone who knows what they are doing.

But it’s painful.

Confession: I don’t believe in the kind of God who would send a virus to make a point. But I do believe in a God who can bring healing out of even the worst things imaginable. Could it be that God is re-planting in the midst of this storm? Giving us back to each other? To ourselves?

If Holy Thursday teaches us anything, it’s that Jesus is in this re-membering business. The business of putting souls back together that have been torn apart by grief and fear.

In the end, he does so because he too knows what it’s like to be ripped apart from his life, his family, his friends, and God. That’s what that thing with the bread is about. How mind-boggling that someone would choose such profound pain and somehow overcome even death with love?

Jesus re-members because he was re-membered.

And that’s a God worth remembering.

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[1] The Lexham Analytical Lexicon of the Septuagint, “klao.”