can never know how the precious moments of early childhood shape a life. Influences come in and are buried so deep it’s hard to see the mechanism by which they wield their power. But I do remember sitting there at the chapel services each morning at Grace Church School, singing the hymns and reciting the prayers and, most of all, staring up at the soaring gothic arches of the apse. I loved the songs, but it was the architecture that communicated a sense of loftiness—the complex weave of columns, the biblical heroes looking down from the stained glass, the dark wood pews. I was living in a fairy tale, a land of timeless figures, hidden forces, chivalry, and infinite depth.
The first glimmerings of faith came to me architecturally—during those mornings at Grace, and then years later at Chartres. Grace Church is at Tenth and Broadway, near the Strand bookstore. It is in a normal, crowded part of Manhattan, and in fact Broadway bends to accommodate it. But to leave the sidewalk and enter the church is to walk into a deeper story. The Kingdom of Heaven is announced on the façade; you sink into a hushed reverence inside the door as the world falls away; you take the slow journey down the aisle and glimpse the heroes of the faith in the chapels and windows on either side. There’s the moment of illumination in the transept, as light floods in from all directions, and then, turning around, the glory of the rose windows. Grace isn’t a big church, but it seemed infinite to me.
I learned the Lord’s Prayer at Grace, the hymns and the liturgies, and of course I became acquainted with the story of Jesus. I sort of knew he was on the other team. There were lots of Jews at Grace then, and we didn’t sing his name when it came up in the hymns. In my memory the whole volume in the church would drop.
In its outline, the Jesus story is a pretty familiar myth, which probably recurs in all cultures: The city is riven by fractures, by cycles of vengeance and counter-vengeance. The only way to purge the hatred and division is by piling the sins of the community onto a scapegoat. It is by casting out the scapegoat that the sins of the society can be externalized and expurgated. It is by killing the scapegoat that unity is achieved.
Jesus is the classic scapegoat, the innocent outsider that all the groups could rally around in their bloodlust, and dump their hatreds on. The only thing that is different about the Jesus story—and it is a big difference—is that in this story Jesus came to earth precisely to be the scapegoat. He volunteered for this job, forgave those who executed him, and willingly carried the sins of the world on his shoulders. He came precisely to bow down, to suffer, and to redeem the world. He came not to be the awesome conquering Messiah that most of us would want, but to be the lamb, to submit, to love his enemies. He came not to be the victim of sin but the solution. His strength was self-sacrificial, and his weapon love so that we might live.
That’s a clever plot twist.
AMPHIBIAN
In my semi-secular world of Jewish New York, we put peoplehood before faith. We were living in the shadow of the Holocaust, so survival was not taken for granted. We celebrated effort, work, smarts, discipline, accomplishment, achievement. In the rabbinic tradition, the Messiah was associated with poverty, righteousness associated with the poor and the miserable. But that is not how Judaism is lived out in American culture. We were pointing toward accomplishment.
But the Jesus story was not about worldly accomplishment. It was nearly about its opposite. Jesus bowed down in order to rise up; he died so others might live. Christians are not saved by works but by faith. In fact, you can’t earn the prize of salvation, because it has already been given to you by grace.
In the Christian story, the poor are closer to God, not the accomplished; the children, not the prominent. The meek are the blessed ones—the leper, the wounded, and those who bear pain. Jesus was blandly uninterested in the rich and the powerful, who could have done him a lot of good and around which everything in the outside world revolved. He gravitated downward—to the prostitute, the outcast, and the widow.
In the story of my childhood, the pushy are blessed