Project 2025 and the Jesus Project: How I Live in Hope and Joy While Being Afraid and Pessimistic

The cross killed the Jesus Project. Jesus had a mission – to right Israel to faithfulness to Yahweh alone – which is to say to find and keep peace by distributive justice through non-violence, and it, he, failed.

He had to wait to be raised from the dead.

So do we.

But he never wavered in the project.

But all our projects of salvation fail.

But the salvation of God project, the Jesus Project, is all that matters.

But we will fail in it and with it.

But God will not fail in the salvation project.

He is raised! Resurrection!

The Project of God that is Peace by Distributive Justice Through Non-Violence that is Jesus did not fail and does not fail.

There are other salvation projects that are socially and politically demonic. Like Project 2025. There are other salvation projects that are personally and spiritually demonic. Like religions that demand a behavior or belief.

 We can join the Jesus Project but doing so means it will kill you not only once, but twice. Not only in one way but in two ways. It’s as if to make sure we are dead. Totally dead (and I figure that’s so because resurrection actually only works on dead bodies, not live bodies. By definition. Think about it).

 Totally dead.

 One, the first death, all our efforts, agency, work, accomplishments, alignments and correctness mean nothing to God. They mean everything in and to the world, but nothing to God. They get us nothing with God even as they change, literally, the world. With God it’s God who does the deciding and choosing and God decides and chooses us based on God’s heart and mind, not ours. And, miracle of miracle, God says yes to us, not no, no strings attached. All our life is dead to God. All our life is alive in God.

Two (and this is what Martin Luther called the second death, the easy death) is that you will (likely) suffer physical, emotional, financial, relational and vocational harm because you are doing the Jesus Project things. The reason the severity is easier than the first death is not intuitive. In fact, most think it the hardest and steer away from it. And I think that’s because they have not suffered the first death. Once you have suffered the first death, once you have suffered God (check out Luther in the Heidelberg Disputation of 1518 saying that we only know God in suffering and the cross, wherein he was speaking of the first death, not the second*), the second death is, well, secondary. Still real, to be sure, but not as hard to take when the first death has actually and already occurred (this is why religious martyrs can be, and often are, calm and serene as they are led to the gallows).

 So, there you are, in the Jesus Project and you are going to die. And you do. First Death, done (Baptism is the ritual delivering this and making it experiential. See Romans 6). Second Death: well, we’ll see how it goes and maybe nobody gets hurt (but not likely).

 What happens now?

 I think Jesus had the exact same question and had to wait to find out. And find out he did! He was raised from the dead! Jesus (and his Project) live! People ran around excitedly telling others “He is Raised!” and feeling like because he was raised they were too!

 But before they knew it he was gone. Poof! Gone! But he did, before he left, give them all some marching orders to continue to live their lives in the Jesus Project Way. The Way of Peace>Distributive Justice>Nonviolence. But then, gone, and as if to put the fine point on the truth of living in the Jesus Project (“following Jesus”) means death (those 2 ways) and resurrection (waiting around eternally for God to complete the Project), Jesus has never been seen again. Gone.

 Perhaps you can see how being a Christian means attaching ourselves to Jesus’ Death and Resurrection and not being spiritual or religious or moral ourselves. In fact, that attachment does the killing of our salvation machinations. It means being attached to the Jesus Project and not another Project, not even a very religious one. And it’s realizing it’s Jesus, ahem, God, who makes the attachment.

 Let me close by reminding us where I started: God will not fail in the (Jesus) Project. We will fail, but God will not fail. We live in and by the Jesus Project and though we fail in its accomplishment, God will not fail, and it will be, and is, accomplished in Jesus Christ.

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*I cannot say this without calling to our attention just how critical it is to understanding the nature of faith. It is pivotal. It is crucial (“crucial” = cross! How’s that for an appropriate word of description of importance!) But because Luther in his writing here in the Heidelberg Disputation is working to mark the difference between what he calls the “theologian of the cross” and the “theologian of glory,” Luther uses the term “cross” when he speaks of the two killing agencies (“suffering” and “cross”). Luther is accurate here and in “cross” he is using that word “cross” as short-hand for the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, but I think in order for us not to implant our usual thinking about “cross” (cross as being “Jesus died for my sins so I can go to heaven”) to this phrase concerning how we come to know God only through “suffering and the cross” we need to change out the word “cross” and replace it with “death.” So, we get this: we only know God through suffering and death. There is some major surgery that needs to be done here, removal of two cancers if you will, that needs to happen in order for us to get at what this means. First, take out of the meaning of this finding of God any reference to a Jesus’ action we believe did something to save us and that we can now believe we can believe and it saves us. Secondly, take out the also very normal and popular understanding of “knowing God only by suffering and death” that says this “suffering and dying” is something we are to do, as in martyring ourselves either by the prosaic (bringing cookies to our neighbors) or the profound (throwing our body over a grenade for our fellow soldier or standing up for justice and getting taken out for it).

I turn here to Gerhard Forde’s work on this. He writes,

“In the face of all this, the claim here is that it is only through suffering and the cross that sinners must be able to see and come to know God. So theologians of the cross must be able to speak honestly and forthrightly, to ‘say what a thing is.’ This is the deepest reason why we call the Friday of the crucifixion good. Bu now we must be careful. What is meant by suffering here? It seems obvious that Luther does not mean just physical pain. He himself experienced much excruciating pain during his life, but never to my knowledge does he identify that pain with the suffering worked by the cross or use it to make claims for himself as a sufferer. For Luther the sufferings of the spirit, the pangs of conscience, the terrors of temptation (Anfechtungen), were always more agonizing and serious than the physical pain he also knew well. Even physical death, though heartrending enough for loved ones, was a far lesser matter than the kind of death experienced when the wrath of God assaults the sinner. So the suffering Luther has in mind first and foremost is the result of God’s operation on the sinner. One can find reference to that throughout his writings (sic: Luther’s exposition on the Psalms 1-22 from roughly the same time as the Heidelberg Disputation). The suffering Luther has in mind is something God inflicts on us just by virtue of the fact that [God] moves against the presumption of our works. [God] is out to do it all. We suffer this unilateral action of God. We suffer because we don’t like it. We don’t like to be put out of control.”

(On Being a Theologian of the Cross: Reflections on Luther’s Heidelberg Disputation, 1518; 1997, p. 86)

Once we are assaulted and insulted by God because in life we have to just sit or stand here and take it with no response but trusting God to do the right thing no matter what, we see the extent of our dependence on God and see, now, just what faith is. We don’t even have the regular go-to options of Stoicism (“I am going to respond to the vagrancies of life by grinning and bearing it”) or Epicureanism (“I am going to respond by eating and drinking and sex or whatever else I can name as my self-fulfilling pleasure”). To trust God means all options for us are dead.

Once here we can re-insert the word “cross” in place of “death” in the phrase “suffering and death.” It can go to what Luther wrote: knowing God through only “suffering and the cross.” We can re-insert it because now in reference to Golgotha and Empty Tomb we are stating that what took place there was not some supernatural swooping in by God to beat down evil with some kind of substitutional sacrifice or victory over physical death or even show us the path we can take to glory (those three classical understandings of what happened in Jesus’ death and resurrection, the three “atonement theories” of the ages). What took place there was the definitive death of all our glory roads and the resurrection of God alone. We know this because the crucifixion of Jesus was the end of his glory road and his resurrection was the celebration that all glory roads end and the only thing standing alive is God’s glory road alone and God, the God of Peace Through Distributive Justice Through Non-Violence, that road, will not be denied. Note: we still live and die and that’s it. Only God reigns. Do we believe this? If yes, the party has begun! If not, we can be the party poopers and go over to the corner of the room where there is only, as the Scripture describes it, “weeping and gnashing of teeth.”