You Can’t Change What Happened

But what happened doesn’t have to stay the same

CW: general reference to trauma and traumatic flashbacks

You can’t change what happened.

Of course you know this. Everyone knows this. And yet, who doesn’t struggle to accept the harsh reality of the unalterable past?

A loved one dies, and death is as real as the pulseless corpse in the coffin. And yet, what mourner hasn’t tried to bring the dead back to life through bargaining?¹ Or for trauma survivors, memories may haunt during both night and day, as the deeper subconscious seeks to triumph over evil and survive unharmed and unscathed, even if only in the act of remembering.

We remember. We are remembering beings, and so much of our remembering is involuntary and unwanted as we struggle for control over the past. Even though we can’t change what happened.

However, we can change the meaning of what happened.

Far from some postmodern constructivist therapy, I believe this is one of the profound implications of the resurrection we just celebrated a few days ago. Because of the resurrection, we can re-read our stories and find new meaning. I say this on the basis of a theme from the Gospel of John, that the resurrection provided the “hermeneutical key” to the life and deeds of Jesus.²

What in the world was Jesus doing?

Imagine being one of Jesus’ followers and going up with him to Jerusalem during Passover, when all of a sudden he makes a whip and forcefully cleans house in the temple. How were they to understand that at the time? John the Baptist described Jesus as “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” (1:29). But shortly after that, in a very unlamblike fashion, he violently takes away (same Greek verb in 1:29 and 2:16) all of the lambs and oxen, the air filling with dust kicked up from cloven hoofs. Can you imagine how shocked the disciples must have been? Watching someone display violent anger normally activates the threat response in the nervous system, especially when there is an element of surprise and confusion. I can imagine the disciples’ hearts beating faster, adrenaline pumping (especially Peter! Cf John 18:10), but with nothing to do but watch, they just had to feel the anxiety as one box of money spilt bright flashes of sun onto the ground, and then another, and another, each clang of a chest on the ground causing their hearts to jump in their own chests.

On the basis of John 2:17 and 22, the disciples didn’t understand what happened in the temple that day until after Jesus rose from the grave:

John 2:17 And his disciples remembered that it is written: “Zeal for your house will consume me.”

John 2:22 So when he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this, and they believed the Scripture and the statement Jesus had made.

Richard Hays points out that John is “teaching us to read Scripture retrospectively, in light of the resurrection.” He also calls this “reading backwards” and using “retrospective imagination”.³ What happened in the temple that day is what it is, or was what it was. The facts were, and remain, unalterable. But reading backwards, the disciples understood the true and deeper meaning of that anxious memory. Not only the prophetic zeal that Jesus displayed, but the enigmatic and probably disturbing words of Jesus, “Destroy this temple, and I will raise it up in three days.” They didn’t know then that Jesus was referring to his own body, and that his act of cleansing the temple promised so much more for the future than the fleeting sound of bleating sheep and lowing oxen.

With a little imagination, we can see how stressful this event would have been for the disciples. Apart from the light of the resurrection, those who were present in the temple “perceive[d] only the surface literal sense and miss[ed] the hidden christological meaning.”⁴ For the pre-resurrection disciples, the literal sense was the stressful sense, where stress hormones impair memory and require Spiritual intervention (ie, capital S by the Spirit, not to the exclusion of common grace means).

Where in the world was Jesus?

Such is also often the case for our own stories. We suffer, endure harm, cause harm, harm ourselves, and get stuck on the “surface” of our stories. That is, so long as we remember them on the plane of mere human-historical existence.

As Hays put it, “resurrection is the enemy of textual literalism.”⁵ If we read our stories literalistically, as if each word has one and only one meaning, we will remain stuck in stress. If the resurrection is not true, then what happened is what happened. But if Jesus died and then did not stay dead, if his heart stopped beating and then started beating again, then the past is not simply the past. The nail scars on the dead body of Jesus were not the same as the nail scars on the risen body of Jesus. The former would lead to an entirely different interpretation of the unalterable fact of his crucifixion on a Roman cross. The latter, however. . . Where do we even begin?

As the risen Lord, Jesus is not bound by space and time. The Spirit who mediates the presence of Jesus in the present (John 14:17) is the same Spirit who teaches us this way of remembering the past (John 14:26).

It is on this basis that a counselor or spiritual director can guide a person through a painful memory and picture Jesus being present in the past. The aloneness that is the hallmark of trauma cannot be erased, but it can be transfigured. To play with another line from Hays, we can read our stories “figurally” and, with the aid of “figural imagination”, imagine the figure of Jesus in our most painful and lonely moments.⁶ In the light that shines from the face of the Risen One, this is not fancy, but fact. Jesus was there, though we were unaware, though we couldn’t believe, though all the forces of darkness forced any hope from his saving presence out of those events.

Unchanged and Changing

Again, this doesn’t change what happened. And yet it does. Reading backwards in light of the resurrection, we discover additional and deeper meaning of what happened. I cannot declare that meaning to you, or even to myself. Better to leave that to the work of the Comforter (with the help of trusted friend, spiritual guide or counselor):

[12] "I still have many things to tell you, but you can't bear them now. [13] When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth. For he will not speak on his own, but he will speak whatever he hears. He will also declare to you what is to come. (John 16:12-13)

I can’t declare to you the transfigured meaning of your story, resting as potential energy waiting to be activated by the Spirit. But I write to emphasize the resurrection as “the hermeneutical clue that decisively integrates…[our] entire system of meaning formation.”⁷

It is presence that integrates. As Bonnie Badenoch so helpfully put it,

“[T]he essence of trauma isn’t events, but aloneness within them. Who we perceive as being with us before, during, and after an event is central to our ability to integrate the trauma throughout our embodied and relational brains.”⁸

But what if, before, during, and after a trauma, we were never truly, finally or lastingly alone? What might happen to the meaning of our stress-trapped memories when remembered in that light? This kind of remembering is not easy, nor is it quick.⁹ To say what goes without saying, reading this post won’t work any magic. But I hope it offers a measure of encouragement, that the “deep magic” of God which reinterpreted the cross of Christ can likewise reinterpret the crosses of your past.

Quote from Eric Johnson

“[U]nited to the Son according to the Father’s will, the stories of believers have been—and are being—divinely incorporated into Christ’s story. As in Augustine’s Confessions, they are now to renarrate their own story in light of Christ’s by faith. Everything in their story now has to do with the story of Christ—their relationships, their sufferings, their victories, and their defeats.”¹⁰

Question

Where do you feel the need for some retrospective reading in your story?

1 As defined by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, “bargaining” is an attempt to negotiate with the pain of loss, often in the form of “what if” questions, ie, “what if [I had done this or that], then maybe the accident wouldn’t have happened and they would still be alive.”

2 Richard Hays, Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels, p. 3, p. 312.

3 Hays, Echoes of Scripture, pp. 311-312.

4 Hays, Echoes of Scripture, p. 311.

5 “resurrection is the enemy of textual literalism. Or, more precisely, resurrection reconfigures the literal sense of Scripture by catalyzing new readings that destabilize entrenched interpretations: the resurrection stories teach us always to remain alert to analogical possibilities and surprises.” Richard Hays, “Reading Scripture in Light of the Resurrection,” in The Art of Reading Scripture, ed. Ellen F. Davis and Richard Hays, p. 234.

6 Hays, Echoes of Scripture, p. 312.

7 Hays, Echoes of Scripture, p. 3_._

8 Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships, p. 25.

9 “[R]ecovery from past suffering is a slow process, sometimes taking years, to work through past trauma and present damage, again and again and again, until one’s story has been renarrated frequently enough that one deeply believes it is more heroic than tragic.” Eric Johnson, God & Soul Care, p. 263.

10 Johnson, God & Soul Care, p. 144.