Last
week I had lunch with the pastor of a church in town whom I suppose one might
describe as a conservative evangelical.
Our conversation was cordial and wide-ranging, and when it was all over
I was left with two overall impressions.
The first was that this man was supremely confident in the purpose of
the church as a missionary enterprise.
He gave no sign of inhibitions or defensiveness about reaching out to
people with the gospel of Jesus Christ.
And I found myself admiring him for that, even a little bit envious. But he also seemed to equate the mission of
the gospel, somewhat simplistically, with converting people to the Christian
religion as he understands and practices it.
And so my second impression was one of rigidity, of a conviction that is
tied to the need to be right, to be certain, and to compel others to be
certain, of absolute and invariable truths.
The
resurrection of Jesus might seem to be one such truth. Either you believe it happened as an
objective fact, the thinking goes, or you do not, and therein lies the line of
demarcation between being a Christian and being something else. But in the stories of the resurrection in
the Gospels themselves, proving the certain factuality of the event is not the
most important thing. They are stories,
by and large, about subjective experiences that Jesus’ disciples had of encountering
him after his death. A common characteristic
of these encounters is their ambiguity; often they hinge on the question of
whether it really is Jesus, and how
the disciples will know that it is.
You
could say that the essential message of these stories is that the life and work
of Jesus goes on. The physical and
mental healing of the afflicted, the renewal of Israel’s faith and hope, the
restoration of covenant community that he accomplished through his words and
actions--these works are still underway, where Jesus is remembered and learned
from and loved. When we say “Christ is
risen!” we are bearing witness that the same life-giving power of God, which
was manifest long ago in Jesus of Nazareth, is still known, still active in the
human world on human terms in those who carry on his name, his story, his
Spirit.
But couldn’t
we say the same about any particularly wise, noble, courageous, faithful, and
loving person? We might imagine, on our
very best days that something like this could even be said about us after we’re
gone. We can hope to be remembered, and
that in the memory of others we would live on.
And if we have lived our lives well, perhaps the memory of us will give
some hope, encouragement, and inspiration to the next generation, or even the
one after that.
We
can certainly think about the resurrection of Jesus in this way. Under the influence of modernity, this is more
and more how we do think of it. But it
is hard to imagine the Christian movement exploding into the world the way that
it did if this were all that the resurrection really means. And the historic confession of the Christian
faith says that it is not. We say that the God of Israel, the creator of
heaven and earth, was involved in the life of Jesus in a unique and particular
way. God chose Jesus’ time and place for
a decisive intervention in the sacred history of his people. And with the Spirit of God guiding him, Jesus
gave that sacred story new power with his life, and broke it open with his
death, so it could become the sacred story of the whole world. It became the story of the transformation of
all humankind into the holy people of God, a transformation coming about
through the risen life of Jesus.
But
if Jesus had died at a ripe old age from eating a poisonous mushroom, as is
said of the Buddha, his resurrection might have been a stupendous miracle, but
it would not have made him Messiah and Lord.
It is not incidental to the exaltation of Jesus, or to the
transformation it initiated in the world, that the body that rose alive from
the empty tomb had been put to death in a gruesome public spectacle. It had been tortured and killed as an act of
terror meant to crush any idea of resistance to the power of the state. It was the resurrection of a victim, murdered
in a miscarriage of justice, in which the religious leaders of the people of
God were deeply complicit.
The gospel
proclamation of the resurrection of the crucified puts a particular stamp on
the mission of the church. Or at least
it ought to. But when you’re talking
about God’s decisive breakthrough into history, and about uniting the entire
human race in a single spiritual destiny, it is easy to slide into religious
imperialism. It is easy to think that we
Christians, or we, the true Christians,
are now in charge of the world’s transformation, which is something we effect,
by converting people to our religion, convincing them that we and only we can
possibly be right.
But to
say that Christ is King of Kings and Lord of Lords, the great victor over the
powers of evil and death and the final judge of the world, is only half the
truth. Because his is the victory,
through the power of God, of a victim; the victim of those who were certain
they were right. And the zealous
attempt to remake the world on the basis of half a truth is why, when you look
at the record of what has been accomplished so far, you see tremendous achievements
in humanizing society: hospitals, schools, and orphanages, music and art of
transcendent beauty, profound expressions of philosophical truth, movements of
social reform and emancipation; and also so much conquest and murder, so much
enslavement and oppression, so much rape of human beings and the natural world,
done in the name of Christ.
This
morning’s reading from the Gospel of Luke, describes faith in Jesus’
resurrection, not as a moment of decision, when we grasp the truth of a
doctrine and make it our own, but as a journey we make together in the company
of a stranger. It is a conversation
that begins not with an announcement but with a question: “What are you
discussing with each other while you walk along?” The disciples have no answer, but just stand still,
looking sad. So we might say the
resurrection faith is a conversation Christ begins with us when we are stuck,
at a standstill, when our hopes for God’s redemption and our faith in God’s
promises are disappointed. The stranger then calls the disciples’
attention from their own disheartening and confusing circumstances back to their
sacred story. Not to pick out texts as
proofs of Christian doctrine, but so they see the whole panorama of Moses and
the prophets from the vantage point of a God who is with his people in their suffering.
He
shows them a God who speaks liberation to the oppressed, comfort to the
afflicted, consolation to the bereaved, who speaks out on behalf of widows and
orphans, exiles and slaves, and the alien in your midst. And though the disciples still don’t
understand why, their hearts begin to burn with longing for the living presence
of this God. So when they come to their
destination, they press the stranger to stay with them a little longer, “for
evening is at hand and the day is past.”
He accepts their kindness (or is it their need?—maybe a little of both);
he comes in and sits down with them as their honored guest. And when he breaks bread and blesses it and
gives it to them, they know.
Their
minds go back to a hundred other meals at the end of a day of hard walking, to
rude peasant cottages and tax collectors’ villas, where Jesus was the guest who
became the host; how he blessed and broke the bread, and together they feasted,
a company of strangers from all walks of life, the not-quite-right and the
not-all-there and the too-much-too-fast and the too-cool-for-school. They remembered how those meals seemed to go
on and on, and nobody worried about the time, or whether the wine would run out,
but their hearts were light and their laughter was easy, and for those few
precious hours they were one people, brothers and sisters in the family of
God.
The
disciples in the house in Emmaus came out of their reverie, and saw that Jesus
was gone. But they knew he was alive;
and they knew that what they’d seen was not a memory of the past but a vision
of the future. And they knew what they were
supposed to do.
