Signs of Life

• Isaiah 65:17-25
• 1 Corinthians 15:19-26
• Luke 24:1-12
• Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24

 

One of the really strange things about this story I just read is that it features such minor characters.  Mary Magdalene and Joanna merit exactly one prior mention in Luke’s Gospel, back in Chapter 8, where there are a couple of verses about some women whom Jesus cured of diseases, or cleansed of evil spirits, who went around with him in Galilee and supported his mission out of their own means.   Mary the mother of James appears in this story here, for the first and only time.  And the men, the male disciples who have been Jesus’ chief companions, witnesses to his adventures, and foils for his teaching, are nowhere to be seen. 

Which, of course, is how they wanted to be.  When the chief priests and elders and temple police came to arrest Jesus, led to him by one of the twelve, the other eleven scattered and melted away into the night.  Except for Peter.  Peter tailed them furtively all the way to the high priest’s house, and even went after them into the courtyard, and sat down with them around the bonfire.  But when a servant girl recognized him as a friend of Jesus, he denied it three times.  This story epitomizes the danger that the disciples were in, in the aftermath of Jesus arrest and trial and crucifixion.  They didn’t know whether the authorities would be hunting down his known associates and get rid of them, too.  So Peter and the other disciples go underground.   

But it is different for the women.  The powers-that-be in Jerusalem would not have seen them as leaders who might take Jesus’ place at the head of his movement, or as teachers who would continue to spread his blasphemies.  They would have considered such activities to be the work of men.  So the women are left in relative peace to do the work that women do: of grieving; of caring for bodies, the living bodies of children, brothers, and husbands, of elders, and the bodies of the dead.  The people who killed Jesus wouldn’t give a second thought to some women going to his tomb.  Their concern is with maintaining their rule over the living, and Jesus doesn’t pose a threat to that anymore. 

So the women come to mourn, to take their final leave of Jesus, so that they can begin to move on.  But his body, that was to be the tangible presence of irretrievable loss, is gone.  Only the linen wrappings that shrouded the corpse remain, lying where he left them when he walked out of the tomb.  And the women see a heavenly visitation that lights up as clear as the dawn what Jesus had been trying to tell them all along.  They understood how he could only have accomplished what he had come to do by giving himself over to the servants of death, and so to rise in the fullness of life in the Spirit of God.  And these unimportant characters, who came from the margins of the story to pour out their grief on the stark proof of death’s irresistible power, go away from the tomb as the first of all, to bring news to the universe of the final victory of life, of love, of joy.

But first they have to go and tell the guys.  And no doubt they find the male disciples wrestling with urgent questions: Is it safe to go out into the city, or are we wanted men?  We could try to slip secretly out of town by night and go back to Galilee, but news about what happened here will get there before we do, and what kind of fools will we be, slinking home with our tails between our legs?  What was Jesus thinking, bringing us here, and what did we think was going to happen?  And what about the things we saw when we were with him, the things we did, and heard, and thought we understood—it all seemed so true, so powerful and real, but what are we to make of it now?  Should we even stay together, even try to carry on, and if so, who will lead us?  Who decides what we will do, and where we will go, now that Jesus is gone?

So while these important debates are underway the women burst in.  Breathless from running, faces strangely aglow, scarcely able to get the words out in their eagerness and excitement, babbling about an empty tomb, about men in dazzling raiment who asked them why they looked for the living among the dead.  “And don’t you remember,” the women ask, “how he told us back in Galilee, that he would be handed over to sinners, and die on a cross, and on the third day rise again?  Now it has happened, just as he said!”  You can imagine the awkward silence, as the guys look around from one to another, and then finally one of them clears his throat, and starts to speak: “So—like I was saying…”

At first the male disciples of Jesus took the resurrection story as the hysterical chatter of some grief-crazed women.  But then they began to see the signs of the risen Christ for themselves.  It wasn’t always easy for them to recognize him.  And that’s still the way it is, for us.  We still tend to think that the power of resurrection depends on what can be believed about what did or didn’t “really happen” to the body of Jesus in the darkness of the tomb.  And more and more, people don’t even care.  To them it is an idle tale, a quaint, outmoded superstition, a distraction from the important discussions about saving for retirement, or how to crush ISIS, or keeping the kids off drugs. 

But the approach to the resurrection that I try to take is to follow the lead of the messengers who spoke to the women at the tomb, when they reminded them of what Jesus was talking about all along.  Because all along Jesus talked about people who prefer for their god a hard taskmaster only they can please; a god of stern judgment, whose favor we can earn by working hard and following the rules.  We spawn a thousand myths to deceive ourselves about this god, not all of them what we would necessarily call “religious.”   But all these myths are self-serving, all view some other human beings as rivals and threats to what’s rightfully mine.  All justify coercion and violence in the name of keeping order, and exclusion in the name of keeping our selves pure.  All these myths demand sacrificial victims, and Jesus knew his enemies would make him one of these.

But he was also talking all along about a God whom he called “Daddy,” a God of unconditional grace and love; of boundless compassion and healing forgiveness, who continually makes the world anew.  Jesus talked about a God whose first and final word is “yes”, “yes” to the whole creation and to the goodness of life, who is effervescently present and active everywhere, like a mustard seed or yeasty dough, as abundant as a great catch of fish or a ripening field of grain, as simple and playful and open-hearted as a little child. 

And Jesus taught that this God sent him to laugh at the gods of death, and to show the world how they are overcome.  Which all sounds great in theory, but the worldview of resurrection is hardly second nature to us.  It has practical implications that cut deep across the grain, such as “love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, and bless those who curse you.”  Which is why we have places like this one here: places to come back week by week to listen again to the words and deeds of the one who had the mind of resurrection all along; places where we help one another to slip free of the snares of the idols of death, and discover again that the empty tomb is not an idle tale; places where we learn to see the signs of the risen life of Christ, as he left them for us—new birth in a bath of water, and a wedding feast of bread and wine—so that, little by little, we will come to see them everywhere.         

Songs of Justice

1 Samuel 1:4-20
1 Samuel 2:1-10
Hebrews 10:11-14 (15-18) 19-25
Mark 13:1-8

On Thursday morning I got a text message from Kate Klarkowski that her daughter Diana, who lives back in New York, had gone into labor.  Kate has checked in with me regularly as Diana’s pregnancy has come along, and each passing month has brought with it mounting excitement, but also relief.  Diana and her husband Kevin have been down this road before, only to end up in sorrow and disappointment.  But when I returned to from a walk to the store to get some things for my lunch, Jerry in the office had a message for me: Kate has her first grandchild, an 8 lb., 2 ounce baby girl named Frances Delaware.

This news made me think of another woman who finally got the baby she wanted—Hannah, the mother of Samuel.  Hannah’s husband tells her not to worry that year after year she is unable to conceive a child.  He loves her and favors her and thinks that this should be enough for her, but that is easy for him to say—he has two wives and the other has given him plenty of daughters and sons.   In those days people believed that the gift of children was in the hands of God, so Hannah goes to the sanctuary at Shiloh and prays fervently for the child she longs to have. 

She vows that if God will only grant her what she asks she will dedicate the child back to him, to live a life of special holiness and renunciation.    So Hannah gets her first born son, but this gift is not simply hers to enjoy.  If we read on in the story we find it is not a heartwarming family drama about Hannah and Elkanah and their cute little boy.  It is about Samuel, who goes as a child to live in the sanctuary of God, and his call to be a prophet, who goes on to anoint the first kings of Israel.

And Hannah’s Song is more than a psalm of thanksgiving for the granting of a woman’s personal request—it is a universal anthem of human liberation.  The God whom Hannah praises is not above caring about ordinary human beings, and Hannah’s heart exults in his strength, who in giving a child has restored her strength.  But beyond that she doesn’t make a lot of claims for herself.  She doesn’t thank the Lord for answering her prayers, or her rewarding her patience.  It’s more like she praises God for revealing once again just who he is. 

It’s not personal—God doesn’t play favorites.  This is just how he deals with the whole world, which he created and over which he rules with providence and justice.  Hannah is on top now, but that’s because she was on the bottom before, and she has to watch out not to get arrogant.  The Lord kills and brings to life, lifts up and lays low, makes poor and makes rich, and his justice is as immovable and as perfectly balanced as the pillars that hold up the earth. 

The Song of Hannah echoes in the words of another song of thanksgiving to God, the Magnificat of Mary in the Gospel of Luke.  And as we will soon be hearing, Mary is another a woman who has improbably conceived a child.  

But for Mary, like Hannah, this is not an occasion of merely personal joy—she sings of God’s mercy in remembering Israel, and his power to execute justice.  Somehow, Mary knows that her unborn son is an instrument of God’s judgment on the world, that in giving him to her the mighty are cast down from their thrones and the lowly are lifted up, the hungry are filled with good things, and the rich go away empty.  And this is in fact who the church confesses that Jesus is, the Son not just of Mary, but in the power of the Holy Spirit the Son also of Israel’s God, who’s will it is to restore the wholeness of the world, and free it from the stain of injustice and the sentence of death. 

He is the Christ, the anointed priest, prophet, and king of the world, and he will be its judge.  And in fact, as the Song of Mary says, his holy birth has already given us a sign of God’s judgment.  We are already in the last days, because the judge of the world has already come.  He dwelt among us, offering reconciling justice in words of grace and works of mercy.  He healed the sick, fed the hungry, confronted the mighty with their hypocrisy; he brought the kingdom of God within reach, and proclaimed that it belonged to the poor. 

And the world judged itself by rejecting him.  It condemned him to die on the cross, and so erected an indestructible sign of its own perversion of justice.  The vain pretensions of the human race to be able to straighten ourselves out—to decide for ourselves who is right and who is wrong, who deserves to get what she wants out of life, and who must suffer in silence—these were nailed to the cross with Jesus and lifted high for all to see.

But God is just, and God’s justice is mercy and forgiveness.  And so she raised Christ from the dead, as we will rise with him at the last.  God has heard the cry of the poor, has seen the tears of the mothers who have lost their children to violence, to starvation and disease, to drugs and suicide—and the tears of those who could not bear children.  God remembers, and in the end all will come to light, all will be restored, all emptiness filled, and all that hurts will be healed.  This is the work of Christ, the ministry of reconciliation for which he was sent, and which we who love the world long to see completed. 

So as we come to the end of another year the question comes up again—“When?”  How long must we wait?  Sometimes it feels like the world is going from bad to worse.  When we hear about the slaughter of civilians in Syria, Afghanistan, or France, and see the misery of migrants streaming across the borders of Europe or the United States, it seems to us that inequality and injustice, violence and destruction and pollution are rising to a point where something has got to give.  Something has to change, but we’re not sure whether to be hopeful about that change or to despair. 

And that is the really important question, more important than the question of “when?” (which, contrary to popular belief, neither Mark nor any of the other writers of the New Testament really cares about, or tries to answer).  We need to know whether the long arc of history really does bend toward justice.  We need to know if there really is some great purifying work of the spirit moving through all this suffering, or whether we are just beginning our descent into hell.  We need to know if all the trouble we see around us is the labor pains of our new birth in a new creation, or the death throes of a god-forsaken world.

The children who are born today will need, even more than we do, an answer to that question, because they will come of age in a very different world from the one that we were born in.  The masters of media spin tell us to measure this difference by our children’s immersion in digital media and mobile microcomputers.   But the truth is they face far more sober and painful adaptations—to stagnant economic growth and falling standards of living, to social and atmospheric instability, both of which are prone to break out in violence.  They will have to learn to do without the profligate use of fossil energy that fueled our free-wheeling lifestyles, and to do so quickly if they wish to have children of their own in a world worth living in. 

They will need to learn things we have forgotten about the power that comes up from the bottom, and the wealth that grows out of the land, and the wisdom of deep cultural tradition, that is hidden in communities of memory.  They might want to learn again about a God who created a world in magnificent harmony, who blesses it and calls it good, and entrusts it to us to tend and keep.   It will help them if they know about the justice of that God, who does not play favorites, but whose mercy is over all his works.  And they might like to know that the judge of the world has already come.  Our judgment of him was blasphemy, treason, and death.  His judgment of us is truth and forgiveness, indestructible life and love.