What we see is glory

• Exodus 14:10-31; 15:20-21
• Romans 6:3-11
• Matthew 28:1-10
• Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24

There is something anti-climactic about the story of Easter.  It’s not like the Passion Story that comes before it: now that’s a story, the kind that bears telling and re-telling.  And we did that; we told and re-told the story of the Passion of Jesus, beginning last Sunday with a dramatic reading taken straight from the Gospel of Matthew and then re-telling and re-enacting, in traditional ceremonies of the church (locally-adapted, of course), the journey from supper at sundown on Thursday, through the long night of watching and praying in the garden, through the three hours of horror and sorrow on Friday afternoon, to the peace of Saturday morning, and the silence of the tomb.  It is a tragic story, but like all great tragedies it is cathartic.  It lets us feel the way we really experience the world a lot of the time but rarely get to express in community.  So there’s a way in which the betrayal, and trial, and crucifixion, and burial of Jesus feels like an entirely satisfactory climax to his story.

And yet if it ended there, it would not be the great story, the sacred story of two thousand years of religion, and music, of painting and sculpture, of drama, film, and literature, of the folk art and ritual of cultures from South Africa to Siberia, and Fiji to Guatemala.   It would not be the story that turns ordinary men and women into saints.  Not because it would be a sad story—the world is full of sad stories, and many of them beautiful—but because it would be only another sad story among so many.  The whole story of Jesus only becomes what is because of Easter.  But what kind of story does it become?   Does it change from a sad story to happy one?  Or from a true story to a myth?

Mary Magdalene and the other Mary run away from the tomb of Jesus not with fear and not with great joy but with both mingled together.  And this combination of fear and joy is what accompanies an encounter with what the great rabbi and philosopher Abraham Heschel called “the sublime”: that which transcends and radically calls into question our normal categories of experience.  Which is why it is essentially irrelevant to ask, concerning the resurrection of Jesus—“did it really happen?”  That is the question of a humanistic age, and its import is, “is this something we can fit into our conventional human story of reality?”  When you put it like that, the answer is clearly “no.”  But if the answer is “no; the resurrection does not fit into the story we human beings prefer to tell about ourselves,” it is because it is the answer to a different kind of question.  The resurrection comes into a human story, the story of Jesus and his disciples, but it is not our question to ask about that story.  The resurrection is the essential question that story asks about us. 

The story of Jesus and his disciples is our story, because it raises the essential questions put to us by our own existence.  They are the questions asked of us by being alive and being human: by our experiences of joy and love and healing, of freedom and forgiveness, and belonging in community; and our experiences of fear and hate, affliction and loss, of conflict and oppression and despair, of missing the mark, and being at loose ends.  These experiences, and the way they all somehow come together as the one experience of being alive and being human, also come together as a single question; a question that is bigger than we are, that we cannot answer and don’t even really know exactly how to ask. 

Reading the Bible is one way, our way, of entertaining that question, of letting it live, and work on us, so that we are not simply drifting half-asleep down our passage through this world being satisfied with our own answers to our own superficial questions.  For Christians the story of Jesus and his disciples is the crystallization of the question that the Bible asks us.  And in the story of the resurrection we find our answer.  And the answer is “yes.”  “Yes.”  The resurrection is God’s “yes” to the question of what it means to be human, a “yes” we can give in answer because we believe it was first given to Jesus, and then to his disciples, by God.

Just for that reason, faith in Christ’s resurrection is not a mental exercise, not a matter of convincing oneself that “I believe it really happened.”  We can believe that, but just as it is the answer to the question posed to us by our whole lives, it is an answer we must give with our whole lives.  That is why St. Paul urges us, in the Letter to the Romans, to understand that when we were baptized we died and were buried with Christ.   Which can’t have “really happened,” because here we are, alive.  So Paul must not be speaking to our rational intellects, to the part of us that asks and answers our own questions.  Rather he is speaking to the heart of our consciousness, to that inner image we have of being “I”, a person, unique and entire unto myself, who is alive and has a life story. 

And what Paul is saying is that to be “in Christ,” to really know and really live in God’s grace and spiritual power, it is not enough to accept the certitude of doctrinal assertions about Jesus.  It is not even enough to obey him as the authoritative moral teacher, and to attempt to practice what he preached.   These things are valuable and even necessary, but in and of themselves they are not enough.  Because what it really means to be “in Christ” is to surrender everything we are to God.  All of it—even that deepest, most essential heart of our being, that very sense of being a person who owns the copyright on the story of “me.”  If we give that up to God, with the nakedness of faith we see in Jesus, praying in the garden, “not my will, Father, but yours be done”; if we say “yes” to God with the abandon of love that we see in Jesus on the cross, we will get it back.  

It will be very like what it was before.  We will be the person we always were, the same weak, gifted, happy, sad, simple, complicated, stupid, brilliant, virtuous, sinful person.  The same mere mortal—only completely new.  We will be raised with Christ.  United with Christ.  “It is not I who live,” says Paul in Galatians, “but Christ who lives in me.”  And in Colossians: “You have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.  When Christ who is your life is revealed, then [who you really are] will be revealed with him in glory.” 

 

“The glory of the Father,” says our passage from Romans today, is what raised Christ Jesus from the dead.  Which is a curious way to put it.  Why the “glory”?  Why not the power, the mercy, the love, or the justice?   I think to understand what Paul is saying here we need to know that glory is not just one among many attributes that we assign to God by analogy to human characteristics.  The Glory of God is what belongs to God alone.  You could say Glory is God, because in so far as human beings can see God, Glory is what we see.  But what Christ’s death and resurrection renews in us is the knowledge that God does not keep his Glory to himself, but gives it away.   We may be looking upward at heaven, or outward at the earth, or inward at the uncreated image in ourselves, but if ours are the eyes of a heart that says “yes” to God, what we see is Glory. 

Mary Magdalene and the other Mary, arriving the tomb, experience it first as a kind of anticlimax, the emptying out of their expectations for how the story of Jesus will end.  But then, running away from the tomb with their strange new message, they meet the glory of God in person.   He greets them: “Hey!”—just the way one person would greet another on a bright spring morning on a garden path.  And they fall to their knees and prostrate themselves before him in the first-ever act of Christian worship.  But they also grab onto his feet, just to be sure.   

Instruments of death

• Ezekiel 37:1-14
• Romans 8:6-11
• John 11:1-45
• Psalm 130

One evening last week I looked in on my daughter’s room, and found her lying on her bed, watching a YouTube video on Meg’s tablet.  She’d finished her homework, and you might not be surprised to hear that, from her point of view, there was nothing wrong with what she was doing.  But obviously I saw it somewhat differently, because I went over to grab the device out of her hand.  She put up just the briefest moment’s worth of resistance before letting it go, and I took it out and put it in the living room.  Now to my mind, I was simply setting a limit, not meting out punishment, and I went back as if nothing unusual had happened and asked if she’d like to play a game, or maybe have me read a book aloud.  But she was upset with me, and, once the heat of the moment had passed I could understand why. 

Because, while grabbing away the iPad was hardly a blip on the scale of harm people do to each other, it was violent.  I didn’t ask; I didn’t explain; I just went and took it from her because I’m stronger than her and I could.  Of course I had my reasons, but violence always does.   And it is true that, as a father, I do have a responsibility for setting and maintaining appropriate boundaries around my child’s consumption of digital media.  Meg and I have standards around that stuff that are more restrictive than some parents we know, and less so than others.  Those standards have changed as our daughter has gotten older, and have become more complicated as internet-enabled devices have slowly but inexorably accumulated in our house.  Which explains how Risa and I had different interpretations of the rules the other night, and whether she was breaking them, or not.

But it doesn’t explain why my frustration boiled over the way it did.  Because it wasn’t really about her, and whether she was being disobedient.  As I thought about it later, tossing and turning at 3 and 4 o’clock in the morning, I could see that underneath my impatience and anger was a sense of helplessness.  It was a reaction to my feeling that digital information devices and the form of culture they represent and communicate, has become a power beyond my control.  It has invaded the most intimate spaces of my life: my home and my family relationships.  It has become a defining influence on my daughter’s development, imprinting the way she understands and interacts with the world, even to the point of shaping the physiology of her brain. 

And it feels like this is something I did not choose.  At the beginning of the sixth grade her school gave her an iPad and began requiring her to do most of her homework on it.  That same year her friends—and she has lots of those, who are very important to her—all started getting their own smart phones or internet-enabled mp3 players, on which they communicate outside of school by text message or video chat, and we knuckled under to the pressure and got her one, too.  And it’s not like her mother and I are Amish or something.  We have a land-line as an emergency backup and for the fax machine, but if it rings we know it’s a telemarketer, because no one we know has the number.  I myself would have to look it up on my mobile phone to tell you what it is. 

I access the internet from my laptop, or Meg’s infamous tablet, and I have to say, I find it a great convenience.  I like being able to instantaneously access the surf report, and the menu from Hector’s Pizza; or to renew my library books from the kitchen table.  I enjoy watching highlights on YouTube of the basketball game I heard parts of on the radio last night, and streaming my telenovelas (for Spanish-language learning purposes only, of course).  But on the nights when I look around my house at each one of us in a separate room, alone, on a different device, I don’t see entertainment and convenience.  I see erosion at the very foundations of what it means to be a society, and have a living culture.  I see death.    

It’s strange how the forces we harness and devices we employ to secure and enlarge our sphere of life become instruments of death.  The technological revolutions of the industrial age furnish no end of examples.  To take just one more, the automobile freed us from the crowded confines of the city, from the inconvenience of traveling on someone else’s schedule and rubbing elbows with strangers, only to exile us to sprawling cultural deserts devoid of common spaces, where nothing is within walking distance, or to trap us on freeways choked with traffic, pollution, and rage.  And now we come to find that the waste products of burning the fossil fuel that makes this way of life possible have so disrupted the world’s climate that we face the real prospect of extinction.

But this experience, of seeing what we intended for our benefit rebound to our destruction, is not limited to the sphere of technological “progress.”  This are just illustrations of what the Bible reveals as the universal tragedy of our existence.  The world is beautiful and good, and we were made to be sovereign in it, for our blessing and our joy; and yet somehow in taking hold of it and subjecting it to our control, it has twisted in our grasp.  The letters of St. Paul, and especially Romans, bear witness to a shattering realization: even the religious law, God’s gift to the Hebrew people, the seal of their covenant, the path of righteousness and peace to which Paul had zealously devoted his entire life, had become in human hands a hostile alien power of condemnation and of death.  

Death, in the sense that Paul speaks of it, is not the end or the opposite of life.  It is the shadow clinging close to every aspect of life itself, staining everything we create, all the good we do, all our best intentions and self-improvement projects, continually threatening to cancel them out, or turn them to unforeseen baneful consequences.  We were made for sharing the infinite life of God, and yet we continually try to grasp hold of and carve out a little piece of life to possess entirely on our own terms.  And to seek life that is not offered back to the giver of life, or to take power, without consecrating it to the source of all power, or to do work, even for the sake of the good, the true, or the beautiful, that is not conceived and carried out in the Spirit who is goodness, and truth, and beauty itself, is what Paul calls “setting one’s mind on the flesh.” 

And this fundamentally-flawed orientation to life, leads, sooner or later, into a trap—into being bound and gagged and imprisoned in the airless darkness of futility.  It is into the depths of this prison that Jesus cried, in a loud voice, “Come out!”  But before he did that, Jesus wept.  He wept for love of his friend Lazarus.  He wept with Mary and Martha, whom he also loved, and with the Judeans who had come down from Jerusalem to console them, some of whom were spies of the men who wanted him killed.  He wept with outrage and compassion at the whole sad, anguished mess that is human life under the tyranny of death.   And maybe he wept for himself, for he knew he would soon take Lazarus’ place in the tomb. 

Because calling one man back from the grave, even after four days, would not be enough to break death’s hold on the rest of us.   That was something Jesus could only do by meeting the powers of death head on.  Only he could reveal their sway over the world, at such cost to our hopes for wisdom and love, for justice, peace, and fulfillment.  It was up to him to pay that cost in full, in his own divine human person, and so to unmask the lies of the powers of death, and reveal their impotence.  But also to reveal, to the people who believed in him, the salvation that is coming into the world—a life so full of grace and truth that death cannot touch it, on either side of the grave.