The
first time I went to St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco it was
Easter morning. I’d just moved into an
apartment a few blocks from there, and, walking around my new neighborhood a
few days before I’d come upon the Anchor Brewery. And, right across the street, there was this
extraordinary building, looking like a cross between a log church from Siberia
and the Shogun’s castle in a Samurai movie.
A sign out front claimed that it was an Episcopal Church. Which was my brand, so to speak, at least it
had been for about a year-and-a-half, so I took note of the service times. And because it was right before Easter, I
decided to come the next Sunday.
I
showed up a little before 10 o’clock on Easter morning to find the place
strangely quiet. There were empty
parking spaces along both sides of the street, and the sidewalk the entire
length of the block was completely deserted.
The doors of the church were
closed, and the windows were dark. But
there was a small white paper sign taped to the entrance, and so I went up and
I read, “Our Easter service was last night.
You are invited to join us for an Easter picnic at the Southwest corner
of Jackson Park at 11 a.m. Sorry for the
inconvenience, and please come back again soon.” I was a little exasperated as I scrambled to
come up with Plan B, and I remembered that the service at Holy Innocents, the Episcopal
church near my old house, was at 10:30.
So I rode off on my bicycle across the Mission District thinking to myself,
“What kind of church doesn’t have worship on Easter morning?”
When
Mary Magdalene and Joanna and the other women from Galilee set out with their
spices at early dawn on the first day of the week, they went with certain
expectations. And they were
reasonable. It is reasonable to expect
that, when you go to a Christian church on Easter morning, there will be people
there worshipping, and in the same way, when you see a man publicly executed, and
you see his lifeless body taken down from the scaffold where he had been
hanged, and placed in a tomb, it is reasonable to expect that when you go back
to that tomb, his body will still be there.
One
can imagine that they set out for the tomb that morning with a sense of
dread. Perhaps they were anticipating
the pain of saying good-bye. Maybe they
were already starting to imagine the sight of their spiritual master, who had
been more alive than anyone they’d ever known, lying lifeless and cold. Maybe they were already weeping at the
thought of the marks of torture on his beloved body, as the raw memory of shock
and horror came flooding back. But they
went, hoping to do the only thing they could do for him anymore— to finish the
job of embalming his corpse. Now that
his enemies had finished using him for their public spectacle, the women went
to have just a few quiet moments to grieve together with his body, so that
their last memory of him would be one of reverence, and tenderness, and peace.
That
was all they were hoping for, but what they found when they got there was something
else entirely. There are really only a
couple of things I want to say about this.
The first thing is that the writers of the Gospels, in this case, Luke,
want us to take these women seriously.
Luke acknowledges that there will be skeptics—there were skeptics right
away, starting with the male disciples of Jesus. They came around pretty quickly, when Jesus
himself came and ate and drank with them.
But the women were the first, and their vision at the empty tomb was
enough to convince them. Perhaps when
Luke wrote this he was thinking of the skeptics in his own day, who no doubt
tended to be men. Does that remind you
of anyone?
This, of course, is a continuation
of a theme that you see throughout the gospels, but especially in Luke, about
how the wisdom that Jesus teaches is hidden from the wise and understanding but
revealed to babes—or women, or shepherds, or Samaritans, generally people whose
opinions were discounted. It is
interesting that it is just at this point, at Jesus’ resurrection, that these
women, who have been obscure, background figures up to now, suddenly emerge as
main characters. They even have
names. They were real people, Luke seems
to be saying, and the story they told was true.
And I think this has implications
for the way we think about Christ’s resurrection now. It suggests that a lot of the arguments that
have gone on over the past couple of centuries between male scholars and
theologians about whether or not Jesus “really” rose from the dead have missed
the essential point. I think these
arguments betray a lot of typically modern condescension toward the Gospel
writers, and the characters they portray.
To hear some of them you would think that people in the 1st
century had never had a warm, fuzzy, feeling about a dead friend—“You know, it
was like I could almost feel his presence, almost like Jesus was really
here”—and couldn’t tell difference between that, and what they were
experiencing now. There’s also an
anachronistic materialism that sometimes creeps into those arguments, as if the
disciples were saying “Wow—God reversed the auto-metabolic processes of organic
decomposition in implausible contravention of the laws of nature! Far out!”
No, the essential point about the
resurrection is that the people who were there knew it happened. And if I
were to paraphrase their proclamation for today, it would go something like
this--“ I just woke up from the worst nightmare. Just when I thought all the worst things I’d
ever thought and heard about human beings had been proven right, and just when
I thought that God had justifiably abandoned us to a never-ending downward
spiral of greed, hate, and ignorance; and just when it been occurring to me
that the bad guys will always win, and we might as well just give up on ever
having a world where justice is really done and peace actually prevails,
because people never will learn to love each other, and for all our promise
we’ll never have anything to show for it because our hearts our just too cold
and our eyes are just too blind, and our tongues are just too forked for
anything good to last—just then, at that moment, when I was ready to stick a
fork in it and call it done, something happened.
Something happened that turned that
whole picture completely around. It was
like the world I thought I lived in had suddenly turned inside out, and where
all I had been able to see was cruelty, suddenly I saw compassion. And where before all I could see was misery,
suddenly I saw resilience. And where
there was treachery I saw forgiveness, and where there was sorrow I saw joy,
and where before there was only death, suddenly I could see only life. And there was one little phrase that summed
up the whole transformation. It was the
truest thing I ever said, and as soon as I said it I knew that people will
never stop saying it as long as the sun shines and the sky is blue—Christ is
risen!”
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