It was bound to happen: we all go through
that narrow door which swings wide for us.
My friend got there first, a little out of breath,
surprised, no doubt, how easily it opened.
I had hoped to catch him, having glimpsed him
in the crowd ahead. “Friend!” I called out,
as the traffic clattered past, but he was farther
up the hill and would not have known my voice
from sixty years and a continent’s divide. As in
a dream I saw him move, but I could not move.
As in a dream I called out, but I could not make
a sound.
We change from moment to moment,
but not that we can see. Green leaf to brown
while we are not looking. Then winter’s
pale light and bare ruined choirs.
We see that door in front of us, our hand
raised to knock. We hear the footsteps
coming up. A voice behind the door
calls out our name. We are home.
”A person exists to be the agent of creative goodness. When we thus create goodness we are both ourselves raised from the dead and also the agents to others of resurrection.”1
My memory of the resurrection of the dead cannot be separated from paintings I saw as a child. Whole families were climbing out of their graves together. They were dressed like they were going to church and all of them had smiles on their faces. Some of the little ones were still standing in their graves, transfixed by the apocalyptic maelstrom swirling around them. Many other people were already drifting skyward, arms upraised, legs trailing, drawn like iron filings to a magnet.
The sky above them was all towering clouds of blackness shot through with bolts of lightning. In the far background were the hapless wicked, lashed by meteors of fire and stampeding from gaping fissures opening in the ground beneath them. Skyscrapers were toppling and bridges snapping, but in the center of the sky, encircled by clouds of angels, was Jesus — crowned, sceptered, and majestic.
Let us say here that no artist can come close to what Resurrection Day will look like, although you can’t fault one for trying. The illustrations I saw were from the fifties and early sixties, and they faithfully preserved glimpses of that era. There’s a poignancy in such depictions: the artist paints his own longings for an ascension in his lifetime, with his friends and neighbors all aboard, most every one White, genteel, and self-assured.
Now I am comfortably agnostic about the details of Resurrection Day. Even St. Paul is vague about it. He spends more time warning about the suddenness of its coming than he does on what will then transpire. Those of us who are alive, he says, will be caught up in the air to meet the Lord. First the righteous dead, then us. And we’ll be with God forever from then on. It’s a message of encouragement. That was over two thousand years ago.
But I’m more interested in how people live after Easter. Emotionally speaking, for the disciples Easter weekend had all the charm of terminal cancer followed by a massive heart attack. And then, just when numbness turned to mourning and they could not finish any sentence that began, “Let’s ask the Lord . . .”, just then they were thrown into a new world where the air was so crisp and clean they were left gasping and their views of reality clearly had to be reverse-engineered.
The death and bodily resurrection of the one you love most in the world pretty much runs you through the gamut from fear to tears to awe and then tears again.
The reason this matters is that we see the disciples having time to get to know the post-resurrection Jesus. There was the report, duly discounted, by the women who met him at the tomb. There was the encounter by two disciples with the stranger on the road to Emmaus. Then his appearance in the locked upper room. Then later, meeting him on the beach in the early morning, after a long night of futile fishing. There was time, in other words, to remind yourself that everything about your life had changed because the Lord had risen from death. And he was right here, in the flesh.
For us, it’s different. Come Monday morning, we’re staring at the computer screen between meetings and wondering when our parents will get their COVID shots. The joy of Easter morning has faded and we’re feeling like the whole thing might have been a sacred ritual that has lost its meaning. Or even a beautiful, dark, tragic illusion. How do we live forward in the reality of a future two thousand years in the past?
The resurrection of our lives here and now does not lift us out of the daily grind or magically thwart all pain and disease. We won’t live in a bubble henceforth that reroutes hurricanes or turns floods aside. Those things may still happen to us; what matters is what we perceive and how we respond to the grit and the blows.
Let’s set aside the practical mechanics of bodily resurrection after death. God knows, whatever such resurrection is, molecular biology and neurophysiology won’t penetrate the mystery. If that is what’s ultimately preventing our trust in God it would be better to pluck out that eye than to continue blind to all that transcends the empirical.
What, then, is resurrection? Given our skepticism and our fear of being scammed, how do we recognize resurrection after Easter? Because there is no resurrection without a crucifixion, those who are daily resurrected are well acquainted with crucifixion. And if, like St. Paul, we find ourselves dying daily we are yet assured of a daily resurrection.
It may come to us quietly and without warning. Like much of our experience with God, we’ll be a step behind in recognizing the green shoots of new growth in our lives.
When we have burned our bridges before we get to them, and yet find in the destruction the soft breeze of forgiveness, that is resurrection. When we have focused all our efforts to achieve a goal and still have fallen short, but a wider range of possibilities opens to us, that is resurrection. When an artist tries to create a thing of beauty and cannot translate the image in her head to the canvas before her, she feels a failure. But then a new courage arises in her from somewhere and the old inhibitions fall away. She wields her brush with confidence and the image emerges. That’s resurrection. When a person has agonized about the forced options he is faced with and then inexplicably finds peace no matter the outcome, that is resurrection.
Resurrection in this life raises us above our fears and creates in us channels of goodness to others. When Jesus cries out that “streams of living water” will flow out from those who trust him, that is resurrection in action. When he promises us life and that more abundantly, that is resurrection in defiance of crucifixion.
Lent leads us prayerfully through a thoughtful self-examination up to Easter. And Easter gathers up the shards of brokenness that result and points us toward a new wholeness. It’s not dependent on whether we summit the emotional peaks, but on how we traverse the valleys below. “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me.”
***
On Easter morning the women make their way through the streets before dawn. They are going to the tomb to do for Christ’s body what could not be done in the haste to get him down from the cross. Even though they have no way to roll the stone away, they trust that something will work out, that someone will help them. They know that doing so will put them in danger. But they go ahead. Respect, courage, love—all those combine to compel them forward. Resurrection has already begun in their hearts, although they have no name for it yet.
Williams, H. A. The True Wilderness. Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse Publishing, 1965, p. 12 ↩
“I know this happiness is provisional: . . . but ineluctable this shimmering / of wind in the blue leaves.”1— Denise Levertov
“Jesus wept.”
The shortest verse in the Bible and the favorite of middle-school children who are required to memorize a Bible verse. Why he wept can easily be conjectured: his friend Lazarus had died. An urgent summons had come, but Jesus dawdled, deliberately, it seems. He and the disciples were across the Jordan River, not far from where John had baptized Jesus. It was a prudent move: he had barely escaped a stoning outside the Temple for blasphemy. The crowds found him, hailed him as being everything John had said he was and more. “Many came to believe in him there.”2
When the messenger arrives, Jesus assures the disciples that “this sickness will not end in death; it has come for the glory of God.”3 So, although he loves Mary, Martha, and Lazarus, he holds on, he stays in place for two days. This is either a consummate folly or a breathtaking high-wire act of faith.
When the devil took Jesus, famished and weakened, to the pinnacle of the Temple, and invited him to fling himself out over the city because the angels would bear him to earth as lightly as a feather, Jesus retorted that God is not to be tested. This life is not a circus act. But now, knowing that Lazarus will surely die, Jesus waits. His time is coming. If he would not tempt Death for himself, he is willing to defy it for a friend. After two days, Jesus says to the disciples, Let’s go. Time to waken Lazarus from sleep. Ah, they say, he’ll be alright then. No, says Jesus, he’s dead. This will be good for your faith. Let’s go.
But the disciples remember how close death came to Jesus the last time he provoked the powers that be. If he goes back this soon, those who want him dead will definitely finish the job. “Are you going there again?” they ask incredulously. Anyone can walk in the daylight, argues Jesus. The real test is whether you can walk in the dark without stumbling.
There was darkness ahead, without question. And Thomas, patron saint of doubters everywhere, breaks the open-mouthed silence. “Let us also go, that we may die with him.”
Bethany is two miles from Jerusalem. They are there in less than an hour. “If you had been here,” says Martha sorrowfully, “my brother would not have died.”4 And some standing nearby wondered aloud why he could open the eyes of the blind but had done nothing to keep Lazarus from dying.
***
It is after Easter, but I am thinking about death. Not so much death as dying, the myriad of individual droplets of experience we call “life” spinning down into the whirlpool we call death. I am thinking of the violent, hallucinogenic dreams survivors of the coronavirus have endured. They were swept out in that riptide, far from shore; somehow, they find themselves once again emerging from the surf. I am wondering how they re-enter the life that has stuttered along in their absence. On their return from that hellish dreamscape, what will be most precious to them? How will they live with the gaps and absences in their timelines? These dislocations will change them—our friends, our neighbors, our families.
I stand pensively in the April afternoon sun, trying to memorize the tint around the back petals of the tulips in Brookside Gardens. I want to recall this moment years from now, when a scent or a certain cast of light brings it back. I want there to be a moment to bring back.
How strange it is to walk within a glorious spring day in Maryland, soft with yellow light and bright with flowers, while thousands of people fight for their lives—and thousands more risk their own lives for them. We have not seen such an indiscriminate killer in this country for years. It is “As if a man should flee from the face of a lion, and a bear should meet him: or enter into the house, and lean with his hand upon the wall, and a serpent should bite him.”5
We are in one of those social earthquakes that lay bare our fault lines, when the tectonic plates shift under our feet and upthrust the strata of neglect and callousness that future societies will judge us by. But we see, in addition to the sturdy bravery of our best—the nurses, respiratory therapists, doctors, and scientists—the quiet endurance of the grocery clerks and delivery people, postal and sanitation workers. The social divides and the rampant inequities are exposed; we see with new appreciation the people whose daily efforts define the normal we belatedly cherish.
Later, at home, I pick up a memoir by Joyce Carol Oates, A Widow’s Story.6 I am wary, for she writes prodigiously—not just in the number of her books, but through the style and mood and the enveloping weight of her words. Her eye omits nothing, even as she writes of her confusion in grief.
She writes of how her husband died in hospital a week after being admitted with pneumonia. He seemed to improve, so she left his bedside to catch a couple of hours of restless sleep at home. They called from the hospital deep in the night; they were urgent but cryptic.
She races to his room. A doctor tells her there was nothing they could do. She is in freefall. She is in a parallel universe. She sees herself across the room, a sobbing figure, crooked with grief. Who is this person? When she crosses the threshold of his room, she crosses an equator to a hemisphere she will never leave.
I wanted to experience through her how she brought these two halves of her life, marriage and widowhood, together. How did she see them; first with one eye closed and then with the other? Like every person suffering the death of a loved one, she learns while grieving.
It seems to me that Jesus learns this too, that his confidence on Wednesday ebbs into grief on Sunday. No matter how we prepare, the death of one we love is a gut-punch.
Jesus stands before the tomb and weeps for his friend, already four days dead. He weeps for all humans who die and are dying. And he weeps for himself, for his own dying, which he knows is up ahead. He has meditated on his coming death since Lucifer promised him he wouldn’t die. He knows it will be public, violent, and humiliating. Raising Lazarus will be the last straw. The machinery to kill Jesus will whir into action.
***
If Jesus raised Lazarus, why can’t he prevent the COVID-19 victims from dying? Wrong question.
Raising Lazarus is a sign of wonders to come. Jesus does it as a warning and a blessing. In John’s Gospel, Jesus heals, forgives sins, feeds thousands—all signs that we might believe that God sent him. The raising of Lazarus is a sign too, a sign that death will one day be vanquished. It is a test case, a finger pointing to the moon, a “first-fruits” as the Bible says.
Do you wonder what Lazarus was thinking when consciousness returned? As a dream fragments on waking, slipping through our fingers as light and sound envelop us, so he must have struggled at first in panic when he found himself bound in a winding-sheet. Then he is surrounded by faces—his sisters, Jesus, his neighbors and friends. He is confused, somewhat embarrassed, but he cannot prevent the upsurge of surprise and relief and then joy unabated. When our loved ones die, when we are dying, Lazarus is a living pledge of wonders still to come.
“This is the heart of this story: the essence of all things became part of existence—subject to change, decay, and death, just like us.”7 As much as the die is cast and his fate is sealed, Jesus sees beyond his own death. He bows his head and weeps again for relief, gratitude, love abounding.
“Here we discover the answer to perhaps the biggest question of all: why is there something rather than nothing? The answer is, because essence—or God, as we usually say—always intended to be our companion, to be with us . . . Jesus is the whole meaning and purpose for existence in the first place. Jesus is the reason we exist.”8
Agnostic as to the how, of the resurrection, I am all in for the why: it is God’s way of making sure we’ll be with him forever. And although my imagination bleeds out when I think about the afterlife, I’m going on record to say it will be a feast for the senses and a jolt to the mind. To say nothing of love and friendship. And when dying inevitably comes between us and this Narnia, God will see us through it with equanimity.
Levertov, Denise. “Of Being,” in The Stream and the Sapphire: Selected Poems on Religious Themes, New York: New Directions, 1997, p. 5. ↩
”Be content, be content. We are the Body of Christ! We have found Him because He has sought us . . . There is nothing further to look for except to turn to Him completely, where He is already present. Be quiet and see that He is God.” —Thomas Merton1
It is sometimes said that there are two kinds of Christians: the ones who live for the Crucifixion and the ones who live from the Resurrection. The main difference between them is their terminus point, what Aristotle might have called their telos, the meaning and goal of their lives.
The Crucifixion people are concerned with judgment and their salvation. The Resurrection people are ready to permeate the world like salt in soup. There have been millions of crucifixions without a resurrection; there has only been one Resurrection with a crucifixion. Resurrection people stake their faith on defying those odds.
Most of us are brought up to be Crucifixion people. We are told we are born in sin, that sin corrodes even our best intentions, and that this enormous burden of sin has estranged us from God. Our sin results from breaking God’s law and it’s in our very nature to break it. Since the irreversible penalty for breaking the law is death, and since not even God can make an exception, we are doomed. We broke it, we must pay for it. But God has provided a way out for us by sending his Son, Jesus—a perfect sacrifice—to die in our place. The Law’s demands are met, and we are saved—until we sin again.
It’s all contractual, with obligations and penalties, demands and responsibilities. There is a coldness here that runs to the bone. There is an unspoken, but deeply felt understanding between the parties involved that because we can never adequately repay God for the sacrifice made, that we are forever in debt—and God will never let us forget it. In moments of our greatest vulnerability, when we have no resources left and nothing in us that can rise to meet the danger that is coming, the dread that we will have to yet again beg for forgiveness so that we might be saved from our own clumsiness, scours all gratitude from our hearts and replaces it with fear. And perfect fear casts out love.
My experience with this perspective goes back to a preacher whose message week after week never varied: We are dead in our tracks and there is nothing good in us. We must throw ourselves on the mercy of God and cling to the foot of the cross. And it may be that God will look down on us and forgive us for nailing Jesus to the cross. But we dare not move beyond the circle of the cross; there we must remain, drenched in our sins and desperate for the blood of the Lamb, hoping to placate the God we have deeply offended.
Some variation of this no doubt rings out from pulpits from week to week. It is a reaction to the “cheap grace” dispensed by an indulgent god, who regards our sins as faux pas, and who can be counted on to turn the other cheek indefinitely. It is the predictable opposite of the Crucifixion position. In place of the cold calculation of sins, there is the sunny smile of the affable god. Where our sin creates an enormous gulf, there is instead a wave of the hand and a cheerful, ‘No problem!’ This is a god of respectability, whose only request is that we maintain a reasonable semblance of ethicality.
We turn away, instinctively, from both these gods, for they are false—and they reflect back to us a false view of our humanity. In the one we become abject, paralyzed, and terrified. In the other, we are self-centered, smug, and blind to the wreckage we leave behind us.
This provokes in us different reactions. We might redouble our efforts to do life perfectly, keeping lists and analyzing the data. But this is about as effective as Paris Hilton’s T-shirt, which read, “Stop Being Poor.” Or we might kill the messenger, rejecting those who would stop to help us out of the ditches we have crashed into. Another reaction is to throw the whole thing over, confess that we were duped by God and religion from the start, and try to begin again, free from the superstitions we once fervently followed as truths. All of these are ways we cope with cognitive dissonance, in which our actions and our values no longer correspond and, instead, cause us deep distress.
Or we could try repentance, what the New Testament calls metanoia, a turning around to take a new and different path. This is our turning to God, and we are at our most vulnerable in doing so. Because we judge God by our own standards, we find it almost impossible to believe that God has been with us all along, especially when we felt most isolated in our sin. We may resolve to live right, do our very best, and make it up to God. Merton cautions us, however: “The best is not the ideal. Where what is theoretically best is imposed on everything as the norm, then there is no longer any room even to be good. The best, imposed as a norm, becomes evil.”2
Even if we are reflective about our state of being with God, there is in us a nagging suspicion that it couldn’t be as simple as “You will know the truth and the truth will set you free,” and “So if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed.” What will we be free from? In these verses Jesus also says—and could we refute him?—“Very truly, I tell you, everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin.” We are all slaves, then, and the result is that we cannot believe we have been set free. Mental slavery—the acquiescence to the power of a distorting reality—destroys our trust.3
Crucifixion people collapse right here and have not the trust nor the will to stand up. Because they must be the best—and they cannot—they are bound in an endless loop of self-recrimination and guilt. They might experience a momentary high as they imagine Jesus’ death on the cross wiping the slate clean and averting God’s wrath. But in the next moment they are brought down as they sin. They cannot move forward because they regard sin as discrete unlawful actions, which they cannot stop performing.
But sin is like living with a crippling disease, an ongoing state of being. One learns to cope, to find ways to walk anyway, in the faith and hope that one day we shall “run and not be weary.” Until then, we remember both how fragile we are and yet how we can do all things through Christ who strengthens us.
Resurrection people know their personal history; they know where the cracks are. They know what crippled them and how they got that way. They were listening when Jesus said, “Take up your cross and follow me,” and they hoped, with all their heart, that when Jesus cried out to them from his own cross that “Today you will be with me in paradise,” that it was true. For they knew that they were crucified with Christ, but that they would live because it was Christ who would live in them.
They would continue to bear the scars of their battles and to walk with a limp—a reminder of their struggle to give their ego over to God. But most of all, they were emboldened to become salt in the world and to become light where they were, because they had a clear-eyed experience of being loved.
“Be content, be content. We are the Body of Christ! We have found Him because He has sought us. God has come to take up his abode in us, in sinners. There is nothing further to look for except to turn to Him completely, where He is already present. Be quiet and see that He is God.”4
Merton, Thomas. Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander. Garden City, NY: Image Books imprint of Doubleday & Co., 1968, p. 23. ↩
”Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him; and he vanished from their sight.” Luke 24:31
I sometimes catch myself falling into a reverie or rather, I find myself in a reverie, and I come to and I quickly look around to see if anyone noticed. These moments render me motionless in place, sitting or standing, my eyes fixed inwardly, a fingertip tapping my upper lip. Disregarding what is actually in front of me, I often see a dusty road winding through low hills that are golden in the evening light. To place it on a map is to find it just off American Canyon Road in Napa County in Northern California, a shortcut from Highway #29 that runs from the city of Napa to Highway #80, which arcs above Fairfield and Suisun City and the estuaries that meander down to where the waters drop through the Carquinez Straits on their way to San Francisco Bay.
Our geography of the mind forms around images that emerge like islands from our seas of memory. I don’t know why these hills stand out for me and why I recall them, except the evening light on their golden curves and slopes rising above the cool shadows of the canyon is a glimpse of the California of my youth and a harbinger of home. This image, transposed to Palestine and overlaid with the story of the two disciples on their way to Emmaus, has become a touchstone of my spiritual journey.
***
Luke’s road story tersely describes the disciples the Sunday after the crucifixion. Two of them are on their way to Emmaus, a village seven miles from Jerusalem. It is the waning of the day, one filled with grief and strange occurrences and things that cannot be believed. They are confused and distraught. The energy at the core of their community that drew them in and held them together, has been ripped out. They feel a centrifugal force flinging them into the darkness. Nothing looks familiar anymore, but everything remains the same.
They are heading for home, about a two-hour walk, as the hills begin to cool. They are joined by a stranger who picks up on their distress immediately. “What are you talking about?” he asks innocently. They stop in their tracks, astonished. “Are you the only one in Jerusalem who doesn’t know what happened in the last few days?” gasps one of them, Cleopas. The stranger shakes his head. “I guess so. What do you mean?” “I mean—,” he pauses and seems to gulp for air, “I mean all this about Jesus of Nazareth, who was a prophet in what he said and did before God and the people.” The other one picks up the thread. “Our chief priests and rulers handed him over to be crucified. And he was. And we had hoped that he was the one, the one who would liberate Israel. And now it’s the third day and this morning some of our women have astounded us. They went to the tomb early, but they didn’t find his body. They claimed they had a vision of angels and these angels said that Jesus is alive. So some of our people went down there,” she paused, “and it was just like the women said. But they didn’t see him.”
The Stranger listens silently. Then he says gently, “How thick-headed you are and how slow to recognize what’s been going on for all these ages.” And he explains, beginning with Moses and the prophets, how the history unfurled and the part that the Messiah was to play. They listen, entranced. They’d never grasped the full story and now they saw themselves as part of the drama.
This our stop, they said, when they reached Emmaus. The Stranger nodded and turned to go. “But stay with us!” they begged. “We’ve got some bread, some fruit. Talk to us some more.”
It was a small place, but adequate. Cleopas gestured, “Please, sit down. I’ll get some wine.” His wife bustled in the background with the hummus and the bread. Cleopas peered at The Stranger in the fading light. “You remind me of someone,” he said hesitantly. He shook his head. “I know I’ve seen you somewhere.”
His wife laid out the simple food before them. “Please,” said Cleopas, “bless it for us.” The Stranger took up the bread in both hands. He tore it in half, he raised his eyes, he extended his arms, and breathed a prayer. That moment—one that Cleopas and Mary replayed endlessly to each other in years to come—in that moment they knew. And then he vanished.
This is the rest of the story. The two look at each other, open-mouthed. Mary shivers. “I knew it!” shouts Cleopas. “Didn’t we feel our hearts burning as he spoke?”
They set out at once, seven miles back through the night—no thought of danger—running and walking, entering Jerusalem, winding through back streets, up the stairs to burst in on the Eleven and gasp out the story. Everyone is talking at once and then “there he was, standing among them. Startled and terrified, they thought they were seeing a ghost. But he said . . . It is I myself. Touch me and see (Luke 24: 35-39).”
***
This is my spiritual life story; it might be yours as well. I find myself on the Emmaus road, confused into muteness, despairing that Jesus has been killed and me not seeing the cosmic order in it. Like the disciples, the resurrection makes no sense to me. The dead are really dead and, Lazarus notwithstanding, Jesus is not coming back from this deadness. This being a mystery which I cannot penetrate, I am setting off for home, disconsolate but with some part of me ready to suspend my disbelief in a flash, given the chance.
This is the moment when the Stranger should enter unheralded, although given my two-thousand-year advantage, I am primed and looking for him on the road. But he doesn’t appear and it is getting late and I must be on my way. It is the road to home, although I somehow know I can’t stay there. The journey then becomes an occasion of reflection, some of it recalling my studies, some of it musing on the examples of others, less of it a comparison from experience. Although I can’t say that the whole of Scripture is open to me, I do see the patterns coalescing between the Law and the Prophets. For me, they seem like the inner turmoil of a fractious family, the falling out and the making up, the exodus and the exiles. It’s a story of heartbreak and deep love on both sides, God and humans, century after century, until at last, when the times are the worst, God comes in by stealth, poured into an infant. It’s not my family, not my fight, but could their love be extended beyond these tribes? Is this a family I’d want to be adopted into?
I have my doubts, but then who doesn’t? It’s who that baby grows up to be and what he does that draws me. That he died and who killed him, is apparent to me. Sages and prophets, outlaws and heroes, the ones who carried on in the face of evil, he was one of them too. Another in a long line of good men and women who tried to save us from ourselves. But the question is, would I have killed him too?
On the road, that is the question which haunts me. But I am analyzing the danger he presented to the established order, the eternal disruption that was coiled within him. It’s history, it’s a theoretical construct, it’s a theological and moral question that demands footnoting and further research. It could be a breakthrough article for me, edgy enough to attract attention, but a rather simple mental exercise of speculation that cannot be disproven, only disregarded.
A Stranger joins me on the road. I am lost in thought, preoccupied, and suddenly, there he is. I did not see where he came from. There is a disconcerting moment in which he searches my face as we greet each other, but it passes. I lapse back into my thoughts and the story the Stranger is telling fades; it is a pleasant murmur that can be tolerated. I ask him to stop for a meal, of course, as a matter of courtesy. One must not neglect to entertain strangers for thus one might entertain angels.
It’s when he blesses bread and breaks it, a simple and universal gesture, that I recognize him. And then he’s gone, leaving an untouched meal, because I am gone too, retracing my steps in haste through the night with a joyous hunger for the company of others. Of the names he has been known by, there is one which describes him best, Immanuel, God with us. It’s only when he’s gone that we see him.
If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied. — I Corinthians 15:19, NRSV
Pity is only as good as our capacity to rise above it. It’s a natural response for most of us to the suffering of others, and it can open the door to something longer lasting, say empathy or understanding. But by itself, pity doesn’t lift or restore us. It usually drops us in our own estimation.
We want hope now, in this life. We need it. The paradox here is that our hopes for the future churn up our present and make us restless for a present that opens up the future. Most of us do not live in the present, despite the wisdom of the ages and the sages among us. We live with one foot in the past and we lean into the future, while the present is what happens to us as we stretch between the two. Somehow, we make it work.
We’re not even sure what the dimensions of the present are. It depends on the context. If we’re talking about the present in the historical flow of things, it could be this year and maybe part of last year, although so much seems to happen now in weeks and days that last year seems like an eternity gone.
Our own present flexes and stretches like an accordion. My present is that which is of interest and concern to me right now. The length and depth of the love I have within my family and friends, the books I’m reading, the words I am writing, the events I am reacting to. How I respond to Christ in this moment, how honest I am with myself or how I dodge the things that unnerve me.
We hear enough about living in the present from wise people in all ages and from all faiths in the world that we should pay more attention. Jesus asks us not to worry about the future because it has enough worries of its own. Paul suggests that we hold the past in memory and press on to the present. Both of them believe that God meets us in the present and promises us a future. God can’t change our past, but he can help us to live with it.
But Paul is writing to the Corinthians, people whose community together is shot full of incest, drunkenness, and fighting. They are learning as they go, trying to rely on each other and on this mysterious Spirit, not at all sure they can leave behind what defined them in their past. Maybe that makes it harder to live right in the present, seeing as how some lines of habit are burned into their relations with each other.
But there’s something else. The Christ that Paul has introduced the Corinthians to had been murdered by the Romans in a manner specifically designed to humiliate and terrify him and anyone who might have claimed to be his friend. State criminals like that were crucified and their bodies were thrown out on the ash heap, to be torn by dogs and left to the birds. This is not a person you want to claim as your god.
If the Corinthians only have hope in this life, Paul claims, they are most to be pitied, for the implication is that their god has played them for fools. Even pagan gods were immortal. And anyway, they wouldn’t be caught dead on a cross at the hands of inferior beings like us. More likely, they would rain down fire and plague until we cried out speechlessly.
The theme that Paul riffed on, the extended guitar solo, if you like, soaring on the music of the oral traditions of Jesus in his time, was the battle that Christ had waged with the angels and principalities and powers of the universe. That battle had been won when Jesus died; the worst they could do to him turned out to be the burning fuse that eventually blew their powers to kingdom come. Along the way, these powers found common cause with those who were so anxious to perfect the path to God that they crushed the spirit of those who sought to find their way.
“When the ‘religion of fear’ finds its way into the Christian church,” said Jurgen Moltmann in The Crucified God, “those who regard themselves as the most vigilant guardians of the faith do violence to faith and smother it.”
The violent bear it away, a la Flannery O’Connor.
“This pusillanimous faith,” continues Moltmann, “usually occurs in the form of an orthodoxy which feels threatened and is therefore more rigid than ever. It occurs wherever, in the face of the immorality of the present age, the gospel of creative love for the abandoned is replaced by the law of what is supposed to be Christian morality, and by penal law.”
The Corinthian Christians, along with all their bumbling relationships, were having a loss of confidence. Their neighbors and former confidants were trying to understand how anyone could fall for such a loser god. Because that man, Jesus, was crucified and he died, just as every Jew the Romans crucified died. The Romans scored 100 percent on the efficiency scale for all that. So if these Christians had put their trust in that man, they deserved to be pitied (when they weren’t being mocked) because a dead god was even less useful than a dead goat. Nobody could beat the Romans for mopping up all resistance and wiping out the political opposition.
They were efficient, but not effective: One man got through to the other side.
Oh, he died alright. But in some way that can’t fully be explained, after crucifixion and a hasty burial in a sealed tomb, he showed up in Galilee on the beach, he entered a locked room in Jerusalem filled with terrified disciples, and he hiked the seven miles to Emmaus with two of his friends and then vanished over dinner. Peter saw him, the twelve saw him, as did five hundred of his friends in Jerusalem, along with James, his brother, and his closest circle in Jerusalem. Lastly, in a weird kind of premature birth, he appeared to Paul who made that singular experience the balance point of his spiritual gyroscope for the rest of his life.
Paul’s message, the engine that kept him going over mountains, across seas, through the fires, in spite of whippings and chains, is that Christ, the one into whom all the fullness of God had been poured, the one who suffered a most humiliating death—that one had been raised from death to start human history up again with a new beginning.
As Clarence Jordan once said: “The crowning evidence that Jesus was alive was not a vacant grave but a spirit-filled fellowship. Not a rolled-away stone, but a carried-away church.”
Buddhism says if you are shot with an arrow, don’t get in a debate about the type of arrow, the composition of the arrow-head, and the trajectory that embedded it in you. Pull out the arrow.
We could argue for eternity how the resurrection could have happened, but without resolution. Because it isn’t verifiable by our usual standards of empirical measurement. It isn’t even comprehensible in a way that can be said without stuttering. What matters is the result of the message of the resurrection—a faith-filled community that infiltrated the world and stayed true, even unto death. That is power. The glory is still to come.
Dante's Woods 