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Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Don't Look Here!
 Psalm 126; Mark 16:1-7
The artist pretty well nailed the moment...
Shock! Empty tomb!! Angel glowing bright as the mid-day sun!!!
These women had come to Jesus' grave ever so quietly in the dawn's early light, with the makings of a proper embalming for his oh so dead body.
And with his body, their hopes and dreams lay equally dead. All he had embodied for them and the rest of his followers had died three days before as they watched his crucifixion. Now, the least they could do was pay their last respects, providing the next best thing to a decent burial.
But no! In this picture we see the rude surprise they found at Jesus' burial site.
The angel tells them, "He's not here, but alive again and on the move!" Then he says they need to go tell the disciples about it, and get them in motion to reunite with Jesus in Galilee -- "just as he told you."
I hear the angel calling these women, the disciples, and us as well, to make sure we look for Jesus in all the right places. And to beware assuming we know where all those places are going to be.
The women logically expected to find Jesus dead and buried, for they had watched him die and seen his body carried off to this borrowed tomb. But of course!
Instead, it's clear now that they needed to remember more than Good Friday's horrible events. To think back beyond that day, to hear again his words of promise.
"I will be killed, and buried, yes. But I will rise again! After that we will meet again, and I will tell you everything you'll need to know about your next steps on the journey of faith."
You and I, like these good women, must not go looking for Jesus in all the wrong places. How tempting it is for the most sincere Christian person, congregation, or denomination to think of Christ the Tiger (T. S. Eliot) as some kind of elegant purebred house cat.
He is anything but predictable. We dare not define him tightly into a spiritual symbol with no practical relevance in "real life." He is full of new surprises, and he usually springs them just in the nick of time.
Here's an example of this principle at work in the earliest churches...
The Apostle Paul was also shocked into new spiritual life by (a) meeting the risen Christ in a transformative vision, and (b) having more Gentiles than Jews accept his message of Jesus as God's Messiah. After much struggle, he wrote a one-verse manifesto of the world-changing nature of Christ's new covenant community.
In Galatians 3:28 he says, "There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus."
Paul saw clearly, and put into practice, the first part of that declaration. His churches freely welcomed Gentiles and reinterpreted Jewish traditions spiritually to find a way forward together in the name of Christ.
The second and third points took longer, more complicated, paths to fulfillment.
In the Letter to Philemon, Paul urged a church leader to receive back into his household a slave who had stolen from him, run away, and wound up in a Roman jail. There he met Paul, became a Christian, and got Paul to write a letter of reference to Philemon upon his release from prison. Paul instructed Philemon to consider the man now to be more than a slave, to be in fact his brother in the family of God. While Paul didn't expect the slave to be freed from bondage, he definitely sowed the seeds of freedom here. For spiritual equals simply can't live for long in practical inequality without going crazy or committing evil deeds. In due time, among Christians, slavery ceased to be.
In various letters, Paul spelled out rigid standards for women's behavior in the church and in the home. They were to remain silent in worship, to cover their heads, and to exert absolutely no authority over men. At the same time, in some of those same letters he speaks highly and affectionately of numerous women as gifted teachers, church leaders, and even partners among the apostles. The Book of Acts also describes Paul and some of those women in action, gladly teaming to lead and teach the early Christians how to be the church. It took centuries for the majority of Christian churches to catch up with Paul's practices because his principles were so dogmatic. Thank God, most of us now accept that gifted women are called along with gifted men to lead the church in learning and doing the will of God.
This last example underscores the fact that sometimes (usually?) intuition prompts us to do the right thing even when our logic, traditions, or expectations might contradict it. Only when the tension becomes no longer tolerable are we ready to break through to sufficient philosophical, structural, and emotional transformation. And once that change takes place, there can be no safe or sane turning back to the way we always did things before.
Whew. All that from three women shocked at an empty gravesite out of looking for Jesus in the wrong place?
In a word: Yes.
Listen to the GODcast!
posted by Jack Buckley at
6:38 PM
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