What Does It All Mean? Easter 2008

Acts 10:34-43; Jeremiah 31:1-6; Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24;
Colossians 3:1-4; John 20:1-18; Matthew 28:1-10

Peter’s Sermon in Caesarea (Acts 10:34-43); Psalm 118; and the story of Mary Magdalene being first on the scene (John 20:1-18) are always offered as traditional readings for Easter Sunday morning. These are the pillars of Christian faith: Peter’s sermon tells the story of Jesus in about 200 words, much as the story of the Hebrew people is told and retold at Passover and throughout the Jewish liturgical year. Psalm 118 becomes a song of vindication for Jesus as Lord instead of a song of praise at being able to once more enter the Temple in a condition of reconciliation with God. “[T]he stone that the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone,” appropriated from the original meaning, refers to the risen Christ as the foundation of the church. Finally, our favorite Mary, the forgiven sinner, walks in the garden alone and encounters the personal savior.

Easter Sunday is easy. The scent of forced-bloom lilies in the sanctuary is overwhelming; the local symphony orchestra’s entire brass section has a paying gig – even the trombonists have been dispersed throughout the City. The choir turns its stoles to the gold side and screams Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus. People show up who haven’t been seen since Christmas Eve. The plate collection is the most lucrative of the year. The thunderstorms of Good Friday and Saturday are over and done, and the sun is shining. The Easter ham is slow-cooking in the oven, and the kids are stuffed with multi-colored Easter “peeps” and chocolate bunnies.

Who needs a sermon?

– Everyone who slides over the uncomfortable story about “resurrection” and talks about spring: New life from death – as though Jesus were planted like winter wheat and appeared along with the crocus and the daffodils to prove that nobody really dies, that “love is come again, like wheat that springeth green.” These are perfectly usable and valid metaphors for the cycles of birth, life, death, rebirth – the archetype of the dying rising god, who brings renewal, fertility, hope. But if that is all Jesus’s resurrection means, he is no different from the Celtic gods like Herne, or Lugh, or the Greek goddesses Persephone and Demeter.

Peter’s sermon in Acts is no help. He reiterates the story, but already Jesus’s Way has been watered down to forgiveness of petty personal sins. But then, Peter never did quite get what Jesus was all about, and very nearly joined Judas in opting for collaboration with the normalcy of Roman rule. The Colossians passage is just as bad: We are piously advised to “seek the things that are above, where Christ is.” Authentic Paul’s commitment to distributive justice-compassion has been eliminated by the usurper writer, along with Paul’s passion about life transformed by participation with the risen Christ in God’s kingdom, not the Emperor’s. The Elves have eliminated this part (Matthew 28:11-15), but after the women have left to tell the men that Jesus will meet them in Galilee, Matthew suggests the distinct possibility of a hoax. The tomb guards have run in a panic to the chief priests. Once the priests met with the elders, it was clear that a cover-up was necessary. The guards were paid “a large sum of money” to forget about angels and earthquakes, and to claim a “Passover Plot” perpetrated by Jesus’s followers, “still told among the Jews to this day.” To claim that Jesus’s disciples stole his body and made up a story about a resuscitated corpse is no worse than dumbing down the message.

Throughout these meditations on the Revised Common Lectionary has run a thread called “Piety vs. Covenant,” or the theology of Empire (piety, war, victory, peace) versus the theology of Covenant (non-violence, distributive justice-compassion, peace). The only opportunity offered in the Year A Easter readings to claim something different from the imperial paradigm that still prevails in 21st Century conventional Christianity is the Old Testament prophet of the Covenant, Jeremiah. So long as the people honor God’s mandate for distributive justice-compassion, God will provide protection and prosperity. In the reading picked for this Easter Sunday, Jeremiah assures the “remnant” of the people left in Jerusalem that as a result of keeping the Covenant, they will be reunited with those returning from exile in Babylon.

What does it mean to keep the Covenant in a post-modern, post-Enlightenment, pluralistic, global, 21st Century? Clearly the Way to keeping the Covenant is not to look “up” to God.

In Mark’s original version of Easter morning, the women who found the tomb empty were so terrified they simply ran away without telling anyone. But the story could not have ended there, or I would not be writing this meditation, and nearly 2,000 years of Christian history would never have transpired. Somebody added a codicil in which the women did as the young man sitting in the tomb suggested, and they “briefly” told “those around Peter” what they had seen. In Matthew and Luke, angels explain what has happened. By the time John creates his version, there is only one witness – Mary Magdalene – who carries the story to the rest of the scattered followers. Regardless of how it is told, the story is the same: Jesus is not here. He is risen. That is a terrifying realization. If Jesus is not here, what happens to the message? What happens to distributive justice-compassion? What happens to those who had the courage to oppose the Empire? The visitors who find the tomb empty are confronted with a choice: If God’s realm of justice-compassion is to be restored – as the Biblical record presents the argument – it will either be by the direct intervention of God alone (apocalyptic eschatology), or by the collaborative action of God in partnership with humanity (participatory eschatology).

For 21st Century Christians, with Jesus seriously dead, and contemporary cosmology rendering theistic, personalized gods beyond belief, the only way to renew the Covenant is a participatory eschatology, through equal partnership with a kenotic God “whose gracious presence as free gift (Paul’s charis) is the beating heart of the universe and does not need to threaten, to intervene, to punish, or to control A God whose presence is justice and life and whose absence is injustice and death." John Dominic Crossan and Jonathan L. Reed, In Search of Paul (Harper SanFrancisco 2004, p. 291.

Despite all the temptations that the Empire offers, the renewing of the Covenant is up to us. On Planet Earth, we can only look “out” (not “up”) to find other planets and galaxies, and perhaps to discover something about the nature of the universe, the character of the spirit/creator we call “God,” and the conditions in which humanity finds itself; but then we can only look “in” to ourselves to create the response that will result in the partnership.

He had stood his ground honorably to the very end; he had kept his word. The moment he cried out “Eli Eli” and fainted, Temptation had captured him for a split second and led him astray. The joys, marriages and children were lies; the decrepit, degraded old men who shouted coward, deserter, traitor at him were lies. All – all were illusions sent by the Devil. His disciples were alive and thriving. They had gone over sea and land and were proclaiming the Good News. Everything had turned out as it should, glory be to God!

He uttered a triumphant cry: “It is accomplished!”

And it was as though he had said: “Everything has begun.”

Nikos Kazantzaki, The Last Temptation of Christ ( Simon and Shuster, New York, 1960), p. 496.