Whom do you seek?
The Very Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.
Easter C
21 April 2019 8:00 a.m. and 10 a.m. Festive Choral Sung Eucharists
Parish Church of
Trinity, Ashland (Oregon)
God, take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.
Four years ago, I went on pilgrimage to the Holy
Land. I was moved again and again by the
various sites we visited. It was all very meaningful, but I always had the
haunting question of how many of the sites were identified by 4th
century pious imagination or actually had real claims to be where events took
place in the first century.
The most certain of all, I think, were the sites
associated with the night of Jesus’ arrest.
Gethsemane still has 4 trees that were alive when Jesus prayed and was
arrested there. From the garden, it is
about a 45 minute brisk walk down the Kidron Valley and up a long flight of
stone steps from the first century that have been excavated and are still extant
to the site of the High Priest Caiaphas’ palace: on a promontory across a
valley looking out onto the Temple Mount and what was the Roman governor’s
palace. At the top of that flight of
steps that a bound Jesus was forced to march up, there now stands the Church of
Gallicantu, the Church of the Cock’s Crow.
In the stone plaza before the Church there stands a statue of a rooster
singing the morning and of a weeping St. Peter, where almost certainly that sad
tale is set. In the crypt of the Church,
four or five stories down through 2,000 years’ worth of dust and rubble, is a
warren of 1st century cells carved out of the stone beneath the now
long-lost palace. When archaeologists
excavated the crypt caves in the 1800s, they found 2nd century
Christian graffiti, still visible, crosses carved into their walls marking the
site as one of early Christian special devotion. Almost certainly, it was in one of these
cramped, unlit, and forgotten pits that our Lord spent his last night.
Standing in the damp lowest cell, I felt the
claustrophobic and pressing fear that the lights might be extinguished. I could only imagine what fears beset Jesus
there, knowing almost certainly what awaited him in the morning.
We talk here at Trinity a lot about the Celtic idea
of thin places: where the veil between this world and the spirit world is so
thin that it is almost transparent. We
feel awe and inspiration in these glorious mountains around us and the nearby
ocean, and realize that there is something deep beneath all this. We often feel
it in places like the isle of Iona or Skellig Michael, or in the great
cathedrals. Many of us feel it in small
intimate churches like Trinity.
But there are other thin places, places that touch
the darkness rather than the light: Vimy Ridge, where
hundreds of thousands died in WWI trenches; Auschwitz, in Poland; the Slavery’s
Road of No Return in Benin; the Choeung Ek “Killing Fields” in Cambodia;
Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan; the Pearl Harbor monument; the Memorial to the
Victims of the Rape of Nanjing in China, and the 9/11 Memorial in New York
City. That ancient little cell in
Jerusalem, in its dark, dank way, participates in such dark thinness.
Our
lives, as wonderful as they are, can be haunted by darkness. Just as the bright thin places give us
glimpses of the joy and love beneath creation, these dark thin places point to
the pain of human existence: war, hatred, famine, abuse, and ultimately death,
the great leveler of all.
The reality of that cell, of the unjust arrest,
torture, and execution of Jesus touched me.
In it I recognized an old acquaintance:
fear of meaninglessness, of random ugliness, and horror. Fear that might makes right, that looking out
for number one in the here and now is the only reasonable life strategy in a
world where death is the final destination.
A fragment of the earliest preaching of the
apostles is found in 1 Corinthians 15, dating only 20 years after the events: Christ died for our sins, was buried, was
raised from the dead, and then appeared, first to Cephas and the Twelve, then
to more than 500 believers, and then to James and the apostles (1 Cor.
15:5-7).
That little cell connected me with Christ’s
passion; where might I find a thin place that connects me to the resurrection? The
sites in Jerusalem that claim to be where all this took place do not do it for
me: the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, or the so-called Garden Tomb. Perhaps it is because these sites are so
hotly contested as key holy tourism properties by conflicting denominations. But a greater reason is that the actual
stories of the crucifixion and resurrection in our Gospels include many
elements that seem to be later meditations on and legendary narrative additions
to that earliest apostolic preaching, additions that are often at odds with
each other.
But there is a more basic problem: seeking the living Jesus in the dead ruins of
that earlier age. Here in this theater
town, Ashland, it is worth noting that one of the great precursors to modern theater
is a Medieval Miracle Play based on today’s reading from the Gospel of Luke: a dialogue between the Marys who come to the
tomb and the angels who interrupt them:
Whom
do you seek in the tomb, O dwellers in Christ?
Jesus
of Nazareth, who was crucified, O dwellers in heaven.
He
is not here; he is risen, just as he foretold. Go, announce that he is risen
from the tomb.
Another Gospel and other forms of the Miracle Play
add the line “why do you seek the living among the dead?”
Whom do you seek?
If you are a dweller in Christ, why seek him among the dead? We are no longer talking here about the
historical Jesus, but the Cosmic Christ.
Do not seek him in his tomb.
I think the thin place here for us is the Table to
which Jesus invites us, where he said his body and blood, life-giving
nourishment, are to be found. It is
found in the coming together of his followers to pray, encourage, and eat the
gifts offered on that altar-table. It is
found in communion, inclusive community, and service.
Easter
is not a myth, nor a fairy tale, but a glimpse, shocking and overwhelming, of ultimate
reality. It’s easy to dismiss these stories as naïve, nice, but
naïve. It’s easy to dismiss them as wish-fulfilment—wonderful, perhaps,
but not real. Maybe, we sometimes think,
the story of Jesus ends in the dark tomb.
Maybe might does make right, only the strong survive, and we need above
all to look out for number one. Such
feelings are part of being human, of being spirits in the material world.
But,
as Presiding Bishop Michael Curry asks concerning such questions, “How’s that
workin’ out for ya?” How’s that workin’ out for the world?”
Not
well at all. In a world where only the
strong survive, the wicked prosper and the gentle suffer. Looking out only for number one, for our own
family, our own group, our own nation, puts all of life into a negative
ledger.
God
raising Jesus from the dead turns all of this on its head: in the refulgent light streaming from the
empty tomb, we see that the poor, hungry, and thirsty are indeed blessed, the
mourning comforted, the meek provided for, and the impure, unclean, and
diseased made whole and accepted. We see
that the only way of saving our life is losing it, of being first is being
last, and of making a nation great again is in making it good again, or maybe
good for the first time.
Jesus
shows us the way: unselfish, sacrificial love, love of God and of our fellow
creatures. Jesus is the Way: the means of grace, and the hope of
glory. Death is not the end. All will be well in the end, and if all is
not well, we are not at the end. This is the ultimate reality, not a myth or fairy
tale.
Beloved: Christ died for our sake. He was buried. One and a half days later, he came forth
again, and he appeared to his disciples. He appeared in such a way that they
knew he was no resuscitated corpse, no ghost, no dream, nor
wish-fulfillment. It was wholly
unprecedented and the disciples clearly had problems finding adequate language
to express what they had seen, felt, and experienced. The details in the later stories only
underscore this process.
The
zombies and ghosts of popular imagination are less alive than the people they
once were. But not so with Jesus risen
from the tomb: He was more alive than he
had ever been, and more lively and free as a subject and actor. This is why the disciples quickly hailed him
as Lord and God.
Christ
is raised. And this changes everything
in our world.
In the name of Christ, Amen.
