Speak, Memory! (Easter C)

 

 

“Speak, Memory!”
The Rev. Dr. Anthony Hutchinson

Easter C
30 March 2013 8:00 a.m. Said and 10 a.m. Sung Eucharist

Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland (Oregon)

Isaiah 65:17-25; Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24;1 Corinthians 15:19-26 ; Luke 24:1-12

God, take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

One of the great blessings of being a parent is knowing and having an adult friendship and relationship with your children after they have grown.  One of the stranger elements of this sweet relationship, however, is being confronted with the divergence of your memory of events you shared with  your children when they were little and how they as adults remember the same events.  Often, you would not know that they were the same events at all.

The novelist Vladimir Nabokov wrote an autobiographical memoir called, Speak, Memory!  Different forms of it appeared in English and Russian, and the profound differences in the editions has led many editors, critics, and historians—and Nabokov himself—to wonder whether remembered “reality” is a will-o-the-wisp, and that memory itself is an act of imagination and creation where the remembering story-teller and the reader or listener are at an equal disadvantage. 

Memory has a mind of its own, and much of this has to do with our emotions, our heart.  

Christine Cleary, who works with cancer patients and their families and helps them come to grips with their memories, wrote the following essay as part of the “This I believe” series: 

I believe that memory is never lost, even when it seems to be, because it has more to do with the heart than the mind.

At the same time my 44-year-old husband, Ed, was losing his life, my mother was losing her ability to remember. As Ed’s lungs filled with cancer, Mom’s brain was becoming tangled in plaque. She forgot how to start the car, whether or not she had eaten and which family members had died — including my father.

I became afraid that one day I, too, would be unable to recall my husband, not because of Alzheimer’s, but simply because my memory of him might fade. So from the day of Ed’s diagnosis until his death a year later, I set out to memorize him: his crooked smile and vigorous embrace, his woodsy smell and the way he cleared his throat when he reached the top of the stairs. I knew I’d always be able to recite his qualities — kind, gentle, smart, funny — but I wanted to be able to conjure up the physical man in my mind, as fully as possible, when he was gone.

Back then, I thought memory was a deliberate, cognitive process, like remembering multiplication tables or lyrics or where the keys were. Unable to rescue Ed from cancer, I was determined to save him from the only thing worse than dying: being forgotten.

Later I learned that memory has a will of its own. You can’t control it any more that you can influence the weather. When it springs up, a person loved and lost is found, if only for a few seconds.

Recently when I was driving, I had a deep and sudden sense of Ed and the way it felt to have him next to me in the car. My body softened as it used to when we were together seven years ago, living a shared life. I wasn’t remembering his face or the way he walked; the careful details I had stored had nothing to do with this moment in the car. Looking in the rearview mirror, I recognized in my own face the same look I once saw on my mother’s face in the nursing home. I had asked her a question about my father, and she became confused about his identity. Yet, as she sat there, dressed in a shapeless polyester outfit, she briefly appeared young and radiant, her face filled with love and her eyes misty. Her brain couldn’t label the man correctly, but that was not important. It was clear to me that her husband was vivid in her heart, a memory even Alzheimer’s could not crush.

I believe there is a difference between memory and remembering. Remembering has to do with turning the oven off before leaving the house, but memory is nurtured by emotion. It springs from a deeper well, safe from dementia and the passage of time.  (http://thisibelieve.org/essay/10417/)

In recent decades, a great deal of research into the neuro-biology of memory has explained much of this.  What we remember when we call up an event from the past is not a sensory record from that event, but the neural impressions, narrative, and feelings from when we last remembered.  In very fact, memory is a creative and imaginative act.  The development of the way our brain registers and creates memory in this way seems to have been to our evolutionary advantage: at a subconscious level, we are able to apply new things we have learned since past events and experience them in new and useful ways.  If you want to read a good book on this, try Oliver Sack’s book called (what else?) Speak, Memory!

On this brightest of mornings, the Sunday of Resurrection, Easter Day, why do I talk of memory? 

John Dominic Crossan, writing in the Huffington Post this week, said:

“The details of Jesus' death were not fact remembered and history recorded. They were prayer recollected and psalm historicized.  … If Jesus' death was a communal crucifixion [i.e., a crucifixion story created by community for community purposes], must there not have been also a communal resurrection?”

Here at Trinity, we have just finished reading and studying Crossan and Marcus Borg’s book The Last Week.  We welcomed Marcus here in Ashland just two weeks ago and heard many of the reasons that he and Prof. Crossan believe that we must understand the stories of Jesus’ death and resurrection as not simply historical fact remembered, but rather, meaning, hope, value, and faith told in narrative form. 

The case for saying that these stories are not simply fact remembered and recounted is unassailable.  There are far too many examples of the Hebrew Scriptures coloring different accounts’ details, and far too many tensions and contradictions between the various accounts to allow them to be historical chronicle.  In many ways, as Borg and Crossan write, these stories function as parables expressing deep Christian faith.    

After our last Lenten Soup supper, I received an e-mail from one parishioner.  He took exception to the message he got from Borg and Crossan:  that what they call the “post-Easter Jesus” was a mere object of the faith and hope of the community, and had no role as subject or actor apart from the perceptions and hearts of the believers.  “If the risen Christ did not exist apart from the imaginations and hopes of the believers, I am not sure it is worth believing in him at all” was the parishioner’s implication.  This sounds a lot like today's epistle reading, doesn't it?  

I am not sure this is, indeed, what Borg and Crossan are saying, but the question is fair and certainly worth pursuing when Crossan says these stories “are not fact remembered” but rather “prayer recollected and psalm historicized.”  

I agree that these stories are full of meaning beyond simple recounting of “what happened,” and admit that the details and differences in the stories handled down to us show the marks of oral tradition and story-telling that call into question their value as detailed chronicles of historical events. 

But I must say that as a historian, I find a purely mythological reading of the passion and resurrection stories to be unconvincing.

The earliest form of this tradition that has survived is not found in the Gospels.  It is not even a story.  It is a proclamation found St. Paul’s first Letter to the Corinthians.  Writing only about 15 years after Jesus’s death, Paul tells us of the “tradition” of “Good News” that was passed on to him by earlier Christians: that Jesus died, was buried, was raised, and then appeared (1 Cor. 15:1-5). 

It was from this early apostolic proclamation—based on their experience and their memory, right after the events—that Christ died, was buried, was raised, and appeared, that the various stories about Jesus’ death and bodily reappearance later developed over the next 30-50 years.   

The pattern of the development is clear:  Mark, the earliest Gospel, in its earliest form narrated the passion and the discovery of the empty tomb, but places the earlier apostolic proclamation:  “he is risen” and “he [will] appear” on the lips of characters in the story.  Matthew and Luke develop this barebones narrative in separate ways, adding stories of appearances and details of the resurrection itself.  John, the last canonical Gospel, develops these story traditions even further and tells of additional appearances.  By the time you get to the post-canonical Gospel of Peter, you have details added and added to the narrative, even to the point of witnesses to flashes or light and angelic escorts to bring Jesus from the tomb and a floating, talking cross praising God. 

 It is clear that there is narrative development as the story is told and retold.  And it is also clear that reflection on Hebrew Scripture informs the process.  And, as Crossan points out, the Psalter was a major part of this.  But those of us who pray the Psalms daily know that this collection of poems and hymns is above all a book about emotion—the whole range of human emotion, from love, and adoration, to joy, to sorrow, to homicidal rage.  It is understandable why such a book would have exerted such a central role in the process of the formation of memory and the retelling of such emotion-laden stories.    The differences and similarities suggest a period of oral story-telling in congregations between the apostolic preaching and Gospel writers, with the stories with each retelling adding or reordering details, whether remembrances of events or parabolic references to Hebrew scripture.  The very malleable and changeable nature of memory that I discussed above complicates the problem for someone trying to determine what actually happened.  

But that does not mean that all the details in the canonical Gospels are simple artifacts of story-telling, with no grounding in events.  Remember—the earliest reports, even before the story tellers art began to spin these tales—was this:  “Christ died, was buried, was raised, and appeared.”   

The early disciples were no fools.  They knew the difference between wishful thinking and personal experience.  The idea that the reports of Jesus’ being raised arose in small groups sitting shiva for Jesus is to my mind hardly likely.  There is just too quick a shift—from utter demoralization and despair at Jesus’ death to bull-headed and joyful optimism and willingness to suffer martyrdom for Jesus’ sake—at the origin of Christianity.  For me, it is a much more probable to say that something shocking and unusual, even unique, happened on Easter morning than to argue that the early apostolic proclamation arose simply as the result of proof-texting of the Hebrew scriptures.  The problem, of course, is whether we allow for the possibility of such a thing.

Sisters and brothers:  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 seek to underscore this. 

He was more alive than he had ever been, and more lively and free as a subject and actor.  This is why they quickly hailed him as Lord and God.

Speak, Memory!

Christ is raised.  And this changes everything in our world.   

Thanks be to God. 

In the name of Christ,  Amen. 

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[Note for on-line readers only:]

 Developing Narrative in the Resurrection Stories

The earliest preserved references are fragments of the earliest apostolic preaching found in 1 Cor. 15:1-5: “For I passed on to you the tradition thhat I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the [Hebrew] Scriptures, that he was buried, that he rose the third day in accordance with the [Hebrew] Scriptures, and that he appeared, first to Cephas and the Twelve, and then to James and the apostles.” 

The earliest story as such that has survived is in the earliest Gospel, Mark.  There, in the original form of the Gospel that ended abruptly with the women fleeing from the tomb and saying nothing because they were afraid (Mark 16:8), the story as such is just about the women returning to the tomb early on the morning after the Sabbath with spices to properly anoint the body of Jesus, which had been dumped unceremoniously in the tomb in haste before the Sabbath started the evening of his death.  They see the stone has been rolled back, and a young man in a white robe (we recognize him as an angel) tells them that “Jesus … has risen, he is not here; see the place where they laid him” (Mark 16:6).  You see, the words of the early apostolic proclamation has been placed onto the lips of a character in the story: “He is risen.”  Then the angel adds, “Go tell the disciples … that he is going to Galilee.  There you will see him, as he told you” (Mark 16:7).  Here again, the early apostolic proclamation is placed onto the angel’s lips in this narrative, but now in the future: he will appear. 

The next Gospels to be written, Matthew and Luke, about 15-30 years later, take Mark’s bare bones story and develop it further as narrative, using their own sources and concerns.   Matthew adds a great deal of narrative detail. He develops the story about the guards and the stone, and brings in an earthquake that opens graves throughout the city.  Thus detail in narrative is added to the simple proclamation “he was raised.” The women run excitedly to report to the disciples. As the women are running to tell the disciples, Jesus actually appears to them (Matt. 28:9) and the early apostolic preaching’s “and he appeared” becomes part of a narrative rather than simply a list of affirmations.

In Luke, the women tell the disciples, but they don’t believe them, thinking that they have heard just women’s “idle tales” (Luke 24:11).  But Peter runs to the tomb, and looks in—there he sees “the linen clothes by themselves” (Luke 24:12).  This is an added narrative detail, seemingly trying to explain the actual raising of Jesus proper, suggesting that somehow the corpse of Jesus had simply evaporated upon his resurrection, leaving the clothes lying there.    This element of the story is taken up in exquisite detail in John.  

Luke then adds the story of the two disciples on the road to Emmaus on Easter evening (Luke 24:13-35).  Jesus appears to them, talks to them, and finally they recognize him as he explains the scriptures (in the early apostolic preaching, Jesus died and was raised “according to the [Hebrew] scriptures.”    In looking back on it, they say they recognized him in the breaking of the bread.    This story in Luke was circulating among early Christians, for it shows up in extremely abbreviated form in the additions to Mark (Mark 16:12-13), added later to help bring that Gospel into harmony with the others. 

Luke then has the two disciples return to Jerusalem to tell the news.  All of this is on Easter evening.  When they tell their story, the disciples reply that Jesus has appeared to Peter (Luke 24:35).  Again, the apostolic proclamation is placed on the lips of characters in the story.  But then in Luke, Jesus appears them (Luke 24:36-43).  There is great detail—“See my hands and my feet—it really is me!” he says, “I am no ghost, look I have flesh and bones!”  Then to prove it, he eats some broiled fish they give him. 

A form of this story of Jesus appearing to the disciples the evening of Easter is taken up by John, another 20 or so years later.  It is the familiar story where Thomas is not present, but then is at a later appearance.   Interesting, for John, the sending of the Spirit occurred not on the Day of Pentecost, but on the evening of Easter Sunday, when Jesus “breathes” it into his disciples (John 20:19-29). 

Other snippets of differing stories show up in the four Gospels, with Jesus appearing also in Galilee, whether on a mountain or on the lakeshore. 

If we move another few decades ahead, we start seeing in the Gospels that were not included in the canon the telling in narrative of the actual resurrection itself.  In the Gospel of Peter, the two soldiers see it all:  the heavens open, two angels descend in a great flash of light, the stone rolls away by itself, and then three men, no two come out of the tomb, two of them supporting the one extra, followed by what seems to be a floating cross.  A voice comes from heaven “You have preached to the dead,” and the cross, which also is apparently a talking cross, replies, “Yes.”