Victor, not Victim (Easter 2B)

Christus Victor Mosaic, Ravenna, 6th century

 

Victor, not Victim

Easter 2B
15 April 2012; 8:00 a.m. Said Mass and 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass

Homily Delivered at Trinity Episcopal Church

Ashland, Oregon
Acts 4:32-35; Psalm 133; 1 John 1:1-2:2; John 20:19-31 

We declare to you what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life-- this life was revealed, and we have seen it and testify to it, and declare to you the eternal life that was with the Father and was revealed to us-- we declare to you what we have seen and heard so that you also may have fellowship with us; and truly our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ. We are writing these things so that our joy may be complete.

This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light and in him there is no darkness at all. If we say that we have fellowship with him while we are walking in darkness, we lie and do not do what is true; but if we walk in the light as he himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin. If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.

My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous; and he is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world. (1 John 1:1-2:2)

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

“The hardest thing in my life,” a dear friend once told me, “is that I always feel like I’m such a fraud.  When things are going well, I’m always trying to catch up and make it appear that I’m totally on top of everything.  When things aren’t so good, I seem to spend all my time trying just to appear normal.”   

I think that almost all of us have that feeling on occasion, and it is very debilitating.  It is a great drain on emotional energy to always be feeling behind the curve, trying to catch up, or always trying to stay on top. 

There seems to be built into life itself, as good as life is, a painful disjunction between where we are and where we ought to be, or where we feel we ought to be.

The problem with making coffee in the morning is that you haven’t had your coffee yet and can barely negotiate the fixings and the machinery. 

The problem with looking for your glasses is that you can’t see to find them. 

The problem with pleasure is that there always is a point where it is too much and becomes disappointing or hellish.  Too much of a good thing is a bad thing. 

The problem with marriage is that the attraction that leads us to commit to each other—despite all our desire for autonomy and freedom—can have a mind of its own, and tends to wander after a while. 

The problem with trying to not be so much a fraud is that you have to fake it so much.

The problem with making progress in spirituality is that you all too soon notice it and become very proud of it, and immediately lose it, or, worse, see it twisted into something ugly and unrecognizable.     

The problem with trying to put away bad behavior is that it always seems to crop up again, sometimes in much worse form.

The problem with trying to live ordered lives is that life just can be so damned messy.  And, as we have seen the last few weeks in this parish, the problem with health and life is that they end in sickness and death.

I’m not saying that life isn’t good.  It is good, and sweet indeed.  All I am saying is that for whatever reason, there seems to be built into the very structure of our lives a gap between the is and the ought, between how things are and how they ought to be, between what we are and how we should be.   

In the Hong Kong subway, there are little signs pointing between the station platform and the opened doors of the trains.  They say, “mind the gap.” 

The gap I am talking about is much bigger, and so pervasive we cannot “mind” it.   It is the chasm between what we desire and what we fear, what we hope for and what we dread.  In the story of Lazarus and the Rich man, it is the “great gulf fixed” between Abraham’s bosom and hell.  The chasm is found beneath and in almost everything in life. We see it in arguments, in disappointments, in unfulfilled hope, ruined expectation, and spoiled esteem.  We experience it in dissatisfaction, when we feel shame, when we taste guilt.  Law calls it a crime.  Morals call it sin. 

Trying to lower our standards to conform to our behavior doesn’t get rid of the gap, it just hides it for a while.  Trying to get rid of all desire, as Buddhism teaches, is itself still a form of trying. Resignation to the unacceptable is a recipe for no progress, either in society or in personal life. Careful efforts at following rules and written prescriptions of how things ought to be, whether in the Torah, the Quran, or a Christian Bible interpreted by the letter, may make things better, but only for a while. No matter how hard we try, the ideal always seems to retreat, like the horizon line, and the chasm between where we are and where we should be remains as great as ever.  

And therein lie the roots of cynicism, pessimism, and despair, despite all the good we see in our life.  The problem with moral improvement is that we fail.  The problem with health is that we eventually get sick.  The problem with living is that we all die. 
 
Today is the second Sunday of Easter. The epistle reading today says the following, “Jesus Christ … is an atoning sacrifice for our sins.” 

I was raised in a tradition that taught that when we say Jesus “died for our sins,” this meant that he had to die on the cross to pay for our sins.  God was just and we all deserved punishment and death; God the Father sent Jesus in love and mercy so that he could take our place.  And all we have to do is have faith in Jesus, repent, and follow him.  And then we won’t suffer the punishment for our sins, because he bore the punishment for us. 

This is doctrine of transferred punishment. 

The early undivided Christian Church never defined its doctrine of the atonement. The Nicene Creed says that it was "for us and our salvation" that Christ became incarnate and “for our sake” that he was crucified.  But it does not tell us how this was the case.  Just 15 years after Jesus’ death, St. Paul quotes the tradition he had received from earlier Christians: “Christ died for our sins"  (1 Cor 15:1-5), but again, does not tell us what this means.

Paul elsewhere gives us more than a dozen vivid images to describe what Christ did:  he liberated us from oppression, he saved us from danger on the battlefield, he created us anew, he purchased us back out of slavery, he reconciled us to God as one would reconcile friends who had quarreled, he propitiated an angry deity, he declared us innocent as in a court of Law, he transformed us like in the Greek myth of metamorphosis.   He is searching for the right image, drawing them from a wide range of human life, but clearly is not completely satisfied with any single one of them.

Similarly, today’s epistle from1 John uses numerous images used to describe what Christ did in addition to the one it takes from the Jewish Temple rites-- an atoning sacrifice that drives out or expiates impurity and sin.  He is also described here as light conquering darkness, life conquering death, and a public defender called to speak on our behalf.

Over the ages, the Church has explained the atonement in different ways. For the first four or five centuries, both Eastern and Western preachers simply declared that Christ was a victor:  on the cross he took on sin, death, and hell in a battle, and on Easter beat them all.  Once feudalism had become the main social arrangement where Christians lived, they used its sense of honor based in social rank and began to say that Christ offered the “satisfaction” to a Deity insulted and dishonored by the failings of mere human beings, who could never repay their debt of honor to such a superior.  In the High Middle Ages, secular-leaning scholars like Peter Abelard argued that the example Christ set encourages us to behave better and thus be freed of sin, while the more churchly ones like St. Thomas Aquinas argued for a sacramental view, directly linking Christ’s death on the cross with Holy Communion, which they called the sacrifice of the Mass, and which they saw as directly transformative on those who not only partook it, but merely gazed upon it in reverence.  It was only during the Renaissance, with its greater emphasis on the individual; political economy, and legal reasoning, that Christians began primarily explaining atonement as substitutionary punishment.

All of these ideas are simply different ways of describing how Jesus closed for us the gap between how things are and how they ought to be, between what we are, and what God intends.  The different images and doctrines just emphasize different parts of the chasm.  And none is ideal. 

One of the classic texts used as a so-called proof of the substituted penal punishment explanation of the atonement, 1 Peter 2:24, says  “[Jesus’] own self bore our sins in His own body on the tree, that we, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness; by whose stripes ye were healed.”  But even this passage introduces this image by using another image, “Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an example, that ye should follow His steps” (v. 21).   He thus says that Jesus died for us and bore our sins in his body on the Cross to serve as an example to us, an idea close to Abelard’s: he died for our benefit by leaving us his example.   

In the person of Jesus, the gap between what ought to be and what actually is was as thin as it possibly could be.  It is because of this thinness of the gap shown in Jesus’ life and teachings, that his disciples interpreted what happened on Good Friday and then Easter morning in the way they did.  The resurrection was the ultimate closing of the gap, bridging of the chasm.

Soon his followers were saying that Jesus had in some way been God made present among us.  They knew that his resurrection showed that his death was not meaningless or random.    Within a decade of his death, they were affirming clearly as Paul reports in the passage I quoted earlier, “Jesus died for us in accordance with the scriptures” (1 Cor 15:3-9), thinking of passages in the Hebrew Bible where a good person suffers wrongly but is delivered by God, thus bringing the wicked to a knowledge of God, and where this is described poetically as the wounds of those who suffer wrongly as a kind of medicine that heals the wicked.

I have felt the healing and calming effect of Jesus’ victory, of his bridging the chasm.  Christ on the Cross and Christ risen again gives me courage to try again, to not lose hope, whether this is making amendment of life or trying to work for a better world around me.  The sweet comfort and the fierce joy we feel at Jesus’ victory is but a foretaste of a world with the gaps closed, the chasms filled, with all as it should be, all as God intends.  No frauds, no sickness, no guilt, no oppression, no fear—just the loving presence that enables us to do and be what we ought. 

Sisters and Brothers of Trinity Church Ashland: the Lord is risen indeed.  In his victory over sin, death, and all that is wrong with the world, he shines before us as a great light, he stands before us as the closing of the gaps, of bridging from where we are to where we need to be.  We need not fear the darkness, the chasm, or be discouraged by our failings.   

Thanks be to God. 

Too Good to be True? (Easter 1B)

“Too Good to be True?”

Easter 1B

8 April 2012; 8:00 a.m. Said Mass and 10:00 a.m. Sung Festival Mass

Homily Delivered at Trinity Episcopal Church

Ashland, Oregon
Isaiah 25:6-9; 1 Corinthians 15:1-11; Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24, and Mark 16:1-8

 

I would remind you, brothers and sisters, of the good news that I proclaimed to you, which you in turn received, in which also you stand, through which also you are being saved, if you hold firmly to the message that I proclaimed to you--unless you have come to believe in vain.  For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. For I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me has not been in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them--though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me. Whether then it was I or they, so we proclaim and so you have come to believe. (1 Cor. 15:1-11)

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

Many “common sense” sayings are just plain wrong.  “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks,” we say, but does that mean that a person is incapable of change?  Maybe “one bad apple does spoil the whole bunch,” but doesn’t it often happen that a “bad” person can be uplifted and bettered through associating with “good” ones?   And then there’s “the Lord helps those who help themselves,” a statement that seems to affirm a faith in God but actually says God is irrelevant.  

Think of the phrase “if it seems too good to be true, it probably is.” “It’s just too good to be true!”  What does this say about us?  That we have been so beaten up by life that we simply assume that if something is true, it will be disappointing?  That nothing true can be purely good?

Today is Easter Sunday, the feast of the Resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. 

It is not popular in some quarters today to believe, let alone publicly proclaim, the fact of Jesus’ resurrection.  Many modern and post-modern thinkers are troubled by its literalism and physicality, and argue that it works better when understood as a story expressing our faith and values, but not as an affirmation about something that actually happened. 

I understand these feelings.  It is hard to believe in life after death.  The one thing we know, and that our experience tells us again and again, is that when you’re dead, you’re dead.  There is no coming back.  If someone does seem to come back, either they never were dead in the first place, or someone seems to be having a hallucination, a dream, or seems to be transported into flights of poetic beauty, of really good story-telling based in wishful thinking and not the hard, cruel facts of our existence. 

So some modern scholars and theologians believe the early disciples, after the disappointment, shock, and grief of his death held little bereavement groups. Trying to make sense of Jesus’ teachings, life, and death in light of the Hebrew Scriptures, they began to tell hopeful stories that ended up taking a narrative life of their own, reflected a generation later in the various contradictory resurrection stories found in the Gospels.

 

Behind this reflective way of trying to keep the hope and faith of these stories alive while trying to be honest with doubts about their historical accuracy is an underlying assumption, at least at the emotional level.  The story is just too good to be true.  

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 this purely mythological reading of the resurrection stories to be unconvincing.

The earliest account of this tradition as it develops that has survived is not found in the Gospels.  It is found in today’s epistle reading, where St. Paul, writing only about 15 years after Jesus’s death tells us of the “tradition” of “Good News” that was passed on to him by earlier Christians: that Jesus died and was buried, was raised, and then appeared.  It is from this early apostolic preaching that the various stories about Jesus’ death and bodily reappearance develop, moving from barebones angelic proclamation in the earliest Gospel, Mark, to more and more developed stories in the later Gospels.

The early disciples were no fools.  They knew the difference between wishful storytelling and personal experience.  The idea that the stories 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 these stories 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.   

We mustn’t be too hard on modern Christians who doubt Jesus’ resurrection.  It is clear from the stories themselves that the early disciples were themselves doubters.  It was too good to be true.  St. Thomas in John’s Gospel tells the other disciples,  “Unless I feel the prints of the nails in his hands, I will not believe your story of Jesus alive again.”

Thomas was not alone. The women in today’s reading from Mark see an angel at the tomb proclaiming that Jesus is not there but has risen.  The women run away “trembling with astonishment” and tell no one “because they were afraid” (Mark 16:8).   That is where Mark in its earliest copies ends.

In Luke, as the women come back, they remember words that Jesus had said to them while he was alive, and this gives them the confidence to announce what the angel has said.  But the apostles take it as “an idle tale,” and do not believe them (Luke 24:10-11). 

In Matthew, when Jesus finally appears to the disciples after their return to Galilee, “they saw him and worshipped him, but some doubted” (Matt. 28:17).

It is clear that the disciples here do not know what to make of what has occurred—it was so unusual.  They believe in ghosts, but clearly this is no spirit.  They know that Jesus was dead and buried and are certain that people do not come back from the dead.  But here is Jesus talking to them, more alive than he has ever been before. 

They struggle to understand and find the right words for it. 

They finally settle on an obscure image found in the Book of Daniel: the raising of the martyred righteous on the Last Day. Written during the Maccabean revolt, the book is concerned with the fate of righteous Jews who suffered torture and death at the hands of the Greek Syrian tyrants.  It says that God will act to right injustice.  He will create the righteous martyrs anew, and bring them forth alive from their graves, shining like the stars in heaven.

To be sure, talk about resurrection at the end of time is a literary and mythological image, not an historical one.  But the belief of the earliest disciples that Jesus after his death reappeared to them in bodily reality, itself the origin of the tales of specific resurrection appearances that developed later, to my mind is a fact of history.

It seems that the disciples themselves each had their own thresholds for when to stop saying, “it’s just too good to be true.”   Early on Easter morning in John, Mary Magdalene sees the resurrected Jesus by the tomb, but mistakes him for the gardener.  It is only when Jesus calls her by name that she recognizes him (John 20:25-16).  For her, it takes his voice.

In Luke, early in the evening on Easter Sunday, Jesus appears to two disciples walking to Emmaus.  For them, it takes Jesus' breaking bread with them for them to recognize him.   The act triggers memories of Jesus' open table-fellowship, his feeding of the outcast, and the strange Passover meal just days before where he said the Seder’s bread of affliction was his body and its celebratory wine his blood. 

When the two disciples arrive back in Jerusalem, they are told “the Lord is risen indeed, and has appeared to Simon” (Luke 24:34).  Apparently for Peter, it was simply seeing the gentle eyes of Jesus—the eyes that had looked on him after his three-time denial—for him to recognize the Lord (cf. Luke 22:61).  

In Luke’s story, the disciples gather together late evening on Easter Sunday.  Jesus appears to them, but where John says simply that the disciples that evening (absent Thomas) “were glad when they saw the Lord” (John 20:20), Luke tells more:  the disciples cannot believe their eyes, and wonder for a moment whether they are seeing a ghost.  Jesus replies, “see my hands and feet, it’s really me; touch me and see, for a ghost doesn’t have flesh and bones as you see I have” (Luke 24:39).  They still “disbelieve from joy” (Luke 24:41).  “Too good to be true!”  It is only when Jesus eats a bit of roast fish that they recognize him (Luke 24:42-43). 

So when Thomas in John says, “unless I touch the wounds, I won’t believe,” he is no more a doubter than any of the other disciples, or than any of us.  We all have our own thresholds of trusting God, of believing, of having faith.   Mary needs to hear his voice; Peter see his eyes; others his breaking the bread, his eating fish.   When, the next Sunday, Jesus actually appears to Thomas, Thomas doesn’t need to touch him to believe.  He takes one look and declares, “My Lord and My God.”   Jesus himself praises Thomas for his affirmation, “Happy are you because you have seen and believed.  How much happier are those who, though not seeing, still believe.”

Jesus here is talking about us.  We are in the same place as the disciples before they actually see the risen Lord:  we each have our petty thresholds and barriers we set up for faith.  “I won’t believe in God if he doesn’t prevent evil and suffering.” “I can’t believe in God unless I see some miracle or vision.”  “I can’t believe in God unless I understand everything I desire to know.”  But this is just our beaten down hearts talking, afraid to trust because we have been hurt in the past, disillusioned by the world.  “It is too good to be true.”   This is not a description of the world, but an expression of our pain. 

That is the point of these stories.  Jesus taught by word and deed that this whole world is occupied enemy territory.  God’s putting things right, the in-breaking of God’s true kingship, was already set in motion in his person.  But Jesus’ death seemed to prove the foolishness of his teaching.   It was unjust, wrong, and horrible, proof of just how bad this monstrous world actually is. 

But a day after his burial, Jesus, more alive than he had ever been before, came back to his friends.  They had no doubt that he had been dead.  And the one before them now was so burningly alive that many of them had problems recognizing him. 

The way we can learn to recognize Jesus, and see God’s hand in our lives is by listening to these stories again and again and engaging with the one they tell about.  It is important that we care passionately about it, and if this means sometimes expressing our thresholds and being labeled as “doubters,” that’s O.K.  God can break down the walls we place around our hearts only if there is something there for him to grab onto.  It is our passion and yearning, for the good, the right, the holy, and the beautiful that provides the traction necessary. 

Let us be more honest in our prayer life, and express our complaints and conditions, so that God might break them down, and give us the great gift of letting us recognize him. 

In the name of God, Amen. 

A Chasm Bridged (Easter 4A)

 

A Chasm Bridged

15 May 2011

Fourth Sunday of Easter Year A

Congregation of the Good Shepherd, Beijing China

10 a.m. Eucharist

Acts 2:42-47; Psalm 23; 1 Peter 2:19-25;  John 10:1-10

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

“The hardest thing in my life,” a dear friend once told me, “is that I always feel like I’m such a fraud.  When things are going well, I’m always trying to catch up and make it appear that I’m totally on top of everything.  When things aren’t so good, I seem to spend all my time trying just to appear normal.”   

I think that almost all of us have that feeling on occasion, and it is very debilitating.  It is a great drain on emotional energy to always be feeling behind the curve, trying to catch up, or always trying to stay on top. 

There seems to be built into life itself, as good as life is, a painful disjunction between where we are and where we ought to be, or where we feel we ought to be.

The problem with making coffee in the morning is that you haven’t had your coffee yet and can barely negotiate the fixings and the machinery. 

The problem with looking for your glasses is that you can’t see to find them. 

The problem with pleasure is that there always is a point where it is too much and becomes disappointing or hellish.  Too much of a good thing is a bad thing. 

The problem with marriage is that the attraction that leads us to commit to each other—despite all our desire for autonomy and freedom—can have a mind of its own, and tends to wander after a while. 

The problem with trying to not be so much a fraud is that you have to fake it so much.

The problem with making progress in spirituality is that you all too soon notice it and become very proud of it, and immediately lose it, or, worse, see it twisted into something ugly and unrecognizable.     

The problem with trying to put away bad behavior is that it always seems to crop up again, sometimes in much worse form.

The problem with trying to live ordered lives is that life just can be so damned messy.

I’m not saying that life isn’t good.  It is good, and sweet indeed.  All I am saying is that for whatever reason, there seems to be built into the very structure of our lives a gap between the is and the ought, between how things are and how they ought to be, between what we are and how we should be.   

In the Hong Kong subway, there are little signs pointing between the station platform and the opened doors of the trains.  They say, “mind the gap.” 

The gap I am talking about is much bigger, and so pervasive we cannot “mind” it.   It is the chasm between what we desire and what we fear, what we hope for and what we dread.  In the story of Lazarus and the Rich man, it is the “great gulf fixed” between Abraham’s bosom and hell.  The chasm is found beneath and in almost everything in life. We see it in arguments, in disappointments, in unfulfilled hope, ruined expectation, and spoiled esteem.  We experience it in dissatisfaction, when we feel shame, when we taste guilt.  Law calls it a crime.  Morals call it sin. 

Trying to lower our standards to conform to our behavior doesn’t get rid of the gap, it just hides it for a while.  Trying to get rid of all desire, as Buddhism teaches, is itself still a form of trying. Resignation to the unacceptable is a recipe for no progress, either in society or in personal life. Careful efforts at following rules and written prescriptions of how things ought to be, whether in the Torah, the Quran, or a Christian Bible interpreted by the letter, may make things better, but only for a while. No matter how hard we try, the ideal always seems to retreat, like the horizon line, and the chasm between where we are and where we should be remains as great as ever.  

And therein lie the roots of cynicism, pessimism, and despair, despite all the good we see in our life.  The problem with moral improvement is that we fail.  The problem with health is that we eventually get sick.  The problem with living is that we all die. 

Today is the fourth Sunday after Easter.  In the Western Church’s calendar, it is called “Good Shepherd Sunday.” Note all the readings about shepherds.  The traditional collect or opening prayer for this Sunday is: 

O God, whose Son Jesus is the good shepherd of your people: Grant that when we hear his voice we may know him who calls us each by name, and follow where he leads; who, with you and the Holy Spirit, lives and reigns, one God, for ever and ever. Amen. 

Today’s reading from 1 Peter describes Jesus as our shepherd because he, “suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you should follow in his steps. When he was abused, he did not return abuse; when he suffered, he did not threaten; but he entrusted himself to the one who judges justly.  Christ himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, so that, free from sins, we might live for righteousness.”
 
I was raised in a tradition that taught that the reason Jesus had to die on the cross was to “pay for our sins.”  God was just and we all deserved punishment and death; God the Father sent Jesus in love and mercy so that he could take our place.  And all we have to do is have faith in Jesus, repent, and follow him.  And then we won’t suffer the punishment for our sins.  

As a result, whenever I heard a scripture like, “Christ died for us,” “he bore our sins in his body on the cross,” “so that you, free from sin, might live righteously,” I heard only the doctrine of transferred punishment.  The problems in such a view never occurred to me until I was much older.  One of my sons, at the time nine years old, asked me, “How can God love us and Jesus?  My Sunday School teacher says he sent Jesus to be die on the cross to pay for other people’s sins. Human sacrifice is wrong.  Punishing the wrong person isn’t fair, even if they agree.  Couldn’t God have just forgiven us, and not kill off his own son?” 

The undivided Christian Church has never defined its doctrine of the atonement. The Nicene Creed says that it was "for us and our salvation" that Christ came down from heaven and became fully human, and that it was “for our sake” that he was crucified. But it does not tell us how this was so.  In one of the earliest recorded statements of Christian faith, St. Paul quotes the tradition he had received from earlier Christians: “Christ died for our sins"  (1 Cor 15:1-5), but again, does not tell us what he means by this. Does it mean, “as a result of how badly we treated him,” or “in order to accept the punishment for our individual violations of God’s Law,” or “in order to correct our tendency to go astray by his good example,” or something else? 

Paul elsewhere gives us a dozen or so vivid images for what Christ did:  he liberated us from oppression, he saved us from danger on the battlefield, he created us anew, he purchased us back out of slavery, he reconciled us to God as one would reconcile friends who had quarreled, he propitiated an angry deity, he declared us innocent as in a court of Law, he transformed us like in the Greek myth of metamorphosis.   He is clearly searching for images and is not completely satisfied with any of them.

Over the ages, the Church has explained the atonement in different ways. For the first four or five centuries, both Eastern and Western preachers simply declared that Christ was a victor:  on the cross he took on sin, death, and hell in a battle, and on Easter beat them all.  Once feudalism had become the main social arrangement where Christians lived, they used its sense of honor based in social rank and began to say that Christ offered the “satisfaction” to a Deity insulted and dishonored by the failings of mere human beings, who could never repay their debt of honor to such a superior.  In the High Middle Ages, secular-leaning scholars like Peter Abelard argued that the example Christ set encourages us to behave better and thus be freed of sin, while the more churchly ones like St. Thomas Aquinas argued for a sacramental view, directly linking Christ’s death on the cross with Holy Communion, which they called the sacrifice of the Mass.  It was only during the Renaissance, with its greater emphasis on the individual; political economy, and legal reasoning, that Christians began primarily explaining atonement as substitutionary punishment.

All of these ideas are simply different ways of describing how Jesus closed for us the gap between how things are and how they ought to be, between what we are, and what God intends.  The different images and doctrines just emphasize different parts of the chasm.  And none is ideal, as my son’s questions revealed. 

Despite how I would have understood it as a younger man, today’s text in 1 Peter says that Jesus died for us and bore our sins in his body on the Cross to serve as an example to us, an idea close to Abelard’s: he died for our benefit by leaving us his example.   

In the person of Jesus, the gap between what ought to be and what actually is was as thin as it possibly could be.  It is because of this thinness of the gap shown in Jesus’ life and teachings, that his disciples interpreted what happened on Good Friday and then Easter morning in the way they did.  The resurrection was the ultimate closing of the gap, bridging of the chasm.

Soon his followers were saying that Jesus had in some way been God made present among us.  They knew that his resurrection showed that his death was not meaningless or random.    Within a decade of his death, they were affirming clearly as Paul reports in the passage I quoted earlier, “Jesus died for us in accordance with the scriptures” (1 Cor 15:3-9), thinking of passages in the Hebrew Bible where a good person suffers wrongly but is delivered by God, thus bringing the wicked to a knowledge of God, and where this is described poetically as the wounds of those who suffer wrongly as a kind of medicine that heals  the wicked.

I have felt the healing and calming effect of Jesus’ victory, of his bridging the chasm.  Christ on the Cross and Christ risen again gives me courage to try again, to not lose hope, whether this is making amendment of life or trying to work for a better world around me.  The sweet comfort and the fierce joy we feel at Jesus’ victory is but a foretaste of a world with the gaps closed, the chasms filled, with all as it should be, all as God intends.  No frauds, no sickness, no guilt, no oppression, no fear.  Just the loving presence that enables us to do and be what we ought. 

Sisters and Brothers of the Congregation of the Good Shepherd:  Happy Good Shepherd Sunday.  May the image of a loving and dedicated herder of sheep, once wounded for his flock, who now brings back the stupid and wandering animals from where they are to where they ought to be help us all have courage and hope.  We need not fear the chasm, or be discouraged by our failings.  Christ the Good Shepherd calls us each by name, lays us on his shoulder, gently, and rejoicing, brings us home, brings us to where we should be.   Thanks be to God. 

In the name of Christ, Amen

 

Jesus' Focus on Family (Proper 27C)

Jesus’ Focus on the Family

Homily Delivered at Spoken Eucharists 9:00 a.m. and 11:00 a.m.

Morrison Chapel Macau

7 November 2010

Proper 27C

Job 19:23-27a; 2 Thessalonians 2:13-3:5; Luke 20:27(28-33)34-38; Psalm 17

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

In the main hallway of our home there’s a gallery of family photographs:  my wife and me and our four children in group poses over the years,  our parents and brothers and sisters and their families, two marriages of children,  cousins,  grandchildren.    Often guests comment on what a lovely family we have, picture perfect.  My wife and I smile politely in return, and say little.  For thankful as we are for our family and for each other, and for all the happy memories these photographs summarize, we realize the pictures capture only single moments and single threads of complicated stories.  

Our guests don’t realize that there are pictures not shown because they are just too painful.  Some risk  setting off a scene were they to be seen by some visiting family members.  Those not shown include ones taken close to deaths in the family, during episodes of mental illness of some family members, at funerals, or after the suicides of cousins and nephews, divorces, tragic accidents and illnesses.  

I understand about idealizing the family.  I was raised in a religious tradition that celebrated an idealized, romanticized family, patriarchal and conservative.   As in our hallway, often the ideal image was but a sanitized caricature of real families.  When women wanted equal say, or to have their own careers, the idealized family served as a club with which patriarchs and church leaders could beat them down.  The brutality of this was disguised by gentle, earnest “priesthood voices,” and the gentle playing of hymns extolling family love in the background.

Idealizing the family is big business.   Witness over the years the success of American television programs “Little House on the Prairies,” “the Waltons,” and “Leave it to Beaver.”   The Rev. James Dobson’s “Focus on the Family” Ministry attracts every week millions of people struggling for happier, better lives and seeking direction on what it says is the Bible’s teaching’s on the family. 

Unfortunately, the Bible is not a particularly good place to find idealized families.  You just have to read it to realize how messy and twisted human families can be, and have always been.   If you think a patriarchal family is an ideal, just look at the horror stories told in Genesis about the families of the patriarchs themselves.  Hatred, deceit, disloyalty, rape, and murder all appear in those hallowed chapters. 

Rarely do people who claim to promote the “Biblical teaching on the family” refer to today’s Gospel reading, though it is a key text in trying to see what Jesus’ actual view of the matter was. 

Theological opponents of Jesus approach and ask him a question.  They are Sadducees, members of the priestly class known for their strict constructionist reading of the Torah (the first five books of the Bible) and their unwillingness to accept other books as scripture or entertain theological ideas not explicitly expressed there.  As a result, they do not believe in any life after death, since this idea is explicitly found only in later prophetic and wisdom writings. 

Their question has seven brothers dying in sequence, each marrying the first’s wife in accordance with an obscure provision in the Torah.  “If there is such a thing as a resurrection from the dead,” they ask Jesus, “to whom does the woman belong when they all come forth in this resurrection?”   For them marriage is a bond relationship, where wives and children have the status of property.  In their patriarchal society, a woman can ‘belong’ to only one man at a time, though men can ‘own’ several wives.  Thus she clearly can’t belong to all seven.  The resurrection is therefore an impossibility, and something akin to a dirty joke. 

Jesus replies by simply denying the underlying premise of the question:  “She belongs to none of them, for in the resurrection no one owns anyone else. They all belong to God.” 

The three great branches of Judaism in Palestine at this time had three completely different takes on the question of the messiness of life, the prospects for a future life after death, and the relationship between these. 

The Essenes or the Dead Sea Scrolls community hated the messiness of life and saw it as something to be defeated.  They believed in a form of the immortality of the soul and thought that those purified through strict obedience to the Torah, the Community Rule, and its ascetic practices (including celibacy),  would after death continue to live apart from their bodies and join with the purified living in the great army of the Sons of Light that would defeat the evil world and its Sons of Darkness.  They were this-life denying but future-life affirming. 

The Saduccees, the ones in today’s reading, believed that the Law controlled the messiness associated with life.  But they rejected both immortality of the soul and a resurrection of the body.   Thoreau, when asked about the afterlife, famously said, “Please, one life at a time!”   The Sadducees would have agreed.  They were this-life affirming but future-life denying.  Believing as they did that life’s messiness was incompatible with an ideal perfect future life, they denied the existence of any such ideal. 

The Pharisees also believed that the Law brought order to the messiness of life, but were generally more optimistic about life in general and rejected the asceticism of the Essenes.  They accepted both the immortality of the soul and the resurrection of the body.  They were this-life affirming and future-life affirming. 

Jesus is closer to the Pharisees than to the Essenes and the Sadducees:  he affirms this world as well as the world to come.  You might think his language about “being as the angels in heaven, neither marrying or being given in marriage” is some kind of Essene contempt for the body and marriage per se.  But this is a misunderstanding.  

Remember that in John 2, Jesus shows up at the wedding at Cana and plays his appropriate role as a wedding guest, even to the point of helping all his fellow guests enjoy the party by miraculously creating copious amounts of wine from water.    In the words of the Prayer Book, he thus “adorned this manner of life,” marriage.   He also showed he was no alcohol-eschewing ascetic.   He loves this world, this life, particularly the bits that give us joy, including love, marriage, family, work, and simple pleasures like wine and food. 

His response to the Sadducees here stems from a key element of how Jesus saw the world, one where he differed from the Pharisees on a crucial point: how to distinguish between the good and the bad that is mixed together in this life, and what in this life would remain in the life to come and what would be burned away in the great Day of the Lord. 

Jesus refused to use the distinction between clean and unclean, or between conventional and abnormal, as the dividing line.  Rather, he used almost exclusively how we treat one another, the distinction between just and unjust, between acting fairly and unfairly. “First seek God’s reign and the justice it requires, and everything else will take care of itself” he says in one place (Matt 6:33).  “Unless your justice exceeds that of the Pharisees and the scribes, you are not fit for God’s reign” he says in another (Matt 5:20). 

His opponents criticized his noticeable laxity in respecting differences in the Torah between clean and unclean.  His desire to help those most in need of his message led to accusations that he spent all his time in unclean settings, with prostitutes, drunks, and tax collectors (disloyal traitors working for foreign invaders). 

Within this larger context of affirmation of this life, liberalism on matters of ritual purity, and strong criticism of social injustice, we see the logic behind his answer to the Sadducees’ question on the resurrection. 

The Sadducees assume that marriage and family are key constituents of what it means to be human and alive and that marriage as they knew it was the only kind of marriage there can ever be.  They see that the religious framework of marriage—the Leviticus clause about marrying your dead brother’s childless widow—as unchanging.  So marriage’s messiness, religion’s messiness, indeed life’s messiness is for them  incompatible with any perfect realm.  That is a major reason behind their denial of the resurrection of the body and immortality of the soul. 

But Jesus corrects the error head-on.  Where the messiness and contingency of life in this world make it hard for the Sadducees to imagine any of it lasting beyond death, Jesus focuses on the differences between this life and life in the age to come.  This age is messed up, but the age to come is ordered in accordance with the creator’s will.  This age is riddled with injustice and wrong; the age to come has justice flowing like a river.   

In specific reply to their question on marriage, he says that in this age we make exploitative contracts and establish unfair relationships of subordination.  Men take wives as chattel (that’s what the word “marry” means in this context) and women are taken as chattel (“are given in marriage”).  But in the age to come, in the resurrection, there will be a radical equality.  There will be no exploitative contracts or relationships.  Only one subordination will exist, the one that binds each person to God: “Those who belong to this age marry and are given in marriage but those who are considered worthy of a place in that age and in the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage. Indeed they cannot die anymore, because they are like angels and are children of God, being children of the resurrection.” 

“In the resurrection all will have God as father,” he says, and this implies that in the resurrection, unjust parent-child relationships will cease along with unjust marriage.   Elsewhere,  Jesus says, “call no one your father on earth since you have one father, your one in heaven” (Matt 23:9).  Contrary to later radical Protestant readings, this is not a prohibition about calling a priest “father.”  It is about real life fathers.   Jesus is saying even families aren’t absolute, even fathers are in some ways defective when contrasted with the True Father. 

Jesus acted this out as well.  In Mark 3 we read a story about Jesus’ family trying to get Jesus to come home and start acting like a normal, obedient son after he began his public ministry.  They think he has gone insane by abandoning his family. In reply, Jesus publicly breaks with his family and says “Whoever does God's will is my brother and sister and mother.”

For Jesus, what separates this world from the way it is supposed to be is injustice and alienation from God and each other.  The true pattern, sometimes imperfectly but joyously reflected here, lies in the Age to Come.  We should not mistake the distortions, the twisting, the messiness of that pattern we see in this life for the true pattern.  We should not, like the Sadducees, deny that a true pattern exists.  

C.S. Lewis makes a great point about the contrast between “the real thing” and poor substitutes:  if the only thing we know is a poor substitute, or a distorted shadow, when we actually run into the real thing we may think it strange, and perhaps mark it as the poor substitute.  He tells a story from his youth—stealing cigarettes from his father’s stash.  Occasionally when the cigarettes were so few that even one might be missed, he dipped into his father’s plentiful cigar stash, which he kept only for honored guests.  He says that he and a friend thought “poor us, today we’ll have to put up with cigars when we might have had cigarettes!”   

In saying “call no one father,” Jesus suggests that earthly fathers—no matter how good, how loving, and how wise—are poor substitutes for our Father in Heaven.  In contrasting chattel marriage here and its absence in the resurrection, he is suggesting that our earthly families—no matter who good and sweet—are dim reflections of the true human relationships God created us for, and has in store for us.   Even our gender is perhaps a dim, distorted echo of the brilliantly sharp distinctions of personality of those who enjoy the beatific vision of God. 

Thus, Jesus here does not teach that the resurrection is celibate, or that people there are neutered.  He does not say that human relationships are excluded from the next life.  His point is not that human relationships are all bad, something to be gotten rid of.  His point is that all of life that we know will be changed for the better as God’s kingdom comes, when His will is done on earth as in heaven.   Life will then match what it was created for, and not be mixed with the painful distortions we see here. 

His point is that the most important relationship is the one we have with God.  If that is right, all the other ones will take care of themselves.  If it is wrong, the other relationships are doomed.

Jesus in this story says clearly that exploitation, injustice, and unfairness are totally excluded from the age to come.   This means that we must reexamine our assumptions about society, including marriage and family.  In opening our hearts to God, in emptying ourselves to God’s fullness, we need God to lead us to more just relationships.   Jesus here is not saying that the world is wholly evil and corrupt, and that marriage, and love, and families are mere passing ills, destined to be jettisoned along with our evil bodies as we leave in death this world of sin.  He is saying that in this world, all things are admixtures of good and ill, and if they are to endure in the age to come, must be transformed, starting now.

Jesus affirms both this life and the life to come because he believes that life—this messy, boisterous, and glorious life—is redeemable and transformable. This is part and parcel of his faith in a God who acts to save his creatures.  And it’s not just his teaching  It is what his life, death, and resurrection are about. 

So what part of family life and relationships will endure?  I personally think that hope for such on our part is demanded by Jesus’ affirmation of this life.   But I also think we will be very, very surprised by what God actually has in store for us.  Whatever it is exactly, we can be sure it will make our sweetest joys here pale by comparison. 

The fact is, there is no family that is “normal,” no family that is ideal, just as there is no such thing as a perfect human being, or a “saint” who has no failings or disabilities.  Last Monday was All Saints’ Day, the day where we celebrate the link between us and the society of the age to come, the community shared between the faithful living and the faithful dead, the communion of saints.  A saint is not a person without failings and disappointments.  A saint is a person burdened with such disabilities who nevertheless in faith and hope perseveres despite them. 

This week in our prayers, I hope that we can all reflect in silence about eternity and the life to come, about the true image of humanity and human relations yet to be revealed.  May this image be a balm to the images of the sick humanity we see in the mirror and lock away in unseen photo albums.  I pray that the hope generated by such a vision enlivens our faith, makes us strive harder for justice now in how we treat others, especially those most dear to us, and keeps our eyes fixed on the real family that Jesus invites us to focus on.   

In the name of Christ, Amen.  

 

Morrison Chapel, Macau