A reflection on the readings for Easter Day: Isaiah 25:1-10; Psalm 118: 1-2, 14-24; 1 Corinthians 15:1; Mark 16:1-8 - by Janine Goodwin.
When the blog schedule came out and I saw my name by Easter, my first impulse was to ask to be switched to a different Sunday. Since I don't have a congregation, I was hoping to ignore Easter: the thought of it was painful. In the last few months, I have had to deal with the death of people I love. I was very angry with the people who told me everything would be all right when anything I'd recognize as “all right” was no longer possible, and even angrier with the ones who told me that “every thing happens for a reason” or that “God is in control,” despite the fact that many things can't be seen as good without making God seem to be cruel or incompetent by any standard that makes sense. My first thought about Easter was “Christ is risen. So what?” After a day or five, I remembered that what we want to ignore is very often what we most need to face, and took on the challenge of facing Easter with grief and anger. It helped a little to remember that God meets us where we are, not where we think we ought to be.
As I started studying the account of the resurrection in Mark, I began to realize how much my past responses to Easter had been shaped by fairy tales and movies. It was embarrassing to discover that I had, on some level, been thinking of the Resurrection as a version of the standard-issue happy ending, inwhich the heroine or hero or deus ex machina is able to use time travel or magic to restore the dead to life, undo the damage the bad people have done and conquer them decisively, get everyone out of danger, and make everyone live happily ever after in a world that is better than before. Sometimes they even explain the whole crisis and why it took them so long to work things out. Everything is tidy and everything fits.
No wonder I was furious. My expectations were all wrong. It was a relief to discover that Easter is not like any of those stories. It is far more strange and far more real.
The resurrection doesn't fix anything.Jesus doesn't come back to the life he had: he has gone on into new life. In Mark's gospel, he doesn't even show up except in an ending that was appended later, which does not appear in today's reading. In the gospel of John, his risen body is clearly different from ours,but still bears the marks of his execution; he is not an invulnerable superhero. The people who colluded to have him killed are just as much in power, and will not be defeated or changed. The disciples are in just as much danger as they were before: when they talk about what they have seen, their danger will increase. Happily ever after is nowhere in sight, and all we know about life after death is that Jesus didn't rise from the dead to to tell us all about life after death, but to insist that we keep listening to him about how to livein this world. The angel says only, “Don't be afraid. He is not here. Go tell the others, and go where he said he'd meet you.”There is no command to be happy ever after. There is no explanation of the way in which the contradictory truths of ultimate goodness and present pain fit together. There is change beyond our dreams and beyond our understanding, and we will never see the end of it; we will be finding out the meanings for all the time there is.
The very lack of consolation in Mark'saccount is a help to those who grieve. Everything the angel says is something a person in deep grief can hear without fury. It is direct and simple. It was an immense relief to me to notice that angels open conversations with “Fear not,” but never with, “Cheer up!” No one is required to act happy or to try to understand everything: all they have to do is act on what they know, whatever their emotions may be. The women are trembling and astonished after their encounter with the angel, and they say nothing because, despite the angel's words,they are still afraid. Everyone's initial reaction to the resurrection, in all the gospels, is one of confusion, with disbelief and fear close at hand. Joy and certainty come later. Safety never happens at all. As always, the reign of God refuses to show up on our schedule and be what we expected. We are called to see what is real and to listen, we are told to get moving, and Jesus is going to meet us: that has to be enough.
The most expansive visions of God's reign in one generation are found to be limited or perplexing by another. Isaiah makes a wonderful, prophetic song about a great feast, the end of injustice, the end of death and sorrow, the unityof all people, and a few sentences later the poetry is rudely interrupted (at least for people like me) by his insistence that the Moabites will be trodden down like straw in a dung-pit. I suspect the prophet's limitations got in the way there. I don't want a feast unless the Moabites are there too, but I can't be smug toward Isaiah,since I have just caught myself imagining a God who would give us a happy ending instead of a fundamental change.
Seeing all this has been healing in away that does not take grief away. I had been afraid there would be nothing left of Easter if I couldn't bear trumpets and lilies and rejoicing. Trumpets and lilies and rejoicing are good things. They are about Easter, but Easter is not about them. Easter is not a time when we are required to be happy because everything is fixed and figured out. It is a time when even the most wounded of us can assert that Jesus is not in the tomb even as we face that our loved ones will not come back. Jesus has transcended death. We don't know all of what that means; we don't have to. We can be trembling and astonished, but fear is not the point. We can still meet Jesus and be with him without trying to be stronger or happier or wiser than we are. We can be afraid, confused, and grieving, even as we believe that the Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia.
Showing posts with label Easter. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Easter. Show all posts
Friday, April 6, 2012
Saturday, April 3, 2010
Easter
Reflections for Easter, April 4, 2010 by The Rev. Jacqueline Schmitt
In 1999 I was a university chaplain, and our Sunday services were held in the afternoon. On Easter that meant reading the gospel story of the disciples encountering Jesus on the road to Emmaus. Our congregation had walked through all of Holy Week together, including a late Saturday night vigil at the cathedral. Some even attended Sunday morning services at local churches. But our communal Easter centered on this reading from Luke, of the two friends on the road and the mysterious stranger they meet.
In 1999, different wars were raging than the ones that rage now, so when you read this sermon, insert the conflict that preoccupies your conscience in place of the one I mentioned then. But profoundly, the date – April 4, the anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King –is the same this year as then. Something not to be lost in the frenzy of last minute Easter preparations as we rush to Alleluia.
It is true! Jesus was raised from the dead, walks, talks, eats, drinks – it was too astounding for the disciples to believe.
Death is far more believable. Struggling and discontent are more frequently our companions than one who makes our hearts burn within us, one who opens our minds to truth and reason.
On Friday, when we walked the Way of the Cross on campus, I was struck with how life continued to swirl around us, life in all of its mundane, ordinary splendor. In the back of my mind all week, though, has been the war in the Balkans, the suffering of the Kosovars, the apparent futility of NATO’s heavy bombing.
Today is the anniversary of the death of Martin Luther King, Jr., whose life – and death – was a witness to the power of non-violence. Imagine this: NATO troops marching into Kosovo like the civil rights marchers did into Birmingham, into Selma, into the face of violence, hatred and for some death. What if they put their bodies between the Kosovars and those who hate them, as did the young Episcopal seminarian, Jonathan Daniels, whose body stopped a bullet intended for a black woman trying to register to vote? It’s a foolish fantasy of mine. The power of those who hate and kill is too strong.
The disciples on the road to Emmaus lived in the same reality we live in, a reality marked by finitude and scarred by pain. Not enough good things happen to us for us to take on face value something spectacular that appears before our very eyes. We may feel it in our hearts, but our minds, world-weary and skeptical, can’t quite take it in. The currents of despair, filled with the flotsam and jetsam of day-to-day life, swirl around us.
Yet the astounding thing about this story of Jesus and the disciples on the road to Emmaus, is that the appearance of the risen Lord is so ordinary. He walks and talks with them on a familiar road. He sits down and shares a meal. My favorite painting of this story is by the Italian artist, Caravaggio. It shows three men sitting around a simple table, a peasant’s table, with a meal of wine and bread and roast chicken in front of them. One of the men is obviously, to our eyes, Jesus. The other two men are brawny (probably Italian) peasants, with strong, working-men’s arms and rough hands and sturdy, no-nonsense faces. The painter catches them at the moment of recognition that this man sitting with them, talking with them, is Jesus. You can see the movement in the painting, the men catching their breath as they rise out of their chairs, their hands beginning to reach out to their beloved friend.
Jesus comes after his death as he came in his birth: in the humblest of circumstances to the simplest and poorest of people. No chariots of fire, no Roman legions converted en masse, no temple rulers falling at his feet. The astonishment of it is that this is how Jesus comes to us: in the middle of our ordinary lives, when we least expect it, in the simplest of settings. In a gesture of hospitality and welcome, Jesus is known to us in the breaking of the bread.
Our prayers in the Easter season rise to heaven, yearning that more people will hear the simplicity of this astounding fact: the death that seems to reign supreme in so many parts of this troubled world is vanquished. Put down your weapons. Join hands. Alleluia! Christ is risen! The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!
In 1999 I was a university chaplain, and our Sunday services were held in the afternoon. On Easter that meant reading the gospel story of the disciples encountering Jesus on the road to Emmaus. Our congregation had walked through all of Holy Week together, including a late Saturday night vigil at the cathedral. Some even attended Sunday morning services at local churches. But our communal Easter centered on this reading from Luke, of the two friends on the road and the mysterious stranger they meet.
In 1999, different wars were raging than the ones that rage now, so when you read this sermon, insert the conflict that preoccupies your conscience in place of the one I mentioned then. But profoundly, the date – April 4, the anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King –is the same this year as then. Something not to be lost in the frenzy of last minute Easter preparations as we rush to Alleluia.
It is true! Jesus was raised from the dead, walks, talks, eats, drinks – it was too astounding for the disciples to believe.
Death is far more believable. Struggling and discontent are more frequently our companions than one who makes our hearts burn within us, one who opens our minds to truth and reason.
On Friday, when we walked the Way of the Cross on campus, I was struck with how life continued to swirl around us, life in all of its mundane, ordinary splendor. In the back of my mind all week, though, has been the war in the Balkans, the suffering of the Kosovars, the apparent futility of NATO’s heavy bombing.
Today is the anniversary of the death of Martin Luther King, Jr., whose life – and death – was a witness to the power of non-violence. Imagine this: NATO troops marching into Kosovo like the civil rights marchers did into Birmingham, into Selma, into the face of violence, hatred and for some death. What if they put their bodies between the Kosovars and those who hate them, as did the young Episcopal seminarian, Jonathan Daniels, whose body stopped a bullet intended for a black woman trying to register to vote? It’s a foolish fantasy of mine. The power of those who hate and kill is too strong.
The disciples on the road to Emmaus lived in the same reality we live in, a reality marked by finitude and scarred by pain. Not enough good things happen to us for us to take on face value something spectacular that appears before our very eyes. We may feel it in our hearts, but our minds, world-weary and skeptical, can’t quite take it in. The currents of despair, filled with the flotsam and jetsam of day-to-day life, swirl around us.
Yet the astounding thing about this story of Jesus and the disciples on the road to Emmaus, is that the appearance of the risen Lord is so ordinary. He walks and talks with them on a familiar road. He sits down and shares a meal. My favorite painting of this story is by the Italian artist, Caravaggio. It shows three men sitting around a simple table, a peasant’s table, with a meal of wine and bread and roast chicken in front of them. One of the men is obviously, to our eyes, Jesus. The other two men are brawny (probably Italian) peasants, with strong, working-men’s arms and rough hands and sturdy, no-nonsense faces. The painter catches them at the moment of recognition that this man sitting with them, talking with them, is Jesus. You can see the movement in the painting, the men catching their breath as they rise out of their chairs, their hands beginning to reach out to their beloved friend.
Jesus comes after his death as he came in his birth: in the humblest of circumstances to the simplest and poorest of people. No chariots of fire, no Roman legions converted en masse, no temple rulers falling at his feet. The astonishment of it is that this is how Jesus comes to us: in the middle of our ordinary lives, when we least expect it, in the simplest of settings. In a gesture of hospitality and welcome, Jesus is known to us in the breaking of the bread.
Our prayers in the Easter season rise to heaven, yearning that more people will hear the simplicity of this astounding fact: the death that seems to reign supreme in so many parts of this troubled world is vanquished. Put down your weapons. Join hands. Alleluia! Christ is risen! The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)