April 24, 2011

Easter Day

The Isle of Iona is often described as a ‘holy place’, and it is easy to understand why that should be so.  Christianity in Scotland originated there in the sixth century, ushering in more than fourteen hundred years of religious life, witness and worship.  Its peaceful beauty has drawn pilgrims from every corner of the earth, made worshippers of them and sent them forth inspired and refreshed.  This unique constellation of nature, faith and history deserves as much as anywhere, perhaps, the title of ‘holy place’.

And yet on Easter day shared in celebration with Christians across the world, there is also this from the Archbishop of Canterbury:

Holy Week… comes to gather us around the one true holy place of the Christian religion, Jesus himself, displayed to the world as the public language of our God, placarded on the history of human suffering that stretches along the roadside. (Rowan Williams)

This Holy Week, millions have indeed gathered around Jesus, the one true holy place of Christianity, have remembered his life and ministry and retraced the journey of his passion and death.  And as we do that, we ask, what does the public language of our God say when we hear it, not in dogmas and doctrines, the endless interpretations and commentaries, of which much of the New Testament itself is the forerunner, but in the event, the action, the Word made flesh who is at the heart of our faith?

This public language speaks first of a different understanding of God.  Jesus reveals a divine reality expressed in a created order that is to be cherished, hospitable to mankind, with an instinct towards wholeness and healing and integrity of creation.  In this divine reality, God is not a punitive, vengeful projection of human fear and ignorance or the legitimization of self-serving power, deciding who should get cancer and who should get motor neurone disease according to arbitrary and sectarian categories of who is in and who is out.  In a life that is risky, unpredictable and at the same time both full of wonder and joy and full of sorrow and loss, God in the public language of Jesus is a compassionate and welcoming reality that gives us ‘an unshakable right to be here as a creature among all creatures, not dependant on having to negotiate that right with any other created being, culture or system.  The activity of God [in Jesus] is an act of unconditional trust in our right or capacity to act and give’. (Rowan Williams)  We are not good with abstractions, and Jesus expresses this reality in relational terms; this relationship with the source and depth of existence is like that of a child with a loving parent, intimate, tender and mutually forgiving.

It’s been over 2,000 years, but this different understanding of God still has a hard time catching on.  The human tendency to see God as big stick or carrot, as the authorization for human self interest, as abusive father, as the great arbitrator of who’s in and who’s out is as persistent as ever.  But anything that reduces God to proposition, that makes people sign statements, that undermines the radical act of unconditional love and humanity is not the public language of Jesus.

And that public language of Jesus, placarded on the history of human suffering, is still as offensive as it ever was in its refusal of violence.  From the outset, Jesus turned understandings of power on their heads.  For a faith whose founder was unequivocal in teaching that his followers should love their enemies, do good to those who hate them, bless those who curse them and pray for those who ill-treat them – and who died doing exactly that, Christians have been remarkably willing to embrace war and engage in conflict.  They have been, and are, found on both sides of many conflicts, and have been prepared to kill, not only to defend their own side but to aggressively obliterate the other side.  Far fewer have been mediators, negotiators or conflict resolvers.  It is hard to understand why the resolution of conflict should have received such low priority in the history of the Christian church, for even where mediation has gone on, sometimes pursued with great patience and at great cost; it is often overlooked, downplayed and often all but invisible.

The public language of Jesus is not passive or weak or masochistic, it does not exalt suffering and sacrifice for their own sake, or seek them out.  Rather, it recognizes them as an inevitable part of love.  In his life and ministry, Jesus stood firmly in his own religious prophetic tradition.  The Hebrew prophets believed that a religious community that does not hunger and thirst for justice to be done bears false witness.

Prophetic voices are those who read the signs of the times in the light of the justice and love of God, and speak out against everything that distorts or diminishes the image of God in human beings.  In doing so, they may come into conflict with the status quo, with powerful interests who have an investment in the way things are.  They may find themselves resisting and confronting established power.  This, of course, is exactly what happened to Jesus, and it led him to his death.

In Jesus’ own religious tradition, the pinnacle of spiritual power was located in the Ark of the Covenant, placed at the center of the temple in Jerusalem in the Holy of Holies.  Access to this was tightly controlled, and sinners, the unclean, foreigners and women were kept far away from it.  Jesus’ crucifixion, a judicial murder, shifted spiritual power to another place altogether, to a place outside holiness, outside the walls, a place of impurity and death – and those who were closest were the same people who were usually kept far away.  This is a radical reversal of the nature of power.  The public language of Jesus takes us outside conventional holiness.

One of the most provocative things that Jesus did was a kind of indiscriminate mixing with people who were outside conventional holiness.  He made friends with them, ate meals with them, and told the chief priests and elders that the tax collectors and prostitutes would be going ahead of them into the kingdom of God.  These were the people Jesus made visible, affirmed and included, because they were also the people who were otherwise silenced and unheard.  We can hardly begin to realize how offensive, hoe deeply threatening this was to the powers of the day, and indeed how challenging it still is.  And practically every encounter Jesus had – with the very poorest widow and the excluded outcasts and foreigners – practically every healing act – of those who were considered untouchable, of the mentally ill, of the paralyzed and bent – had not just a personal outcome but a social one too.  By his acts, Jesus included people once more in communities from which they had been shut out.  Here is a placard placed on the history of human suffering that shouts out, ‘You are accepted’.  Here is the ‘see, hear, touch’ gospel.

After all, what is love if it remains invisible and intangible?  As the Japanese theologian Kosuke Koyama writes: ‘…Grace cannot function in a world of invisibility.  Yet in our world, the rulers try to make invisible the alien, the orphan, the hungry and thirsty, the sick and the imprisoned.  This is violence.  Their bodies must remain visible.  There is a connection between invisibility and violence.  People, because of the image of God they embody, must remain seen.  Faith, hope and love are not vital except in what is seen.  Religion seems to raise up the invisible and despise what is visible.  But it is the ‘see, hear, touch’ gospel that can nurture the hope which is free from deception.’

This is the strange and uncomfortable resurrection hope.  Placarded on the history of human suffering that stretches alongside the roadside, the only thing that isn’t strange is the crucifixion.  It is the most wearily predictable thing in the whole story, the familiar memory of suffering.  But the resurrection hope is where the film always runs out.  All those meetings with friends who don’t recognize Jesus, all the intimations of a strange new way of being in relationship, that underline a break from the past; ‘do not try to hold onto me,’ he says.  But also in all these stories of strangeness, the refrain, ‘do not be afraid!’

And we, who stand along the long roadside of human suffering, emerge from the crowd of history for a few short years, how will we hear the public language of our God, and how will we respond?  Will we live hopefully as people of the resurrection?  Will we live this Easter day learning not management and bargaining and rule-keeping, but naked trust in that naked gift of love – love that escapes all our efforts to pin it down, to control it, to obliterate it?

The naval base at Faslane in Scotland is home to Britain’s submarine based nuclear missiles.  Quaker activist Jan Sutch Pickard wrote these lines of reflection on an incident that occurred during a peace vigil outside the base:

We shared communion at the gates of Faslane:

one of the places in a broken world

where breaking bread and drinking bitter wine is most relevant.

We shared it to remember

security – not of barbed wire and missiles –

but of God’s love

that risks all and gives life.

We shared, in a warm circle of believers.

But later, when we sat down on the cold road,

We found that the bread and the cup

had escaped and were still out there in the crowd,

being shared carefully, among people of all kinds:

this paradox

of pain and promise

being passed from hand to hand

in a broken world.

Let us pray: Risen Christ, we are full of questions and you are full of life.  Break open in us this Easter your justice, your tears and your joy.  Amen.