Easter Reflection

 

At the end of his Gospel, Mark leaves us with an empty tomb and witnesses who never give witness.  With so many accounts of the risen Jesus in later Gospels, it seems a rather abrupt and unsatisfying conclusion. So unsatisfying that mush later scribes added an additional ending.

But what if we look at Mark without the additional stories we were privy to later, and don’t feel their lack. The tomb actually isn’t empty, there is an angel: a being that is the voice of God. The women that left too afraid to tell anyone must have said something eventually or how would Mark know the story?

Three times in Mark’s gospel Jesus says that “On the third day He will rise again.” And Mark does tell us that this happened. The only written witness we have prior to Mark is in Paul’s letters. Paul tells us that Jesus 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.

Similar to Mark though, these are not stories or descriptions of the appearances. None of these statements about Jesus having risen report any words he said. They simply state that the risen Christ was seen. For Paul and Mark that is sufficient. Why might that be sufficient? It seems a wild claim does it not?

The reason it would be sufficient is that many Israelites and definitely Greek converts would be expecting the resurrection of the just. It was an idea that existed prior to the Christ event. It could be found in the Greek translation of Hebrew Scriptures. As time marched on and it seemed no others but Jesus were resurrected, more details of the Christ event were sought.

We in the Order of Jesus Christ Reconciler would love to hear the details of the progress of the seeds you planted. We asked you to plant these seeds to ritualize Jesus’ assertion that unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat; but if it dies, it produces much fruit. Yet the details of the plants are not what’s important here. What’s important is the spiritual impact this ritual invokes in you.

So perhaps, just perhaps, Mark understood that focusing on the details, or wanting a witness to explain what happened, might distract from the wonder of the miracle. What does spiritually experiencing the miracle of life, even the life of a plant inspire in you? How about the simple statement Christ is Risen?  He is risen indeed!

Reflection for the Third Sunday of Lent

 

Ecofeminist Ivonne Gebara sees the resurrection through the prayer life of oppressed women. These women struggle and suffer for daily bread and often go hungry. Their faith gives them the hope to struggle on. This is a resurrection of continual rebirth and transformation.  And I quote, “[Jesus ]is the symbol of the vulnerability of love, which in order to remain alive ends up being murdered, killed . . . and which then rises again in those who love him.”

John the evangelist often seems to present a Jesus who isn’t very vulnerable at all. In today’s Gospel John puts these words into Jesus’ mouth: “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” It is later explained that Jesus is referring to his body as a temple. This strikes me as very curious for a number of reasons.

For one in both Mark and Matthew this statement is not something Jesus says, but is specifically said to be false witness against Jesus. Here is Mark’s version:

Some took the stand and testified falsely against him, alleging, “We heard him say, ‘I will destroy this temple made with hands and within three days I will build another not made with hands.’” While this is no doubt an allusion to the forming of the Church, I suspect what makes this testimony false is the claim that Jesus himself will do this. I remind you that in several epistles Paul explicitly states that God (The God of Abraham, the first person of the Trinity) raised up Christ Jesus.

This distinction is important to me. Jesus is said to have brought the dead back to life. Lazarus is the most well-known example. If one reads John as Jesus saying, “I’ll just raise myself from the dead.” It cheapens resurrection and eliminates any distinction between resurrection and revivification. It would almost lead to the conclusion that Lazarus was the first fruits of the resurrection of the dead.

Even worse though, such a reading can undermine the incarnation! The whole of creation is sanctified because Jesus is fully of creation. God has come down to our level. This is why we can have an intimate relationship with the creator of the entire universe. A universe created by in and through Trinitarian love. And for a time part of that Trinity was within a fully human mind heart and body, echoes of which are still retained by the Christ.

Jesus was fully human, despite His divine personage. I once again quote Gebara, Jesus comes “from this earth, this body, this flesh, from the evolutionary process that is present both yesterday and today in this Sacred Body within which love resides. It continues in him beyond that, and it is turned into passion for life, into mercy and justice.”

“Within which love resides.” Right here on Earth. This Love gives us the unreasonable hope to carry on. We planted seeds on Ash Wednesday to symbolically illustrate Jesus’s saying “Amen, amen, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat; but if it dies, it produces much fruit.” Not every seed that’s planted grows. We have no guarantee that ours will sprout. We can’t make it happen ourselves. My will is helpless in this situation. We are vulnerable. Yet without that vulnerability, there is no rebirth or transformation.

Why do you Baptise?

 

I baptize with water. Okaaaaaaaaaay, that’s not a why. We don’t get the He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit until 7 verses later.  And the eventual why we get is on the next day. John the Baptist baptizes so HE might be made known to Israel. In John’s Gospel the Baptist doesn’t have anything to do with repentance or forgiveness.

This is quite a contrast from Marks version which was read last week. In Mark, John the Baptist himself is forgiving sins. And he does so in Luke as well. Matthew equivocates that John’s baptism is for repentance, forgiveness he leaves for Jesus. By John’s Gospel however, none of that remains.

It would seem that the higher your Christology, the harder it is for mere humans to forgive sins. John’s Gospel doesn’t even have the Lord’s prayer in it.  Not our job to even forgive sins against us. The disciples are able to, but only after they receive the Holy Spirit at Pentecost – so it’s not ever really them that do it.

We can’t have people forgive sins if our theology is that Jesus came into the world to save sinners – period, no other reason. To be fair John doesn’t even go that far. There are many different reasons why Jesus came in John’s Gospel. To do the will of the Father, to bring light to the world, to testify to the truth, to give eternal life, etc. Even when John does say that Jesus came to save, he’s speaking of the whole world, not individuals.

This led me to wonder what the other Gospels said about why Jesus came. In Luke’s Gospel Jesus came to preach the good news of the kingdom of God. Jesus also says he came to seek and save the lost. Jesus says this when people grumble about Jesus eating with sinners. This is a variation of Mark’s story when Jesus is critisied for eating with sinners. In Mark’s book, Jesus says that he came to call sinners, not the righteous.

I think the use of the word call here, rather than save, is Jesus summoning, or inviting, sinners to the banquet of the kingdom of God. I’ll remind you that the kingdom of God is NOT heaven. The kingdom of God that is to come is a new Jerusalem on earth. The kingdom of God among us is doing God’s will. Forgiving the sins done against us is doing God’s will as Jesus taught us in the Lord’s Prayer.

For you see, God has already forgiven us. That is the good news. If only we could forgive others, if only we could forgive ourselves, then the kingdom would be here among us.

There is an amazing speech that Doctor Who gives to someone who is waging a war. When you fire that first shot, no matter how right you feel, you have no idea who's going to die. You don't know whose children are going to scream and burn. How many hearts will be broken! How many lives shattered! How much blood will spill until everybody does what they're always going to have to do from the very beginning -- sit down and talk!

The person he’s talking to does not believe the other side would stand down if she did, “not after all I’ve done.”

The Doctor responds, “You're all the same, you screaming kids, you know that? "Look at me, I'm unforgivable." Well here's the unforeseeable, I forgive you. After all you've done. I forgive you. I did worse things than you could ever imagine, and when I close my eyes... I hear more screams than anyone could ever be able to count! And do you know what you do with all that pain? You say this -- no one else will ever have to live like this. No one else will ever have to feel this pain. Not on my watch.

This for me is a key point. ALL HAVE SINNED. We all hold somewhere, some version of that pain. No one is pure. Yet God has forgiven us. Humanity is in big trouble right now because far too many people turn that pain on others – or what may be worse, delude themselves into thinking they are pure and have no need of forgiveness and so have no need to forgive. It’s those OTHER people who have sinned.

That, my dear friends, has a lot to do with why the kingdom of God is still very far off in the future. So we wait. Advent is all about waiting. Waiting to celebrate the incarnation as well as waiting for the kingdom to arrive. In the meantime, do what you can to relieve the suffering of others. For we don’t even know what damage our pain can do.

 

Popcorn

So this Gospel passage is often used to defend the modern notion of hell. So let’s get that out of the way. I’m an annihilationist, meaning I read the Gospel as a choice between life and death, not heaven and hell. Jesus contrasts punishment and life. He does not say punishment or reward nor does he say punishment or the bosom of Abraham. I say bosom of Abraham because that is the alternative to the fire used in the Lazarus and the Rich man parable. In Mathew 10:28 Jesus talks about the fire that will destroy the soul using a Greek word can also mean life.

That all being said it misses the whole point of this passage. As much as I would love use this as a hammer passage to chastise politicians that pass laws making feeding the hungry illegal, or who deliberately spread a disease for their own financial gain, or who lock the stranger’s babies in cages. That’s not the point of this passage either.

The point of this passage, as I understand it, is that if Christ is your King, your focus should be easing people’s suffering. Clobber passages have nothing to do with easing people’s suffering. To bring up a point I have made several times, the Good Samaritan did not seek revenge on the bandits, he tended to the wounds of the victim.

Tending to the victim does not make for stories that (to quote Eddie Izzard) that are good for eating popcorn. We blame the victim in our culture. The poor brought hunger on themselves. If you used “the Secret” (meaning if you wish hard enough) you’d never get sick. And we have no use whatsoever for people who’ve ever been in prison, much less those who are still in there. It’s better for the hero to kill them off in the final reel.

The kingdom isn’t like that. The kingdom will be full of people who care for others. People who care for others are bringing about the kingdom. Caring for others is about finding out what the other needs, not how YOU think they should be cared for. Something funders of charities don’t understand – the rich and the eye of the needle thing. Love IS the answer. Sadly, there is so much resistance to that truth. If you listen to our pop songs, even love is framed as a competition.

Resistance to the culture we find ourselves in is not going to be about fighting evil. Where anyone got fighting evil from Jesus’ words is beyond me. It will look like the Underground Railroad, getting slaves out of the South. It will look like hiding Jews in occupied Holland as in the Ann Frank Story. I bet you could eat popcorn to movies like that.

 

   

 

How wise can a virgin be?

 

What if the foolish virgins never left to buy oil? What if they let their lamps go out, but stuck around anyway? I’m guessing they’d be as embarrassed as anyone who botches their job at a wedding, but they’d still have gone to the feast.

Now let’s talk about the “wise” virgins. They will not share their oil, and in fact it is they who send the foolish virgins out to buy oil – in the middle of the night. Would the market even be open? Are the foolish virgins foolish because they listened to the “wise” ones? Jesus doesn’t say the bridesmaids who came to the door after it was shut had even gotten the oil.

So what of the behavior of the so-called wise virgins? Assuming for the sake of the argument that oil represents faith, I can relate to the difficulty of sharing it, because my faith is rooted in my personal experience, an experience that no one else has had. Though some have had similar experiences – but I did not provide those experiences. I can guide people on their faith journey, but I can’t share my faith directly.

However in this story the “wise” give really shitty guidance – or at least some of them do. We know no oil was shared, but we don’t know who or how many suggested that the “foolish” go on a pointless errand. This brings to mind one of my biggest pet peeves about Christianity in America; people who convince others that they have to have all their shit together before they can approach God. That Church is for those who are so-called pure, and those who need Christ the physician do not belong there. You’ll find them in any church.

But these are all virgins we’re talking about, the inexperienced. So perhaps they’re all making honest mistakes. The true culprits are the groom’s entourage. The ones who have been with Christ and know better and still misinform virgins; clergy obviously, but also those who go along with them to avoid embarrassment.

You’d think they would rather be embarrassed and at the feast then to be told by the Son, “Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to err, it would be better for him to have a great millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.”

Blessed are we who were told we do not belong, who were sent away by the so-called wise, and still stayed for the consummation of the marriage - which is the “good part” anyway. In fact consummation of our love, not of possessions, is why many of us were condemned. Blessed are we who looked upon the shed blood of those like us, while the so-called wise pretended that they were pure. 

No doubt this was a challenge. Many of us ran out of oil, yet could not stay away so long that we missed the feast. In the early Church, being a Christian meant found family. Love in a world that treated people like possessions. I believe the marriage of Christ and the Church is the first true love marriage.

May we be loving found family to others who have been sent away.