In the dying of the dark, quiet resounds:
a cat rasping food from her bowl;
the whining clamour of electrical connections
picked up by the antennae in our teeth.
Dawn shatters on street lamps, security lights.
Shadows decline over the rising bird call.
Sceptical natures conspire at misdirection,
shroud the vital moment of resurrection.
I nearly didn’t go this morning. I have too many things to juggle between now and tomorrow’s noon wedding and the flight to a family funeral to follow.
Still, they haunted me and hounded me out of the door. They demanded to be heard, to be seen, to be made a priority in the list of “to-attend-to”s in my head.
The ones from 25 years past: young, foolish, dead.
The one from three years ago: older, too long dying, and too long dead.
The one in the back of my car, yesterday.
The coroner at this morning’s opiate addiction summit said, “Pay attention to the dead: each one has paid a high cost to teach you something.”
The public health expert stated that, “America has an addiction problem.”
More than one speaker questioned our cultural intolerance to pain. The television sells us a pill for every ill; every visit to the doctor asks, “Are you in any pain today?” One of them said, “Life is not pain-free,” and he was right. Anyway, the trading of physical pain for an addiction which will cause anguish and agony far beyond one’s own knees does not seem like a good trade-off, to me.
We heard the statistics that for every opioid overdose death that comes to the attention of the coroner, another 100 people are abusing heroin, or fentanyl. That doesn’t count the people hooked on legal, prescribed painkillers. Anywhere from 1 in 5 to 1 in 3 of those heroin fatalities that ends up in the coroner’s office started out as the victim of pain, from an accident, or an injury, or surgery, and became the victim of a pain-relief addiction.
My friend and I, at the break, wondered together what our role as pastors might be in the prevention and treatment of that epidemic. Raising awareness is a low-hanging fruit. Asking our parishioners before they go in for that surgery what their plan is for pain relief, whether they have discussed with their doctors the risks of addiction, of over-prescription and drug hoarding – some conversations will be easier than others. Going home and checking our own medicine cabinets for abusable and marketable pills – that’s a no-brainer. Surely, in the shadow of the cross and resurrection scars, we should have something to say about the problem of pain, and the idol we make out of our own brilliant panaceas.
It is easy, when life is easy and relatively comfortable, to say such things. It is easy to think that I would be immune; but it has become frighteningly normal, this descent into hell, and the grave beyond.
Yesterday, in the back of my car, the bubbly 11-year-old who ten minutes earlier had been turning cartwheels in the church meeting room kept up a constant stream of commentary.
“That’s where Daddy works.”
“The baseball is playing tonight – look! The screen is lit up!”
“Did Davey kill himself or was he murdered?”
I glanced at her mother, who peered forward through the windscreen, as if to look for a way out of answering.
“Those aren’t the only options,” I tried. “Sometimes people just die.”
Mother, still staring into the traffic in front of us, filled in a detail. “He ingested a fentanyl patch which was meant to go on the skin. They didn’t find him for three days.”
The child, all-knowing and curious, persisted, “So did he kill himself, or did the person who gave him the patch kill him?”
Three days. The image never leaves you. The opened door, the stone rolled away, the shock of death emptying itself into the corridor; life recoils. The Easter irony does not escape me. But it is no April Fools’ joke.
We have a problem.
Why do you look for the living among the dead?
These angels are irrepressible! The women are on their faces on their ground in fear, and the angels, instead of telling them, “Do not be afraid,” are giggling and teasing them: “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here.”
Angels are not known for their good manners, always bursting in unannounced and proclaiming people pregnant and the like. Still, you have to smile at these two, they are so overflowing with the joy and wonder of the message that they have to deliver: “He is not here, but he has risen. Why do you look for the living among the dead?”
The message of the angels, the message of Jesus’ resurrection is that the life of God will not be defeated by death, that it will not be overcome by evil, that it will never lay still in the grave while there is work to be done, justice to roll down like a river, love to be made known to all of God’s creation.
So why look for the living among the dead?
There is a clear choice, in the story of Jesus, between the life of God and the way of death and defeat. We find that the sacrifice of the innocent for the sake of the powerful leads nowhere. The betrayal of belief, the betrayal of love for a few silver dollars leads only to death. The dismissal of the grace of God because it doesn’t fit into the box that we have brought to the party doesn’t stop that grace from overflowing; it only leaves us confused, and bitter.
It is no good looking for the living God along the pathways laid out by the dealers of death.
The way of life, on the other hand, prefers healing to harm, repentance to revenge. In the Garden where Jesus was arrested, a sword was wielded in anger to cut off the ear of one in the service of the dealers of death, and Jesus stopped the violence, even as it was being wielded to protect him, and he healed the ear of the wounded one, even though that one would turn around and bind the hands that healed him and lead him away to the cross.
In the way of life, justice prevails over power. The sacrifice that is offered, the life that is given, the love that is given would give its life for the sake of the world, not in order to conquer the world, but to convert it to the knowledge of the love of God, to the irrepressible life that is found in God.
We do not need to go looking for death: it will find us. We see it on the news, in our streets, in our politics, maybe even in our churches.
It deals in fear, which leads to mistrust and suspicion, burying love and fellowship under layers of paranoia and festering prejudice.
It deals in insecurity and arrogance, which lead us to judgement and persecution, the selfishness which leads to isolation, the self-importance that leads inevitably to violence.
It deals in death, while Jesus would deal us life.
The life of the Risen Christ proclaims that the power of fear, arrogance, self-importance, the violence of death have no hold over the life of God, the love of God. It is irrepressible.
It deals in hope; the hope that even in the midst of terror, there may be love, there may be life. It deals in the courage to tell out the story of Jesus’ resurrection, even when we might not be believed, at first; even if the ways of life might be thought naïve, or foolish; it deals in encouragement. It deals in the grace, in the love of God: the gratitude that leads to generosity; the repentance that leads to recovery, and to justice.
The forces of death will push back. We see it on the news. We see it all around us. Even in our own churches, the powers of evil will try to quell our resurrection joy.
On a clergy Facebook page this morning, I read of calamities accompanying various Easter Vigils last night, and one wise colleague responded that the powers of evil were actively attempting to burn down our hopes of resurrection, of restoration, of life over death. A thurifer, swinging incense over the congregation, lost grip on the chain, and the hot coals fell out onto the church carpet, burning holes instantly as they touched the ground. But, the baptismal font was right there, and filled with the waters blessed as a sign of our salvation, and they were the perfect foil for that impudent fire.
The powers of evil will not overcome resurrection. They will not silence our alleluias. The life of Christ, Jesus risen from the tomb, will defeat death. Over and again we see it: little signs of life in the midst of it all, little signs of God. The quiet, distant laughter of the angels, filled with glee, irrepressible: Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here.
He has risen. Alleluia!
This seems like a good time to remember that Jesus did not invent the cross. That cruel intersection of brutality and labour came from no divine inspiration, but rather from the same spirit that haunted prisons like Abu Ghraib. It was designed by the architect of concentration camps and suicide vests. It was devised along with the knot of the noose hung from the lynching tree.
The repurposing of the cross as an instrument of salvation, on the other hand, was a work of divine genius.
Can you imagine if we wore nooses around our necks as jewelry? If we decorated our sanctuaries with icons of abuse? If we collected replicas of the true Nazi gas chambers?
We shudder, because we know only too well that there are such collectors around us still. Imagine if bearing the cross provoked that same turn of the stomach. By rights, by the way that it was employed as an instrument of degradation, dehumanizing torture and death – by rights, we should have banned it from our sight. It should be taboo.
Instead, we venerate it. God has wrought some miracle by redeeming the cross from our shame at its deployment, in turning it to our glory. All it took was an act of human foolishness, matched with a work of divine genius.
Jesus was fool enough to stay out of love: love for his disciples; love even for his enemies. He prayed that they might find his way to be the one of light and truth; of life.
“What is truth?” asked Pilate.
Jesus should not have stayed in Jerusalem. That was his folly.
His genius was not to escape death but to defeat it on its own terms. To take on the burden of a denigrated race, false conviction, political oppression, the betrayal and abuse of a trusted and intimate friend, the random violence of the battle-scarred soldiers; the random cruelty of a sin-scarred world. He took it all upon his back and carried it stumbling through the streets of the holy city of God, he who had taught us to pray, “Thy kingdom come.” He bore it all, and he suffered death upon the cross.
We put him there, we with our random sin and abject inability to love as much as we would like to be loved.
But his genius was not dimmed by our cunning architecture of terror and of torture. His love was not quenched by the darkness of the sky or the fading of his eyes. His passion was not quelled by the stilling of a beating heart.
He beat death at its own game. Every nail that we pounded in, every detail of death that we considered, or blind-eyed, or committed: every “none of my business;” every “eye for an eye;” every “I’ll take care of my own, you can go to hell;” every “you can go to hell.” Every nail in the cross, every nail in our coffin he took with him to the tomb. He descended into hell, where such details of death belong.
We venerate the cross not because we used it well, or had it right, or learned never to do it again: we are still trying, we are still getting caught in the details, snagged by jutting nails.
We venerate the cross not because of our ways with that device, but because of the way that Jesus turned it into the death of those details, those nails, those sins that we pin to him, suffering him to suffer for us because we haven’t got it right yet. He has made it the conduit to send those things to the place where they belong, so that we have a chance at living free of them, if we will only let them go on down to Hades with Jesus, and not ask for them back.
To his persecutors, he became their conviction, their chance for conversion. To their victims, he became their banner, and their hope for healing and new life, even if his own resurrected body still bore the scars. To each of us, who all tend both to sin and to be sinned against, such is still the way of the world, he is our hope for that undying love we so deeply seek.
He beat death at its own game because true life wins. He outwitted cunning cruelty with his foolish love. He turned our abuse of his humanity into the design of his divinity: the suffering God, who would die to save us from ourselves. We nail our pain, our shame, our hopes to his cross; we carry it with us as a reminder that he will bury even death for us, whatever shape it takes, if we will let him.
__________
Further reading:
James H. Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Orbis, 2013)
Kelly Brown Douglas, Stand You Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God (Orbis, 2015)
“It is finished.”
Hurry, Jesus. Hurry to the appointment
you have made to duel death. Hasten
the darkening sky, that a false dawn may break
early; that you may fell the great destroyer.
The soldiers come with mallets and spear,
we hear them marching, breath
charging up the hill. Hurry, Jesus.
Finish it.
Caiaphas, the High Priest to whom Judas betrayed Jesus: Caiaphas had determined that it would be better for one man to be put to death for the sake of appeasing the Romans, for the sake of keeping the peace; for the sake of his own skin. He, being a High Priest, was accustomed to making sacrifices that were not his own.
He was wrong. Jesus was not the only one to die out of that betrayal and arrest. Judas found that he could not live after all without Jesus.
Caiaphas’ strategy did not keep the peace, either. Pilate, renowned for his ruthlessness, was hardly going to turn soft at the offering of one Jewish rabble-rouser. In 70 AD, thirty-some years after the crucifixion, the city of Jerusalem was routed, and the Temple razed. The seat of the High Priest was gone forever.
Judas, Caiaphas, Pilate: they all chose the wrong path. The thought that by means of power, money, cunning or bribery, that they could save their own skins; that they had no need of the salvation that comes from God.
They were all wrong. Rome itself would fall soon enough.
What survived from that night was much more humble, more simple, more durable. What survived was the humility of Jesus, washing the feet of his disciples. What survived was his body and blood, endlessly recreated of the sacrament of bread and the wine. What survived was his word, his commandment.
“Love one another,” he said, “as I have loved you.” Not by your power, still less by your sacrifice of others; not by your cunning or your cleverness or your wealth or your might will they know you. “If you have love for one another, all will know that you are my disciples.”
The temptation to fix Jesus’ plan, to hurry it along or to improve it with an extra boost of power, or to discard the unlovable parts; to make sacrifices of others, or to sacrifice what is not our own; that temptation is with us all, whether we are on the side of Caiaphas or of Judas, Pilate or Peter.
But it does not have the final word. Only love endures.
As the frog seeks its spawning ground,
I yearn for the waters of new life.
As the child wails for its mother’s breast,
I crave your loving tenderness.
As the hunger striker is starved of a reprieve,
I cry out for justice, or at least for mercy.
As one whose eyes are forever dimmed,
I thirst for the glory of God.
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Life shines in the dark lens of your countenance.
When you hide your face, all die, and return to the earth.
Was it dust or grief, guilt or love that made you turn away?
A thousand years in your sight pass like yesterday;
three hours in but the blinking of your eye.
When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, “Woman, here is your son.” Then he said to the disciples, “Here is your mother.”
There is no changing one body for another. It is not the case,
Jesus, that because you die, another will take your place.
He will not grow into your clothes, your skin, your lungs
tested lustily in that barn when, at your birth, she wept for joy to hear your cry.
As though to prove your sheer, fallible humanity you try
to make it all better, when it would be better, Jesus,to leave them to their grief.
They will find out one another if need be; there they will agree
it is but empty labour you offer with your wasting breath.
If you had raised up children from the very rocks for Abraham,
after Isaac and that funeral pyre,
Sarah would cover her face, and her breast.
send them away hungry; the Lord will provide,
but there’s no taking back your sacrifice. Like your hands, your feet, your side,
their hearts would never mend, not quite, after you died.
“Today, you will be with me in paradise…”
I went to paradise once, before it was washed away. The Flood that was never meant to happen again consumed the golden sands, devoured the prayers of Allah’s faithful people. Their floating village sank beneath the perfect azure waters.
I saw a show – one of those ancient biblical types, pretending archaeology will dig up a God, instead of only his old bones. They found the Garden of Eden under the ocean, buried in silt and the forgetfulness of the sea.
Perhaps there is more to fear from rising sea-levels than first we thought. We made no such promise, after all, never again to destroy the earth by a flood. Instead, we drown our sorrows.
…”I tell you truly.”
over the water 