ST MATTHEW-IN-THE-CITY
ANGLICAN CHURCH AUCKLAND NEW ZEALAND
Seeing and Letting Go
April 12, 2020
Cate Thorn
Easter Sunday
Video available on YouTube, Facebook
I’ve been struck this year by the different characters that populate the scriptures that lead to Easter. I know they are the same texts every year and so the same cast of characters yet what I noticed this year is who gets included in this story that leads to Easter. Who is included and what is included.
Jesus wept at Lazarus’ death before raising him; a man born blind given sight and Pharisees and Jews portrayed as intransigently resistant, Palm Sunday procession, triumph to tragedy in a week. The sensory opulence of Mary at dinner table, squandering scent, anointing then wiping Jesus’ feet with her hair; of disciple Judas community, breaking of bread included, and darkness, and betrayal. Water and towel and servant washing of feet; commandment to love as we’re loved by Jesus in so doing we reveal ourselves as his disciples. Soldiers with lanterns and weapons, ear slicing, high priest trials and disciple denials, questions of truth, sentencing and soldier flogging, thorn tearing crown wearing, cross carrying, inscription bearing, soldier lot casting and clothing dividing, sour wine, agony of dying, side piercing, Joseph and Nicodemus spice bearing linen cloth wrapping burial custom and in new tomb laying.
These are the things we’ve heard that have led to this day. Easter day when we proclaim the story did not end there, that was part of the story, not the whole. But before we pass quickly to such glad tidings I want to pause. This story is not a fun story but it would not be the story it is if it did not include the characters, their parts, their actions it does.
This year in noticing the characters this story speaks to me as one of radical inclusion. Please do not hear me suggesting this as some colonising claim of all people under the Christian banner, no not at all. Rather I notice that this story includes a whole cast of characters we might usually deem outsiders, scapegoats for us to exile. Especially those with role we decide cause this death.
But this story is not just an over there, or back in time, or a carefully scripted drama to entertain. This story, this type of story is being enacted now. It’s a fundamentally human story. It’s a story of each one of us. It is our story. If it’s a story of radical inclusion, then it tells of the radical inclusion of all of who we are, as we are. Including those parts of us we’d prefer not to acknowledge or face too often.
Just as each of the characters has necessary role for this unfolding narrative of divine presence, so, then, does each part of us that make us who we are.
Perhaps we’ve had sense at times of falling short, disappointed, perhaps, frustrated at ourselves. As a species on this planet, we’re increasingly aware the ways we live are not sustainable, do not benefit our world, each other, our planet. At the moment we’re made even more aware of our vulnerability with this virus arising from within our natural world.
Let us sit honestly with all of this. Feel its weight and heft, acknowledge the burden of it. Let us let it be, put it down for a moment. Sitting with it, let us relinquish our strategies, our ways to try to fix things. They’re oriented and informed by the very impetus that got us here. Instead of thinking we have to be different, other than we are, let’s be still and take some time to listen to our story. Notice the way we tell our story, notice the character parts, the actions, the decision and choices made. They all have part in making us who we are. They’re a rich resource.
As we acknowledge them and see the part they play in enacting the drama of our life, we see they also impact our world. Perhaps we’re not happy with what we see. Perhaps we’d prefer to live differently. But before we attribute to ourselves the mantle of knowing from ourselves how to do that let’s stop for a moment. We know not what we do – I think this is the season for such quote. Let’s turn to our gospel, look to Mary weeping, bereft, seeking the Jesus she’s lost. Mary knows it’s Jesus when he names her. She comes to herself and sees the Rabbouni she’s known from that self. Do not hold on, let me go, she’s urged.
Like many things in our life, we want to hold on to what we know, to a story that fits us. We want to hold onto the story of faith that we know, that is familiar to us, that reassures and comforts us. But in so doing do we seal the story off. The expansive openness we proclaim in reality is open to include those who see and tell the story our way. Open to those who enact life within the boundaries we set for belonging. Inadvertently we seal ourselves off from it. We cease to hear it continuing to speak to us, teach us, disrupt us.
Easter dawns this year in a new world of Covid-19 that’s broken open our familiar world immediately and radically. Everywhere we’re scrambling, politically, financially, medically, perhaps most immediately socially. Words are being spoken of being in this together, behaving in ways for the good of our community, our nation. One hopes these are signs of hope and change. But they’re also times of honest revelation. In his article in the Guardian, Kenan Malik quotes Michael Gove saying “‘The virus does not discriminate, but,’” Malik continues “societies do. And in so doing they ensure the devastation wreaked by the virus is not equally shared.
Last week, tens of thousands of Indian workers, suddenly deprived of the possibility of pay, and with most public transport having been shut down, decided to walk back to their home villages, often hundreds of miles away, in the greatest mass exodus since partition. Four out of five Indians work in the informal sector. Almost 140 million … are migrants from elsewhere in the country. Yet their needs had barely figured in the thinking of policy makers who seemed shocked by the actions of the workers.
All this should make us think harder about what we mean by community. The idea of community is neither as straightforward nor as straightforwardly good as we might imagine. When Donald Trump reportedly offered billions of dollars to a German company to create a vaccine to be used exclusively for Americans, when Germany blocks the export of medical equipment to Italy … each does so in the name of protecting a particular community or nation.
The rhetoric of community and nation can become a means not just to discount those deemed not to belong but also to obscure the divisions within.
“We’re all at risk from the virus,” observed Gove. That’s true. It is also true that societies both nationally and globally, are structured in ways that ensure that some face far more risk than others – and not just from coronavirus.” [1]
This is the way things are, let us be present, be honest, be open to the pain and the desire arising in us for things to be other-wise.
When we claim rhetoric of triumphal victory at Eastertide, of death vanquished and overcome we can forget this is a story of vulnerability, of deception, of deep betrayal, of failure, of death. And a story of our human capacity to love so deeply we're willing to forfeit our very life. It is our story. It reveals a way to live letting go, present to our fundamental vulnerability yet unafraid, present to the way things are without deception.
What happened at Easter? What happened to cause Easter to be so pivotal for us? To make our faces light with smiles and our hearts unburden?
At Easter, in the story we tell, there is trust, letting go, death. Then there is a deep reassuring knowing, an embodied experience of continuing presence.
Today we hear of Mary’s embodied experience. Mary, mind full occupied with grief and despair couldn’t see the Jesus she knew, intimate, until he called her to herself. She was re-membered, could see things as they were and could see the one she loved, Rabbouni, Teacher. Could see in time to let him go, to let her way of knowing him go, so new ways of understanding could arise.
In Christ’s suffering and cross, the words in one of our NZPB liturgy’s say, God’s glory is revealed.
Could it be that God’s glory is revealed through the muddle of inchoate pieces we accumulate and name as who we are – through our perfect imperfection? When we sit down, are honest with ourselves, able to accept that we’re cracked and chipped and imperfect, we open ourselves to restoration and healing, for divine grace to be known through us. We’re opened to want a world of this, like this.