Strange… But True?

April 1, 2018

Cate Thorn

Easter Day     Acts 10:34-43     Mark 16:1-8

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Today is Easter Day … it feels different doesn’t it? Maundy Thursday we stripped the church of decoration, of sign and symbol of Christ, God present with us. Told the story of betrayal, light fading from the world, leaving us in darkness … stripped of decoration and light the church somehow seemed emptied, more a building, less a place that gathered and held us.

Good Friday we walked that barren path to the foot of the cross where in silent dread we witness and cannot change that we put God, intimately known to us, to death. In bleak darkness we left that place, knowing the world is changed and that we had part in such change.

Then this new day, Easter Day dawns, and something’s different, there’s a joyfulness, a lightness, as if a burden’s lifted. I don’t quite know how, but there’s something about Easter Day that feels like a change for the better, as if despite our actions or inactions we’ve been relieved of their consequence.

One thing we’re not relieved of, though, is the strangeness and unbelievability of the Easter story of death and resurrection that’s core to the faith we profess. Once, in conversation with our son Nathanael about the Easter story he was musing, “Imagine if you found Jesus’ fossilized bones … but how could you prove they were his because they didn’t have DNA banks to hold records so you couldn’t prove it.” “Yeah,” I responded, but it’s a bit more complicated than that because the story says that the disciples never found Jesus’ body when went to the tomb.” “What? Where did it go?” I replied “The way the story’s told Jesus came back to life, his body wasn’t found because he came back to life, we’re able to continue to meet and know Jesus because in some way he continues to be alive.” “Nah, nah, that’s just weird, it doesn’t make any sense, that’s just crazy, who could take that seriously?” Mmmm, interesting, eh?

I remember talking to a colleague about Easter sermons and mentioned I thought to include this conversation in a sermon. She looked at me aghast and said “But then what? Where do you go from there?” I didn’t have a flash answer, it just seemed to me important to let it be said that for many people the Easter event – that humans could and did put Jesus (God in human form) to death and that his closest followers recognised Jesus in human form, as if he’d come back to life after death, this Easter story core to the Christian faith – is pretty unbelievable, it doesn’t make credible sense.

We know the story well enough, the enthusiasm with which we joined the jostling halleluia-ing crowds of Palm Sunday, tempered with sadness for we know what’s to unfold. Holy Week as we tell the story of Jesus’ last supper, his betrayal, Gethsemane agony, trial, as we stumble with Jesus to place of his crucifixion, witness his death, we do so sombrely and quietly. We don’t think to shout out in protest, we don’t say – it shouldn’t happen this way, we’ll not agree, we’ll support this Jesus, we’ll rally and be as this Jesus is, we’ll defy the power systems of our day. This Easter event doesn’t seem to stimulate in us a spirit of dissension against the injustice of the systems in our day. Rather we focus on Jesus the exemplar. Maybe because we’ve joined ourselves to a strand of tradition that says and sees there’s more in this than just one act, and just one man in time. We’ve come to proclaim divine presence in Jesus whose acts defy the human powers at work in our world. Perhaps we trust it to divine power to overcome injustice. 

Or might it be that our still, witnessing silence expresses our willingness to be aligned with such divine power yet our fearful reluctance to act. For laid bare before us is the crucifying reality of what can happen if we do. We find we’re rather too much like the disciples who desert Jesus at his arrest and flee. Or the women confronted by figure in white and empty tomb who “made their way out and fled … bewildered and trembling; … they said nothing to anyone, because they were so afraid.”

This is a big drama writ large to which we attach significance beyond that which takes place. We may feel overwhelmed by what’s revealed of our potential, of what’s asked of us. Yet, as I joined in the strange and unbelievable story of Easter, it struck me. This isn’t story of an historical event back in time apart from me before which I’m helpless. It’s a story I know only too well. My stubborn reluctance to comprehend or embrace the unknown, my fearful fleeing from vulnerability and obstinate insistence on remaining unchanged, each time I choose this way I deny, betray, reject, put the life of God to death, God who knows intimately the travail of human life and desires for me to breathe deeply the fullness of life. I can learn to choose differently.

It’s curious that just three months ago we celebrated the season of Christmas. We prepared ourselves to receive and welcome the Christ child. Born in our midst, God with us, made incarnate in human form. God in form we identify with, God made of flesh and blood, like us, vulnerable to all that is life in this world. We rejoiced to know God walks with us. God choosing to be in the world in this way reveals that God is present in the world in tangible, relatable, knowable ways. Which is great, but tempting for us to proceed to make God in our own image. Replete with ideals and expectations of God, complete with conditions and regulations to define who’s acceptable and can gain access.

Easter’s Passion story reveals how inadequately God as we imagined, the Messiah of our hopes and expectations comes up to the mark. In the story of this season and in our liturgy we put to death God who threatens our accustomed way of living and being. And we see we have a part in it. With altars stripped on Maundy Thursday, kneeling before Jesus hanging crucified on Good Friday, emptiness of Holy Saturday, we feel the stark absence of God. Sure, intellectually we can distance ourselves see it as simply an enactment of ritual. But, you know, it gets under our skin, strikes at our heart, bereft, we experience what absence of God might be like.

At Christmas we create God with us, at Easter we sacrifice that God. We didn’t intend this. We only wanted to kill the God who was not of our preferring. When we realise what we have done we find we are left with nothing, our hands are empty, our hearts torn open. 

Then quietly as the light of Easter dawn creeps across the landscape of our lives we feel small flicker of hope flare in our torn open hearts. There’s something about this flicker that’s familiar. We know it and yet, like those first disciples, we don’t quite recognise it. This life of God arising – it is new to us.

Confused and bewildered, we’re still trying to make sense of this, to understand quite what has and is taking place. For all our knowledge we cannot crack the paradox, just can’t make this killing of God and resurrection make sense. That we cannot do so seems to make the story unbelievable, to unstitch our Christian faith. That is, if this faith thing depends on the acquisition of knowledge, knowledge gained as result of study and learning. What if faith is more about wisdom upwelling from engaged experience, wisdom that changes and transforms us from within, that makes us different than we were, we know not quite how? We can talk and talk, persuade and cajole, read and become most erudite but it will not transform our heart or the heart of another. A paradox is inherently unsolvable through logic, but if we sit with it, grant it place, take it seriously in its own right, we might just find we do gain some understanding that draws us more deeply into truth, into what is real. 

As the light of Easter dawn creeps across the landscape of our lives we feel small flicker of hope flare in our torn open heart. It’s somehow familiar, while yet to be known. This life of God arising is new to us. We need to learn the shape it now takes. Jesus asks we not hold onto him, that we free him from our bondage to that which has died. Free ourselves to discover God who is still with us yet in ways we’re still to know. That flicker of hope catches and we find our hearts are burning within us. With great joy we rush to share our experience, our hope filled meeting again and together our voices rise in thanksgiving, Christ is risen we say. He is risen indeed!