Tag Archives: bible

The Challenge of Gratitude

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Most of us believe in gratitude. But in the story of Jesus healing the ten lepers, only one of the healed lepers turned back to thank Jesus for what he had done. (Lk. 17: 11–19) If gratitude is so simple, why did nine out of ten not show it? Maybe gratitude isn’t as easy as we think. If we recall our childhood, expressing gratitude was not a spontaneous act, even though we were happy to receive nice things. As soon as we began to talk, our parents would ask us over and over again: “What do you say?” when given a present. So, what is the difficulty with gratitude?

Sometimes the problem is that we simply aren’t grateful for what we received. Most of us have childhood memories of receiving an ugly sweater or a toy three years beneath our current level from and aunt or uncle or grandparent. In such cases, we’re taught to care about the feelings of these people and, more important, to be grateful for the love they showed by giving us something. In Robertson Davies’ Deptford Trilogy, a man deprived as a child of any generosity, said that a book of Shakespeare plays that he never read was his most prized possession because it was the first time anybody had given him anything. It is also true that some people give in manipulative ways, which does not inspire gratitude. But this does not get at why we have trouble expressing gratitude when it is due.

The thing about receiving from others is that it shows our dependence on them. Children, of course, are totally dependent creatures, in need all the time for everything. I wonder if this has something to do with the difficulty of learning to say the magic words” “thank you.” If we are receiving gifts all the time, a gift is nothing special; it’s just part of the order of things. There is also a certain amount of frustration about being dependent all the time which gets in the way of feeling gratitude for what we are given.

But are we who are adults any better at gratitude, since we aren’t so dependent? My seminary professor of ascetical theology told us that thanksgiving was the hardest fundamental kind of prayer for most of us. It’s easy to pray for something but not so easy to give thanks for receiving it. Why is this, if we aren’t so dependent all the time as children are? Well, actually we are dependent on others for many things because of our human limitations. Most fundamentally, we are dependent on God. After all, each of us exists because of God’s creative energy that made our existence possible. On top of that, God redeemed us through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. How often do we get to the nubs of this dependence and thank God for it? Maybe, like children, we take it all for granted. Of course being grateful for redemption involves realizing our need for redemption in the first place, which is humiliating. And what about what we earn in money and social capital? St. Thomas Aquinas argued, contrary to Luther and Calvin, that humans can earn merit, but he said that the ability to earn merit is a gift from God, which puts him close to Luther and Calvin after all. So, like children, we are dependent all the time for everything. It takes humility to accept this.

As monks, those of us in the community of St. Gregory’s Abbey live a life of complete dependence, putting us into the position where gratitude has to be as much an ongoing facet of life as dependence. I think back on how often, during the intercessory prayers, Fr. Anthony would give thanks for his monastic vocation. I, too, feel this same gratitude, and it occurs to me that the monastic vocation is a gift from God, but also a gift of our supporters. Among other services, such as our guest ministry, is the importance of offering deep and continuous prayer for all people. It occurs to me that if giving thanks is so difficult, then continuous prayer for everyone needs also to be continuous thanksgiving.

Working with Unjust Wealth

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There is much puzzlement about the parable of the mid-manager who is dismissed from his office. (Lk. 16: 1–9) Not least is the question as to whether we should called him “the Dishonest Manger,” as does the NRSV, or the “unjust manager” as many other English translations have it. The Greek word here is adikaios. This is in the dikaios word group which normally is translated as “justice “ or “righteousness.” Here, it is preceded by the alpha privative so that literally it means a manager without justice or righteousness. Dishonest mangers do have that lack, but since the word dikaios occurs frequently in the New Testament meaning justice and/or righteousness, I think it is preferable to say that the manager is unrighteous rather than dishonest. The unjust Judge who would only do justice for the widow when pestered by the widow was also described by the word adikaios, which is clearly best translated as “unjust.” (Lk. 18: 6) There is a significant difference in the two English terms and since this parable is very opaque, we can use all the clarity we can get. This understanding of the word gains more credence when we note that the unrighteous manager is not accused of embezzlement but of squandering the property of the rich man who had hired him. There is also the matter of the rich man acting on hearsay without apparently doing any independent investigation.

The unrighteous manager’s inner dialogue is realistic and pragmatic. He is quite clear about the ulterior motive behind his scheme of lowering the debts of his former boss’s clients: that these people will welcome him into their homes for what he has done for them. It appears that the unrighteous manger is cheating his former master, but it is possible that he was receiving a commission on the notes and was deducting what would have been his share. That the former master chuckles over what his fired employee has done suggests that he had not suffered further loss over these transactions. It’s hard to see how the Kingdom of God can be like this sort of moral muddle, and Jesus does not, in fact, say the Kingdom of God is like this. So what does a parable like this have to do with the Kingdom of God?

The parable suggests that handling money is intrinsically problematic, and the greedier one is, the more problematic it is. Both the rich man and the people who owe the rich man material goods come across as wanting best value for their money. Almost all of us do that and that is why this parable mirrors our involvement with money and other material goods. Calling the wealth “unjust” rather than “dishonest” better captures the systemic injustice of the world’s economic system. The unrighteous manger is the only one in the parable who acts generously even if that is only under duress: unless the “squandering” of the rich man’s property involved being generous with the goods he was responsible for. Given recent events, I can’t help but think of the refusal of some politicians to “squander” money on helping those most in need of assistance.

Indeed, Jesus shifts the focus from handling money in this world to the relationship between how generous we are with money in terms of our eternal destiny: “And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone they may welcome you into the eternal homes.” (Lk. 16: 9) Jesus then goes on with a few other comments, the most pertinent being “No slave can serve two masters, for a slave will either hate the one and love the other or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.” (:Lk. 16: 13) The rich man and the clients who owe the rich man goods are caught in serving wealth, while the unrighteous manager seems to have freed himself from it to some extent. By mirroring the morally chaotic life of pursuing wealth, Jesus alerts us to the need to escape this rat race by aiming for “the eternal homes.” So where is the Kingdom of God? It isn’t here unless we all practice the generosity of the unrighteous steward which disrupts the system he was living in up to the time he was fired.

The Call to Contemplation

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The brief story of Jesus visiting Martha and Mary, when Martha serves Jesus and Mary sits at his feet, listening to him, (Lk. 10: 38-42) has been interpreted as contrasting the active and contemplative lives since the early church. The contrast between Martha being so frantically active and Mary so still a listener firmly calls for attention. In any case, the relationship between activity and contemplation is one with which Christians have struggled since the Early Church. Although the Desert monastics embraced an ardent contemplative lifestyle, there are stories about the need for Martha, such as the amusing story of a visitor to a monastery who said he would not help with the work because he had, like Mary, chosen the better part, but was upset when he wasn’t called to dinner.

On the face of it, though, the contrast of action and contemplation doesn’t seem to be an issue for Luke or the other Gospel writers, which raises the question of whether or not the use of this story for evaluating the relationship between action and contemplation might be a bit anachronistic, even if congruent to the story. So I thought about what the story might have met to Luke–-but came up empty. I couldn’t think of any other meaning than the traditional one, which raises the question of whether it is so anachronistic after all.

First, I reflected on the pace of each of the four Gospels. Mark, considered the earliest, is very fast paced, breathlessly narrating the healing miracles and overwhelming the reader (or listener) with the power of Jesus’ ministry. Matthew and Luke slow the pace considerably, mainly by including long episodes of Jesus’ teaching, teachings that require reflection to begin taking them in. Although Luke’s pace is roughly the same as Matthew’s, it is instructive that he stresses more the times Jesus went off alone to pray, suggesting that Jesus had to balance his active life with contemplation. John, most likely the latest Gospel, is much the most contemplative Gospel as it unfolds at a very slow pace and suggests deeper meanings to the events in the narration. Such a progression suggests a growing awareness of those who developed the Gospel traditions of the need to contemplate the meaning of Jesus’ life that culminated in the shocks of the crucifixion and Resurrection, as well as absorbing the teachings which seem to have puzzled Jesus’ closest followers at the time. So, the traditional interpretation of this brief story doesn’t seem anachronistic after all.

When we look at the opening chapter of the Epistle to the Colossians, we encounter profoundly contemplative insights on the part of Paul, or whoever else might have written the epistle. (I favor Pauline authorship, but if somebody else shared the same contemplative insights as Paul demonstrated in his undoubted epistles, that attests all the more to the contemplative development of the early church.) Paul connects Jesus, whom he encountered on the Road to Damascus, to the Creator of the world, (Col. 1: 15–17) perhaps sensing the same creative activity on the part of God in Genesis as in the re-creation Paul experienced when Jesus called him out. This same Jesus is also the head of the Church, (Col. 1: 18) the specific group of humans who have responded to Jesus as Paul has. All this convinces Paul that the fullness of God dwells within Jesus. (Col. 1: 19) Most important, Paul realizes that Jesus’ reconciliation with him, who had formerly been hostile to Jesus, is part of a general reconciliation Jesus has made with all people, a reconciliation made not through the military, political, and cultural force of the Pax Romana, but the Peace of Christ who suffered at the hands of the Roman Empire. (Col. 1: 20) The very persecution Paul engaged in was flipped to a reconciliation by the suffering of Jesus. In this dense passage, we see the fruits of profound contemplation, a sitting at the feet of Jesus in quiet prayer. This gives us all the more reason to believe that Luke, probably writing two or three decades later than Paul, was passing on a caution traced back to Jesus that the action required by charity, such as in the Parable of the Good Samaritan that directly precedes this story of Mary and Martha, and the need to proclaim the Kingdom of God, be grounded in quiet contemplation of what the Kingdom ix really about.

In Genesis, we have the incident when Abraham and Sarah welcome three men who turn out to be angels. (Gen. 18: 1–10) Although there is much activity, we don’t see the frantic movements of Martha, and certainly not a trace of the resentment on Martha’s part. Starting with the Early Church, there has been a tendency to interpret the angels as the Holy Trinity come to visit the patriarch and matriarch. That interpretation really is anachronistic, but Paul’s proclamation that “the mystery that has been hidden throughout the ages and generations but has now been revealed to his saints” (Col. 1: 26) suggests that some interpretations of scripture will transcend time. The well-known icon of the Trinity by Andrei Rublev, inspired by this scene, leads us into the deep contemplation, not only of the hospitality of Martha, Sarah, and Abraham, but also of the hospitality of Mary who invited Jesus deeply into her heart. Such a presence of God within us can never be taken away from us and will remain with us for all eternity.

It Was Necessary that Jesus Ascend

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With the celebrations of Christmas and Easter and, to some extent, Pentecost, the celebration of Ascension seems to get lost in the shuffle, something of an afterthought if it is thought about at all. Part of the trouble is that it isn’t all that easy to get an idea of what the Ascension is all about, so we wonder: What ‘s the big deal? We celebrated Jesus’s birth at Christmas and his rising from the dead at Easter. What more do we need? Isn’t the Resurrection enough? According to Luke and John the answer is: No.

Another part of the trouble is that the Ascension is a downer with Jesus leaving his disciples. The first aria in J.S. Bach’s Ascension Oratorio is a long lament over Jesus’ departure. Hardly a cause for celebration. If Jesus loves us enough to come to earth and spend time with us, why would Jesus leave us?

Distance as well as closeness, however, typifies our relationship with God. It is put succinctly in the Psalm verse: “For though the Lord is high, he regards the lowly.” (Ps. 138: 6) In theological terms, God is radically transcendent, but also radically imminent. God’s immediate presence wouldn’t be all that awesome if God were not transcendent as well, and a god who remains aloof from humans doesn’t exactly catch the heart of humans. Moreover, God’s distance gives humans space to live by decisions humans make while God’s closeness offers guidance to those who are open to it.

Luke describes a forty day period during which Jesus talks about the Kingdom of God and the forgiveness of sins. Most importantly, Jesus opens up the scriptures to the disciples by explaining why it was “necessary” that he suffer and rise from the dead. (As Luke and the other Gospel writers make clear, the “necessity” is human, not divine.) All of these are good thing, such good things that it is puzzling why Jesus would leave rather than continue with them. So what was the problem?

On the road to Emmaus, Cleopas and his companion told Jesus (while not recognizing him) that they had hoped he would “redeem Israel.” (Lk. 24: 21) In opening the scriptures to these two companions, Jesus shifted their lost hope to the need for Jesus to die and rise again. But after opening the scriptures for another forty days, Jesus was still asked: “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” (Acts 1: 6) At this point, it was clear that, as long as Jesus was with the disciples, they would be distracted from his opening the scriptures to them. The temptation to triangle Jesus into their human agenda seems to have been irresistible as long as Jesus was physically present. Only if Jesus left them would they have the space to let the scriptures be opened to them so that they could understand the need for Jesus to have died and risen again. Jesus’ leaving also left the disciples as vulnerable to other humans as Jesus himself was while on earth, putting them, and us, in the position of suffering at their hands.

A second reason for the need for Jesus to ascend after a relatively brief time after his Resurrection builds on the first reason but also reinstates the dialectic of transcendence and imminence that had been temporarily compromised by Jesus’ Incarnate presence on earth. In John, Jesus says that only if he goes away can he send the Paraclete to guide them in all truth. In Luke, Jesus promises the disciples that the Holy Spirit will soon come if they wait in Jerusalem. Sure enough, ten days later, the Holy Spirit comes in tongues of fire, giving the disciples the gift of tongues so that they can communicate with other peoples. More importantly, the Holy Spirit guides the disciples into understanding the scriptures that Jesus had opened up for them so that not only did they finally understand that Jesus had to die and rise again, they were inspired to preach this truth along with proclaiming the forgiveness of sins.

In Ephesians, Paul proclaims the reality of the crucified, risen, and ascended Lord, seated at God’s right hand “in the heavenly places.” (Eph. 1: 20) Jesus may be exalted, with “all things under his feet,” but this exalted Jesus remains the crucified Lord who had to die before being so highly exalted. That is, we are not under the rule of a powerful deity, we are under the rule of the crucified one who rose with total forgiveness of those who tortured and killed him. It is this crucified, risen and ascended Lord who appeared to Stephen when he was being stoned for preaching what the Holy Spirit had inspired him to preach, and it was the exalted Jesus who filled Stephen with the same forgiveness of his persecutors. The ascended Lord may be infinitely up on high, but this same Lord sends the Holy Spirit deep into our hearts with the same apostolic message of forgiveness he gave to the disciples.

Resurrection in Miniature

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One of the oldest instinctual human acts is to reverence the bodies of the dead. Only in the most recent years have there been any signs of attenuation of such customs. There are no pragmatic reasons for it. As Søren Kierkegaard noted, the dead can’t pay you back for what we do for them, which makes reverence for the dead a profound act of disinterested love. Why do we have this instinct? Why was it important to the women to bring spices to the tomb at the dawn of the day after the sabbath at great expense? In answering these questions, it occurs to me that there is something awesome about death. How is it that the life that used to fill this body is no longer there? Where did that life go, if it went anywhere? Finding the tomb empty was bewildering to the women. How could they reverence the body if the body was not there? Worse, what sort of disrespectful act might have been committed on the body of a man who had died a criminal’s death?

Suddenly seeing the two men in dazzling clothes only compounded the bewilderment. These “men,” presumably angels, teased the women for looking for the living among the dead. (Lk. 24: 5) True, if one is looking for a live person, a tomb is not the best place to look, but the women had come to reverence a dead person who had meant much to them, and a tomb is the right place to look for that. As it turns out, the women who came to the tomb are the first to be told that Jesus is risen. They are also derided for not having expected this outcome, but since this is the only time in the history of the world that a dead person has risen bodily from the dead, they can be pardoned for not expecting it, Jesus’ prophesies of dying and rising notwithstanding. After all, the disciples didn’t believe Jesus when he said he was going to be killed. How could such a great man come to such an end? And if they didn’t believe Jesus was going to die, they would hardly have gotten to the notion he would rise again. Given the reaction of the women at the tomb, they hadn’t believed these prophesies any more than the disciples did.

It is highly significant that the first persons to be told about Jesus’ rising were not the disciples, but this small group of women who came to care for a dead body by anointing it with spices. One could say they got a lot more for their kind action than they bargained for. What if nobody had come to the tomb to reverence the body of Jesus? Would the resurrection have been made known? The story following in Luke gives us the first resurrection appearance of Jesus himself, but it isn’t straight-forward. The two disciples on the Road to Emmaus don’t recognize Jesus, but they invite him to stay with them when they come to an inn at eventide. If they had not kindly invited the stranger to stay and share supper with them, would they ever have seen the man as Jesus resurrected from the dead?

When the two disciples run back to Jerusalem to tell the other followers of Jesus, they are told that Jesus had appeared to Simon Peter. Although one would think this appearance the most momentous of all, it is mentioned almost in passing. Even Paul gives it more prominence is his list of appearances. (1 Cor. 15: 5) Luke then concludes with Jesus appearing to all of the disciples. It all seems low-key and very quiet. Hardly earth-shaking as the Resurrection is in Matthew.

I suggest we think further about how closely tied the Resurrection appearances in Luke are to small acts of human kindness. In Brothers Karamazov, Dmitri tells of how a man’s small act of giving him a bag of nuts made a deep impression on him. Such acts may seem to accomplish little, but they are the stuff of the resurrected life that abides.

A Cup of Cold Water

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Jesus’ words about cutting off hands and feet and plucking out eyes in order to avoid unquenchable fire are pretty grim and can leave us feeling traumatized. (Mk. 9: 43–48) It is enough to make a preacher look for ways to make everybody feel better. For starters, I think I can safely say that this business of cutting off hands and feet and plucking out eyes is hyperbole and Jesus doesn’t expect or want us to do any such things. Even so, even if we take these words metaphorically, they are clearly metaphorical about giving up something that feels like a part of us, so we aren’t in for a free ride by any means.

Why the talk about stumbling blocks that lead to sin and the drastic solution of dismemberment? The French thinker René Girard is helpful for understanding what a stumbling-block is all about. The Greek word is skandalon. It refers to offense, scandalizing other people by our conduct or our words. In the preceding verses read as last Sunday’s Gospel, the disciples had argued about who was the greatest. Jesus then put a child among them and told them to become like this little child. (Mk. 9: 33–37) At the beginning of today’s reading, the disciples are complaining about somebody casting out demons in Jesus’ name, another example of arguing about who is the greatest, as they see this exorcist as a competitor while Jesus sees him as somebody else doing what needs to be done. (Mk. 9: 38–40) Girard suggested that when people become rivals, they become stumbling blocks to one another. They become entangled with one another, tripping and falling over each other. Children, such as the child Jesus placed among the contentious disciples, are very vulnerable to such a competitive environment in many ways. If they feel they have to compete to get attention in order to have their needs met, they copy the behavior that is modeled to them. More tragically, children are often “collateral damage” in the conflicts waged by their elders, whether it is in the family or large-scale warfare. A society permeated by people arguing and fighting about who is the greatest is hellish. It is a fire that never goes out. So we don’t have to think in terms of an afterlife, but it is worth mentioning that there can be no such rivalry in heaven so we do have to give it up if we are going to find heaven heavenly. Besides, the word translated as “hell” is Gehenna. Far from referring to the afterlife, Gehenna refers to a valley outside Jerusalem that Jeremiah and other prophets said was used for child sacrifice. (Jer. 19: 2–5) This image is most apt for the vulnerability of the “little ones” or “the least of these.” This term does not necessarily refer to children, although because Jesus had recently placed a child among the disciples, it is easy to think that. There is no question, however, that Jesus is referring to all vulnerable people, which certainly includes children.

These considerations would suggest that we need to cut off our rivalrous desires and throw them away so as to avoid the hell of rivalrous contention. The trouble is, we can’t really cut off our desires and throw them away. We are still human if we have one hand or one foot or one eye, but we aren’t human if we don’t have desires. And it isn’t that we have some bad desires we can throw away and some good desires that are keepers. We have desire. Period. So it isn’t a case of cutting off desire but directing it and, when necessary, redirecting it. Such redirection can feel like an amputation for those of us who are addicted to fighting over whether we are the greatest. We have a simple but powerful example of redirecting desire away from rivalry towards charity in the words sandwiched by the apostles’ complaint about the “unauthorized” exorcist and the exhortations to cut off hands and feet if they cause us to stumble. Here Jesus urges us to give a cup of cold water to anyone who bears the name of Christ. (Mk. 9: 41) Such redirection leaves us vulnerable to those who continue to play the hellish game, but Jesus has told us that the kingdom is about being among the least of all people, the most vulnerable. The more we are in touch with our own vulnerability, the more sympathy we have for the vulnerability of others, including the vulnerability of those who try to hide their vulnerability through rivalry. We need these cups of cold water to put out the fires.

On Being a Mustard Shrub

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The Parable of the Mustard Seed is one of the most famous parables of Jesus, one that gives us hope that a small beginning can have an impressive ending, or so we think. This notion of an impressive ending comes from the versions of this parable in Matthew and Luke. ((Mt. 13: 31–32; Lk. 13: 18–19) There, the mustard seed grows into a tree, although Matthew does call it a shrub that turns into a tree. Mark, most likely the earliest version, and closest to Jesus, simply says that the mustard seed grows into the “greatest of all shrubs.” (Mk. 4: 3-32) A shrub, even a sizeable one, doesn’t seem so impressive, especially when we realize that mustard shrubs were considered intrusive weeds in Jesus’ time. What is Jesus getting at? We can get a lot of help by looking at some contexts for the parable.

This parable seems almost certainly to be inspired by a similar parable in Ezekiel: “This is what the Sovereign Lord says: I myself will take a shoot from the very top of a cedar and plant it; I will break off a tender sprig from its topmost shoots and plant it on a high and lofty mountain. On the mountain heights of Israel I will plant it; it will produce branches and bear fruit and become a splendid cedar. Birds of every kind will nest in it; they will find shelter in the shade of its branches. (Ezek. 17: 22-23) With the prophet, we have Yahweh taking something small, a twig, and making something great and impressive out of it: a tree on a mountaintop that shelters birds. So it is easy to see why later versions of Jesus’ parable would move in this direction. But in Mark, the seed is smaller and less impressive than a twig, and the mustard shrub is much less impressive than the splendid cedar. Moreover, cedars are cultivated for their wood; mustard shrubs are weeds. A triumphalist vision in Ezekiel has been downsized quite a bit by Jesus. So again, what is Jesus getting at?

In Mark, the Parable of the Mustard Seed is immediately preceded by The Parable of the Growing Seed where, after seed is scattered on the ground, “the earth produces of itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head.” (Mk. 4: 26-29) In this parable, the growth seems natural, something that happens by itself. We sense the mystery of God’s creation that brings plants into being and makes them grow. The mustard shrub also grows naturally, but it is an intrusion that is planted intentionally, perhaps an image of the intrusiveness of God’s kingdom. And yet the mustard shrub is also an image of welcoming, a place for birds to build their nests, an image of inclusiveness from what we might call an outcast plant.

The two parables of plant growth are preceded by a more elaborate parable with much the same imagery: the Parable of the Sower. Although analogies of natural growth are there, the emphasis is on failure. Most of the seeds fall on rocky soil or among thorns or on the roadside and bear no fruit. This parable coincides with the disciples’ first signs of failure; they do not understand the parable. As the Gospel progresses, the failures of the disciples increase, culminating in the desertion at Gethsemane, Peter’s denials, and then the women running from the empty tomb, saying nothing to nobody. The seed falling on paths, rocky ground, or thorns looks like the disciples. We don’t even have a mustard shrub; we only have scattered seeds that don’t grow at all.

But God can create out of nothing. God did this in the beginning, and God does it again after Jesus’ Resurrection. (Note that the first word of Mark’s Gospel is arche, beginning.) And St. Paul says that, in Christ, “the new creation has come.” (2 Cor. 5: 17) In Jesus’ parables, what little seed did fall on good soil yielded thirty, sixty or a hundredfold. The mustard shrub was just enough for the birds of the air to come and make their nests. How did even this much come from such massive failure? We have a hint at the New Creation when, in the face of the disciples’ failures to accept his coming death, Jesus tells his disciples that they will be handed over to councils and beaten in synagogues and will stand before governors and kings because him. (Mk. 13: 9) This prophecy leaps out of the frame of the Gospel narrative to the witness of the apostles recorded in Acts. The Parable of the Mustard Seed leaps even further out of the frame. In the face of our human failure, there will still be an intrusive, unimpressive kingdom that most people don’t want, a kingdom like a shrub which opens its branches to God’s people to further, with Paul, Christ’s ministry of reconciliation. (2 Cor. 5: 18)

See also Sowing Parables in our Hearts

Unfinished Story

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We all like a story that ends happily with the loose ends tied together in satisfying ways. It makes us feel good, especially if the good guys had to overcome the machinations of the bad guys and the bad guys got what they deserved. Likewise, a symphony that ends triumphantly raises our spirits. The only thing wrong with these things is that real life isn’t like that. Yes, there are happy and satisfying moments and what we might call mini-happy endings, but happily ever after isn’t a sure thing, as Sondheim showed in his musical Into the Woods where we see just how grim the ever after can be. (Among many other things, Cinderella’s marriage with Prince Charming is on the rocks.) These thoughts suggest that the feel-good happy endings are illusory. The hard reality of real life can feel all the harder for it. A more positive way to look at it is to take the happy endings eschatologically. In God’s good time, everything really will be worked out. There is much comfort in this hope and it is fundamental to the Christian vision, but sometimes we need more direct and realistic encouragement and hope along the way. Sometimes an ending to a story that doesn’t resolve everything or even anything, or a symphony that ends with chords that hang in the ear, is actually more comforting (The sixth and ninth symphonies of Ralph Vaughan Williams are good examples of this.)

Easter Sunday tends to be celebrated as the ultimate happy ending. Yes, Jesus suffered a horrible death, but he came through alive and well and happy and the gates of eternal life have been opened to everybody. But with a lectionary that gives us Mark’s Resurrection story every three years, we get something very different. It ends with a group of frightened women running away from the empty tomb in spite of the angel’s announcement of Jesus’ Resurrection. All this after a totally bleak account of a god-forsaken Christ dying on the cross. What kind of happy ending is this? From the earliest Christian centuries to the present day many have had trouble believing Mark would end his Gospel this way. That is why there are a couple of additions clumsily attached to the end that don’t even remotely match the style of Mark’s writing and outlook.

For those of us who feel better with a happy ending, Mark is a real downer. But the advantage of an unresolved ending is that it can give us pause to think about some things we might not think about if blinded by a happy ending. The frightened women running from the empty tomb make it clear that the strife indeed isn’t over and the battle isn’t done as many horrifying current events make clear. The women thought they would anoint the dead body of Jesus, but that didn’t happen. Ending the Gospel with the women anointing the body to match the anointing of Jesus’ head at the house of Simon the Leper just before the passion would have been a satisfying bittersweet ending. But we don’t ever get that. So what hope do we get from the frightened women?

For one thing, a big thing, if we don’t really know what to make of the Resurrection, if we aren’t sure what it really means for our lives, we can take heart from these women who also didn’t know what to make of it. If we feel flat-footed and flat-brained about the Resurrection, these women in their awkward, frightened flight were obviously flat-footed and flat-brained themselves. This can give us space to ask ourselves what it really does mean that Jesus is risen from the dead. How do we live with a Jesus who died but who isn’t dead after all and is very much alive here and now? When we ask ourselves these questions, the answers are hardly obvious and we are then in a position to let the questions linger rather than prematurely clutching at a fully resolved happy ending.

Mulling over these questions can help us notice that the other Gospels also leave unresolved cracks in their narrations of the Resurrection. In Matthew and Luke, where the women are reported to have told the other disciples about the empty tomb and the angel’s message, the disciples think the women are out of their minds. Nobody seems to recognize Jesus at first when he appears. Why? The moving story of the journey to Emmaus is especially illuminating. The two disciples on the road are downcast, not the least cheered up by the rumors of what the women had said. But at least they are asking questions and this gives Jesus the opportunity to lead them into further insight as to what has happened. The story of Jesus becoming recognizable in the breaking of the bread and then disappearing leaves us hanging, but it leaves room for more to come. These disciples who listened to Jesus as he opened the scriptures to them have much more to learn and to look forward to, even if they don’t know what all of it is.

The ending in Mark is so abrupt because it isn’t really the end. It is the beginning. Galilee is where the story began. The disciples are told to go back and make a new start and we are told to do the same. The obtuseness and cowardice of the disciples throughout the Gospel aren’t the last word after all. Jesus isn’t finished with them and he isn’t finished with us either. Forgiveness is sneaking in right when we weren’t expecting it. With the stage cleared of Jesus, the disciples, the women, we are all that is left with the angel to prod us on. This Gospel is our story now and it will never have an end any more than the Risen Christ has an end. Will we return to the beginning of the story and live it ourselves? Let us sit quietly with the risen Christ with all our puzzlement and disorientation and prayerfully let the Risen Lord fill our hearts and minds with the Risen Life.

The World God Loves

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John 3: 16: “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son” seems to be almost everybody’s favorite Bible verse. I don’t mind being a non-conformist when called to be and I have been known to get a conceited pleasure out of being one, but this is among my favorite verses too. However, the very popularity and familiarity of the verse can perhaps dull us to its power to impact our lives.

I will work with what seems an innocuous question: What is the world that God loved enough to send the Son into it? The word kosmos in normal usage had a neutral connotation, meaning the world in general, the world that happens to be. This corresponds to normal usage in English. In John’s Gospel, however, the word has a highly negative connotation, closer to the negative connotations of “worldly,” only much stronger than that. Most New Testament scholars interpret the word as John uses it as “the world-against-God, the world in rebellion against God,” as I learned it in seminary. Curiously, much preaching on this particular verse, including my own, seems to make it an exception; thinking of the world in a neutral way. But what if this isn’t an exception? What does this verse look like then? What does the world hostile to God look like, and what kind of deity would want to get messed up with it?

The reading from Numbers gives us a snapshot of the world against God. One would think that their deliverance from Egypt would earn some gratitude on the part of the Israelites, but all they do is grumble angrily about the hardships in the wilderness. (Num. 21: 5) When attacked by poisonous snakes that image their poisonous behavior, they repent. That’s something, but they Israelites show a pattern of turning against God time and time again when things get tough. The snake Moses puts on a pole saves the people. This smacks of sympathetic magic but surely God is telling us something here. What we have is poison driving out poison. Many medicines operate on the same principle; the Greek word pharmakon from which we get the word “pharmacy” means both medicine and poison. Somehow, God uses the poison of rebellion to cure the rebellion, perhaps because the plague reveals the truth of the poison of their rebellion. Paul writes that to the Ephesians that they “followed the ways of the world”—using “world” in much the way John does—following the desires and thoughts of “the flesh.” (Eph. 2: 2–3) One could say they were deserving of wrath because they embodied it.

In the John’s Gospel, we see much of “the world” in the sense of the rebellious world. The debates between Jesus and the enemies John calls “The Jews” are very intense. Their accusations that Jesus is possessed of a demon when he offers them freedom from sin make them look demon-possessed themselves. (Jn. 8: 48) These debates make painful reading on account of their ferocious character. In contrast to the frenzied emotive outburst of rebellion in these debates, John also shows us the cold calculating style of rebellion. When Lazarus is raised from the dead, they react to the resurrected life with a plot to kill Lazarus as well as Jesus since people are following Jesus because of this resurrection. And then there is the cold calculation of Caiaphas who says that it is better that one man die for the people than that the whole people perish. (Jn. 11: 50) John seems to have no love for these enemies of Jesus. Surely God can have no love for them. John’s dramatic portrayal of their enmity tends to reinforce our own rejection of these enemies. But these enemies are the kosmos. They are the kosmos God loved deeply enough to send his beloved son into it.

Right before John declares this love on God’s part, Jesus alludes to the serpent in the desert: “Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes may have eternal life in him.” (Jn. 3: 14–15) Jesus has turned this unsettling and cryptic gesture into a prophecy. The poison of rebellion on the part of Jesus’ enemies leads to Jesus being raised on a cross and the poison of this rebellion becomes the cure for the very same rebellion. In Ephesians, Paul, who himself had been a rebellious enemy of Jesus, experiences this very same love that motivated God to give God’s only begotten Son to make him, and us, who were dead in transgressions, alive in Christ. Not only alive, but raised up with Christ and seated with him in the heavenly realms. (Eph. 2: 4–6)

All of this sounds great–and it is beyond great–but John warns us of the judgment that the Light came into the world and we preferred darkness to light. (Jn. 3: 19 ) As the kosmos works to protect its rebellion to this blinding light, it falls into blinding darkness. How? If we slip into the default neutral understanding of “world” in the great verse proclaiming God’s love, we think this “world” is us—the good guys, and the world in rebellion is some other world—the bad guys who rebelled against Jesus. Paul had no illusions of this sort after his Damascus experience. But do we see the truth of our own grumbling in the deserts in life? Do we see ourselves as part of the kosmos Jesus loves in spite of our rebellion? Asking ourselves these questions as honestly as we can is a fundamental Lenten practice. Further on in Ephesians, Paul stresses that Christ’s raising us to His life has destroyed the barrier that had polarized Jew and Gentile–the ultimate embodiment of an us vs. them spirituality in Paul’s day. If we think this love is intended for us and not for them, we have fallen deeply into the darkness, preferring it to the Light that came into the world. Being among those who believe and have eternal life, then, is not a mental act of thinking something is true; it is about opening our eyes to the light, letting that light blind us, and then stumbling in the light instead of in the dark. It is this bumbling and stumbling that leads into the quality of life that is eternal life where there are many rooms in the Father’s house. (Jn. 14: 2)