Tag Archives: risen life

On Looking Forward to Easter

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In Matthew’s Gospel, the Resurrection starts off with a bang in the form of an earthquake. It’s the sort of thing that grabs our attention and makes us take notice that something of great significance has happened. After this bang, the narrative in Matthew, not to speak of the other three gospels, is surprisingly quiet. It’s sort of like one of those symphonies that starts with a bold statement and then subsides to build up musical ideas for the long haul. And the Resurrection, far from being over-and-done-with, is an event for the long haul. We’re still hauling, and so is God.

When Matthew tells of the earthquake, we get a sense of Jesus exerting a huge amount of force to break out of the tomb. That would not be surprising. The stone that Joseph of Arimathea put at the opening was heavy enough, but the Pharisees had put a seal on the tomb and posted a guard. One would think it would take something like an atomic explosion to set Jesus free. But that isn’t what Matthew describes here. What Matthew describes is the angel coming down during the earthquake and rolling away the stone to show that Jesus was already gone! Jesus had quietly slipped away to begin his resurrected life before anyone knew anything had happened.

St. Benedict’s admonition to spend Lent looking forward to Easter with joy and spiritual longing has haunted me many times over the years and I have commented on this before. This year, it haunts me more than ever. Does Benedict’s admonition mean that now Easter is here, we don’t need to look forward to it any more? I don’t think so. Benedict introduces his chapter on Lent by saying that a monastic should live a continuous Lent, which means we should look forward to Easter all the time as well. That means that even on Easter Day we also look forward to Easter. This circles back to the notion that Easter is for the long haul.

What are we celebrating in celebrating Easter, and what are we looking forward to in looking forward to Easter? There are many good answers to these questions, but the answer that keeps coming to me is gathering. By the time of his death, Jesus’s disciples had scattered. Only a few women and the Beloved Disciple in John were at the cross. After his Resurrection, Jesus began gathering the disciples, starting with the women who had come to the grave to anoint the body that wasn’t there. Matthew fast forwards to the disciples being gathered at Galilee where Jesus told the women he would meet them. There, he sends them on the mission of gathering all people of all nations. Considering the scattering of people occurring today, that job of gathering is still a work in progress.

The scattering that we see, both in the many wars occurring at this time, and the intensifying racial tensions in the US are much more like a continuation of Passiontide than a celebration of Easter, even when the calendar turns to that day. This should not be surprising because the Passion of Jesus took place on account of a severe resistance to Jesus’ life of gathering. We’re still trying to seal up the tomb to try and keep Jesus there and find ways to keep people apart. Although Jesus has proved to be the ultimate escape artist, Jesus continues to live the resurrected life as the Lamb slain since the foundation of the world, as the Book of Revelation shows us. (Rev. 5: 6) Just as Jesus allowed the religious and political authorities to crucify him rather than commit violence against them, the risen Jesus did not and does not come in violence or vengeance, but comes in self-sacrificing peace and forgiveness. That means that the risen Lord continues to suffer through his members everywhere who are persecuted by those who prefer to scatter. Jesus is the leaven in the bread and the fermentation in the wine served at the altar at every Eucharist to leaven and ferment our lives with his life of gathering.

Unfortunately, pointing out the ways other people try to reseal the tomb seems to be everybody’s blood sport. It is worth recalling that at the Last Supper, Jesus was still dealing with resistance from his closest disciples. It is also telling that, after the Resurrection, when the disciples met with the risen Lord, Matthew says that even then “some doubted.” (Mt. 28: 17) If some disciples still held back from the risen Lord’s gathering of all people, what about us? In the subject of racism, for example, I find myself having to peel away layer after layer of my own racism, as if it were an onion. I suggest that a helpful Easter exercise would be to examine ourselves for the ways we seal the tomb and set up obstacles to the Risen Life Jesus would have us lead. We need more earthquakes that send angels to roll away the stone and remind us that Jesus is alive among us, suffering every time we try to put the stone back. Meanwhile, Jesus remains with us for all time, strengthening us to gather with others and giving us much to look forward to in looking forward to Easter.

Rising to the Life of Christ

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crosswButterfliesWhen St. Paul says in Romans that we are baptized into Jesus’ death, what kind of death are we baptized into? An aged person drifting off while asleep? A ritual death with no consequences? No, we are baptized into the death of Jesus. This particular death, the one we are baptized into, is a judicial death resulting from collective violence. This is the shameful death of an alleged insurrectionist at the hands of an Empire. This death was caused by the meltdown of rivalry in the society of first century Jerusalem, exacerbated by the betrayal and cowardice of Jesus’ closest followers.

Once we know what death we are baptized into, we know what life we are raised to. In his risen life, Jesus showed no resentment or vengeance to those who had gathered to put him to death or had dispersed out of cowardice.  Moreover, Jesus was not entangled in any of the rivalrous feuds that are a way of life for most humans. Imagine living without all the entanglements and resentments swirling around and inside of us. Hard to do, isn’t it? That is how radically different the risen life is from the life we live now.

If our “old self” is crucified with Jesus, then we have, like Jesus, died in the place of the victim. That means we have died to our tendency to fuel resentments and resolve these resentments through gathering against the victim, as Paul himself repented of having held the clothes of the men who stoned Stephen and openly approving of what they did.

None of this means that repenting of personal sins and faults doesn’t matter and that becoming free of them is part of the resurrected life. However, Christian teaching has a strong tendency to stress personal renewal to such an extent that horrifyingly sick participation in collective persecution goes unnoticed. That hundreds of thousands of Christians could lynch thousands of black people shows us now, now that the lynching era is over, how easily this sort of group contagion can take over in what is often called an “enlightened” and “civilized” era.

Rather than congratulating ourselves on giving up lynching after roughly a hundred years of the sport, I suggest we take careful note of the growing polarization in our country over social and religious issues. Honest disagreement is not a problem; it’s a good thing, something that keeps us honest. But polarization tends to be conflict for the sake of conflict so that conflict feeds itself and it feeds each one of us. Never mind that polarized conflict is as nourishing to humans as sawdust and glue. What is really dangerous about this polarization is that it easily collapses into collective violence as a way of resolving the tensions.

If we wish to be serious about living the risen life with Christ, we must be baptized by the love and forgiveness of the risen Christ and allow him to gently but firmly remove all the resentments we feed on so as to feed on body and blood of the Lamb of God who reaches out to everybody with vulnerable love.

Can you imagine such a thing? Can you be overwhelmed by such a thing in baptism?