Isaiah 65:17-25 17 "For behold, I create new heavens and a new earth, and the former things shall not be remembered or come into mind. 18 But be glad and rejoice forever in that which I create; for behold, I create Jerusalem to be a joy, and her people to be a gladness. 19 I will rejoice in Jerusalem and be glad in my people; no more shall be heard in it the sound of weeping and the cry of distress. 20 No more shall there be in it an infant who lives but a few days, or an old man who does not fill out his days, for the young man shall die a hundred years old, and the sinner a hundred years old shall be accursed. 21 They shall build houses and inhabit them; they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit. 22 They shall not build and another inhabit; they shall not plant and another eat; for like the days of a tree shall the days of my people be, and my chosen shall long enjoy the work of their hands. 23 They shall not labor in vain or bear children for calamity, for they shall be the offspring of the blessed of the LORD, and their descendants with them. 24 Before they call I will answer; while they are yet speaking I will hear. 25 The wolf and the lamb shall graze together; the lion shall eat straw like the ox, and dust shall be the serpent's food. They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain," says the LORD.
Luke 24:1-12 But on the first day of the week, at early dawn, they went to the tomb, taking the spices they had prepared. 2 And they found the stone rolled away from the tomb, 3 but when they went in they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus. 4 While they were perplexed about this, behold, two men stood by them in dazzling apparel. 5 And as they were frightened and bowed their faces to the ground, the men said to them, "Why do you seek the living among the dead? 6 He is not here, but has risen. Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, 7 that the Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men and be crucified and on the third day rise." 8 And they remembered his words, 9 and returning from the tomb they told all these things to the eleven and to all the rest. 10 Now it was Mary Magdalene and Joanna and Mary the mother of James and the other women with them who told these things to the apostles, 11 but these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them. 12 But Peter rose and ran to the tomb; stooping and looking in, he saw the linen cloths by themselves; and he went home marveling at what had happened.
“These words seemed an idle tale.” That is what the disciples thought. And our old testament passage, with its new heavens and new earth, rampant vegetarianism in the animal kingdom, seems fantastic as well. How do we get from an idle tale to this new creation? How do we get from an idle tale to Christ resurrected from the dead – never to die again? To many living in the world today the thought that there is more to life than what we have now seems an idle tale. Isaiah word that they shall neither hurt nor destroy on my holy mountain runs counter to current notions of how to secure nations. Isaiah paints a world where people live in their own houses without fear of being homeless; where people work without fear of being jobless. God does this – we are not told how.
In our passage from Luke's gospel we are not told how Jesus has risen from the dead, but we are shown something. We are shown that something about the world is changing. The women at the tomb see a vision of angles and are told not to seek the living among the dead. Well to them it was only reasonable to seek Jesus there, among the tombs. He was after all dead. They are told though to consider that this dead man now lives. This is a new world indeed. And Jesus is not just any dead man who now lives: he is the embodiment of Isaiah's new heaven and new earth. He is the embodiment of a promise that had been killed. When the women visit the tomb that morning they have in their minds ,”this is where the new heaven and new earth we'd hoped for is buried. We thought for a moment that it was ready to be fulfilled on earth, but now it is gone. Now things are as they have always been and they will never change.” Then something unpredictable happens: the tomb is empty.
The empty tomb is unpredictable. It is a sign that the assumptions we make about God and the world and other human beings are conditioned by predictability. It is a sign that God is not predictable. To the people of Israel that Isaiah writes to, a people in exile, it is incredible that they will ever inhabit Zion once again, much less that they will dwell in non-violent security, safeguarded by God. This text to them told a story that seemed unpredictable, an idle tale. Even so, the resurrection of Jesus is even more unpredictable. But to us today, having heard this story so often over the years, have we lost an appreciation for this unpredictability? Has the resurrection taken on an appearance of predictability for us. Study of the old testament shows us a God who is unpredictable. God is passionate, angry and loving, changing his mind, describing himself as a father and a mother, a warrior and a shepherd. This God, who Jesus calls Father, avoids being pinned down. He is always loving and faithful. But. He will not be predictable.
But if today God seems predictable to us, and therefore amenable to the way of the world, supporting whatever the national agenda is, whatever the apocalyptic expectation is, and the God of the old testament is different, and the God of Jesus is different; then we have to wonder how we arrived at the point. Because at this point, if we are worshiping a God who is agreeable to whatever the world wants to do, endorsing consumerism, building a large military state, then we are not worshiping the God who said ,”you shall have no other gods before me.”How have we strayed so far from a God who is unpredictable, not quiet, not willing to sit in the back of the room while we adults do the important work? Such a God is surely safe and comfortable, but such a god is surely a hollow idol, a projection of our own desires. How do we get back to the God who loves us and is faithful, but in unpredictable ways? This God of Jesus who will not be quiet and go along with how things are. This God of Isaiah who wants to remake all of creation into a vegetarian, anarcho-collectivist theme park? Talk about unpredictable.
The way to find God is through the resurrection. In some churches today they repeat the phrase that the resurrection is the renewal of creation. This should fill us with wonder, not just at the natural coming of spring, but wonder at the power of God, loving and unpredictable, at work in this world and in our hearts and lives. This is the wonder of Easter.
The wonder of Easter is that Jesus rose from the dead.” Think about that, “from the dead”: what does that mean? We know the full story now, but that first Easter, the disciples knew only that Jesus was dead. Really dead.
I thought: how quickly we skip from the cross to the resurrection. In our imaginations do we leave time for Jesus to be really dead? What does it mean for the Son of God to be really dead? Is God faking it? Is Jesus only pretending to be a corpse and then when the stone is rolled over the tomb's door, he springs up and amuses himself with whatever you'd amuse yourself with in a cold,dark tomb? He would bide his time, and then, on the third day, as the stone was rolled away, walking out of the tomb with a yawn and he would say, “hey, look at me. I'm risen from the dead.”Or did his cold body lay there and his spirit go off on a holiday, visiting his Father in heaven, catching up on what happened while he was away? Or did his spirit prowl the caverns of hell, bursting open locks to infernal dungeons, liberating souls pressed beyond hope in a death that seemed unending?
Such thoughts spring from an ancient heresy called docetism.: the belief that Jesus only appeared to suffer, only appeared to be dead. Like all heresies it is a weed that never is eradicated from the garden. It springs from the desire to protect God from things that seem undignified, as if God were a child that needed protection from bad things. Such a God is the god of the Greek philosophers, an unmoved mover. They imagined a god who never feels or desires – such human responses were the result of the corruption of matter. To the Greeks matter is evil and must be overcome. One way to overcome matter is to practice being unaffected, to face death and loss showing as little concern as possible – and also to treat success and triumph the same way. In this way, matter is overcome and the person begins to resemble God, an unmoved mover.
Such a god is not the God we meet in the Old Testament. In the Old Testament God creates matter and revels in it. God is passionate. God loves and regrets, is angry and weeps. God's relationship with Israel and Israel's relationship with God is like one of those relationships where a couple is throwing plates at each other one minute and planning a second honeymoon the next. If you think I'm exaggerating, read Ezekiel 16 for God's side and Psalm 88 for Israel's. These texts are extreme in their bitterness, but they show how deeply held the passion each has for the other is. As Judaism and later Christianity encountered the Greek world, the tendency was to say, “our God is like your God.:” to soften the hard edges of Israel's God. And so well meaning theologians have created ways in which the language of scripture, where God regrets, hates and loves, is read metaphorically, necessitated by our limited human understanding. God only seems to regret, love and hate. The Greeks are superior to the Hebrews and so this unmoved mover, that's got to be right. It sounds so right. So respectable. And best of all predictable. As omnipotent, omniscient, immutable and eternal as such a God is, such an unmoved mover is predictable – and if some thing's predictable, then it can be manipulated. And if human beings can manipulate god, then we can control God – pretty clever.
But the Old Testament God, Yahweh, Abraham-Isaac-and Jacob's God, the Father Jesus prays to in the garden, is unpredictable. While an unmoved mover might pretend to like matter and might pretend to die, this God of Israel actually loves matter and actually would pull a stunt like dying. The unmoved mover blinks but God doesn't. God drives straight for the edge of the cliff and slams down on the gas. And so, when the women go to the tomb on Easter morning, followed by Peter and John, Jesus is, for all they know, really dead. Their teacher , their brother, their friend has died. How deep must their grief have been when they arrived at the tomb that morning? How exhausted by sorrow they must have been over the past two days. Jesus had gone to the cross and there had been no last minute reprieve, no legions of angles, no angelic host wiping out the Roman army and restoring the Davidic blessings and monarchy to Israel. Jesus kept driving straight for the cliff and the results had been predictable.
Or not. Not predictable: the resurrection is unpredictable. It seems an idle tale. Jesus is risen from the dead; he is risen indeed. And just as he was really dead, he now really lives. He was dead, like we're really afraid of dying. What will it be like for each of us when our hearts stop and our brains turn to dust: the sound goes off, the screen goes blank? Jesus knows. As scripture says, “he tasted death for all humanity.” And Jesus lives in the way we're really afraid of living. Jesus lived with unpredictability. He did not seek comfort. He did not seek a home. He talked about God clothing flowers and feeding birds, and acted as if that was as much concern as he needed to devote to such things. He claimed it was more important to pray for enemies and help difficult people. That fear about what people might do or think and worry about tomorrow: these were a waste of time. He claimed that the way to handle the Roman occupation was to ask if they needed any more help. He forgave sinners their sins left and right too: all kinds of sinners, all kinds of “not our kind of people” - he went and told them that they were OK with God and OK with him. And then he warned the authorities, the very people you want on your side, that they probably were not OK with God or with him – at least just as they were. When you think about it, it's obvious that he's pedal-to-the-metal towards the canyon rim – and he's having just a normal conversation: “some weather we're having. Have you considered the lilies of the field? What if we offered to carry a burden an extra mile, no charge, for these Roman soldiers – that'd freak them out wouldn't it?”
And it's obvious that he's courting death. You don't live a life that displays the powers as weak and ineffectual without making them mad. Jesus is setting a bad example and they must stop him. Jesus is giving people the idea that they don't have to be imprisoned in the system; they can just step out. They don't have to live in fear; they don't have to crave security; they don't have to get a little more; they don't have to get ahead. . If people ceased to voluntarily put themselves under control of the powers, then the powers, the systems, would starve. So the leaders: pharisees, saducees, and civil authorities push back, hoping that Jesus will resort to their weapons. If Jesus will just adopt the tactics of violence, the tactic of giving a little to get a little – well the systems of the world understand that. The systems – the banks, the armies, the bureaucracies – hope Jesus will meet them on their terms, because then he'd be just one problem among others instead of The problem.
So Jesus has to be treated as an enemy of religion and an enemy of the state. He has to be crucified and certainly he'll blink there. Certainly facing crucifixion he'll succumb to fear and fall under the sway of the powers and world systems. Of course they'd kill him anyway, but how delicious his ruin would be. Except that Jesus doesn't blink.
But at least he's dead and things can go back to where they've always, predictably, been. Except something unpredictable happens. That Jesus is risen from the dead means that victory belongs to us and not to the systems, the powers, the “way the world works.” That Jesus lives means that all that talk about not fearing, not being anxious, not craving security but being generous, loving, and non-violent is bed-rock truth, while the world's promise of better living through greed, fear, and violence is a house built on sand. It's an impressive house made with $100 screw-drivers and the best things money can buy. Every day great carloads of people and materials are pumped into it. This house almost seems to block out the sky, but it is built on sand and one day it will tumble down into the desert. A rusting hulk, an oddity to travelers. How do I know this? Because Jesus is risen from the dead.
Jesus is risen from the dead and Jesus is the same after the resurrection as before the resurrection. And this Jesus will come again. Jesus's life is the defeat of the powers and systems -those things that say, “come to us for food, come to us for security, come to us for what you need. Play by our rules and we'll feed you; fight our wars and we'll secure you; repeat our slogans and we'll put a roof over your head.” But all these promises the world makes are hollow. For all the fear, for all the willingness to spend on the next big thing, for all the sacrifice of our lives and for all we promise to do for scraps of bread – the promises of security, prosperity, predictability have no real capital backing them up.
Jesus is risen from the dead, and he comes again in judgment. But not judgment as popular imagination might have it: shoveling sinners by the thousands into a lake of fire. Jesus judges the powers and systems that have captured the people of the world and that scar God's good creation. Jesus has judged and he will conquer the false promise of the world's systems and powers. Jesus does not conquer by violence. Good reformed theology, and theology as ancient as the early Church, says that Jesus conquers not because he is mighty, but because he is worthy. This is what Revelation says, “the lamb is worthy.”
The last hope of this world's systems and powers is that we may be mislead about who Jesus is and what his rising from the dead might mean. The world hopes that we'll think God was just pretending. But we do not think this is an idle tale do we?
No comments:
Post a Comment