Christ is Risen

One of the great paintings at the Chicago Art Institute is Picabia's "the priest" which I snapped a photo of here. I'm amazed at the size of it. Picabia, one of the founders of Dada, created a large piece here, I suppose from his post-Dada interest. In the 1940s he did a series of pastisches on movie posters. Mostly he's known for his earlier work. This piece looks like it's from in the teens or twenties, and it exhibits features of synthetic cubism - color variation, organic shapes. Note how the eye and face of the priest are suggested, but then fragmented. Perhaps this refers tot he fragmenting relationship of the Church and society of that time.
This photograph gives the sense of the painting's scale and size. It is a monumental image in this gallery space, controlling a large area around the painting. Unlike Seurat's Grande Jatte in the same museum, this painting doesn't draw people into its space but sends them back. In this way the priest is an intrusion, carrying a larger than life aura into the room, but an aura that people cannot connect with.

I stoutly spudder [along]

Last year when I was visiting the Chicago Art Institute, I had lunch at the cafeteria there, and I went straight to the counter where a big hunk of corned beef, which was being served with potatoes and carrots and onions, was displayed. The man behind the counter said to me, as he sliced the meat, "you look like a fellow that likes to eat." And as he delivered to my plate a generous portion I responded with Yes. Yes I am a man who loves to eat.
When I was younger I ate copious amounts of fried chicken, gnawing on the cartilage around the leg bone and on the sternum, crunching into the bone and sucking out the marrow. Chicken, ribs, steaks, pork chops - I gave them all thorough attention. And I loved nothing better than eating outdoors in the summer time with my family. I would have a plate piled high with chicken thighs, deviled eggs, field peas, collards and cracklin' corn bread, with a sliver of Vidalia onion, all in one hand on a precariously weighted paper plate, and in the other hand a big glass of sweet tea, poured out of a gallon jar warm onto crushed ice.
I have a series of black and white photos taken a few years before I was born of such a meal spread out in the back yard of my great-grandfather's farm. A white cat sits under a simple white wooden table loaded with chicken and bowls of vegetables. In other photographs my grandfather and his brothers sit around a semicircle on metal chairs talking. In back of them behind a row of trees are acres of cotton. In another photo my grandmother and other women are circled closely together laughing. In another photograph my uncle Wesley stands in a bowling shirt and pleated trousers sucking on the very end of a chicken leg. In all these photos I'm as good as there. I can pet the cat, chase the chickens, hear the laughter, feel the comfort, and taste the marrow of what it must have been like.
All this no longer exists. The children in the photos are retired now and the elders are long since passed. The farm is under a subdivision and the farmhouse was burned down to make place for a day care center. I once went back and discovered that some of the old oaks were still standing where an old shed once stood near the road. I walked around one of them, placing my feet on the roots, touching the rough bark, closing my eyes and trying to breathe in an air of memory, hoping that somehow I might touch again a time, hear a voice and feel the touch of love that wrapped me like a blanket when I was young.
Is this something of what happens where some fragment of ruined hope remains, where like a wailing wall we approach, hoping that by touching the fragment we can grasp the whole and take into our memory and feel in our being an embrace of something lost. And we hope that that embrace would never leave us.
The text in Isaiah 25 demonstrates this, the image of a banquet, of a restoration of a hope that might have been, of being able to taste again and laugh again, after all their loss and exile. How starved they must have been, how homesick, how grief stricken. God though doesn't give them an image of the past, a promise of restoring a golden age. They are not allowed to turn the past into a shrine; instead they are invited to imagine a future better than any past. Not just a future for them but for everyone. Imagine a future where the shame of being exiled is removed; where the grief of loss is replaced with the happiness of discovery; where the fact of death looming over our lives is taken away.
The fact of death looming over our lives is taken away. That must be the crux of the message that joined the first Christians together. As wonderful as the story of Jesus is, his parables, his compassion on women, beggars, lepers, the nearly dead, the shut-in, and the blind, the incredible nature of his defeat of death is what captivates the imagination. He defeated death, never to die again, but to live a new kind of life. And this is the crux of the gospel that the heart of all our fears and the heart of sin that exists in us and in the world is the fact of death. Death tells us that we're doing all we do for nothing. The struggles we face today, whether we get a promotion or find a job, whether we marry this person or have a child, and many other things that seem so important, so important that we endanger ourselves and others in our cars or break in front of old people waiting in line, are rendered laughably moot by the fact that we're going to die. We might say that to live successfully is to successfully deceive yourself about death. This is why the basic message of Ecclesiastes is "live for the day - don't be obsessed with the past or anxious for the future." All Jesus's words in the sermon on the mount fall into this category as well: "Don't worry about the future, consider the birds, consider the flowers - they don't stress their problems and know that God will clothe and feed them."
Not that for Jesus Death is a light thing. He contemplates his death as something that might be avoided, and though he suffered it in obedience, he felt real agony and was shaken to the base of his soul. As it is written, "for the glory set before him." Paul might have said for the feast set before him - and Jesus used the event of a feast to describe the kingdom of God so prominently that, based on this Isaiah passage, we might suppose that for "this gluttonous man and wine bibber" that would be the best kind of outcome.
But this is our hope, that Jesus defeated death, swallowed it up, and his life is the renewal of creation. In his life, by the power of the Holy Spirit we experience this renewal, we are reborn.
As people who have been removed from the threat of death, what manner of life should we expect. Certainly we can still expect to die, but what death means has been changed for us. Death no longer means the end. Death no longer hovers above us, threatening us if we get out of line. This is where our freedom occurs. We are freed in Christ for getting out of line. We are freed in Christ to be indifferent to our death, and we are freed in Christ to become engaged with life. We can now live life as life. Where before we lived a life as an escape from death or thinking about death - becoming immersed in consumerism, in workaholism, slaves to fear, to anxiety, to sin.
This is the meaning of Christ being sacrificed for us - that we can attend the feast. That no longer fearing what Death can do to us, we can feast, we can celebrate with one another (and it is with one another, because no one feasts alone). We are freed from ourselves and for each other. We feast together in the freedom of Christ. We feast freed from the need to sin - we no longer survive by sin, by envy, pride, lust, greed, avarice. We now survive, we thrive, by Grace. What wondrous freedom this is; and it is ours in Christ.
So just as the resurrection is not merely the resuscitation of a dead body, so this feast is not merely a meal, a satiation of hunger. In the Church we are about something more than gathering people together. In the Church we prefigure this eschatological reality. In the midst of our bureaucracy, our meetings, our differences and difficulties - the hilarious audacity of our some of our political strivings and social activities - the Holy Spirit causes our spirits to thrive together and grow together: we participate in God's generosity with our offerings; we participate in God's creativity with our acts of praise and art; we participate in the life of the heavens in our worship. And we taste something of this when we share communion together.
This is not just the eating of a piece of bread or the consumption of some grape. In this supper, around this table, we're lifted up by the Holy Spirit into the presence of the Trinity where we feed on the benefits of Christ by faith. In this feast we remember that Death has been swallowed up and we've been freed for serving each other and the world. So let us practice this feast, accepting our shortcomings and bearing with one another, as God bears with us and accepts us, knowing that Christ's love is working in us in a new creation.

night, vision: goggles

Isaiah 25:6-10 6 On this mountain the LORD of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear. 7 And he will destroy on this mountain the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all nations; 8 he will swallow up death forever. Then the Lord GOD will wipe away the tears from all faces, and the disgrace of his people he will take away from all the earth, for the LORD has spoken. 9 It will be said on that day, Lo, this is our God; we have waited for him, so that he might save us. This is the LORD for whom we have waited; let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation. 10 For the hand of the LORD will rest on this mountain

1 Corinthians 5:6-8 Do you not know that a little yeast leavens the whole batch of dough? 7 Clean out the old yeast so that you may be a new batch, as you really are unleavened. For our paschal lamb, Christ, has been sacrificed. 8 Therefore, let us celebrate the festival, not with the old yeast, the yeast of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.


The feast in Isaiah 25 is presented as a future event. It is an event of generosity and abundance. The Hebrew text is about fat and dregs, really good marrow-filled fat and decanted-dregs. The centerpiece of this feast is the removal of the shroud of death, the shroud that shrouds all the nations and peoples; the swallower is swallowed up. The flow of tears will cease and the disgrace will be removed from all the people of the nations. The hand of God rests on the mountain, the mountain of the feast. That this takes place on a mountain is a sign that this feast is a heavenly feast. This is the salvation that the people of the nations have waited for. It is a salvation that they have not found in the valley of death's shadow. And it is only when they are brought to the place where God's hand rests that they find salvation.
In 1st Corinthians 5 we are invited to another feast, but it is a feast right now. We are told to clean out the leaven that disqualifies us, that we should be a new loaf. Isn't it interesting that the Church is asked to imagine itself as a loaf, clean, unleavened. Christ our paschal lamb has been sacrificed, and we are asked to celebrate, having cleansed ourselves, the Church having cleansed its body of malice and evil, and presenting itself authentic and truthful.
We live our lives in the now and not yet. The feast at hand and the feast to come. This feast at hand is practically the Eucharist, the Lord's supper that we eat. Indeed it is a common liturgical phrase: Christ our paschal lamb is slain; therefore let us keep the feast. But this feast at hand is not necessarily the Eucharist in this passage. Paul, talking about the lives of the believers in Corinth, has chided them throughout this letter for their factionalism and for their lack of concern with sanctification. The Corinthians don't seem to differentiate between their life before knowing Jesus and their life after knowing Jesus. Their lives continue to be leavened with their old ways; they do as they please: they defraud each other; they compete against each other; they tolerate behavior not tolerated in the pagan world. What makes their church different from any other social association?
Paul says that the difference is to be found in Christ, who sacrificed for them, for all humanity, has brought them out of the fear of death, and brought them into the presence of God. Paul uses festal imagery here, as if echoing this Isaiah passage, as well as Jesus's parables about the kingdom being like a great feast, where all the poor, the outsiders, the lame, the blind, the leperous are sought out with great effort and compelled to attend and to feast like royalty. I am unaware that Paul uses this feasting image anywhere else in his letters. Its use here is brought about by the singular issue that the Corinthians pose for him. The issue is this: What binds us together as believers in a world where competing claims and narratives vie for our loyalty outside the fellowship of the Church?
Paul encounters them as people who bring the world's methods into the fellowship of the Church. Not only that, they bring the world's narrative in as well. The world's narrative is this: that matter is all their is; that we must fight to have access to scarce resources; that people must watch out for themselves; and those who falter have only themselves to blame. In the world robbery, permissiveness, greed, gluttony, and pride, especially when conducted under cover of legality, may be winked at; in the world of the Church, a communal world in those early days, such actions harm the body - as if the body were attacking itself. As believers we have to trust each other - we have to trust each other with even the most intimate concerns of our lives. This became especially true in the years after Paul wrote this letter, when during persecution Christians had to trust each other for their very lives. The Christians who live in Iraq and the West Bank and Gaza are living out this intimacy of support right now. They live under threat of losing their lives- and they cannot afford leaven in their midst. Perhaps if we allow our imaginations to think of their struggle, we can taste something of what action and what fellowship Paul is extolling the Corinthians to in his phrase "let us keep the feast."
Let us feast in the eating of the bread and the drinking of the cup: realizing that this feasting is a sharing. What we share together is Christ, and we share Christ with Christians all over the world. This sharing does not come cheap. Throughout the years and to this day men and women suffer for the gospel. They suffer because they follow Jesus who said something about taking up a cross and following him to the place where crosses end up: exposing us, rendering us weak, taxing our endurance.
When we feast we share a cross. We don't fear being executed on our way back from church, or having our land confiscated or being denied the ability to travel to work. Our cross is located in our comfort and our affluence. We fear being uncomfortable and being poor. We hold onto what we have with a fierce grip. You can guess what Christ would put on your cross can't you?
"Let us keep the feast" in our being together, in our sharing, in our discovery of what God's abundance means for us and for our world. The world needs to see this story of God's abundance translated into a living paradigm. The story of scarcity is very strong in the world we live in. How can we increase our imaginations in acts of "faith working through love" that would demonstrate the truth of God's generosity versus the lie of scarcity that leavens the world's discourse?
First we must remember that without the Holy Spirit we can do nothing. When we embark on making this feast a reality, we do so in faith, that what seems impossible, can become actual.
Second we must remember that a feast is not for a single person but for many. And so our churches are not made up of single people but of groups. This very thing is the topic Paul begins with - that we must do away with factions and recognize that in the faith we have common cause. This common cause springs from our relationship with Jesus.
Third we must use our imaginations and not be afraid to act on them, to join together in creative endeavors.
And we must be patient and forgiving of each other. Certainly toes will be stepped on, and it is in this process that we must be open to laughter and graciousness.
There is a feast to come, to be sure, but our task here, as an expression of gratitude for all that Jesus has done for us in bringing us from the mire and blindness of our sin and the sin of the world, is to practice the principles of this feast here in the world.

The moving figure

Eadweard Muybridge made photographs of people and animals in motion late in the 19th century. To me nothing is more beautiful than the human figure in motion, and his attempts at trying to capture that motion from different angles has a completeness about it. Cubism attempts something like this in individual paintings. Associations with early movie making are apparent. All kinds of possibilities are opened up - possibilities that movie making has seldom approached. Experimental films attempt some of these things: triptychs, polytyptchs, stop motion, montage - but basically there's a proscenium that is never crossed when you watch the conventional movie.
Tomorrow I'm visiting my art teacher from Brevard who is now at High Point University, Cherl. I'm going to draw with her drawing class, a prospect I find exciting - she may have a model or else a still life. I'm already preparing to bring way more than I need.
I may have a preaching gig at Easter at the church in Smithfield, where an Easter tradition is to bring various meat products and try to reassemble the beast. They used to do this to insure a successful tobacco harvest - now they do it to celebrate fertility and the coming of Spring. Like any Presbyterian service there will be lots of covering body parts with meat and wearing of vegetables. There will also be the celebration of the keg and the tartin' of the krakens. The "wee timrous cowrain beastie" of Burns "to a mouse" will make an appearance and deliver treats to old and young alike. And the "oh little Brauts of Bethlehem" will descend from the rafters with ululations and scintilations.

My Easter sermon

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?