Resurrection

I've just finished my annual binge of Holy Week services, starting with Tenebrae on Wednesday evening, then Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and finally the Great Vigil that starts at 4:30 on Easter morning with the lighting of the New Fire, a long series of lections that trace the human relation to God through Creation and Flood, Exodus, Captivity and prophetic promise, followed by the first Eucharist of Easter. Three hours from dark to dawn. Holy Week done right demands an immense investment of time, emotion, and imagination. One relives the events of the Passion, but then we are asked to imagine the unimaginable: Christ rising from death, and ourselves living on as resurrected people in a world marked by sin and death. It's a long journey.

Jesus began his life as a homeless refugee, as we recalled last December on Holy Innocents, just three days after Christmas. King Herod, like President Assad, chose to murder the next generation of his subjects rather than risk loss of power, and Jesus's family, like so many today, fled to the precarious safety of exile. Jesus's ministry started in the shadow of his cousin John, whose outspoken calling-out of power got him beheaded by Herod's successor. Jesus made a practice of breaking laws and customs, dining with tax collectors and healing on the sabbath, overturning the tables of currency traders and slighting local power-brokers. His entry into Jerusalem seems to have been misconstrued as an insurrection, and his execution was a triumph of Roman and priestly power, working in collusion to preserve the uneasy status quo of military occupation and theocratic authority. We know about these things from today's headlines.

 When Jesus advised a disingenuous questioner to "render unto Caesar" what was owed in taxes, he was misunderstood, then and now, as urging a kind of quietist acceptance of that status quo. But the real force of his message was the second part: "render unto God what is God's." If his executioners mistook him for a secular Messiah or revolutionary, they missed the point: Jesus is telling us that what we see--the world we live in--isn't Caesar's at all, but God's. Seeing that truth is one way to understand what it means to live as a resurrected person. It may seem like the world belongs to the billionaires and the imperialists, the Trumps and the terrorists, the powerful and the possessive, that whole cohort of Caesar's henchmen. But no, all that is the detritus of sin and death.

We are invited to discard all that and be reborn, with Jesus, into a new kind of world. That's where we need our imaginations. We need to learn to see the world in a new way, not for what it seems to be but what it could be, a world characterized by acts of kindness, compassion, and love. It's not easy--Caesar's folks make it hard to see beyond the deadly realities to that better place--but we are called to try. I'm not very far along that road, which I think of as the road to Emmaus. If you know that story, which happens the day after Easter, you know that a couple of disillusioned followers of Jesus are walking from Jerusalem to a nearby town when a clueless stranger joins them, the only man in Jerusalem who doesn't seem to know about Friday's execution. But he knows a lot of other stuff, and enlightens them about the Scriptures as they walk along. Then as suppertime arrives he blesses their bread and wine--and vanishes! They are left with a body of doctrine, a sacramental meal, and the impression that the resurrected Jesus was there, really, but then he wasn't. That's how I feel about the Resurrection.

It seems odd to be posting--on a blog that is largely political, no less--about something as personal as religious faith. But the personal is political, as the women's movement taught us long ago, and so is Jesus's teaching and example. In response to an irreparably fallen world, he chose death. In the face of rampant injustice and inequality, environmental desecration, brutal intolerance and massive dislocation of peoples, the tiny fixes that pass for political solutions in our paralyzed governmental systems are desperately inadequate. I may go on about Bernie Sanders and the French far left and the need for a revolution in sustainable energy production, but at the end of the day I often feel that our only realistic, pragmatic hope is to live the Resurrection. As we Christians like to say, He is risen indeed. Alleluia.