Third Sunday of Easter

"Touch me and see, because a ghost does not have flesh and bones
as you can see I have."  Jesus,  Luke 24

Resurrection and Woundedness


It was important in the early Church that the account of Jesus' resurrection not become a "ghost story".  Some followers of Christ could not reconcile the divinity of Christ with his humanity, and came to the conclusion that Jesus, being divine, could not have truly suffered on the cross; a wounded God is much more difficult to worship.  Luke writes in the tradition of Christians who share the conviction, handed down by the Apostles, that Christ's humanity and suffering did not detract from his divinity.

When Jesus invites his Apostles to touch his wounds, and then to give him some cooked fish to eat, his intent was clear: "It is I myself".  During Good Friday, we venerated the Cross and meditated on the wounds of Christ as those wounds were the sins of humanity being put upon Christ.  Today we see Jesus, the resurrected Christ, but we also see his wounds.  Jesus was resurrected with his wounds.

Being resurrected doesn't mean we jettison our wounds, or, as Hamlet put it "shuffle off our mortal coil"; the resurrection has transformed our wounds, not removed them.  We carry our wounds through our baptism into our new life in Christ, and we often take on new wounds.  What is markedly different, though, is as Christians we live with our wounds visible, proof our our resurrection.  We can share the painful wounds we've received because we live in a new body, the body of Christ.  Love has conquered death, our wounds are no longer harbingers of death, but proof we have not died, but that we live.

There is that wonderful anecdote of a man trapped in a deep well and the encounter with people who pass the well that cannot help him.  Eventually, a man jumps into the well as his gesture of rescue only to be met with the contempt of the man trapped in the well. "Why did you jump down here to save me?  Now we are both trapped!"  His rescuer smiled: "I've been down here before.  I can show you the way out."

In a sense, our wounds when not hidden, become the agent of connection with a wounded world.  The bumper sticker "Not Perfect, Just Forgiven" comes to mind.  Our wounds makes us human, the freedom from having our woundedness lead us into despair, hate, anger, greed, etc.. is our release from death--our resurrection with the risen Christ.  Chuck Coleson's prison ministry, which has led so many to not let their wounds define them, had its genesis in the wounds of his ambition and lust for power.

What being resurrected means for us is living with the confidence that love overcomes death.  That our wounds present in our new life in Christ become a source of great hope for whom woundedness has led to death.  Like Christ, we can live a life that removes the defensive imperative to cover our wounds and move to dominate, to control and accumulate wealth.  Our life in Christ shows the world another way, the way of Jesus displaying his wounds to his followers as the beginning of their spiritual journey as people of the resurrection. 

The Resurrection of The Lord

From Death to Life

The older I get, the less concerned I am about the historical facts of my faith.  Don't get me wrong, if I could know some historical fact regarding the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, I'd jump at the opportunity; its more a matter of accepting the inherent limitations of living a life of faith regarding the type of knowledge faith reveals.  I see so many folks trading their faith for a type of intellectual dishonesty that makes bizarre claims in an attempt to find an empirical backing to what they claim to already believe.  Harold Camping comes to mind, as do the like-minded who, based on this man's "mathematical" calculations, predicted the end of the world and the parousia on a specific date.  The time came and went.  Nothing.  Another date was set; it seems his calculations were a bit off the first time.  The time came, and went.  Nothing.  Finally, Camping admitted he got the whole thing wrong and is no longer going to make any further predictions.  Humiliated, alone, pilloried in the press, Harold Camping takes his first step towards resurrection: crucifixion. 

There is no other way to resurrection than through crucifixion.  This is the substance of my faith when I proclaim each Sunday "He was crucified, died and buried.  On the third day, he rose again in accordance with the scriptures."

Crucifixion forces our hand, breaks our plans for an orderly and carefully controlled life and puts us at the feet of the cross, or on it.  We will likely never know factually if Jesus was bodily raised from the dead, but one thing is eminently possible: Jesus was killed on the cross by Roman and religious authorities who were threatened by the instability of challenged metaphors: Jesus said he was a king and Jesus said he was the Messiah.  The only possible way Jesus could walk to the cross was a faith borne not in what would come after, but in the sustaining relationship of love he had with the Father.  Jesus' fear, and feeling of dejection in murmuring the 22nd Psalm "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me" ends with the 31st Psalm: "Into your hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit." 

The Resurrection is what happened after.  The disciples witnessed it according to the accounts of Scripture.  But what my faith finds its foundation upon are the resurrections I've experienced in others and in myself that have their origin in The Resurrection. This yolking of death with birth is an incredibly rich source of imaginative literature and art. Easter is the "difficult birth" of a faith borne on the cross of a two-thousand year old man who claimed to be a king and Messiah; but the millions of new lives hewn from the roughness of the Cross is witness to a deeper and more profound truth than an historical event, and the Resurrection has lived long after Jesus walked the earth.

Good Friday of the Lord's Passion

Faith: FAIL. God Punished.

Good Friday is when we recall that even Jesus' closest disciples fled into the night and sought refuge away from the Roman and Temple authorities for fear that they, too would be arrested; faith: FAIL. Today is a day we move deeply into meditating on our need to tell God, as Jesus, hanging on the cross to pull off another miracle, save yourself and save us! No? We’re out of here! I’m not going to end up like that!!

Peter’s famous denial three times echoing Jesus’ earlier query, also three times: “Do you love me, Peter?” Peter responded then: “You know that I love you!” Now, fearful of his life, he replies “I know nothing of this man you refer to!” This is the disciple the Church was founded on. Peter, the so-called “Rock” by Jesus, crumbles into sand at the crucifixion.

The cross is a spectacle of human folly, failure and faithlessness. Yet, despite this, as T.S. Eliot wrote “We call this Friday good.”

Its goodness lies in God’s total submission of his love for humanity in the person of Jesus. It is the goodness inherent when we willing suffer for another person, perhaps a stranger, or even an enemy. Today, we contemplate how we respond to being asked to suffer for another, or whether or not suffering (of ourselves or another) sends us scurrying into the night, renouncing God because we suffer.

“How could God allow such suffering ?” many ask and imply this is the cardinal weakness of Christianity. Perhaps the better question is “Why would God be willing to enter into our world of suffering?” The mightiness of God isn’t a lifeboat dropping out of the sky for survivors floating in a tempest; it is God dropping into the water next to us to show us the way to dry land.

God with us, “Emmanuel”, means God suffering for and with us. God does not want to “save” us as much as he wants to be with us. We want to be “saved”, just as Jesus wanted to escape suffering; its only natural. No one suggests that to follow Jesus we should seek out suffering, but rather following Jesus we will enter the suffering of a suffering world with a resounding affirmation: “Yes” to being with the poor and hopeless, the excluded, imprisoned, tortured, and sick. “Yes” to the suffering of the world, and all its messiness and dysfunction. The cross’ affirmation is entering into the heart of the suffering world and walking with those who suffer to find God calling us into his arms stretched out onto the cross, now embracing us in all of our horror and pain, failure and humiliation. Today we come to the cross to be embraced by Jesus’ crucifixion in order to be resurrected with the Christ.