Second Sunday of Easter

Resurrection and Woundedness

It was important to the early Church that the account of Jesus' resurrection does 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 of 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: proof we have not died, but that we live.

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 make 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. 

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.

Resurrection of Our Lord, Jesus the Christ

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; it's 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 kind of intellectual dishonesty that makes bizarre claims in an attempt to find an empirical backing to what they claim to believe already. 

Christian curmudgeons who scour the Bible making esoteric connections that reveal the exact time Christ will return are examples of this type of dishonesty. Another kind of intellectual dishonesty is prevalent myths handed down by unsuspecting pastors who “read this somewhere” that when Jesus said to turn the other cheek, rather than being a form of submission to an aggressor, it was, in fact, a Middle Eastern custom of offering your enemy your left cheek as a form of insult. Or how about the old “eye of the needle” problem for wealthy people seeking the Kingdom? I’ve heard this explained away from the pulpit by referring to unnamed sources that, in fact, the “eye” was a very narrow gate that a camel could get through, but that it had to go on its knees to make it. The good news here is that you can have your riches and make it through the “eye” on your knees. Of course, there never was such a gate in Jesus’ time, and even the metaphor itself is strained to find Good News for the wealthy (see Kittel’s Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, vol. 3, pp. 592-594 ). But there is no way to explain away the necessity for crucifixion before resurrection while claiming orthodox Christian faith. 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 and breaks our plans for an orderly and carefully controlled life while putting us at the feet of the cross, or on it.  We will likely never have empirical, historical evidence of Jesus’ bodily resurrection, but one thing is eminently probable: 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 born 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 my faith in the Resurrection is also founded on the resurrections I've experienced in others and in myself that have their origin in The Resurrection. This yoking of death with birth is an incredibly rich source of our human experience recorded in art and literature.

 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 a single historical event; the Resurrection has lived long after Jesus walked the earth.

Palm Sunday of the Lord's Passion

Today we begin Holy Week. We see the Passion from Jesus' entry into Jerusalem to rolling the stone to seal the tomb. On Monday, we rewind to six days before Passover, followed Tuesday and Wednesday with the Passover meal and Jesus' subsequent betrayal by Judas. Holy Thursday is Jesus washing his disciple's feet and telling them "If I, therefore, the master and teacher, have washed your feet, you ought to wash one another’s feet." Good Friday, we, once again, meditate on The Cross.

So today and Friday, we speak of the Lord's passion, of God's love for His creation.

Passion.  The word evokes wild adventure, impulsive romance, gestures too big to fulfill, and the brief but intense relationship between Romeo and Juliet.  This concept places Jesus in the tradition of the foolish Romantics—an itinerant preacher from the margins schooled by his radical cousin (John the Baptist) and led to make one final, dramatic gesture to get his message out: die as a martyr.  But Jesus’ death was unlike the death of many of the martyred faithful to come.  His death wasn't for a cause, but a relationship.  God fell hopelessly in love with humanity and inserted Himself to be with His creation to deliver this message of healing, love, and forgiveness.  God’s power isn't the power of Zeus with lightning bolts from the heavens, but God’s message is now simply “Return; I love you”.

Throughout Holy Scripture, God has struggled and seemingly failed many times, just as His people have.  It has been an on-and-off-again cosmic love story between the Creator and His creation since humanity was first created and was given a choice not to love God.  This dance between Creator and created culminated in His great and defining act of love: self-sacrifice on the cross.

Today’s Gospel reading recounts this journey to the cross with Jesus as God leading the way, experiencing the pain and abandonment of His creation, the physical pain of a gruesome, ignominious death, giving into the abyss of his uncreated end: all for love.  But in this remarkable journey, he found a few responding with courage: Simon of Cyrene shared some in Jesus' suffering, the women who gathered at the foot of the cross and stayed there long after the men had scattered for fear of being arrested, the felon who believed because he saw the suffering of an innocent man, and finally the Roman centurion who saw in this suffering man God’s love.  This is pretty intense stuff.

God’s affirmation of his creation, of saying “yes” to the cross, is the ultimate passionate folly to a world seeking safety over communion.  God as Jesus: crucified, dead and buried.  Stay tuned.

Fifth Sunday of Lent

"Has no one condemned you?”
She replied, “No one, sir.”
Then Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you.
Go, and from now on do not sin anymore.” 

The speaker in Isaiah is God, trying to redirect His people's attention from the pains of the Babylonian exile and towards a new exodus---a return home that has echoes of last week’s Prodigal Son parable.  God is making a way in the desert, bringing water to barren soil, renewing life from death.  Today’s Old Testament from Isaiah is almost a response to Psalm 137 “By the rivers of Babylon; there we sat down and wept when we remembered Zion.”  God is pleading with His people to “Remember not the events of the past, the things of long ago consider not” to re-establish His relationship with them.

I think it was more than a preoccupation with a sense of loss; it was a sense that God had spoken through the prophets, especially Moses, and that is where they sought comfort and understanding.  The prophetic reality of Isaiah, however, was calling them to abandon defining themselves by their history, and look to God now and realize God is calling them to a living relationship.  Like all great prophetic literature, the past is only useful insofar as it points forward.

Today’s gospel of the woman and man caught in adultery and Jesus’ response is an excellent illustration of being called to the present.  They dragged the woman to the feet of Jesus in an attempt to catch him pronouncing the death penalty that was prescribed under the Holiness Code of Leviticus (20:10), but in so doing, Jesus would have been guilty under Roman Law of carrying out capital punishment, which had been banned for the Jews.  If Jesus pronounced a pardon, he would have been guilty of heresy.  Jesus, however, brilliantly escapes this trap with the legendary reply: “Let the one among you who is without sin cast the first stone”.  This took the steam out of the crowd and foiled the plan of the religious leaders to trap Jesus. Alone with the woman, Jesus does not condone the sin of adultery but merely says that since she was not condemned by anyone else, so he will not condemn her.  He only admonishes her to “sin no more”.

Using the Law as a tool for announcing God’s condemnation of a sinner was looking back and missing the reality of God’s present love and concern for humanity.  Using tradition and text as a tool of power still has its hold on religious authorities in the Christian church today.  Jesus was sent to fulfill the law in his person; text becomes the Word only when it is faithful to the living and present reality of a relationship with God in the Holy Spirit. Sin is an occasion for communal grief and prayer, not condemnation, for “we have all sinned and come short of the glory of God”.  By grieving sin and loving the one who sins, we heal.  We can only love the sinner by loving ourselves first as God loves us.  Loving means not encouraging sin, but supporting the struggle.  The unrepentant sinner separates him or herself from the community, but the community still longs for a homecoming, still longs for a renewed relationship.  As a community of sinners, the best we can do is keep picking ourselves up and leaning on God’s unending grace.  Our response to ourselves is Jesus’ response to the woman (and equally pertinent to the man not dragged before Jesus) is go, and sin no more.  We can only hope to begin a righteous life if the journey begins with love and support.  Lent is the ideal time to make this beginning because Easter is a celebration of this resurrection.