AN EXHORTATION OF THE HOLY EASTERTIDE

By Bruce Swinehart

Parish Seminarian

Sunday, April 20, 2008 Fifth Sunday of Easter Year A

From Esoteric Images of Jesus

Jesus Meditating in a Yoga Position

Acts 17:1-15
or Deuteronomy 6:20-25
1 Peter 2:1-10
or Acts 17:1-15
John 14:1-14
Psalm 66:1-11 or 66:1-8

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“Do not let your hearts be troubled.”

Is it just me, or does it strike you as a little strange to hear these words during Eastertide? After all, isn’t this is supposed to be a time of great rejoicing and celebration over the resurrection?  Jesus has trampled down death by death -- right?  Don’t we now have definitive proof that God’s love for us is stronger than any hold that sin and death could possibly have over us?  Why would we need to hear this kind of exhortation now, in the middle of what is supposed to be such a glorious and happy time?

Here’s an even better question – how did he know?  How did Jesus, speaking through the Lectionary, know that I might need a little encouragement right about now?  I mean, I don’t want to be the wet blanket at this victory party that all of us Christians are throwing these days, but I have a confession to make.  I my heart actually is a little troubled by some of what’s going on in the scripture readings throughout the Easter Season.

For one thing, I am not exactly sure how to relate to the resurrected Jesus.  I’m not talking about struggling with whether or not Jesus rose bodily from the dead, or whether the resurrection was mythology, metaphor, a spiritual reality or historical fact.  I’m talking about the strange, fleeting appearances of the risen Christ that seem to happen suddenly and at random and don’t really follow any predictable pattern.  I regret that I have not yet been able to attend any of the Wednesday evening series here at All Saints’ on the resurrection appearances -- I suspect that some deeper reflection and discussion would be helpful to me.

To me, this Jesus seems to be a kind of slippery, shape-shifting Trickster figure.  The one who is not quite here but not quite gone, the one who is mistaken for a gardener or a ghost, the unrecognized fellow traveler who vanishes the moment he is apprehended in the breaking of bread.  The one who is ephemeral enough to pass through solid walls, and yet solid enough so that he can grab Thomas’ hand and stick it into his open wounds.  This Jesus has apparently obliterated the boundary line that normally separates the living from the dead.

I keep thinking about what Jesus told Mary at the tomb on Easter morning: “Do not hold on to me.”  That sounds like good advice.  But maybe I need a Jesus I can hold on to.  I miss Lent.  Remember Lent?  Now there’s a liturgical season I can relate to.  Quiet, simple, reflective.  Penitential.  When Jesus went out into the desert to be tempted by the Devil, I was right there with him.  I am well aware of how I am perpetually tempted away from the love of God.  I live in that world.  Becoming aware of my sinfulness is like touching home base for me – it gives me a familiar sense of security.  The ritual of confessing my sins and being absolved of them is like regular spiritual hygiene to me – like bathing.

Plus I love the desert.  It’s beautiful and quiet and empty and spacious out there.  God’s country, as we say.  I miss that earthly Jesus, the teacher and healer, the rabble-rouser, the one who was not afraid to challenge the collusion between the religious authorities and the imperial powers that be. 

The one who ate and drank with outcasts and sinners, the one who said they would call him a drunkard and a glutton because he did not abstain from the everyday sensuality of eating and drinking, as some thought a spiritual teacher should.  I miss his stories – he was a great storyteller, wasn’t he?  I’d love to hear one of those parables about the Kingdom of God again.

Back then, when Jesus kept telling me to follow him it took me a while to get that he meant literally follow him – to Jerusalem, through his betrayal all the way to his death on the cross – but there I was.  And then came the miracle of Easter morning – wow!  It was beyond anything I could have imagined in my wildest dreams.  Maybe it still is.

In John’s Gospel this morning we find ourselves saying goodbye to Jesus yet again – foreshadowing the end of Easter Season, when he will “go to be with God” at the Ascension.  Then the Holy Spirit will come to us at Pentecost, and we will enter the longest Season in the Church Year, which the Catholic tradition calls “ordinary time.”  But here is the tricky part – he’s leaving again, but he still wants us to follow him!  It’s hard enough to figure out how to prepare for these unexpected encounters with the resurrected Jesus, let alone to follow him.  I completely relate to Philip and Thomas in this story.  Follow him where?  Follow him how?

On the one hand, I appreciate that recalling Jesus’ farewell discourse at the Last Supper at this point is meant to be reassuring.  In fact, today’s portion of John’s Gospel is sometimes called the “funeral gospel” because it is reminds mourners that their loved one who has died is going to be with Jesus and with God in the place that he has prepared for them.  The obvious association with this text, then, is that it is speaking about the afterlife, the “undiscovered country” from which no one has ever returned to tell us about.  A place called heaven (or perhaps Iowa).

You might think I would be relieved by this interpretation of John’s Gospel, given my struggles with the kind of neither-here-nor-there state of limbo that we and Jesus seem to be in at the moment.  Perhaps the notion that “Jesus is going home to be with God, and when I die I’m going to follow him there, too” should help me make my peace and find some “closure” on this episode. But it doesn’t, and perhaps the reason that it doesn’t may be the key to helping us understand what is really going on during the Easter Season.

I don’t buy that interpretation because it strikes me as too easy and too simple, and doesn’t begin to contain the enormity of what God has accomplished in the resurrection.  And it doesn’t square with what else is happening in Acts and 1 Peter, which I’ll get to in a moment.

When Jesus proclaims himself to be “the Way, the Truth, and the Life,” I do not believe that he means that he has shown us how to make our way out of this world into the next one.  He is telling us that he has shown us the Way through this world.  And the Truth and the Life that he has revealed is the divine presence in our midst here and now – in these bodies, with these people, on this planet.  Our very humanity has been taken up and assumed by and participates in Divine reality, not just at the end of our earthly existence but all the way through it.  This is also the only way to make sense of the shocking statement that “the one who believes will do the works that I do, and even greater works that these.”  Surely this cannot mean that we will do these works in Heaven, but that we will do them here on earth.

Turning to the other Lectionary readings for a moment, we notice that as the resurrected Jesus is flickering in and out of view during Eastertide, we are also witnessing the Church being midwifed (cq) into existence by Peter and Paul.  Jesus is not so much preparing to leave us behind, as he is in the process of being reborn in the newly emerging Christian communities.  This is important because the “one” that Jesus says will do the works that he does is not an isolated individual, but is one who enacts his or her belief within the context of a community inspired by the love of Christ.  And these works are not necessarily such grand miracles as walking on water or bringing the dead back to life.

In his letter, Peter reminds us that they also include simpler manifestations of “holy living” within the Christian community, acts of charity and kindness, compassion and generosity toward one another.  These relationships are constituted by the utmost integrity and careful consideration of the impacts of behavior and speech: without malice, guile, insincerity, envy or slander.  This is how we prepare ourselves to receive and re-incarnate the spirit of Christ, and it is precisely what empowers us to do those daunting “greater works,” whatever they may be.

Have we as a Christian community accomplished “greater works” than Jesus’ yet?  As the larger Church universal, we would be hard pressed to make that case, wouldn’t we, pre-occupied as we are with sectarian differences and internecine strife.  But at the micro level, for example, in the community here at All Saints’, I think it is much easier to perceive the presence of the resurrected and reborn Christ.  In the way you care for one another, for friends and strangers alike, and in the way the surrounding community knows you by the works you do, and in the way that you embody “the way, the truth, and the life” of Jesus Christ.

You know what else I like about Lent?  I mean, beside the fact that I am sometimes more comfortable with my limited, vulnerable, sinful, isolated self than I am with my glorified, embodied, blessed-in-community self?  Lent comes with instructions.  The Ash Wednesday service includes a very succinct statement of the meaning and the purpose of the Season, and how we should approach it.  So, in closing, I’d like to offer to you my proposal for an “Exhortation to a Holy Eastertide:”

Dear People of God: The resurrection of Christ is the good news of the Gospel of Jesus of Nazareth and the central promise of the New Testament.  Following the resurrected Jesus during Eastertide means staying alert to the possibility that he may at any moment reveal himself to be the stranger who is traveling with you, the one who shares hospitality with you, the one whose presence unsettles you, or the one whom you ignore.  During this season, we prepare for the movement from the baptism by water to the baptism by fire in the Holy Spirit with ecstatic and joyful hearts that celebrate and accept the divine glory that we now know is our birthright.  And we dedicate ourselves to preparing our communities and all our relationships to receive the reborn spirit of Christ into our midst through holy living and acts of love, charity, justice and compassion.  Even as we send Jesus home to God, this is the Christ that will continue to live, work, heal and teach in us and through us and among us until the Kingdom of God has been fully realized on earth.  Amen.

Bruce Swinehart

Sunday, April 20, 2008

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