Third Sunday of Easter 1997

How will I construct my life?

Almost all of the first readings in these Sundays after Easter come from the Acts of the Apostles, and sometimes, such as today, the Gospel reading is also from Luke. And that’s useful because Biblical scholarship over the last forty or fifty years has come to take very seriously the fact that the Gospel of Luke is only Volume I of what he had to say about the Jesus fact. The Acts of the Apostles is Volume II, and you can’t understand one without the other. This has caused a real upheaval in Lukan scholarship because the regnant notion as to how Luke organized all this stuff has been overturned, and now it is pretty generally taken that what Luke had in mind when he wrote all this stuff, Volume I and Volume II, was to depict the whole interaction between God and the human race in terms of promise and fulfillment. That’s the structural principal upon which he erects this thing. You get over and over, as you get it today in the readings from the Acts of the Apostles and the Gospel, this big, big, explanation, a kind of philosophy of history if you will, that everything had to happen as simply the playing out of God’s promise that when God created people they really would be able to live with each other. That promise was fulfilled above all in Jesus, and in the resurrection of Jesus, who was killed precisely because he stood for this universality of God’s redeeming will. Thus ends the lecture, now the sermon.

I think that’s really important because what we’re talking about in these Sundays after Easter is an attempt to get hold of what the earliest followers of Jesus thought he was all about. They obviously take it in terms of Jesus' as illuminating some kind of human fact, and the human fact that is in play here is the inability to live without a future... We cannot live without a future... Without a future, people die. Luke is constantly saying this in every sermon: you have Jesus saying the same thing in his sermon on the way to Emmaus, you have the same thing in Paul’s sermons which was created by Luke, and you have the same thing again in the sermons of Peter, Stephen, and hilip... They all work the same way, and that’s why scholars believe that when Luke organized this thing he had in mind the point of saying, "yeah, God makes promises to us and God keeps her promises." That is precisely the constituent of the Christian life. That’s the future on which the Christian life is constructed. God will be faithful, just as God was faithful to Jesus, this Jew, who realized in his own flesh that God was to save everybody. And he got killed for his trouble because we can’t stand, as we’ve said over and over, what is socially disruptive. That kind of radical egalitarianism simply won’t fly if the world wags on in it’s normal way.

What we get to do today is try and figure out: "Along which axis do I construct my life? What does my future look like?" We talk about promising students, or the musically talented, or the dramatically talented... "Those people are really promising." I think as a parent that that’s what we want to hang onto: "Yeah, by God, if he doesn’t get a Ph.D., he needs at least a BA or a high school diploma..., or maybe he can be another Tiger Woods or basketball, this kid who left after his third year at the University of Michigan to play pro golf..." When you bring this to the level of the institution, of course, this means the maintenance of the status quo: "We gotta stay in business..." That’s the future, and that’s precisely one of the great problems in the Church today. These innovators, these uppity women, these liberation theologians.

How will I construct my life? Is God’s promise the central reality of my life? I don’t think so. My pension plan and my RRSP’s are the things that sustain me and along which I construct my future. This is crucial, but it sounds so trivial as long as we don’t look at this stuff very carefully: "Oh yeah, God’s for everyone, that’s nice. Okay, good, we’ve got that solved." No, it becomes crucial when you start to look at the particularities of it. Along which axis do I construct my future? Is it based on the promise of God that God really will unite us? I truly do not think so. It is not true in my case, and, more often than not, it is not true in the institution of the Church, I’m afraid. If we’re going to say that God has raised this man Jesus from the dead and mean anything, rather than some kind of cliché, then we need to look very carefully.

What is my future? How do I construct my future? The regular religious issue always comes into play. If I have to construct my future on the basis of a promise, then it’s a future with this Other... My future is bipolar, if you will. My future is not just my organizing skills, or my capacity to fortify myself against the unforeseen damages that may occur in my life, which is the way that I normally organize my future. It involves what Martin Buber has called that area of "holy insecurity" with the God who promises that she will be faithful. But I am not in control of the precise meaning and shape of that sort of fidelity. In fact, more often than not, I find that my expectations and desires are upended in the process of trying to be faithful to God. I want to keep making God, and my life, manageable. Can’t do it... And that’s why, going back to the ending of Mark’s Gospel at the Easter Vigil, these ladies were scared, exhilarated, but scared. God has raised this man from the dead. What does that mean? All my securities are now shot full of holes. I am going to have to reconstitute myself, who I am, where I’m going, and how I get there, in radically different fashion. That’s what I really believe Luke is about.

It’s interesting, finally, to see how Luke does this. He seems to say: "Well, look back. Retrospectively, it’s all inevitable: the Messiah had to die..." We know from Jewish thought that no Messianic ideas at the time of Jesus included a dying Messiah. None of them. We wanted a triumphant Messiah, or a military Messiah, or a prophetic Messiah, but we didn’t want a dead one, not a crucified one... So we get, as we often do in the Biblical text, this ambiguity. Luke wants to say, "you have to be prepared to structure life along this unforeseen future because the partner of this life is the God who calls you." But he wants to say at the same time, "Don’t worry, it’s going to be alright..." Yes, but we’ve got to be really careful to make distinctions. What is inevitable is that God will be there. But God will be there as God will be there, not as I determine how, where, and when God should be there.

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RT 29/4/97