Easter Sunday, 1997

Easter Sunday

We celebrate the culmination

Today we celebrate the culmination of the events that we have been celebrating in the Liturgy over the past three days. I want to emphasize that because too often in popular thinking and preaching, I’m afraid, the Resurrection is simply a detached event, having nothing to do with Jesus' life. It’s totally unexpected, it’s like winning the lottery... and that’s a radical misunderstanding of things.

I’d just like to briefly recapitulate the last three days: Holy Thursday Night we celebrated what I suggested was the asymmetrical pattern of Jesus’ love. It occurred to me later on that this is laid out very clearly in that well known Gospel passage, "love your enemy, do good to those who hate you." That is essentially asymmetrical, and it’s the heart of the Gospel of course. Then Friday we saw the price of that asymmetry: to do that is to act in a dysfunctional manner, and the world cannot work on that basis. Or, as I suggested Friday, it is a highly inefficient mode of existence. And so, not surprisingly, a society which is very much into having everybody be an adjusted part of the ongoing organization of things, must eliminate such a person. Such a one works as a great spanner in the machinery of the society.

I’ve been suggesting all through Lent that one way of trying to get hold of Lent is to see this as a sort of deepening of things, and I think that this business of asymmetry and the inefficiency of Jesus’ life are, I hope, useful ways to deepen our understanding of the final events of this man’s life. It occurred to me that when we talk about taking something to a deeper level, another way of putting this is to say that we’re going to take this man seriously. So I’d like to talk about the resurrection of Jesus precisely in terms of taking Jesus seriously because I think that is an enormously rich notion out of which all sorts of things come to light.

What was Jesus’ basic problem?--He was too serious. This does not mean that he was grave and walked around frowning with a furrowed brow all the time, but rather he was simply fully attentive to himself, to his life and above all to God. He took God seriously, and in taking God seriously, he took everybody he met seriously, and this of course is where this terrible inefficiency comes up, this asymmetry. To take somebody seriously--I mean we see this over and over again in the Gospel, this man eats with sinners. "Prostitutes and tax-collectors," he said in an outrageous statement, "are going to make it into the Kingdom before all you good people." Why would he say such a thing? Because he knew beyond the public perception of how things were, and who was who, and where was where... These are human beings, and being fully attentive to them, he took them seriously, and this had serious consequences. He was killed because this highly dysfunctional mode of behavior does not work, it cannot work. We’ve had ample instances in our own century of people who have attempted to do this in greater and lesser degrees: Gandhi, King, Malcolm X..., the list of those who took people seriously, more than political programs, more than religious differences... is fairly impressive. It is precisely by following this notion of taking people seriously--because Jesus took God seriously, that God took Jesus seriously. And so it is absolutely theologically apt to say that God has taken this man utterly seriously, to say that God is attentive to this man, attentive to His own fidelity, fidelity to death. And because God is a steadfast lover, as the Psalm has it and the whole Hebrew Bible testifies, even death does not become an obstacle to God’s taking Jesus seriously. So even on the logical level, there should be kind of a sigh of relief at Easter; the asymmetry of love is broken for those who believe that God has raised this man who was attentive and available to everybody, from the dead.

To take seriously or not take seriously doesn’t sound all that impressive, but I would like to suggest in conclusion a little thought experiment. I think everybody, including me, should for just a moment now try to think of who in your life takes you seriously. Who takes you seriously, and whom do you take seriously? Oh, we can be taken seriously for our minds, or for our bank accounts, or for our bodies, but I’m not reducible to any one of those things. Who takes me seriously, simply for myself, not for what I can do for anybody else but simply because of who I am? I really believe, having tried this for a couple of days, that it works: you can say, "no wonder they’d kill a guy like that, he’d mess everything up." Life as we know it cannot proceed in that fashion. It is intensely inefficient, it is profoundly dysfunctional, but there we are. It is this man whom God has raised, because God took Jesus seriously. So that’s what we’re celebrating, and it’s an odd kind of celebration.

Last night at the vigil, instead of the Gospel of John’s resurrection narrative, we read the Gospel of Mark which ends with these words: "so they went out (these women), and fled from the tomb for terror and amazement had seized them and they said nothing to anyone for they were afraid." Now anyone who goes home and picks up the Gospel from Mark will see that there are different endings; there are at least three endings in most Bibles for the Gospel of Mark, this one and two others. Scholarship has determined absolutely that this is the original ending of the Gospel of Mark. The other two said: "well, they were afraid , but then they spread the good news and everyone was all jolly and happy..." The reason those endings were added is because the original one was too hard to hear. It was too hard, if you will, to take seriously that this should be the impact of the belief that God had raised this man and nobody else. The structure of this fear, I would like to suggest, is very unusual. It is the same kind of fear, amazement, and terror that one would feel, I suspect, in face of a fact that is too good to be true... It is disarming; in a certain real sense it is disabling. Underneath that fear there is, I would propose to you, a sort of exhilaration, and latent joy, however much we want to qualify it, that if we take this stuff seriously will erupt full-blown and full-bodied for all of us, when God raises all of us.

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RT 12/4/97