Transformation Through Easter

Easter doesn’t last forever.  Resurrection does, but the events we commemorate in the observances of the Easter season unfold in a period of fifty days.  That’s why the word “Easter,” questionable etymology and all, is useful.  It delineates the time when the risen Christ appears, instructs and then commissions the band of disciples, who become his apostles to the world.

The Great Fifty Days, as they are traditionally known, are filled with varied and sometimes confusing encounters that change the followers of Jesus from quite ordinary and dispirited men and women lost in grief and regret into a force that literally changes the world in their lifetime.

Perhaps no one personifies that change more than Peter.  The first to name Jesus as Messiah and Son of God, the first with insights into the nature of the life to which they are all being called, it is also Peter who denies even knowing Jesus on the night of his trial.  But then Peter is singled out, forgiven and commissioned by Christ as the Fifty Days near their end.  Can we see the change that comes upon them all by looking through Peter’s eyes?

Peter At Cockcrow
John 18:15-27

The sound of that rooster!  I believe it will echo in my mind until I die.  Daylight has not yet come, and already my own words have burned a scar in my soul.

At table I was filled with bravado.  “Even if they all become deserters I will never desert you...Even though I must die with you, I will not deny you.”

And he said, not unkindly, “Peter, I tell you this very night, before the cock crows, you will deny me three times.”

A mere hour later, in the garden, he asked three of us to keep vigil while he prayed, and three times we all fell sound asleep.

Then came the arrest, and somehow I was bold again.  I drew my sword, and struck the High Priest's servant before he restrained me.  Even so, I followed as they took him to the palace of Caiaphas, where the Council waited.  I alone entered the courtyard, looking for a chance to do something, anything; to prevent what was to come...That is, until they started asking questions.

A servant-girl came over to me.  “You also were with Jesus the Galilean,” she said.

“I do not know what you are talking about.”

Another servant remarked to a group of bystanders, “This man was with Jesus of Nazareth.”

“I do not know the man.”

A little later one of those gathered came over to me, “Certainly you are also one of them.  Your Galilean accent betrays you.”

“By the Lord our God, I do not know the man!”

At that instant the cock crowed.

I bolted from the courtyard.  My shame couldn't have been more complete if I'd handed him over myself.  And now, hidden for fear of discovery, I see myself for the impetuous, boastful, cowardly fraud I am.

Deep inside I know what the morning will bring, and to the very depths of my being I know I have neither the wits nor the courage to do anything about it.

Peter Is Charged
John 21:1-19

Though the mist hung over the lake that dawn, at John’s word I knew Him instantly.  The dash for shore, the fish grilled on the beach, all a blur of movement and sensation.

Then, after we ate, He drew me aside and we were alone for the first time since His rising.  “Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these?”  The words cut deep, and I saw torchlight and chaos.  “Yes, Lord, you know I do.”

“Feed my lambs.”

We walked a little further, and He faced me squarely: “Simon, son of John, do you love me?”  My mind spun, and I was in the midst of a crowd huddling for warmth around a charcoal fire.  “Yes, Lord, you know I love you.”

“Tend my sheep.”

By the water’s edge, He fixed me with a gaze that took in the whole world: “Simon, son of John, do you love me?”  My spirit went blank, and in the depths of my soul a rooster crowed.  “Lord, you know everything; you know I love you.”

“Feed my sheep.”

In that moment I was set free.  Three denials betrayed the shallowness of my early love.  Three questions, searing in their simplicity, undid the betrayal and this time my love held firm.  I have never lost the wonder that H chose me, impulsive and vacillating, to care for our little band, and the wonder is multiplied that by His grace and love alone I have fulfilled the charge.

Howard MacMullen

© May, 2012

Thomas: A Man For All Seasons

As the days of Easter progress, I’d like to take a moment, go back and recall an oft-maligned figure amongst the disciples: Thomas.  Thomas’ words are like an unexpected shower on the Easter Parade; the grumpy uncle whose cynicism spoils the birthday party; the malevolent aunt whose bitterness threatens a family reconciliation.  Can’t he get with the program? 

It may help to remember that Easter itself is a day of consternation, deep suspicion, fear, rushing to and fro and in the end unanticipated joy.  It is not, in the style of some Easter cards, “That happy Easter morning.”  We need to remember that it is in the face of fears, doubts, and common sense that some of Jesus’ closest followers experience the Risen Lord.  As the day unfolds Thomas is not with them, until at day’s end he comes, from where we are not told, to join the rest in their place of hiding.  Still bearing the weight of Jesus’ death, still in fear of what might lie ahead, he comes in out of the cold to be confronted with the joy and jubilation of the others.  His reaction is much as theirs had been earlier in the day.

“We’ve seen the Lord!”

“Oh you have, have you?”

“He is risen!”

“Risen indeed.  Dead is dead.  I won’t believe a word of it unless I see him with my own eyes, and touch the wounds to be sure it’s not some imposter!”  So Thomas goes on his way, and God lets him wait a whole week.  Finally, a week later, Thomas is with the disciples, and in a moment of time his world is changed.  Jesus appears, unannounced, in the midst of them.

Jesus, ever courteous, invites Thomas to touch the nail holes, and put his hand in the spear wound in his side.

“My Lord and my God!” he exclaims.

 “Do you believe because you have seen?  Blessed are they who do not see and yet believe.”  I imagine Jesus delivering that line with an arched eyebrow and just the hint of a smile.  From that moment on Thomas’ belief is stalwart.

Yet Thomas has been the victim of a bad press, and unkind Sunday school teachers, one of whom once fairly shouted at me, “Don’t be a Doubting Thomas!”  “He’s a real Doubting Thomas” is not a line normally delivered in an understanding or sympathetic tone of voice.  He’s been maligned as hardheaded, weak-spirited, disloyal - a person surely not to be emulated, and perhaps to be shunned.

An Apostle, remember, is one sent forth on behalf of the Risen Christ.  In the first years of the Church, the word “Apostle” was reserved for those who had known Jesus before and after the resurrection.  Peter, James, John all meet the standard, and so does Thomas, but some would hold his initial skepticism as grounds for disqualification.

However, I believe Thomas is a man for all seasons.  In fact, I see him as a prototypical Everyman/Everywoman, and possibly as an Apostle to our era.

Let’s look at ourselves honestly.  We can be very tolerant, but we don’t want to be taken in, cheated or fooled.  We look for fraud, and are fast to spot it, whether or not it’s really there.  In our day we might well respond to reports of the resurrection in an empathetic, possibly therapeutic style.

“Why those poor disciples.” we’d say,  “They’re deep in denial about Jesus’ death.  Well, we can’t let them influence anyone else.  If they want to fool themselves, we won’t burst their balloon, but we’ve got to set a standard, maybe give them a reality check.  Let’s tell them we find this whole business hard to believe, and unless we can see..... no, touch his wounds, we’ll have to stick to our own opinion.”

Do you hear echoes of Thomas?  Does it sound like us?

In the resurrection we are, after all, dealing with a collision of worlds: a world of space, time, energy and mass; and a world beyond those qualities, a spiritual reality that we could say provides the infrastructure upon which the world of our daily experience is built.  These worlds interpenetrate each other with surprising frequency, as our scriptures and indeed the beliefs of all the world’s religions attest. 

The Christian claim is that the very Author of all worlds entered our world for a time, was known to a circle of followers, was killed by the power brokers of this world, and triumphed over death to proclaim the start of a New Creation.  Small wonder that we, like Thomas, want to see it and touch it before declaring it!

Having said this, let’s look at several qualities in Thomas that make him an Apostle for all ages, including our own.

First, Thomas is unflinchingly honest.  He will not be taken in by rumor and wishful thinking, and that is a good personal quality.  He does not patronize his friends, but tells them his doubts and reservations.  He holds on to his own integrity, reasoning, perhaps, that if Christ was raised, he would at some point appear to him, but if Christ was not raised, honesty required him to accept the terrible truth.  We can learn from that.

Thomas stayed a part of the infant Christian fellowship in spite of his doubts.  During that week of doubt he must have held some choice opinions about the truthfulness, the stability, even the character of some of his fellow disciples. 

Peter?  That denying hypocrite! 

Mary Magdalene?  I always knew she had a crush on him! 

John?  He’s nothing but a kid.

That’s how we’d likely see it, and that seems to be how Thomas saw it.  But whatever his opinions may have been, Thomas stayed part of the community.  He didn’t let his doubts, and perhaps his judgments, be an excuse to abandon his friends, and walk away from them.  We can learn from that.

Third, when the proof he demanded came in the most dramatic form imaginable, Thomas’ honesty kept him from getting stuck in his pride.  He set a high standard, but when that standard was met he didn’t change it to stay ahead of the reality.  He didn’t require one more proof, then another, and another, never counting anything quite sufficient.  Setting a high bar of proof, he knew when enough was enough.  We can learn from that.

Last, once Thomas was convinced, his great honesty, strength and integrity were given wholeheartedly to the cause of Christ.  He went right to work, and by the most ancient traditions his ministry was prodigious.  When European explorers reached the southwest coast of India the missionaries among them were amazed to find indigenous Christian churches that dated their founding to the missionary work of this apostle who arrived some fifteen centuries earlier.  Thomas recognized that belief is not an end in itself, but must issue in service to the world in the name of Jesus. We can learn from that.

These are the qualities that make Thomas an apostle for all seasons: unflinching honesty, unwavering devotion to the Christian community, even when he thought them wrong, humility to recognize and acknowledge when he was wrong and, once convinced, the determination to carry the new faith to the ends of the known world.  A man for all seasons, all places and all eras.

Howard MacMullen

© May, 2012

Survival At All Costs?

“They Want To Live,” read a headline in the New York Times Magazine a few years ago.  “Science has made it impossible to believe in the afterlife.  But acting as their own lab mice, fervent health buffs are trying to hang on until science delivers the ultimate miracle.”

The “ultimate miracle” turned out to be physical life with no necessary end - technology keeping us going indefinitely, replacing parts as needed, and maintaining health through a feast of vitamins and dietary supplements.

This is easier to believe in than the afterlife?

As noted in regard to the resurrection, I found myself wondering just when “science” rendered belief in an afterlife impossible.  Who were the researchers?  What were their fields of competence?  What questions did they ask?  What hypotheses did they propose to answer the questions?  What experiments did they conduct to test the hypotheses?  Where did they publish?  What other scientists duplicated their research and verified their results?

There were, of course, no answers to those questions.  The confidence that science has made it impossible to believe in the afterlife is nothing more than one of many beliefs associated with philosophical materialism - the idea that all reality is physical.  Believers in that philosophy tend to regard their views as “scientific,” I suppose, because science deals only in material phenomena.  In truth, however, “science” has never even asked the question, let alone constructed hypotheses and experiments to test the hypotheses.  Indeed, many of our best scientists are committed people of faith.

But back to the folks who were trying to become physically immortal.  Just for argument’s sake, let’s suppose these very earnest people were able to succeed.  Suppose that through a combination of good diet, adequate exercise, and a simple little pill that stopped cells from aging, you could put the brakes on the whole life cycle.  Suppose further, just to be on the safe side, you donated tissue samples from all your major organs so that technicians could clone a kidney, or stomach, or heart, grow it in a pig and pass it on to you if and when you needed it.  No aging, no disease, and a ready supply of spare parts just in case.  Would this be a good thing?

A life dedicated simply and solely to physical survival would be, at the very least, a life of self-absorption.  Greater love has no man than this: that he holds onto physical life at all cost?  Maybe that’s why a favorite song a few years back trumpeted self-love as “The Greatest Love of All.”  What kind of priorities would a person develop if life’s greatest good were physical survival?  What would such people know of selfless service, to say nothing of self-sacrifice?  And what kind of world would they build? 

“But isn’t this what Christianity encourages?” I hear some asking.  “By holding out the promise of heaven, religious people are doing the same thing.  The only question has to do with which idea works.”

The answer is that the two approaches come at the thing from different angles, with completely different presuppositions.  The folks quoted in the Times seek longevity for longevity’s sake.  “Dying is not an acceptable option,” said one.

Christianity, and most other faiths for that matter, take some form of afterlife as a given, sometimes even as a problem.  “Life after death is not the point,” wrote C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity.  “I’m afraid you’ve got that whether you want it or not.”

The important thing, Lewis said, is deciding what kind of life we choose to live on earth.  The choices we make here and now form the kind of people we become, which sets our course for this life and beyond.

Jesus taught that in seeking first the kingdom of God, and in learning how to live a life of self-giving love, we find, first, a source of meaning in this life and, second, we prepare ourselves for a deeper life of love and joy that carries through physical death, ultimately into the new heaven and new earth.  Aim for heaven now, living by heaven’s rules, he told us, and you’ll get earth thrown in for free.  Aim for earth alone, and in the end you’ll lose even that.  “Eternal life,” often spoken of in scripture simply as “life,” begins here and now when we recognize that in Christ God has done for us what we could not do for ourselves, and then allow him to reorient our life as a totality, from the inside out: spirit, mind and body.

In the last analysis this is the problem with the quest for mere physical immortality.  It begins with a finite, but limited good - longevity - and by making that the ultimate good robs it of even the limited value it properly has. 

A race of immortals, or even extraordinarily long-lived people, whose goal in life was simply their own survival, would become even more self-absorbed than we already are today.  Their quest, self always at the fore, would result in frenzied competition for scarce biological and medical resources.  Inevitably, advantage would go to the rich and the powerful.  All memory of transcendent good would be replaced with the promise of material survival, and anything would be seen as permissible in pursuit of that goal.  The result would be a literal hell on earth.

Our calling in Christ is to learn to live for others, showing the love and the joy of God, which alone can give meaning to this world and to the world to come. 

Howard MacMullen

© April, 2012

When Worlds Collide

Easter marks a change in the world, a visitation, a reaching into this universe from beyond its borders.  It is a visitation that changes the world we know so well.  Some moderns object that the world as we see it in the Passion and Resurrection of Jesus is fundamentally different from the world we know today, and their implication is that if it’s different it must not have relevance to the world we know.  Let’s look at that claim.

On Palm Sunday, Christ’s entry into Jerusalem, we see a quaint celebration, within the context of the world we know so well.  A popular leader joins his people in a celebration that is both a religious and a national holiday.  He is well received, the crowds hang on his every word, and there is a sense of excitement and hope about him.  We’ve been in such crowds, and hoped such hopes.  It is the world we know. 

By Monday his visit has gotten even more interesting - he enters the city once again, and takes the Temple by storm, overturning the tables of dishonest money changers, setting free the overpriced sacrificial lambs and goats, cows and pigeons.  And still he addresses the crowd, which is beginning to divide for him and against him.  That is the world we know. 

By Tuesday Jesus attacks the pretensions of the religious authorities, and even some of his friends begin to wonder if he’s going a bit too far.  It’s the world we know, and things are starting to turn ugly. 

He stays at a friend’s house on Wednesday, returning to the city on Thursday for a final meal with his disciples, one of whom betrays him to the authorities.  It is the world we know.

On Friday he endures humiliation and suffering beyond words, as false witnesses accuse him, and truthful witnesses are pressed to corroborate half truths; politicians, and representatives of the Roman occupation seek the expedient solution - deadly enemies rush the process, and Sunday’s adoring crowd clamors for his blood; in the end he dies at the combined hands of all of them.  Reflections of the world we know.

By Saturday the tomb’s been sealed, the grieving followers are in despair, trying to decide how to get on with their lives, now that their dreams have been blasted.  And that also is part of coping in the world we know so well.

Then beyond all imagining, comes the news of Sunday morning.  Greeted with disbelief, then doubt, skepticism, but finally with awe-struck wonder, this is not the world we know so well!  This is the moment when worlds are in collision, when a hand reaches out from a place where there was not supposed to be a hand, and everything we thought we knew is turned upside down.

This is precisely the point where some modern commentators tell us we need to pull back, to hedge the declaration with disclaimers; for we, after all live in the modern world.  Science has disproved miracles, including this, the most startling and radical miracle of them all.

But here we need to ask a few questions.  Which scientists proved that?  What scientific disciplines did they represent?  What experiments did they conduct to prove the point?  What were the parameters, and what sort of controls did they employ?  Which of their colleagues conducted the same experiments, and replicated their results?

The truth, of course, is that there have never been such experiments, and “science” has never proved that miracles do not take place.  Individuals who subscribe to the philosophy known as materialism have said these things, but their statements are simply declarations of confidence – a kind of faith, if you please - that nothing can happen in the world apart from the limits of their own limited philosophy.

The apostles were far more empirical than that.  They began with the same ordinary view of reality that we hold, knowing that in this world, what you see is what you get.  They had seen some odd things done by Jesus, but most likely assumed that he merely knew some things they did not.  Dead is dead, and as they laid him in the tomb, they sealed their dreams and hopes away with his broken body.  Then came the first day of the new week.  Across the board the gospel writers report the disciples’ disbelief at the first reports.  They assumed the likely explanations: that the authorities had stolen his body, or that the women had gone to the wrong tomb. 

Yet in the hours and days that followed, these very ordinary fishermen, tax collectors, pious women, harlots, merchants and others were forced by the evidence of their eyes and ears to declare that something without precedent had taken place.  Over about a month’s time they became so convinced that the wall between the worlds had been breached that they left their old lives altogether, traveled to the four corners of the world they knew, from Spain to India, from France to Ethiopia, declaring the news of Easter morning, and without exception choosing to die rather than recant.  We rejoice in the strength of their word, and give thanks for their courage in speaking it.

Christ is Risen!

Let the celebration begin!

Howard MacMullen

© April, 2012

“What Wondrous Love Is This?”

Those words begin a deeply meditative American folk hymn often associated with this season of the year.  As with most songs in the folk tradition there are many verses, but three in particular capture the core message of Holy Week and Easter, and it is worth contemplating as we prepare to begin the week.  In deep and brooding chords the first verse marvels,

What wondrous love is this, O my soul,

What wondrous love is this that caused the Lord of bliss

To bear the dreadful curse for my soul!

The reference is to the words of Isaiah, whose vision of the Messiah as suffering servant, inform our understanding of Christ's suffering:

“We all like sheep have gone astray...and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.”   (Isaiah 53:6)

The events of Holy Week do not merely recount the tragic end of a good man.  They help us comprehend God's plan for setting right the wrongs of the world.  If Jesus was simply an ordinary man, trying to do good, but caught in the kind of hysteria that can overtake any movement, then the events of Holy Week would be but one more sad episode in the history of human beings stooping to subhuman behavior.

But if these same events were actually an expression of love, if the sufferer were to be none other than God Incarnate, and if in the suffering He was lifting for us a burden beyond our ability to bear, then awe and wonder properly mingles with grief and mourning as we watch the drama unfold.  Which is it - an act of amazing love, or of deluded tragedy?  It all depends on who Jesus was.  Fully human, yes, else it would be play-acting.  But faith insists there was far more at work, and the second verse continues:

To God and to the Lamb, O my soul,

To God and to the Lamb, who is the great “I Am”

While millions join the theme I will sing!

The reference this time is to the scene in the Revelation of John, in which the company of heaven offers praise to God for the gift of Christ whose death and resurrection make possible human liberation from sin and death.

“And I heard every creature in heaven and on earth...saying, ‘To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb be blessing and honor and glory and power for ever and ever!’”   (Revelation 5:13)

Jesus is the Lamb, and this is what gives his loving sacrifice its power to lift fallen humanity.  The cross, far from being a snare to stop Jesus' work, turns out to be the very tool by which he shows the scale of God's love.  Furthermore, he shows us the intrinsic power of self-giving love.  Just as Christ's sacrificial love transforms our relationship to God, so we are called to bring that same self-giving love into our relationships. 

All this would be hot air, if we were remembering a good man who just died, no matter how heroically.  The experience of the Disciples, however, is that beyond all expectation, and to their utter amazement, the story was not ended.  The accounts of the first Easter, and the weeks that follow show us a collection of men and women who were nothing if not skeptical.  Yet over a period of a month or so they became convinced that Jesus had triumphed over death.  They do not tell of some ghostly “survival,” nor of a shared conviction that his work must go on, but of the real presence of the man they had known, translated into a new dimension of existence, yet very much with them, teaching and preparing them to receive his Spirit into their lives.  So transforming was this experience that they were changed from simple, fear-filled people into spiritual dynamos who, in their lifetimes, carried the gospel of Jesus Christ throughout the entire Mediterranean world.

Their message, and the presence of the Risen Christ, has been changing things ever since, and so it is in triumph that the hymn concludes:

And when from death I'm free, I'll sing on,

And when from death I'm free, I'll sing and joyful be,

And through eternity I'll sing on!

May we now journey through Holy Week, not skipping over the rough or unpleasant parts, taking into our minds and spirits all there is to experience.  And having done so, may we share the surprise of Jesus’ followers and have the most joyous of Easters.

Howard MacMullen

© March, 2012

To hear the tune, click here

Who Is Jesus?

Who, and what, is Jesus?  This is the crucial question for parade-goers on Palm Sunday.

His actions make a claim impossible for friends and enemies alike to misunderstand.  N.T. Wright suggests that Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem is rather like a group of Christians erecting a manger scene in front of a model of an empty tomb.  Seeing that, you would conclude that whoever created the display was trying to bring together the messages of Christmas and Easter.

On Palm Sunday, Jesus brings together the approaching celebration of Passover, the great story of Israel’s liberation from slavery, and Hanukkah, the festival celebrating the triumph of Judas Maccabaeus, the King who set Israel free from foreign domination.  And for good measure, he rides a donkey, evoking Zechariah 9:9, the King coming in peace.  Every detail of the day touches one of those themes, and the unmistakable message to all who are there is that the Messiah is entering the city, he is the True King and he will do the work only Israel’s God can do.  If he didn’t speak a word, his actions alone would carry that message.

Does he know what he is doing, or is he caught up in the excitement of a holiday crowd, playing out a role that will get him in deep trouble?  Is he a peasant sage, a rustic from the country, unaware of big city sophistication, as critics, ancient and modern have long contended?  Is he blundering into a succession of tragic errors that will combine to cut him down unnecessarily?  Or is he more sophisticated than the critics themselves, employing visual and spoken signs and symbols to confront his enemies in the only way that will ultimately make a difference?

These are not trivial questions.  They point the way to two very different possibilities.  On one hand there is the possibility, famously noted by C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity, that Jesus might have been insane (a more contemporary variation would be “deluded”), or that he was some sort of intentional deceiver, pursuing a scheme of unclear purpose.  The third possibility, Lewis suggested, is that Jesus was and is just what his actions and words declared him to be: God Incarnate executing a plan to defeat the world’s evil in a way that still challenges human imagination.  How do we discern the truth?

Look ahead, Paul counsels the Philippians. 

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death-- even death on a cross.  Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.  (Philippians 2:5-11)

Over the years that short, tightly packed passage has given rise to essays, books, sermons and even hymns.  Its significance here is that it calls us to look at the events of Holy Week and Easter not as short stand-alone episodes, but as related elements in a drama that draws together, and makes sense of everything else in the four gospels.

To the human eye, the days we call Holy Week look like an unmitigated disaster.  In human terms they are, but the only reason we even remember Jesus is that the events of the week were not the end of the story.  Beyond the cross is the tomb, and beyond the tomb is the resurrection, the impact of which works backward, revealing in these strange happenings the hand of God reaching into the chaos and mess of the world to initiate a foundational change in human history.  Follow the parade on Sunday, wave palm branches, throw flowers, but stick around to watch the confrontations and deeds that follow, and then see what happens to it all a mere week hence.

Howard MacMullen

© March, 2012

The Seed, Dying, Once Again

Our Lenten journey approaches Jerusalem, and once again we hear, "Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit."  (John 12:24)  This is a recurring theme, and our culture does not like that message at all.

According to our currently dominant societal values, the purpose of life is to accumulate things.  These include material goods, income and, whenever possible, power and influence to ensure continued access to more things. 

This is hardly a new thing under the sun - people have pursued such goals for thousands of years, but we have elevated it to an art form.  In the process we have exalted greed, calling it "ambition"; we have erased common morality, calling it "realism"; we have applauded naked aggression, calling it "drive".  In pursuit of such goals we have been willing to look the other way when corners are cut; we have been willing to tolerate the demands of employers who require loyalty to job ahead of loyalty to family; we have put advancement and even self-gratification ahead of the people we love; and we have been willing to resign ourselves to the inevitability of the situation.

Into this climate the words of Jesus come, calling us to another set of priorities.  The words hit our numbed modern ears, and seem strange.  Or quaint.  Or naive.

And yet, if we open our ears, the words have a familiarity.  Sometimes we can't quite place it - a tune we heard once and were transported, a comment that spoke sanity in the midst of chaos, a principle of living that made sense of apparent absurdity.

The English novelist Charles Williams referred to this principle as "the Great Exchange - my life for your life."  He saw it as integral to the very structure of the universe - the vision of the Lamb that was slain before the foundation of the world, made flesh in the person of Jesus Christ, visible in his life, ministry, death and resurrection, but also in the workings of nature and human nature.  In such novels as All Hallows Eve, War In Heaven, Many Dimensions and The Greater Trumps Williams restated for our time that which Jesus taught at every opportunity - that the visible, material universe, in which we believe ourselves to be so much at home, relies for its very existence on a spiritual framework, an infrastructure if you will, that gives it shape and form and substance.

Jesus looked at his world, and found there the same corrupting elements that are so troubling in our own. He saw the desperate desire of men and women to secure their material existence leading them into practices that destroyed their spirits, and in the end failed their material goals as well.  He saw them enslaved by false aspirations, and in desperate need of being released from their bondage.  He predicted that their failure to change this orientation would lead to their destruction, and his prediction was fulfilled within the lifetime of most of his hearers, as the Romans destroyed Jerusalem, and sent her people into exile.

And so he taught them with simple, earthy analogies.  The hoarded grain spoils and goes rotten.  The planted grain bears fruit.  Life spent on behalf of others has meaning that transcends the material circumstances of life.  People mean more than things.  Accomplishments are always replaced.  Acts of love leave a permanent mark.  These are not ideals, he said - they are the foundational realities by which the universe is run.

Lent and Easter provide us an opportunity to sense that framework, and to reflect upon what it means.  They give us a chance to think about the ultimate questions, and in the events remembered we can discern eternal answers to our questions.  Our world is in need of a massive reorientation of purpose, and the good news of the Gospel is that it is within reach.  The challenge of the Gospel is that you and I are called to be its messengers, in words yes, but more in the choices we make in our living. 

We are imperfect messengers, to be sure.  We all have a stake in the way things are, even as we see the alternative.  So none of us comes to the struggle with clean hands and pure minds.  All of us are part of the problem, even as we may truly desire to be part of the solution.  That’s why we need to come not as superior beings who have all the answers, but on our knees, confessing our need to be forgiven and reconciled along with everyone else.  It is our egos, our self-absorption that corresponds to the seed that has to die, and that’s a frightening thing to contemplate.  Letting go of our mindsets, our biases, our opinions, our ways of doing things, and asking God to sort it out may feel like death, but isn’t that the point?  It becomes an act of will, hung on whatever faith we can muster, that in the end Paul is right to say, “So it is with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power.”  (1 Corinthians 15:42-43)

Jerusalem is on the horizon, the words of Jesus and his actions trouble us in our comfort, but they are ultimately the very words of life, and so we continue on the road.

Howard MacMullen

© March, 2012