History buffs may have realized that our reading from Isaiah is the same one quoted by George Washington in his Farewell Address. I’d like to tell you that I am smart enough to know Washington’s address, but what I really know is the musical “Hamilton.†In fact, the season of Lent is over, so it may seem strange to start my Easter sermon with a confession, but I have one. I wish I was smarter than I am. At the very least, I wish I was nearly as smart as some people seem to think I am.
I can read about the first third of the journal Nature, the newsy part, but when I get to the main content, the actual science, I am lost. I love James Joyce’s Ulysses, but Finnegan’s Wake is gobbledygook, even with a guide. And while I think some twentieth century poetry, like T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland,†is definitely worth the effort, I am convinced that some of those poets we were forced to decipher in high school and college were writing simply to prove to themselves how smart they were. I mean, could Ezra Pound just stick to one, maybe even two, languages? For all of his crankiness, I’ll take Robert Frost any day, poetry that ordinary people understood.
While I may not be quite as smart as I want to be, I am often smart enough to catch continuity errors in novels, films, television shows. Several weeks ago I mentioned attention and sometimes the lack of attention around continuity in the storylines of the DC and Marvel comic universes, which can be challenging when characters like Batman have been around for decades, in the hands of sometimes hundreds of writers and editors across multiple titles, not to mention television and film franchises, each written to a specific cultural context, World War II, the Red Scare, Black Power, even the LGBTQ equality movement.
In the genre-defining television series “Lost,†the moments before the crash are replayed in flashback again and again. The problem is that the flight attendant’s announcement that the seatbelt sign was on has at least three completely different versions, the captain, the pilot, illuminated, turned on, you get the idea.
During the second episode of the series, Sawyer’s hair and Sayid’s beard grow dramatically in just a matter of hours. I know a few men who’d love to have that hair tonic! Spend some time on the Internet Movie Database, IMDB.com, and you’ll find goofs and continuity errors listed for all of your favorite films. The huge oak tree in front of the Tara plantation is there before the war, gone when the darned Yankees burn everything down, then has miraculously regrown when the war is over, apparently fueled by a fertilizer as potent as the aforementioned hair tonic. Though the best goof in that classic, “Gone With the Wind,†is an anachronistic radio tower in Atlanta.
Scripture is full of continuity errors. Like a comic universe, it is the result of many writers and editors working in a variety of times and cultural contexts, but spanning not decades but centuries. The earliest layers of the Hebrew text may well be from the reign of King David, yet significant new texts and edits were taking place in the first and second centuries before the common era, almost a millennia later. Because the authors of the New Testament use a particular Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures from the second century BCE, we know that sometime after that date authors and editors added almost a quarter of the material we find in the Book of the Prophet Jeremiah, more than three centuries after his death, but of course, most of Isaiah comes from well after Isaiah as well.
Even the New Testament, written in a much shorter period of time, has challenges. The communities that developed the four canonical gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, draw from both shared and unique traditions and sources. Each set of authors and editors brings an agenda to the work. Some are angry at the Pharisees, who expelled them from the synagogue after the Jewish War in the year 70. Matthew wants Jesus to be the new Moses, while the community around John is competing for followers with an alternative community centered around Thomas, so Thomas is made to look almost clownish at times.
But even allowing for divergent agendas and poor editing, the simple fact is, if you were going to make something up, you’d do a better job than this.
You could drive a tractor-trailer of doubt through the story itself, never mind the theology. Since crucified bodies were left to rot on the cross, why was his taken down? It is not like the Romans were sensitive to the Jewish holiday. Maybe he wasn’t left up long enough, and wasn’t truly dead. Or “of course the body was missing! His disciples probably stole it so they could manufacture a story of resurrection!†If you wan’t to disbelieve the fundamental claim at the heart of Christianity, go for it. You’ve got plenty of material.
It seems an odd argument for historic memory, but if you were determined to fabricate a god-man, you’d do a better job. For one thing, it would not be women at the tomb, for they were not acceptable witnesses in that culture. But even before the tomb, before the execution, you’d make Jesus better than he actually is. He wouldn’t, for example, tell the Seventy that the world would end before they returned when it clearly doesn’t end. He’d be less prone to tantrums and name-calling.
Skeptics tried to claim that King David was pure myth until archeological evidence was found to the contrary, and some continue to claim that Jesus is completely fabricated, but I’m not buying. Whatever you may make of Christmas claims of virgin birth and royal descent, it seems pretty clear that a real Jesus walked around preaching a religious reform, that people experienced healing and other things that seemed completely inexplicable in his presence, and that he was executed by Rome at the goading of religious leaders. But most of all, we have this historic memory of resurrection, for it is the only reason we are still speaking about this man two thousand years later, when his life was arguably a failure by every human measure. He didn’t conquer anything, sit on a throne, or get rich. When he died, his movement was still a rag-tag bunch, mostly poor hicks from the sticks with a few well-connected supporters.
This isn’t a sermon of Christian apologetics, my attempt to get you to believe exactly what I believe. I’m not even sure what exactly it is I believe, other than that his followers experienced him as being real and present to them for some time after he had been the victim of the death penalty, that human sin of sanctioned murder. This historical memory is clear.
What isn’t clear, because of contradictions in the text, sometimes in the same gospel, is exactly how he was present. All the emphasis on his being embodied, Thomas touching him, breaking bread, cooking fish, is at odds with other aspects of the story, including teleporting through locked doors, or the strange inability of his closest followers to recognize him until he performed some ritual act like breaking bread or until he called their names. We don’t know, and what we are told does not fit our experience of the world.
What does it mean, this resurrection? What does it mean that early in the morning, before dawn, Mary Magdalene, no doubt grieving and afraid, was doing what women so often do, getting on with the work that needs to be done, when she discovers the empty tomb?
In the cultural Christianity of our age, the resurrection largely serves as anesthesia, numbing us from our death fear with a promise that we will live forever, and these days we get that without any effort, no need for obedience or religious practice. We’ve been fed this form of Easter, the blue pill to use the language of “The Matrix,†all of our lives. Anglican scholar and Bishop N.T. Wright puts it bluntly in his book “Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church.†He writes:
Simply in terms of our attempt to assess, as historians, what these stories think they are about, and where they belong in the early Christian scheme of things, it is extremely strange, and extremely interesting, that at no stage do they mention the future hope of the Christian. This is, of course, counter-intuitive to most western Christians, Catholic and Protestant, conservative and liberal. A thousand hymns and a million sermons, not to mention poems, icons, liturgies and aids to meditation, have so concentrated on ‘life after deathÂ’ as the central problem, the issue which drives everything else, and have so distorted the Easter stories to feed this concentration, that it has long been assumed that the real point of the Easter story is both to show that there is indeed a ‘life after deathÂ’ and that those who belong to Jesus will eventually share it. […] the significant thing to notice here is this: neither ‘going to heaven when you dieÂ’, ‘life after deathÂ’, ‘eternal lifeÂ’, nor even ‘the resurrection of all Christ’Â’s peopleÂ’, is so much as mentioned in the four canonical resurrection stories. If Matthew, Mark, Luke and John wanted to tell stories whose import was ‘Jesus is risen, therefore you will be tooÂ’, they have done a remarkably bad job of it.
You don’t have to be a scholar, Anglican or otherwise, to see that what we’ve been told the reports of resurrection say and what they actually say are not the same thing. To borrow of current events, I recommend that you read the report.
In fact, resurrection, for the Pharisees and other Jews of that age, was the resurrection of everyone, bodily, at the end of history, not our individual notion of pearly gates and wings. The earliest Christian text we have, Paul’s first letter to the church at Thessaloniki, written around the year 52, reflects this belief, as he promises those who have died in Christ will rise up along with the living on the day of judgment.
This two thousand year old story, riddled with holes and continuity errors, means something, for sure. Maybe the key to decipher it for today is found in the weird way we observe Holy Week, in our reliving the events each year as if for the first time, from palm processionals to Easter sunrise, not a commemoration but a re-engagement.
Maybe the truth is that Easter is atemporal, out of time, for just as death is not a thing for God, so, some theologians have posited through the centuries, time is not a thing for God. Think of Jesus’ announcement that the Kingdom of God is breaking into the world for those who choose it, yet there were many who did not experience this in-breaking. The kingdom was and was not, a theological Schrödinger’s cat.
Maybe Easter is every day a prodigal son comes home, a leper is healed, or a sinner has a change of heart.
A retired Lutheran colleague and expert on mimetic theory, the Rev. Paul Nuechterlein, writes:
We find a sense of open-ended commission within the present world: ‘Jesus is risen, therefore you have work ahead of you.Â’ This is very clear in Matthew, Luke and John; even in Mark the women have an immediate task […], and the angelÂ’’s message through them to the disciples, especially Peter, implies that they are going to be given things to do as well.
Is it not fitting that Jesus is in Jerusalem for Passover, a feast celebrating liberation, the escape from crushing human evil, and that Easter brings us an escape from another empire of crushing human evil, an escape from the worst the state and religion could throw at a person, death and disgrace, an escape from the grave itself?
Maybe “Happy Easter†does not need to be “happy empty cultural ritual of spring†or even “happy affirmation of an event that may or may not have occurred in a specific way two millennia ago†but instead can be “happy decision to live today as if our God is more powerful than the weight of empire, of evil, of even death.â€
Maybe to be “eastered†is to look past the continuity errors and to know that this is a good story, this creation we experience, these humans that surround us. There are tragic moments in our story, moments of horror and sorrow, more than a few laughs along the way if we are lucky, but in the end, we live in a love story between a force bigger than all of us, a divine mystery we name as God, and all that was created, big and small, between us sentient beings and that mysterious God, between us and this creation, between us and one another. It is our story, and today is a new page, where the good guys win. This is the day the Lord has made. May you rejoice and be glad in it.