Texts on Easter Sunday, April 11, 2004
Matthew 28: 1-20; Acts 10: 34-43
“God allowed him to appear, not to all, but to us who were chosen”
It doesn’t seem quite fair of God to allow the risen Lord to appear only to some, but not to all. If everyone who believes in Christ receives forgiveness through his name, why, O God, reveal yourself only to some and not to all this Easter Day? Why is the soldiers’ report of miracle met not with money to hush, but Hallelujah? Why must it be that even on the mountaintop of resurrection hope, only some worshiped, while some doubted? What is in the way?
In an Old Testament class, I am always glad when a student gets frustrated, even angry, at the accounts of God preventing change and repentance. Pharaoh is the first exhibit, famously facing Moses off. God hardened Pharaoh’s heart, the stories say, so that he would not relent and not let that people go; but send his strong army to try to crush the insurgent slaves. Why not reveal himself to Pharaoh, and make the whole liberation thing go more gently? Why? So that God’s plan of salvation might unfold, says the story. Poor Pharaoh, poor great army—pawns of God’s needs, it seems. So goes the complaint from the new student.
The stories grow stiffer and harsher when Isaiah is sent to judge this same sea-saved people.
And the Lord said, “Go and say to this people: 'Keep listening, but do not comprehend; keep looking, but do not understand.’ And I said, ‘How long, O Lord. And he said, ‘Until cities lie waste without inhabitant, and houses without people, and the land is utterly desolate.’” '(Isa 6:9)
And the cities were destroyed. The nation that was so confident of its good land and its good God and its right to subdue foreign nations and refashion their values after its own image—that nation would not listen to God’s servant in its midst. Yet the prophets said God it was who stopped the nation’s ears, so that his plan might unfold. But if God is causing you to be deaf and blind, do you share any guilt in your ignorance? So goes the new student’s complaint—and ours, too!
When Jesus came, “the world did not know him. He came to his own, and his own people did not accept him.” (John 1.10) How many are the stories of his healing and teaching wherein some doubt, some deny, some decide to kill him. Yet the word is now louder still: this was in the will of the Divine, that all might be saved.
Is this meddlesome ear-plugging, eye-shutting, heart-hardening action of God over and done with? Does our proclamation—Christ is risen!—signal the end of spiritual torpor and deafness? Clearly not. Still we doubt. Still we do not see. Still, wars and poverty and racism and threats of death and fear of death rage, all evils meshed, tragically inter-causal and ignored. Now, even resurrection is become just another package to be delivered on time. We already know what’s in it.
Here is the thing. If you look backward for knowledge of what is true, you are looking after what is already dead. What is known is old already. What is known can’t be the new thing that God is up to. Knowledge is power, they say. But knowledge is only human power. It holds sway only in the world of things that pass away, things that are already as good as dead. Consider Pharaoh. What does he see? A mere man, Moses, in his front office. Pharaoh knows what sort of man this is. His hardness of heart is nothing more or less than his knowledge, his certainty, his system. Consider Israel, who would not hear. They knew their prophets. They understood the game. You rale away at us for bad behavior; we feel some guilt today, but on Monday morning we make mockery of the prophets over coffee. It’s an arrangement that helps us live with our ordinary wars and injustices. And its foundation is what is called sound knowledge.
Didn’t Jesus’ contemporaries say they knew who he was? “Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon?” We know these people, we know these men. What is he talking about? “And they took offense at him,” the gospel says. In the Jesus stories, the religious authorities always know what is best for the people. They stand on the solid foundation of knowledge. When the soldiers come to them with an account of something really new—a tomb opened, an angel sitting on a stone rolled away—the authorities know that this doesn’t happen. They know that it is best for the people never to hear this story. When they pay the soldiers for silence, the soldiers know what is best, too—take the money and shut up! Everybody knows how it works. Nothing new can come into this world, for its heart is hard with knowledge—the kind you can put into words, write down, and offer to the world as “true.”
Does it work? Yes, in one sense. The soldiers will rise in the ranks, the religious authorities will gain power in their system. In human terms, knowledge is power. But this is exactly not true of the things of God. When it comes to power in spiritual life, only those who don’t know what is true and what is possible—only they rise. All is turned upside down. Not knowing any formula for truth is the key in the door. It is entry onto God’s elevator, as we said some weeks ago. You and I, we experience a strong temptation to stay on this floor where our knowledge allows us to move in and out of the rooms with confidence and style. This is power as the world teaches it. But there is nothing new here. You cannot rise spiritually, except you come to the elevator—to the rising into God’s realm for which there are no words, and where truth has no formula.
History holds stories of servants of God in whom the action of Christ’s freeing Spirit is clear to the inward eye. In the work of Mohandas Gandhi, Christ’s word is there, leading him to help birth the world’s largest democracy, India, a nation destined for great things in this century. What did Ghandi offer? His willingness to suffer obedience to a law higher than the laws of nations. His willingness to not-know the old facts of world power as he faced the force of the British Empire. According to the autobiographical testimony of Martin Luther King, it was Gandhi’s witness to the spirit of non- violence (ahimsa, in Hindu) that turned the young King toward his destiny. While studying for a Ph.D. at Boston University, having no idea what his own life work would be—here is the key, not knowing—King encountered the moving power of Christ’s spirit in Gandhi’s legacy. His world and our world were turned upside down.
Now we stand before the Easter story with the same temptations that always face humans. Do we think we already know what Easter means? Do we grasp its core truth? If so, the stone cannot be rolled away; nothing new can come. Consider the form of our Protestant worship patterns, how easily we slip into the idea that we know what Resurrection means. Norman O. Brown calls this wordy way of worship “reanimation in the mind only.” In other words, we are often only re-telling an old story, as if the story were itself the truth. Brown observes that the Protestant world view sees Jesus’ life and death as “a unique event occurring in time going in only one direction.” That is, Jesus as just something that happened way back there. Now Brown asks, “What has that to do with us here now? The very [historical world view] which establishes Jesus’ miraculous divinity back there then separates our humanity from his divinity now.”
This is because knowledge based in facts leads to hardness of heart. It leads to human victories, human power, who’s right and who’s wrong, never to the divine truth in love. Literal interpretation of the truth sees only one thing, one way. Depth of vision is eliminated. You know how it goes. Reflect on some un-budging stand-off you’ve had with one other person. Maybe it hasn’t let up. Maybe it led to silence between neighbors. Maybe it led to divorce, or a firing, or worse. You know the details. Question: is it not true that in that frozen stand-off, certainty and knowledge reigned supreme? You were right, right? Were you Love?
Remember Rabbi Asher, listening to a fierce dispute between Lev and Ariel. Lev finally turns to Reb Asher. “So who is right? I’m right, right?” Rabbi Asher: “Yes. You are right.” Angry, Ariel fairly shouts, “What do you mean! Rabbi, am I not right?” And Rabbi Asher says, “Yes. You are right.” From the corner of the room, an observer storms over to the rabbi, very annoyed. “Reb! It is impossible! They can’t both be right.” And the Rabbi says, “Yes. You are right.”
Your laughter, soft and beautiful, with no hardness of heart, signals your recognition of the truth shimmering in that little story—a glint of the truth shining in our proclamation—Christ is risen! We say this in the present tense, don’t we? Not “Christ rose”—because a mere fact, mere knowledge, just can’t connect us with the Eternal now. Not all the people are ready to hear this.
What have death and life, crucifixion and resurrection to do with all these matters? Throughout our life, we are as if rising on a pile of knowledge. You know the sort of stuff you accumulate: why, little children think you are a magician because you know so much. But in order to come alive to what is new—really new—you must die, every day, to your knowledge. You know how this works. Has there not come an ending to some battle within you, perhaps with substance abuse or unforgiveness or an anger or a guilty sorrow that just couldn’t be suppressed? But then, you came to the end of the whole story. You came to it as a kind of death to a certain sort of knowledge. Then the new life, then the resurrection.
This is the truth you were not ready to hear when you were in the right. This was the declaration of the prophets, calling all to repent. This was the crucifixion that can never be revealed as a mere fact. Jesus Christ comes through a stony tomb which angels have not yet opened for you. And Christ will come again. Why has God not revealed himself to all? So that you and I—new, knowing nothing—might yet be revealed in Christ: Life, by death. This is the kingdom. This is the glory. This is the power.
delivered at Central Presbyterian Church Buffalo, New York
©Stephen H. Phelps, April 2004
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