'Your Faith Has Healed You'

 Job 42.1-6, 10-17; Psalm 34; Hebrews 7.23-28; Mark 10.46-52

The key theme in today’s lectionary readings is that of passage or transformation.  Passage from a place—variously described—of ignorance, fear or blindness to a place of repentance, trust and the enlightened following of Christ. 

Over the past few weeks we have been reading about Job.  Here, at the very end of the book, God finally speaks up to cut through the ignorant speculations of Job’s advisors.  The response of Job to this rather spectacular intervention is recorded in the verses we read:

Who is it that obscures your counsel without knowledge? Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know. You said ‘Listen now and I will question you, and you shall answer me’. My ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you. Therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes.

The passage traversed here by Job is not the classical Greek journey from apparent knowledge, through ignorance, to ‘true’ knowledge. It is not that Job thought he knew about divine things, but then was shown some secret knowledge or mystery which gave him the key to understand what God was on about in a brand new way. Not at all. Job’s passage is from apparent knowledge, through ignorance, to repentance.  A crucial difference, that.  Not to ‘true’ knowledge but to repentance.  The point of this last chapter in Job is not that he has a beatific vision of God that unveils for him the meaning of everything, but that Job has a vision of God that uncovers precisely nothing, nada, nihil.  That is the paradox of this final vision.  God reveals Godself, certainly, Job is given to ‘see’ things that he had only heard about up until the moment in question, but the God so revealed is one who cannot be mapped, contained or domesticated within the strictures of human thinking or imagining. 

The ‘repentance’ of Job represents, therefore, an acknowledgement of this fact.  ‘My eyes have seen you . . . therefore I repent in dust and ashes’.  Dust and ashes is apparently all that remains of Job’s apparent knowledge and insight into God’s ways.  That Job’s fortunes are then immediately restored, and doubly so, should not therefore be read as some kind of reward for Job’s new-found insight, a classically Greek restoration of equilibrium because of the hard work of the hero in order to restore order from chaos. On the contrary, the restoration is a gift. It comes without antecedent or reason. It cannot be inferred or deduced from anything that comes before. It is sheer grace, the very opposite of that karmic worldview which is obsessed with buying the favour of the gods through the performances of virtue and knowledge. In Job, the abundance of the final restoration represents, by contrast, the sheer grace of the divine toward everyone who repents of such ambitions.

When we turn to the gospel text, a very similar rite of passage or transformation unfolds, a passage that may be characterised as the movement from karmic blindness to Christian discipleship.  The gospel stories are highly symbolic. They should not be read primarily as history in the modern sense, although they certain contain such history.  Thus, this story of a blind man encountered and healed by Jesus on the road from Jericho probably does have a historical core. But Mark takes this core and turns it into an occasion for preaching about the path one must take to become a true disciple of Jesus Christ. 

That this is so becomes clear when we consider the name of the blind man.  It is Bartimaeus—the ‘son’, Mark is careful to underline, of ‘Timaeus’.  Now Timaeus is not a semitic name, it is neither Aramaic nor Hebrew.  It is Roman.  So we know immediately that this man represents not the people of Israel, but another population of the lost, namely the Gentiles, citizens of the wider Roman empire which, at this time, is overwhelmingly karmic in the sense we have begun to describe. 

Furthermore, Timaeus is the common name of one of most influential philosophical treatises of the Roman world, a dialogue written by Plato in the 4^th century BCE.  It is an account, given in the voice of one ‘Timaeus’, of the making of the universe and of the gods by a master craftsman who purposes all to his own good pleasure.  The purpose of human life, according to this Timaeus, is to ascend through the pecking-order of created things at the conclusion of each earthly existence, being constantly reincarnated to a new station in the hierarchy of being according to how virtuous (or not) one has been in a former life.  Here the Roman universe again reveals itself as essentially karmic.  The apparently ‘good’, the industrious and the knowledgeable, are rewarded for their goodness, their industry and their knowledge. They are rewarded by ascending the ladder of being towards a form of divinity which is of their very own making.

That Mark is not particularly impressed with such ideas is clear from his story.  For here we find Bartimaeus, surely a ‘son’ or ‘disciple’ of Timaeus, in a very bad way! His careful following of the way of his philosophical father—the way of virtue, industry and knowledge—has not, in fact, led to enlightenment or a superior station in life, but only to ‘blindness’ and economic poverty.  In fact, he is a beggar who has reached, as it were, the very bottom of life’s barrel. And he has done so a very long way from where he thought he might be by now, living on the very margins of this barbaric town he must now call home, Jericho. 

Now it’s a funny place, the bottom of the barrel. It is a place where things can suddenly become very clear in a way that they have never been before.  It is the place where many an addict, for example, recognises that they have been kidding themselves, and will probably continue to kid themselves to death unless . . .  unless they get some help from somebody else, some other who can intervene on their behalf and give them a hand.  And that is exactly what this former disciple of Timaeus does.  Having recognised that the path of the self-made man has taken him nowhere fast, he cries out for help.  That Bartimaeus was very, very desperate is clear from his willingness to seek the help of one whom his philosophical masters would certainly have regarded as a complete ignoramus, a Philistine or Cretan even, namely the Jewish rabbi, Jesus of Nazareth.  ‘Son of David, have mercy on me’ he cries out, and not very timidly.  On the lips of the historical blind beggar, the term ‘Son of David’ would probably have meant little more than ‘hey, Jewish person’.  But in Mark’s story it takes on the character of a nascent step of faith towards a very new God.  It means ‘Hey Jesus, anointed one of God, Messiah, have mercy on me’.  There is a recognition, here, that the way of his philosophical master—the way of Timaeus—has come to nothing but blindness and poverty.  There is a recognition here, that Bartimaeus needs a rather different kind of God than that offered by the Roman philosophical tradition, a god who sits impervious in the distant heavens and waits for us to earn our way to his footstool.  He needs, instead, the God of Jews and Christians, a God who is gracious and loving, a saviour and healer who meets us where we are, in the midst of our troubles, and actually helps.  And so he cries out to Jesus time and time again, even when he is told by the frankly racist crowd to shut up.

What happens, of course, is that Jesus responds.  He ‘calls’ Bartimaeus to come.  This ‘calling’ is something that only the God of the Jews does. It is the way in which the God of the Jews creates his people Israel, his chosen people, his covenant people.  Not on the basis of their deserving industriousness, virtue or knowledge, but on the basis of God’s free choosing and grace.  So when Jesus ‘calls’ Bartimaeus, he is saying ‘come, be part of the community of God’s calling, the people who know God’s grace and favour, the people to whom God has given God’s very self.’  When Bartimaeus responds to the call by indeed coming to Jesus, Jesus immediately acts to heal him, to take away his karmic myopia and gift him with the chance to take a rather different route in life. 

It is important to note that the Greek word for ‘heal’ is the same as the Greek word for ‘save’.  Jesus heals the man of his disease, that is to say, but in so doing also ‘saves’ him from the karmic chains in which he is bound so that he can experience, for the very first time, that reality we call the ‘grace of God’, that is, God’s unmerited favour and love. Note, also, that Jesus tells the man that it is his ‘faith’ that has saved him.  ‘Faith’ mind you, not virtue or industriousness or knowledge.  For faith, in the Christian tradition is basically about trusting someone else with our lives, trusting Jesus the son of God.  It is the opposite of trusting in our own selves, in our own virtue, work or knowledge. It is about trusting that someone else’s virtue, work and knowledge—the virtue, work and knowledge of Jesus Christ—is able to save us. The story ends with the man following Jesus along the road to Jerusalem, an image of true discipleship if ever there was one.

Now, what are we to make of these stories today, in the midst of our own world?  Well, simply this, I suggest: that we are as likely as Job or Bartimaeus to be enslaved by the laws of karma so beloved by the author of the Timaeus. While the philosophy of the ancient world is rarely read anymore, its basic message nevertheless permeates our society at every level. Day by day, in popular culture or high culture, on the television or at the museum, we are bombarded by a philosophy that proclaims that our purpose in life is to ascend some kind of pecking-order, to better ourselves through virtue, industriousness and knowledge.  Some versions of this philosophy are purely materialistic, and measure the desired-for ascent in purely materialistic ways, like how prestigious your job is or how big a house or holiday your income will buy you. Other forms are more ‘spiritual’, explicitly proclaiming the potential divinisation of the human self through various paths of virtue, self-discipline or self-knowledge.  These range from the ‘neo-buddhist’ and the ‘new age’ through to versions of ‘Christianity’ which emphasise a need for human beings to save themselves.  This possibility was probably revived, ironically enough, with the subversion of Christianity by capitalism. When Max Weber toured northern Europe and America at the turning of the 20^th century, he noticed that it was the ‘protestant’ countries that were succeeding the most in economic terms.  He proposed that there was a ‘Protestant work ethic’ that made this possible.  Protestants worked harder than atheists or Catholics because they lived to work rather than working to live.  The irony here is that this ‘ethic’ is as far from the foundations of the reformed faith as one can get.  The reformers wanted to protest what they saw as a subversion of God’s grace in Catholic thought and practise, the tendency in medieval Catholicism to grant salvation only to those who were able to satisfy the church’s harsh conditions and demands.

The good news for us today is the same good news that revolutionised the ancient Roman world and gave rise to the Reformation.  That God does not treat us as we apparently deserve to be treated, that the favour of God is not conditional upon our capacity to be good, or industrious or knowledgeable.  That God simply loves us, and has acted to save us from our misguided attempts at saving ourselves in Jesus Christ.  For in Christ we can throw ourselves upon the mercy of God and find that God has accepted us and welcomed us into God’s family or commonwealth no matter what we have done or what we think we know.  I, at least, find that to be very good news indeed, not least because I feel that I am simply unable to ‘come up to scratch’ in ways that this society and culture can recognise as ‘successful’. Perhaps you do as well!  In the welcome and grace of God I feel that I am loved, accepted, and valued.  And I need that more than I can say.

Garry Worete Deverell

First preached at Monash Uniting Church on the 30th Sunday in ordinary time, 2012.

The Hidden Light

1 Samuel 16. 1-13; Psalm 23; Ephesians 5. 8-14; John 9. 1-41 

I suppose a number of you have seen a shadow-play. The shadow-play takes place in the darkness. There’s this big screen with a fire lit behind it, and the audience watches as the puppeteers tell their story by casting silhouetted shadows on the screen. Because the characters are all in shadow, you can’t see their faces or the features of their dress, and there are no colours apart from black or white. Because of this, anyone who is watching must use their imaginations to fill in the gaps, to give form and emotional detail to the character’s faces as they make their journey’s through the highs and lows of the tale as it unfolds. Now, the story we read from John’s gospel just now works a bit like a shadow-play. The writer delivers his story not with colourful figures rich in detail, but with characters barely drawn, silhouettes in light and dark. And the reader, or the hearer in this case, is invited to read between the lines, to exercise discernment about the degree to which the story’s truth is visible for all to see, or secretly hidden in the shadows.

At first glance, what we have here is a simple miracle story about a Jewish man, born blind, whose sight is wondrously restored by Jesus on the Sabbath day and therefore cast out of the synagogue for his trouble. Eventually he becomes a Christian, a believer in Jesus. But look again. Is that all there is to this story?

Most commentators will tell you that the story is ‘really’ about faith, that faith is here represented as a seeing, with lack of faith as its opposite, represented here as a kind of spiritual blindness. Note that when Jesus finds the young man after he has been cast from the synagogue, he asks him a question: “Do you believe in the Son of Humanity?” The fellow replies, “And who is he, sir, tell me so that I may believe in him.” Jesus replies, “You have seen him, and the one speaking with you is he.” At that point, the young man cries out: “Lord, I believe” and worships him. This passage makes quite a solid link between seeing and believing. When the man ‘sees’ who Jesus is, suddenly he has faith in Jesus, the kind of faith which falls to its knees in worship. Seeing is firmly established as a metaphor for faith. And the case is apparently strengthened further in the commentary that follows, where Jesus says: “I came into the world for judgement so that those who do not see may see, and those who do not see may become blind”. In other words, Jesus comes to give faith to those without it, and to expose the lack of faith in those who pretend to have it. Faith is seeing, and lack of faith is blindness.

But hang on a minute. I’m not so sure that this traditionally correct approach is nuanced enough. Consider, if you will, the following questions. First, if faith is seeing, then why doesn’t John have the young man make his declaration of faith when first he is healed by Jesus? Why the long lag between seeing and believing? Second, and intimately related to this first question: if faith is seeing, then why does the young man not ‘see’ into the true identity of Jesus until right at the end of the story? When first asked who Jesus is by the Jews, the young man replies ‘He is a prophet,’ which is true, but only partly true. In the gospel of John, Jesus is pre-eminently not a only a prophet but the Christ, the Son of Humanity, the pre-existent Word of God made flesh. And later, when he is questioned more thoroughly, the young man declares that Jesus must have come from God, which is true, but again not true enough. In John’s gospel, Jesus not only comes from God, but is God: he has been as one with the Father from the beginning. And there is a further point which the traditional reading cannot account for. When the young man finally makes his confession of faith, it is not a ‘seeing’ which makes the difference, but a hearing. Jesus says to the man, “You have seen the Son of Humanity, I, the one speaking to you am he”. And it is then, and only then, that the man fall to his knees in worship. Did you catch that? The man had seen Jesus before, but it did not give him faith. Faith finally comes to him only in the wake of this self-revelatory speech of Jesus: “I am he”.

Now, why am I telling you all this? What does it matter if faith is a matter of seeing or a matter of hearing? What does it matter how faith comes, as long as it is faith? Well, it matters quite a lot actually. Because if faith comes by seeing, then it is not really faith. It is knowing. And knowing is the means by which we try to reduce God to our size and make of God some kind of idol that we can get our heads around. But a God we can get our heads around is not the Christian God, the God who made the heavens and the earth, the God of Jesus Christ. It is a God of our own making, a version of our dreams or fears, projected into the heavens and given the name ‘God’, a God we can control and domesticate. A tame God who never asks us to change.

The Gospel of John was actually written, in part, to combat that segment of church and society that had begun to associate sight, knowledge and faith in this idolatrous way. These people, who were later called Gnostics, believed that one could know God up close and personal, that one could have a personal hotline to Jesus and his power, that one could ascend to a direct knowledge of God through a secret path of wisdom which left behind the limitations and sufferings of the body and of ordinary life. To these beliefs and practices, John pronounced a resounding “NO!” No, he says, one may not escape the body and its sufferings, because even the divine one of God took on flesh and suffered like the rest of us. Indeed, John has the divinity or glory of God coming to light not in beatific visions or specialist knowledge, but in the disfiguration of a crucified man, raised above the earth. Jesus is indeed the light of the world for John, but this light lies hidden in the enigma of suffering and of signs that are difficult to interpret. So faith is certainly not about seeing and knowing. On the contrary, as Jesus says to the disciple Thomas, “Blessed are those who do not see, and yet come to believe” (20. 29).

If only these Gnostic ideas had died out with the Gnostics. But they have not. They are alive and well and living in your local branch of Christian fundamentalism. Fundamentalism is dangerous to genuine faith because it has no humility. It believes not only in right doctrine, and the ability to know without any form of doubt what right doctrine is. It believes in wrong doctrine, and the ability to locate it in others. It believes that there is a war going on between believers and unbelievers, and that it can calmly discern the difference between the two. And it believes, finally, that God is on its own side, but not on theirs. Fundamentalism is based on a faith which can see and know, rather than on a faith which believes and trusts in a God who withdraws from our eyes in the figure of the suffering one.

Note this too, that fundamentalism is alive and well not only within the churches, but also beyond the church in the general community. It surfaces, for example, in the certainty of people who approach the church for a ritual service, in baptisms, weddings and funerals. Many of these folk get quite upset when the church will not order these services according to the customer’s already-determined demands and purposes. Why? Because, in many cases, the “customer” is a fundamentalist of the neo-pagan variety, who cannot accept that the church has a calling and a duty to resist this new kind of cultural orthodoxy in the name of Christ.

To these modern Gnostics, who ask as the Pharisees did, “Surely we are not blind, are we?” Jesus replies, “If you were blind you would not have sin, but now that you say ‘We see,’ your sin remains.” You see, for Christians the point is not to be able to see, but to believe that God sees us, not to claim a certain, unassailable, knowledge or experience of God, but to trust that God knows us. The interesting thing about light, as the writer to the Ephesians notes, is that it exposes and makes visible everything in the world but itself. So if Christ is the light of the world, we can trust him to make visible our own paths through life, including the sin that so easily entangles. But we should not expect to see or experience Christ with any sense of certainty until that day when he is revealed in all his fullness. To stare into the sun is to be blinded. But blindness, for Christians, is not such a big deal. “Faith is the intimation of things not seen,” says the writer to the Hebrews (11.1). And Paul says something similar: “We walk by faith, not by sight” (2 Cor 5.7).

The life of faith turns out to be, then, not a full-colour motion picture for those who can see clearly, but a shadow play in which the fully sighted have no significant advantage over those who see not so well. The things of God are hidden in the enigmas of the world, in parables and signs which are difficult to interpret; and pre-eminently in the sufferings of Christ and those who suffer with him and for him by their baptism into his passion. Remember that the ‘healing’ our young man received was soon transmuted into persecution by those who refused to share his growing sense of faith.

So it is for all who are baptised into Christ’s ways. For that is the way of things in a world that prefers the light of the Television and the enlightenment of three-minute-interviews to the dark light of faith, hidden in the career of a suffering God. It is the world in which ministers of the gospel, no matter how hard we try to make ourselves understood, will only rarely be understood—because the people whom we address are blind to the God and gospel to which he is bearing witness. It is a world in which, as for the Jewish leaders in our story, the message of the gospel falls upon deaf ears because of this all-pervasive belief that God and the ways of faith are ours to possess and manipulate for the sake of our own consumer ends. In a world such as this, Christians are called not to know, but to be known, not to see, but to be seen by God, who gazes upon us with a love so wide and long and deep that it surpasses all our imaginings.

We lived in deeply uncertain times. The COVID-19 is only just beginning to bite, but it is being transmitted at an exponential rate consistent with a scenario in which our capacity to respond to all who are sick or dying will be quickly overwhelmed. What we ‘see’ and ‘know’ in this scenario is not at all comforting! Now is the time to actually activate our faith in a God who loves us. To look to Christ for a word of healing. For Christ has indeed promised to heal us, but not in the way a doctor might. The salve Christ offers is far more profound. Indeed, it is salv-ation. Salvation. A medicine that can revive and remake us even if we die. So do not fear. Do not fear even death. For the last enemy is death, and it has been overcome by Christ in his resurrection. Cling to him and you will be saved. Believe in him, and you will share his glory.

All glory be to God—Father, Son and Holy Spirit—as in the beginning, so now, and forevermore.

Prepared for Lent 4 2020 on the First Sunday of the COVID-19 lockdown

Signs of revolution

Isaiah 35.1-10; Luke 1.47-55; Matthew 11.2-11

For Matthew’s gospel, John the Baptist has a special place amongst the prophets of Yahweh.  He is the one who goes before the Christ of Israel, to announce his coming and prepare the way.  Yet even John, when he is imprisoned by King Herod for criticizing his regime, is capable of doubt about Jesus’ true identity.  He sends his disciples to ask Jesus a question:  ‘Are you the one who is to come, or should we wait for another?’  The answer John receives from Jesus recalls the prophecy of Isaiah that we read just now, a prophecy that imagines how things might change when God’s salvation has arrived in the world.   Let me quote:

Strengthen the weak hands, and make firm the feeble knees.

Say to those who are fearful of heart, 
“Be strong, do not fear!  Here is your God! . . .”

The eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped;

then the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy.

Waters shall break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert wastes.

         (Is 35.5-6)

Hear, then, the parallels in Jesus’ answer to John in Matthew’s gospel: 

Go and tell John what you hear and see:  the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.  Blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me.

We may conclude, then, that for both Isaiah and Matthew the advent of the messiah is attended by graphic and visible signs.  The blind see, the deaf hear, the lame walk, the dead are raised, the outcasts are brought into the community once more, and the poor hear good news.

It is important that we understand these signs in their theological as well as their literal sense.  There can be no doubt that Jesus was a faith healer.  He did cure specific medical ailments, and he did raise the dead to life.  Even the most sceptical historians have found it difficult to explain away the sheer abundance of the evidence on this point.  Still, if we are Christians, we must understand that the healings are not just healings, and the raisings are not just raisings.  They are not, in other words, to be understood simply as facts amongst other facts; they are not to be read simply as history.  For the miracles of Jesus have a theological meaning as well.  Theologically, they are to be read as advance announcements or signs of a religious, social, and political revolution, a revolution initiated by God in the words and deeds of Jesus of Nazareth, but not yet completed in its fullness.

I talk of revolution because the coming of Jesus has changed, indeed transformed, far more than the medical fortunes of those individuals he happened to meet in Galilee more than two thousand years ago.  The coming of Jesus has changed everything, from the way we imagine God, to the way we value our fellow human beings, to the way we construct our law and government.  We Westerners so easily forget how deeply our values and our whole way of life have been influenced by Christ and the Judaeo-Christian tradition.  We forget that the discourse of human rights is grounded in the narratives of Christ’s hospitality towards the excluded and marginalised members of this own society.  We forget that feminism found its genesis in the way that Christ formed relationships with women.  We forget that the greatest books and poems of the Western tradition may be read as conversations with the Bible.  We forget that liberation movements, from the abolition of slavery in the Americas to the more recent revolutions in South America and South Africa, have looked to Jesus for inspiration and encouragement.  We forget that many of the modern medical miracles we take for granted are grounded in the research of Christian doctors working in missionary situations.  If there were time, we could talk, also, about the theological origins of the Rule of Law, the Welfare State, the University, the School and the Hospital.  In these, and in a thousand other ways, the coming of Jesus has changed the world.  In these, and a thousand other ways, the love of God in Christ has so changed our humanity that we have been enabled to change the world after Christ’s example.  In so many ways, Christ’s people have been salt and light for a dark and sterile world.

Let us not be content with all of this, however.  For Christ’s revolution is far from complete.  The messianic kingdom has clearly not yet arrived in its fullness.  If you don’t believe me, just look around this country we’re making.  Instead of helping the poor, we lock them up – whether the poor be asylum seekers, the mentally ill, or Aboriginal people.  For these are the people who overwhelmingly populate our detention centres and prisons, each of them all but crushed under the weight of grief, abuse or criminal neglect. I could speak of other national tragedies this morning—like the massive cuts the government has made to foreign aid programmes, or the steady rise in rural and suburban poverty, or the epidemic of depression and anxiety that is sweeping through our young people.  But I shall not.  Instead I would simply remind you that Advent faith is not only about remembering the way in which Christ came to us the first time around.  It is about looking for the signs of that arrival in our own place and time.  Most of all, it is about making ourselves available to God as the church, the body of Christ, so that Christ’s revolution might again become present to the world through the faithful deeds of love and care we offer to our neighbours in response to the grace we have experienced in Jesus Christ. 

I know that many of us care for others deeply.  We work as volunteers with the sick, the disabled, the despairing and the voiceless.  Or we work with the poor and the helpless in our paid employment.  Many of us are generous with our surplus money and goods, living simply so that others may simply live.  But others of us are like so many other Australians.  We look only to feather our own nests, and those of our families.  If that is so, then Christ would confront us this morning with the call to revolution.  “Be converted,” he would say, “be really converted!  Let my Spirit into your cold heart so that the seeds of love may be sown.”  For that is what God’s revolution is essentially about:  love.  God’s love for a lost and broken world; the touchability of that love in the life, suffering and death of Christ; and the power of love to change things, one small corner of the world at a time, through the power of Christ’s resurrection.  If Christ is raised, you see, then the powers of evil and decay we named this morning shall not have the last word.  The last word will be love.  This I believe, and for this I pray daily.  So God help all of us to look for the signs of Christ’s coming, and to become such signs ourselves.

This homily was first preached at St Luke's Uniting Church, Mount Waverley, in December 2004.

Christ is risen to heal the world

Texts: Romans 6.3-12; Matthew 28.1-10

Tonight we celebrate the resurrection of the crucified Jesus, an event that - in the faith of the church – bears no comparison or analogy within the ordinary space and time of this world.  It is an event that has happened only once, and will never happen again in exactly the same way.  The resurrection is so unique, in fact, so singular in its eventfulness, that we are able to say a lot more about what it is not, than we are about what it is.  That’s just how it is when God decides to change world.  The old rules no longer apply, even the laws of biology or physics, and suddenly what we thought we knew turns out to be wrong!

Amongst the many things that the resurrection is not, for example, is a resuscitation of the dead body of Jesus.  We know this because, according to the eye-witnesses, the risen Jesus’ body does not behave like a re-animated body should. It can change its basic appearance, so that even the closest friends of Jesus do not recognise who he is. It can appear and disappear from sight, at once here and then somewhere else in an instant. It can walk through walls. It can even ascend into the air.  Resuscitated bodies don’t do that stuff.

Another thing that the resurrection is not, is a moment of re-birth or re-turn in the cycle of life as we know it.  This may be bad news for those of you who take Bunnies and eggs to be legitimate symbols of ‘Easter’.  Because actually they are symbols of a certain kind of Easter, the pagan ‘Easter’, the Easter that is named after the Anglo-Saxon goddess of fertility, Oestre.  This Easter celebrates, and is actually all about the turning of the agricultural seasons through autumn, winter, spring and summer.  This Easter is about the re-birth of light and life and fertility after a long fallow, enwombed, winter.  It is the Easter that the ancient Christian missionaries sought to overcome, but never did, because here we are in the midst of a bunny-and-egg obsessed culture in the southern hemisphere, which celebrates such things according to the northern agricultural cycle!  Such is the strength of the pagan myth!

Enough, then, of what the resurrection is not.  Allow me to explore something of what the resurrection is.  Tonight's gospel reading shows us that in the face of the resurrection of Christ, the theologian must become a poet.  When he speaks of the resurrection, Matthew does not speak of the thing itself, but only its effects.  This is to invoke what the English poet, Percy Shelley, called ‘negative capability’, the capability of a event that we cannot directly see, touch, taste, smell  or hear, to nevertheless produce effects that we can sense and interpret.  In Matthew’s account, the resurrection is something that happens in the dead of night, the dead of this night (but without the benefit of coal-fire electricity and street lamps).  The darkness represents an event that cannot be witnessed directly, like a nuclear explosion, or the implosion of a vast star into a tiny singularity.  Matthew wants to insist, nevertheless, that the event is very real and that its effects are profound.  That is why he invokes the image of the Angel who brings lighting and an earthquake to unlock the tomb and let the dead Christ free; that is why he speaks of an Angel who is, himself, bright, swift, and devastating as lightening.  The Angel is an image from Jewish apocalyptic literature, a literature that seeks to bear witness to things hidden since the foundation of the world, to represent, though the hyperbolic devices of poetry, the revolutionary action of a God whose actions so fundamentally change the rules that whatever rules we are working with are for ever playing catch-up.

Let us then, like Matthew himself, confine ourselves to speaking of the risen Jesus in terms of his revolutionary effects. The first thing to say is that Jesus is risen to trans-value every value, to re-value, in fact, every thing and every person that is considered mere rubbish by the powers that rule our world. Christ is raised to go before us into Galilee, the Galilee of where we happen to live, the Galilee of Melbourne, shall we say.  Christ is risen to effect in that Galilee a revolution of values whereby those who are called ‘sinners’ become saints and those who are called ‘saints’ or ‘models of virtue’ are shown, in fact, to be sinners.  Christ is risen to give life and worth to anyone generally considered to be either ‘dead’ or ‘worthless’, like aborted babies and the severely disabled, locked away from public view (as they are) in institutions, in order to protect the general public from distress.  Christ is risen to reveal that the many who claim to be  really ‘alive’ and living the good life are already dead, dead inside, living only on the phantasmal power of their insatiable desire and wishful thinking.   Christ is risen to raise the least important people of all, whether they are children or seekers of asylum or whatever, to membership in the royal household of God.  Christ is raised to shine a light on the so-called ‘leaders’ who rule it over us, to show that their care, in far too many cases, is only for themselves.  Christ is risen, finally to reveal that many whom this world considers wise (Richard Dawkins comes to mind) are nothing more than ranting fools, while the so-called ‘fools’ of this world, those who live out a simple faith in the God who is love, are actually wiser than any mind can measure or equation can tell.

Even more than this, Christ is raised to create a new world, a new universe.  Christ is raised to effect a revolutionary transfiguration in the very cosmos we inhabit.  His crucified and risen body straddles, you see, both this universe - the universe think we know - and the new creation to come that God has promised.  Through his body broken on the cross, Christ has opened a conduit, a portal if you like (you Harry Potter fans, you), into this new cosmos, where the rules have been changed so that the power to kill and to break, to maim and destroy, has been rendered as nothing.  There, it is only the love of God shown in this crucified Son that prevails.  In this perspective, the day of resurrection is simultaneously the last day of this creation, and the first day of a new creation.  What happens now is that the new will unfold within the old, until this world has finally fulfilled its purpose: to find sons and daughters for the God who is love.

Note that while the portal has indeed been opened in the risen body of Crucified, the purpose was never to suddenly transport us to that world - immediately and instantaneously - but to create, instead, a colony of witness in this world for the world that is coming but has not yet arrived.  That is what Matthew’s talk of evangelism is about.  You know, the woman being sent to tell the men, and the men being sent, with the women, into Galilee to wait for and bear witness to the resurrected Christ.  ‘In the resurrection of Jesus the new creation has indeed arrived’: that is the substance of their message.  But there is more.  ‘To everyone who believes in our message, Christ will grant a key to the portal of life, that everyone who believes may experience the liberating power of the new creation, even before it has fully arrived!’  This is the promise of the risen Christ to all who would believe.  To every soul who is willing to die with Christ to the hateful values of this world and its values.   To every soul who would submit to Christ’s teaching and allow his or her self to be undone by it.  To every soul who is willing to be broken and remade after the image of the Crucified. Christ is risen, friends, to do nothing less than heal and transform both our selves and our world into a place of goodness and beauty. A world like the one that is to come.

That he does so in a mysterious and rather hidden way goes with the territory.  For the story of Jesus told by Matthew is not, in the final analysis, the story of two worlds, one that comes before the resurrection and one that comes after.  It is the story of an ordinary and not particularly powerful man who is always already - from the beginning of the story to its end - a visitor from the new creation, whose only power is the power of love.  If he was to take Galilee or Melbourne or anywhere by storm, with weapons and armies to effect his will in a campaign of shock and awe, this would be to contradict everything that his Father, the God who is love, is on about.  Instead, in the gospel story, he takes a route at once more subtle and far more powerful: the strange and hidden way of friendship, servanthood and loving sacrifice.  And we who have died with him in baptism are called to do exactly the same: in every thought, in every deed, in every relationship, in every moment; trusting not to the power of this world, the power of our ferocious self-protection or self-interest, but to the hidden power of self-giving love that flows from God’s future, through the portal of Christ’s crucified and risen body, into the hands, the feet, the faces and the voices gathered thus on this night of revolution.  To the church, which is Christ’s very body - crucified and risen, like him, for the healing of the world. 

Christ is risen.  Hallelujah!

Wounded by God

Texts:  Joel 2. 23-32; Psalm 65; 2 Timothy 4. 6-8, 16-18; Luke 18. 9-14

The book of Joel is amongst the most enigmatic works of the Hebrew bible: ‘enigmatic’ because it reflects on an event so disturbing that the authors seem hardly able to speak its name.  From the start of the book to its end, one may read about the dark and terrible effects which that event had in the minds and hearts of the people.  You can read, also, about the prophet’s attempts to heal that darkness, the way in which he tried to soothe the wounded and comfort the despairing.  But you will not discover, with any real certainty, what the event was that actually caused it all.  Some interpreters say that the land was overtaken by a horde of locusts, a veritable army of insects, so large that every living thing, plant or animal, was destroyed in its wake.  Others say that the book reflects upon one of the climactic invasions of Hebrew territories by the Assyrians, the Babylonians or the Greeks, after the manner of so many of the other writings in the Hebrew canon.  But how is one to decide between the two?  For if the authors are writing about locusts, they describe them with the aid of an elaborate and chilling military metaphor.  And if they are writing about an invading army, the image of swarming locusts is invoked to describe its horrible effects on the population of Israel.  But, in the end, the honest reader is left with a sense of radical undecidability.  Something happened.  Something truly awful.  But we can’t really know what that something was.  All we are left with are startling images and the emotions they evoke, traces of a trauma which cuts so deeply that the authors seem unwilling to name it directly, even to themselves.  It is too painful.

This is often the way with a trauma, which I understand to be an unexpected event, a wounding which is visited upon us from somewhere ‘beyond’ our usual frame of reference, a happening which so interrupts the ‘normal’ flow of our lives that we can scarcely believe it has happened.  One day we are healthy and happy, the next day we have cancer.  One moment we are happily married.  The next we are inexplicably alone.  We are engaged in the one of the normal tasks at work, sending a fax, say, when suddenly an aeroplane crashes into the building and explodes.  How does one integrate such experiences?  How does one find a language to explain what has happened, even to oneself?  It is difficult.  Very, very difficult.  Because what has happened seems impossible.  It could not have happened, and certainly does not happen in that person’s world.  And because the impossible is also impossible to name, the only means by which a traumatised person may begin to integrate their trauma, to make it somehow real, is to draw an analogy with something else that person knows.  To paint a picture with colours they have already seen.  To tell a story with characters they’re already familiar with.  To make a song with a tune they’ve been humming all their lives.  That’s why the writers of Joel spoke about their own trauma in terms of locusts and armies.  These were things they already knew about.  Devastating things.  And they provided the images by which the new trauma might be approached but not approached.  Described but certainly not tamed or domesticated.  Acknowledged as real, but never finally mastered or integrated into their known world. 

But now I want to note something even more enigmatic.  The principle name in Joel for the unnamable trauma which had befallen the people is not, in fact, either locusts or invading armies but “THE DAY OF THE LORD”.  Listen as I locate the places where this intriguing phrase is found: 

Alas for the day!  The day of the Lord is near: as destruction from the Almighty it comes.  Is not food cut off before our eyes, joy and gladness from the house of God (1. 15-16).

Blow the trumpet in Zion; sound the alarm on my holy mountain!  Let all the inhabitants of the land tremble, for the day of the Lord is coming, it in near - a day of darkness and gloom (2. 1-2).

The earth quakes, the heavens tremble.  The sun and the moon are darkened, and the stars withdraw their shining.  The Lord utters his voice at the head of his army . . .  Truly the day of the Lord is great; terrible indeed - who can endure it? (2. 10-11).

The sun shall be turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes.  Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved; for in Mount Zion and in Jerusalem there shall be those who escape . . .  and among the survivors shall be those whom the Lord calls (2. 31-32).

Multitudes, multitudes, in the valley of decision!  For the day of the Lord is near . . .  The Lord roars from Zion . . . the heavens and the earth shake.  But the Lord is a refuge for his people, a stronghold for the people of Israel (3. 14, 16).

In that day the mountains shall drip sweet wine, the hills shall flow with milk, and all the stream beds of Judah shall stream with water; a fountain shall come forth from the house of the Lord . . .  Judah shall be inhabited forever, and Jerusalem to all generations (3. 18-20).

What I find most revealing about this ‘day of the Lord’ is that it names a trauma, but not only a trauma.  It is also the name which Joel gives to the experience of God’s salvation, that moment of exodus and of freedom that is the beginning of a new age when the Spirit of God’s peace and justice will fall upon all people, from the least of them to the greatest (2. 28-29).  ‘The day of the Lord’ is therefore  - somewhat paradoxically - both a trauma and a healing, a judgement of sin and an invitation to new life.  Indeed, one might say that the trauma and its healing are mysteriously joined here, that they become the inside and the outside of the same experience.  One might even say that the Book of Joel encourages us to believe that the people of Israel might never have retained their sense of God as saviour without their having been wounded by God as warrior and judge. 

Emmanuel Lévinas, a Lithuanian-Jewish philosopher who died in 1995, wrote about these things more profoundly than anyone I know, but he gave them a particular spin.  Lévinas argued that human beings are so self-absorbed that the only way in which God can get our attention is to make us suffer in a very specific way:  to take us hostage as sufferers of another person’s suffering.  Lévinas, whose parents were killed in the Nazi death-camps, believed that God comes to claim us through a fundamental disruption of the relatively ‘safe’ worlds most of us inhabit.  By confronting us with the face of suffering in another human being, God calls us to be transformed.  In the encounter with another’s suffering, says Lévinas, we are substituted for this other:  we feel his or her pain in our own bodies, and we know ourselves to be responsible in some way.  Our peaceful lives are therefore peaceful no more.  The world changes, and we are changed with it. 

This accounts, I think, for the way in which even the most cold-hearted Australian observer sometimes changes their view of asylum-seekers or Aborigines when they actually meet such folk face-to-face, when they finally see and hear their stories through words, tears and the lines of suffering etched on another’s face.  When encountered by the face of another’s suffering, and not just rhetoric about it, we are confronted with a gaze that makes an absolute and irrefusable claim on us.  It cuts through the right-wing rubbish about individuals and individual responsibility and calls us to make an ethical response: to act as if it is we, ourselves, who are responsible for this other’s suffering.  This, according to Lévinas, is a call from God to justice, and it comes to us in the real flesh-and-blood face of the neighbour.

As always, there is much more that could be said.  But I will close with this.  The faith of Christ is about the redemptive power of wounds.  It is about apostles locked up in prison cells, their lives being poured out as a libation for others, who see visions of God, and angels, and heavenly rewards.  It is about hateful people like tax-collectors, exploiters and thieves par excellence, tripping over their wounds and their wounding of others, only to find that God has welcomed and healed them by that very movement.  It is about congregations who are unjustly deprived of their churches who nevertheless discover that through poverty of spirit comes a richness in faith. The faith of Christ is about people who take up their cross daily, that unique cross which God has chosen for them, and carrying that cross as though it were a pearl of great price or a treasure found in a field.  Because that’s what the cross of Christ is, for Christians:  an instrument of suffering in which the very glory of God’s love lays concealed.  So I say this to everyone here who has suffered, or is suffering, a trauma (and I know that you are!) It is a difficult saying, but true nevertheless.  Love your wound and befriend it.  For it is probably an angel of God in disguise.