What Day is Today

Text: Matthew 28:1-10

This is not a day of sweet contentment. This is not the day that resolves Holy Week’s mysteries. This is not the explanation. It is instead a day of disruption. Of new mysteries made.

Today is a day of confusion. A day of joy and fear. This is the day that Mary Magdelene and the other Mary went to see the tomb.

Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to see the tomb where Jesus had been placed, his death clear to everyone and attested to by the soldiers who went out to make sure. The two disciples went to watch the tomb, in Matthew’s story, not to anoint the body—that is in another Gospel. But to keep a vigil, to keep watch. Jesus was dead. The last scene had closed, the credits had rolled off the screen.

But then an angel appeared, an angel in white, looking for all the world like lightning, with a message: Do not be so quick to draw conclusions. Take a look, see what you see. The angel rolled away the tombstone, and—behold!—as a result the earth shook. Behold! it says. And the guards shook too.

Where was Jesus? Not here, the angel said. He is not here, which was obvious by then. That was confusing. Perhaps there were possible, reasonable explanations why he was not there: Perhaps someone spirited him away (as the guards later think in verses we did not read). Perhaps this was the wrong tomb. Perhaps Jesus had only appeared dead (though they knew otherwise).

None of those things is the reason, says the messenger. Jesus has been raised. That is the reason Jesus was not there. And the angel says again: Jesus has been raised from the dead. And a third time, the same message in a different form: You will see him soon, here, on this earth. And they did.

In the Gospel of Matthew, this story is short and clear. There is no magical realism of the sort found in the Gospel of John. This is an account as straightforward as Matthew can make it. This is what happened, here is who said what to whom. Yet the earthquake and the lightning-like angel—to say nothing of the amazing message—tell us that straightforward and commonplace are two different things. The story is not easily told in natural terms. Yet Matthew’s deadpan delivery makes it clear that it is not unnatural. A surprising and unexpected simple event.

Yet there is an urgency underlying Matthew’s version of this event. Behold! the angel says. The word repeats four times in this short passage, but never translated that way in our Bible. It comes out as “suddenly.” Suddenly there was a great earthquake. But it is really: Behold! A great earthquake! The word comes from a word about sight, about seeing. Seeing with urgency. Pay attention! might be better. Or Look here! Pay attention, Mary Magdelene and the other Mary! Jesus is going ahead of you. Behold! Jesus met them and greeted them.

Expectations get us stuck in a kind of dreary landscape. It is not that the two women had run out of hope. Rather, they saw that what happened to Jesus is what happens to everyone. Promising beginnings give way to disappointed middles or tragic ends. The promise of a new world was not so much dashed as it fizzled out. They arrived at the tomb expecting to find things as things always are. It is not that they could have been prepared for what happened (though Jesus does try to warn his disciples ahead of time). But if everything works out as predicted, then there is no new world. There is no transformation. If our lives follow the expected route, if we understand exactly how things work, then there is no surprising future.

Behold! says Matthew. Behold! says the angel. Mary Magdelene and the other Mary are filled with fear and joy. Both coming as a result of expectations shattered. Is everything going wrong or is everything going right? Should they be afraid that things that cannot happen have happened, or should they be joyful for what has happened? Behold! says the angel. Can they believe their own eyes?

Fear and joy. It is a recipe for confusion. The angel tells them not to be afraid. And Jesus says the same. And he tells them to be joyful (not Greetings as our Bible puts it, but more than that: an encouragement to joy. Great to see you! he says.)

It is confusing. Yet it is only in the midst of this kind of holy confusion that change happens, and new futures are revealed, hinted at. Unfold in us and in front of us. And out of which new worlds are formed, or new ways of being in the world. New kingdoms. The kingdom of God. When expectations are not met, and both joyfully and fearfully so.

Though we sometimes seek out these times of confusion, stepping into adventures unknown, on paths untrodden. More often—if we are blessed—they come upon us, as they did Mary Magdelene and the other Mary. We can and do run from them. In Matthew’s story, the two women are told to tell the other disciples to meet Jesus in Galilee. In Mark’s version, they are told the same. But in Mark, they say nothing to anyone, and run away. In Matthew, they run to the disciples in fear and joy to announce the good news. By their actions, the church is born. A new thing.

Faith is not an antidote to confusion. It does not ensure a predictable life that fulfills our expectations. Such a life closes off all avenues for re-birth and renewal. Rather, faith lets us not only endure that state of fear and joy, it lets us welcome it. To seek it.

God is certainly not done with us. There are bound to be more fearful, joyful disruptions ahead. More mysteries to unfold. Faith enables us to remain confused and not to flee, trusting in God, awestruck at what God has done, and eager to see—Behold!—what will happen next.

Thanks be to God.

Palm and Passion

Text: Matthew 26:14—27:66
Other texts: Matthew 21:1-11

There is a lot of hoopla today, in a seriously religious kind of way. And it will continue throughout this week until next Sunday, Easter Sunday. This is the central moment in the church year, far outweighing Christmas, and we rightly make a big deal of it.

We are so familiar with the story, however, that there are few surprises. Not only do we know what is going to happen, we know how to interpret it. We know what it means. The church has had 2000 years to think about it. And we know how things turn out.

We just heard one of the two Gospel readings for today, this doubly-named Sunday. We heard the Palm part, where Jesus rides into the city amidst rejoicing and hosannas. We are about the hear the Passion part, where the joy turns to grief and horror. These are not two different stories. They are a part of one thing, one story. In its simplest: a rabble-rousing blasphemer comes to the city, makes more trouble, and is arrested, tried, and executed.

However, no such story of life cut short is simple. Hopes and expectations reside in the narrative of all people, and especially in those whom we allow to lead us—from messiahs to presidents to CEOs—allowed because we trust them to redeem us, heal our sorrows and sins, and bring us peace and contentment. They rarely can.

This is one story. But if so, are we obligated to explain it? To explain how what starts in glory ends in grief? What starts in hope ends in mourning? Or it that just the way things go: a sudden change in the winds, and a good life turns tragic?

The people lining the road to Jerusalem expect a king. The king is coming to you, quotes Matthew, borrowing from the prophets Isaiah and Zechariah. And the crowds call Jesus, with hope, the Son of David. A warrior king, scion of the greatest monarch of Israel. They have heard his teaching, seen his healing, eaten the bread and fishes with which he fed thousands, watched him confront authorities. These experiences fuel their expectations of a powerful leader. Save us! they cry—which is what hosanna! means. Hosanna, Son of David—save our nation!

Although this part of the story is about Jesus, Jesus is hardly present in it. It is a story of people longing for what they think Jesus is. Jesus is the carrier of a desperate desire. This man, riding humbly, as it says, on a donkey, nevertheless inspires in the people vision of political power and the overthrow of the sitting government. What is Jesus thinking, as he rides without speaking over the cloaks and branches, as he sees the expectant faces of his brothers and sisters, other than that he is surely headed toward his death. And their disappointment. We do not know; it does not say.

You will hear in a moment the second Gospel reading, also from Matthew, but five chapters later. You will hear that while Jesus at first speaks quite a lot, once he is brought before Pilate, he says almost nothing. He claims nothing. He will not answer when accused. He will not answer a single charge, it says. He will not claim the title of king of the Jews. “You say so,” he responds to Pilate. And those words—except with his last breath, when he asks God why he has been forsaken—those are his final words.

The Jesus of Matthew’s Passion is a humble man, not an imperial one. He was humiliated by everyone—priests, passersby, even the bandits. He is mocked and ridiculed. Save yourself, if you are the Son of God—Son of David, mighty warrior. Save yourself—a wicked mockery of the earlier hosannas. Save yourself, if you can save others as they say you have. But he cannot. Or does not. Unlike in John’s Gospel, where Jesus seems to be in charge of directing a drama about his own death, here in Matthew he is powerless. There no clever win-by-losing scheme going on here. Only losing.

We, like the crowd with its palms and hosannas, have a hard time accepting a humble Jesus. We transmute his powerlessness in the Passion according to Matthew into a secret power. But this makes his death meaningless and trivial if it is only part of some theological mathematics of atonement. Instead, we teach that it is important that God really died—as everyone does—and really suffered—as everyone does—and, if we are to believe Matthew, was truly humiliated. As everyone is.

It is helpful to hear the Palm and Passion story as if we never knew of Easter. If we never knew how things turned out. To imagine that the last word in the Gospel of Matthew was, as we are about to hear: So they went and sealed the tomb.

And then to ask ourselves what is the good news in that. Without the resurrections, does it make sense to follow a God who is disgraced and crucified? Because we do.

The Jesus of the Palm and Passion steps out of the normal way of the world. He is humble not because he is obedient to God—though that is no doubt true—but because the usual and acceptable way of things in the world is arrogance, exploitation, abuse of power, and leverage. Jesus refuses to participate in that scheme, which is a cause of much suffering and despair. Are you king of the Jews, Pilate asks? You say so, answers Jesus. You inhabit the world of kings and courts, Jesus answers, but I do not.

Christians have tended to pray for a kingly Jesus who is on their side, an earthly force with divine power whose wishes parallel their own, morally, politically, or culturally. We are no different in that regard from those singing hosannas by the side of the road.

But the Jesus of Palm and Passion does not serve us like this, but rather with persistent courage and humility, and brings this good news through the ministry of his life—there is a another way.

Resurrection Life

Text: Ezekiel 37:1-14 Other texts: John 11:1-45

Hooray. A warm sunny day. Spring finally has forced its way to the front, pushing winter to the back of the line. The crocuses’ prematurity has been vindicated. We can breath again. A fitting day for texts whose theme is clearly resurrection and rebirth.

Things like to live. The grasses pushes up to shatter the asphalt. The trees thrive even in their urban four square feet of soil. Our bodies crumble and are rebuilt constantly. We get sick, we get well. Forests encroach on formerly cleared land. In the history of our earth, great calamity has destroyed almost all species, and the remainder has re-covered the earth more than once. The Noah story repeats. Life in the aggregate is strong, and against it death is irrelevant.

The miracle of resurrection is matched by the miracle of creation. The wonder of re-birth is exceeded by the wonder of the first birth. Thinking about being born again reminds us of the astonishing fact that we are born at all.

The bones lie in the valley. Ezekiel is led there by God. There are very many bones, it says. Very dry, no marrow, no life left in them. Ezekiel walks around all around them. A desperate and creepy image. The bones represent despair. Northern Israel has been conquered and turned into oblivion. Judea is left alone, bereft. Our bones are dried up, they lament. Our hope is lost. We are cut off from God completely. They mourn in advance the prospect of their certain end from their separation from God.

This theme of displacement is one of the great themes of the Bible, a common pathology of sorrow in the story of God and humans. The theme of being far from home, from the nourishing and true spiritual center, from the source of life. Adam and Eve tossed from the Garden. The Israelites enslaved in Egypt, and then later exiled to Babylon. The fear of eternal judgment that would separate us from God forever.

Out of the depths I call to you, O Lord, we sang in today’s psalm. Hear my pleas, I wait for the Lord, my soul waits for God.

Yet the bones rise. The bones live. Ezekiel speaks to the bones, the Lord speaks to the bones. The destruction is undone, reversed. The organs of strength and motion—muscle and ligaments—grow again, re-organized. Form emerges out of chaos.

And finally, lifeless form is given life by the breath of God. Ezekiel speaks to the winds, the Lord speaks to the four winds. The word for breath is the word for wind is the word for spirit, appearing nine times in these fourteen verses. The wind, breath, spirit of God comes into them, and they live.

The story reiterates the creation, the creation of form from chaos, the speaking of things into existence, the spirit as the carrier of the power of life. This wind/breath/spirit word is the same as the wind that blew over the waters of chaos in the first chapter of Genesis. God the creator in Genesis is the healer in Ezekiel. God the creator, the redeemer, and the breath of life are all the same.

Yet the stories are not quite the same. Resurrection is not the same as first creation. It is not new life, but renewed life. Just as risen Lazarus is not a reborn baby Lazarus, but a restored grown-up person, with memories and unrequited desires and old scars. (As resurrected Jesus came with scars and wounds to show disciple Thomas). Resurrection is an impure process—like everything else in life. The resurrection of the bones in the valley and the friend of Jesus in the tomb restores something that was lost. Repairs something that was broken.

In this way it conforms to John’s notion of eternal life, which is not something that comes after life but which is part of life. Resurrection is therefore likewise not something post-life but part of life. It is not an exception or an aberration, but rather the long-term consequence of the breath of God that animates all the universe. It is built in.

I am the resurrection and the life, Jesus tells Martha. Both resurrection and life. Lazarus is raised, and later eats with Jesus. Both the restoration of loss and also the new life that follows.

Resurrection in this way is the chief model of Christian life. It is the basis for our confidence in words like renewal, revival, restoration, and even repentance. It is the force behind Desmond Tutu’s hymn: Goodness is stronger than evil, love is stronger than hate, light is stronger than darkness, life is stronger than death.

Resurrection describes our experience of being lost and then found by God. Of recovering a life destroyed by grief or anxiety. Of being freed from addiction. Of finding grace when burdened by self-hatred. Our experience of being saved not after death but from despair and hopelessness now is evidence that resurrection is the norm, not the exception.

What kind of God would create the world and yet never rescue it in times of trouble? What kind of God would push the cosmos off on a long, sometimes treacherous, and always surprising journey without a guide?

The Spirit of God dwells in us, Paul reminds us in Romans. God’s spirit/breath is in all of us. Some people dismiss the Lazarus story as mere resuscitation. But that is mean-spirited. The story, like the one in Ezekiel, like the whole arc of the Bible, is one of an always-near God whose love of life infuses all of creation.

Thanks be to God.