Scripture: Matthew 27:62-28:10
You may find this to be a somewhat unusual sermon for Easter. I’m not apologizing for that, you understand. Every year I warn myself against what I perceive to be some of the usual Easter messages whether based on the symbolism of flowers in springtime or the literal belief in Jesus’ resurrection from the dead. There are several kinds of messages that I think of as usual Easter messages and I always try to avoid them, though I won’t claim that I always succeed. But I do try to avoid them because I think Easter can be a dangerous holiday for Christians, and I think it can be dangerous whether or not you treat the resurrection as literal miracle or holy metaphor or whether your starting point is the cheery earthly optimism of the eternal return of springtime.
There are several reasons I say such a thing: that Easter can be a dangerous holiday for Christians. One is that it can lead Christians in the direction of focusing their attention on such things as life after death, heaven, otherworldly salvation, and other such non-earthly matters. Don’t get me wrong. It’s not that I think Christians shouldn’t talk about such things. And it may be that for Sojourners, if anything, the danger is more that we never do get around to such topics very much. I’m willing to consider that thought.
But what I do feel nevertheless is that Easter is not the best time to do that. Easter being a central occasion on the Christian calendar, there tends to be an implication that if this is the central meaning of Easter, then it must be the central meaning of our faith. And I do believe that this incarnational faith of ours needs to stay real, stay immediate, stay hopelessly enmeshed in the interplay between our inner lives and our outer lives, the responses we make to God as a present reality and to real life human beings. When Christianity loses its immediacy, it loses its focus. When it makes too many claims about the promise of heaven and what you need to do to get there, or what Christ has done to get us there, it oversteps its bounds and runs the further danger of becoming arrogant, talking with more certainty than is warranted. It is a danger I sense Christians in general are particularly susceptible to on Easter.
That relates to another kind of danger I associate with Easter, a set of dangers I guess, that I refer to in general as triumphalism. It is pretty much anything that is all wrapped up in the notion of victory, which Easter seems so often to be based on. Christ the Lord is risen today… “Let the Victor’s people sing, Alleluia…Where, O Death is now your sting? Fought the fight, the battle won…” The Day of Resurrection, Earth tell it out abroad…our Christ has brought us over with hymns of victory…for we too want to follow and raise the victor’s strain.” I don’t want to pick on hymns that in fact I enjoy singing, and I don’t really have a problem with singing these hymns if we imagine them as being sort of like a distant song of angels that every so often we are able to tune into and for a few brief moments join in the singing. But it also strikes me as important to avoid, even on Easter, especially on Easter, making too much of the proclamation of victory, important for us, again, to stay anchored in the real world where victories of any sort are hard won and partial and where the language of love seems somehow more true to what we ought to be about, than the language of victory.
Plus, I happen to be of the opinion that there is a subtle, and sometimes not so subtle, message that can be implied in the proclamation of Christ’s victory over death. I just get this feeling that sometimes when people proclaim Christ as victory, they don’t just mean a victory over death; they also mean that he is victorious over other religions. Christ rising from the dead becomes a confirmation that Jesus Christ is God, not a mere prophet like the leaders of other religions. Or his resurrection becomes a proof, a sign, an indication that of all religious prophets and leaders, Christ is the one closest to God’s heart and therefore of all religions, Christianity is the one closest to God’s heart. Other religions may have some nice qualities, some good things to say, but if you want the real thing, if you want victory, if you want heaven, if you want the cross, the grave, and the skies to belong to you, then your choice should be obvious. Christ is where you should turn. Christianity is where you should turn.
As I say, sometimes such things are said out loud not just at Easter but any time of year. But sometimes they are just implied by the language of victory that seems to go so naturally with Easter, and because it goes so naturally at Easter, I believe we need to aware of the danger. I know it could be argued that simply speaking of cosmic victories does not necessary imply everything I have just said about the superiority of Christianity and the inferiority of other religions. But I would not be convinced. What I mean is that I will remain convinced that that danger exists, that the proclamation of Christ’s victory and of our own victory because of our association with or belief in Jesus Christ, drifts inevitably in the direction of proclaiming our own superiority as compared to the adherents of other faiths. I for one do not want to be a party to such things, and so I am suspicious and I resist the triumphalist mood that so often accompanies our Easter celebrations. And, in fact, I would go so far as to say, for the reasons I have been trying to say and for other reasons as well, I would go so far as to say more broadly: Easter is not about winning.
That brings me back to the topic of capital punishment, which I was talking about last week. I’m sorry to be referring back to something that many of you weren’t here for, but I wouldn’t feel right not doing it, and maybe you’ll see why as I go on. I was expressing my opposition to capital punishment (Palm Sunday in my mind being an appropriate time to think about capital punishment since Jesus’ death on the cross was a form of capital punishment), and I was talking about how the spirit of Jesus I find in the gospels is completely a life-giving spirit, not in any way a life denying or a life taking spirit, and how that spirit portrayed so vividly and at such great length in the gospels cannot, in any way I have of thinking about it, be reconciled with capital punishment. And I was talking some about how it was Jesus’ refusal to continue the cycle of violence, how his determination to end that cycle where violence begets violence begets violence, how that determination led to his death on the cross, and that for those who see themselves as followers, that means for us too a determination to break the cycle of violence, and that capital punishment is specifically not a breaking of that cycle but an intentional, willful continuing of it.
I did not talk last week, however, about the victims of capital crimes. That includes of course people who have been murdered, but specifically I mean I did not talk about the people who have had a loved one murdered, sometimes in some horrible, gruesome fashion, and who must live with the pain of their loss and perhaps with their imagining of the crime. I didn’t feel I could end whatever I had to say about capital punishment without taking such pain into account, without letting it register on me and dealing with it somehow. It’s not that I have a lot to say about the feelings of people who have had someone they love murdered in some particularly horrible or heartless way. I have not been in that position myself or known anyone who has. I will not pretend to know what being in that position must feel like. And of course people who do find themselves in that situation feel all sorts of different ways. No two people would react the same way, and even within the same person feelings may change over time, so there is not much to say that would apply to everyone. Some people who you might think would be filled with enormous rage and bitterness and who you might think would have every right to want to see the murderer of a loved one punished as much as it is possible to punish someone, do not—do not want the state to take still another human life.
But some do or at least have what I must presume to be very dark and conflicted feelings about how the state should deal with matters and how they are going to deal with their own feelings. I did not want to have a kind of dismissive attitude toward people who may have different ideas than I do, people whose different ideas come from hard and painful places. I didn’t want either not to acknowledge those feelings or in effect to scold people for having feelings that lead them to think differently from me. Those of us who are opposed to capital punishment need to try our best to put ourselves in that place of pain without immediately labeling it as somehow filled with notions of revenge and an eye for an eye mentality and other pejorative terms.
I raise these thoughts today not just because I ran out of time last week and didn’t get to say everything I had in mind saying then, but also because though it may seem far afield from the story of Christ’s resurrection, I think it is not in fact very far afield at all. Easter begins— always— in very dark, very bleak places, not unlike what I have been alluding to, though of course there are all sorts of things that can cast a blanket of gloom over our lives. And trying to imagine what people might feel having lost someone dear to them through a horrible act of violence, can stand for all the kinds of lostness we may experience as humans. And I would venture to say that if we have not experienced such times, if we never dwelt in such places, if there is no part of our spirits that knows what grief or oppressive sorrow are all about, then we probably don’t have much of an idea what resurrection is about either.
Maybe you can see why I don’t find the triumphalist approach to Easter so appealing. One does not respond to deep grief, or anger, or the desire for revenge by shouting alleluia. The best we can do often is to grope our way toward some loving action that, no matter how frail or fumbling it may be, keeps alive the possibility of some kind of new life. As far as I am concerned it’s fine to go ahead and sing our alleluias along with the claims of victory, but we also need to do so knowing we will then need to put them aside in favor of some very partial and human attempt to do something which just tries to keep the possibility of resurrection alive, knowing that in the end whether anything like resurrection actually happens for us humans is in the hands of God.
In that vein, let me continue with the example of situations that might involve capital punishment, again realizing they can stand for many other kinds of situations. One thought that sometimes get expressed in connection with capital crimes is the idea that executing a person who has done something awful and has caused so much pain would at least provide some closure for those who grieve. Justice will have been done and people can move on with their lives. But with as much respect as I can muster for people who might feel that way, what I want to say instead, one of the things that I believe Easter says, is that there is no such thing as closure. I am not an expert on trauma or the various problems and emotions that may go with it, just a Christian on an Easter Sunday trying to stand before the mysteries, not just the mystery of Jesus’ resurrection, but the mysteries of our living and how it is that the miracle of resurrection takes place for us. And it seems to me that looking for closure as a way of dealing with our grieving, any kind of serious grieving, is almost always a mistake. It is looking for an end when what we really need is a new beginning.
I included a short portion of scripture for today that is not normally read as part of the Easter scriptures, the story of the discovery of the empty tomb and so forth. It is the short exchange between Pilate and some others who are worried that there may be a plot afoot where the disciples would steal the body to make it look like Jesus had been raised. “And Pilate said to them, ‘You have a guard of soldiers; go, make it as secure as you can.” Let’s do everything we can, in other words, to write an end to this story, to close the book on Jesus, or in this case to close the tomb with a stone, as securely as possible. And what happened, of course, was that it didn’t work. One meaning of the resurrection stories in the context I am speaking in today is that the resurrection was not the end of the story, the grand climax of the gospel narrative, not God’s definitive statement of the truth about Jesus, but just the beginning, the bare beginning of another story. Sometimes, finding ourselves in the midst of personal times of trouble, or becoming especially aware of the troubled nature of our world, resurrection doesn’t mean grand assurances, ultimate happy endings, definitive statements of truth, just the bare beginning of a new story or a new direction to an ongoing story.
And this brings me to the topic of forgiveness, which I also said last week that I was going to talk about this week. It may not be clear why that brings me to the topic of forgiveness, but it does because very often it is forgiveness that offers that possibility of beginning a new story or allowing whatever story we are involved in to take some new turn. And one thing thinking the loved ones of the people who have been killed in situations where capital punishment is a possibility, one thing focusing on that kind of a situation does for us is to remind us that forgiveness is sometimes a very difficult thing and should not be preached at people as though it were, as though forgiveness is an obvious good that Jesus after all told us to do not seven or seventy times but seven times seventy times, something that any decent person would do whenever given half a chance.
But the reality is that sometimes forgiveness is hard, so hard that some kinds of it are very nearly impossible, and it can be that hard even in situations that are not as extreme as when a life has been taken by someone. In any case the kind of forgiveness that means the most is the kind that is hardest, though of course it is true that our everyday lives in large part depend on our ability to forgive various small affronts or thoughtless acts on the part of people around us. The social fabric we’re part of, to say nothing of our most important relationships, depends on countless small acts of forgiveness.
But there are some human situations where forgiveness is not simply a matter of refusing to let relatively small matters disrupt relationships. There are some situations where forgiveness does not mean and cannot mean the ability to simply say, “Oh, that’s all right.” There are some situations where what has been done was not all right, is not all right, will never be all right, and where forgiveness must mean something else. It is a well known thought by this time that forgiveness quite often is as important, or more important, to the person doing the forgiving than the one being forgiven. It is a matter of being able to let go of feelings that keep you stuck in the past. It is a matter of the person doing the forgiving being set free from the past, set free to begin to write a new and different kind of story with his or her life.
Years ago I came across a definition of forgiveness that I have remembered ever since. It doesn’t apply to every situation, but I think it does apply to some. It said that forgiveness is giving up all hope of a better past. To put it a different way, maybe sometimes the best we can do in the way of forgiveness is just to let the past be and to begin to write a new story for ourselves. To do that much though, can be quite a lot. In both Isaiah and in the writings of Paul, quoting Isaiah, there is a phrase about the swallowing up of death, that death finally is swallowed up into life. It says to me that although often we cannot come to the point of forgiveness in the sense of making the past seem all right, we can, with God’s help, come to the point of not just wanting to bury the past or to leave it behind, but to take it up into ourselves, to incorporate it into the new story we are beginning, perhaps just beginning, to write.
Some people may think that Easter necessarily presents us with the question of whether we believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. And I know for some people it is important to make that affirmation, and for some people it is important to ask that question. It seems to me, however, that the more pointed question for most of us is whether we believe in the resurrection of human beings, whether we believe it is possible to begin to write a new story for ourselves, as individuals and as the whole people of God, all of us together. For some of us at some points in our lives that is not such an easy thing to believe, that new life is possible. And so on this Easter Sunday I want to say a non-triumphant but sincere alleluia to everyone who has experienced and is living their belief in that meaning of resurrection, that new beginnings are possible. And I wish to everyone a blessed Easter. Amen.
Jim Bundy
April 12, 2009