Outside the Tomb

It really is unbelievable. With our usual sense of what is and isn’t real, you can certainly see why no one believed that Jesus was alive.

And no one in the story did, not just poor old Thomas who gets saddled with that doubt label, after the fact. The tomb was empty, the body was gone. But no one - no one - believed Jesus was alive until they saw him or touched him or talked to him. 

The women who first came to the tomb and found it empty wondered who had taken the body and where. When they told the other disciples, they didn’t believe it either. Not until they’d seen Jesus in person and touched him and talked to him.

I would have thought that, having spent all that time with Jesus, seen him doing the things he did, knowing him the way they did, they might have been more inclined to believe Jesus when he told them what was going to happen. Even the angel at the tomb reminded the women that he was alive, “as he said.” Weren’t they paying attention? Peter was just “amazed.” John’s gospel even suggests that the other disciple, who followed Peter, believed but didn’t understand.

Maybe that’s just it. We struggle to understand that Jesus is more than flesh and bone, broken on the cross, more than words, more than story or teaching or behaviour. We can say that we follow Jesus by trying to be like Jesus, to model our behaviour after Jesus, even to try and live like Jesus. But that’s not being Jesus. 

Jesus is not confined by a tomb, nor a body or the physicality of this creation. Jesus is about being. Jesus is about being love and grace, showing us how that is possible in this form which, like us, is both divine and human. 

I believe that when the gospel of John tells of Jesus describing himself as “the way, the truth and the life,” it’s not asserting that the way is Jesus, but that Jesus is being the way. To be love and grace is the way which is true and life giving. That “way” can exist in more than Jesus. It has existed in more than Jesus, we just always come back to a comparison to the original and nobody makes that cut. But comparison was never Jesus’ point. Meeting a particular standard that always seems slightly out of our human reach was never Jesus’ point. Connecting with the divine and human that is in all of us, embracing the love that’s there, the life-creating, life-engaging, life-giving love that’s there, and being that in the world, that’s Jesus point. That brings us into relationship with God, with each other and with all that is.

Perhaps that seems unbelievable. It certainly seems like the first to discover Jesus was alive felt that way. At first. But they lived into it and they found the way. They lived outside the tomb and we can, too.

Living Every Day

Well, here we are. Palm Sunday brings us to Holy Week which brings us to Easter.

From our perspective, we know what's going to happen. We know that the same people who welcome Jesus with waving branches and honour him by throwing their coats to the ground in front of him, as they would welcome a king, are likely the same people who turn away from him later the same week. We know that the leaders of the Sanhedrin are watching. We know what they were planning. We know the Romans are watching, too.

But we stand in celebration, still, perhaps waving our own palm branches or something like it, recognizing that Jesus planned this moment of celebration. He sent disciples to bring him a donkey to ride, a sign of peace (warriors rode horses), so that he could arrive as the prophet Zechariah had foretold the Messiah would. And the people celebrated his arrival, just in time for the feast of Passover, as they kept a wary eye on Pilate and his soldiers arriving to keep an eye on things during the festival.

Yes, Pilate was arriving in Jerusalem at the same time. He was on a horse. Nothing like a big event to inspire acts of patriotic rebellion, especially one that reminded the people of the exodus from Egypt.  I wonder if he noticed this extra bit of celebration.

So, in that moment, we celebrate what the people celebrated then: the arrival of the promised messiah.

But we know what has to happen. We know that this is not a moment of triumph, not yet. We knows he is walking to his execution. We know that, the very next day, he gets angry at the money changers and sellers in front of the temple and makes a scene. We know he teaches and foretells the temples destruction and the end times. We know he shares the Passover meal with his closest friends. We know he’s afraid, we know he doubts and prays that there might be another way. We know he’s betrayed and arrested. We know his mocked and judged and beaten and killed. We know his lifeless body’s placed in a tomb. We know that’s not where he stays.

Over time, Christians became a Sunday people, something we're now discovering may no longer be meaningful to people, looking to find God in their lives, but also looking for more time to fill their lives with meaningful things. But it's not just our focus on the time at which we gather, it's become part of how we tell the story. Jesus wasn’t a one day a week wonder. Jesus lives every day.

This moment of celebration on Palm Sunday is followed by a greater moment of celebration the following Sunday, yes, it is. But there's a whole week of days in between, important pieces of the story. It’s a story we know is there, but how often do we still walk it with Jesus?

Here is our opportunity to embrace Jesus and hold him close, close with experiences we might share in our own lives, moments of happiness, anger, fear, pain, shame and grief. It’s not a comfortable journey, no. It takes us to death and emptiness. But it doesn't end there. That's why we need to take the journey with Jesus: it’s the story of life and death. And life. That’s a story for next week.

Do you see what I mean?

If you’re looking for words of hope - and I’m pretty sure we all are these days - there are a lot of places to turn, a lot of people who have things to say. If the words are true, they will not only brighten your day, but inspire you to envision a new day, one which is better, and support you in living into it.

Isaiah had just these kind of words for the Hebrew people exiled from Jerusalem to Babylon in the 6th century BCE. Conquered and far from home, grieving the life they had lost, Isaiah told them to listen to God, who says “do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?” (Is. 43:18-19) I brought you out of Egypt, God says, through the wilderness and to the promised land, remember that? Well, now I’m going to bring you home again and this exodus will be even greater.

But, hang on, this seems confusing. You say forget the past. But you also say remember what God did in the past. How do we do both?

Hope is about what’s ahead, not behind. I think God means to say don’t live in the past and don’t mourn what’s past as if it’s lost, as if it’s something to go back to. You can’t. Those things bring you to here, they help make you who you are, but they don’t confine you. Instead, learn from them, grow from them and use them to propel yourself - and your world - forward into a new day.

The exodus from Egypt and the time in the wilderness were formative for the Hebrew people, a core piece of their identity, central to who they are and who they can become. And now, after a crushing defeat, lost in the wilderness of exile and surrounded by an inhospitable culture, Isaiah reminds them, not of better days in the past, but of what takes them to better days in the future: God.

This is not a return to the exodus from Egypt, but a new thing. They won’t return to the Jerusalem that was, nor will they be able to rebuild it exactly as it was. The people they return to will not be the same, either, they, too, will have changed. The new thing isn’t built in the past but on the foundation of the past, as every new moment is.

The spirit of God - the spirit of life - moves in each of us, and we have a part to play. Hope inspires action. God moved through Moses in Egypt and, in Isaiah’s day, Cyrus and the Persians, but also through community leaders who’s name we don’t know, through individuals who worked together, and people who followed.

The ground might still look cold and wet and bare, but underneath new life is getting ready to appear. If we look around, we might see and hear Isaiah calling to us from the earth. Listen, a new day is coming; do you not perceive it?

Prodigal Life, Radical Grace

I bet that Jesus often encountered people who were not happy with the company he kept. Pharisees and religious leaders, mostly, but others, too, I suspect, who felt that Jesus, as a godly person, should be spending his time with those they judged to be equally as godly. Certainly not “those people,” sinners, “tax collectors” and the like. It seems like “tax collector” was a catch all for just the worst or the worst people.

But Jesus would try to point out that those are precisely the people he came for: the ones in need of love and grace, the marginalized, the de-humanized, and most certainly people who were judged by others to be “those people.” We’re all children of God, all in need of grace and love.

In the gospel of Luke, he responds to this criticism by taking the time to tell three stories about being lost and found, three stories about the radical, expansive, life-giving power of grace.

All are pretty familiar, I think: the story of the shepherd who leaves all his sheep to look for a single one that is lost and then celebrates its return; a woman who loses one of ten coins and won’t rest till she finds it, celebrating when she does; and a story of a parent with a problem child.

That last one we’ve traditionally referred to it as the parable of the Prodigal Son. But it's not just about the one son. It's also about the father and it’s also about his other son. It could also be about the mother we don't hear about, possibly the rest of the family, if there is more, and certainly about the community in which they live, who witnessed the story, but Jesus keeps it focused on the four main characters.

It's also not just about the "prodigal" behaviour of the youngest son. Prodigal simply means to be rash and recklessly extravagant. The young son was certainly that. His brother - and others - might argue that the father behaved in a similar way by giving him his inheritance when he did. It certainly violated the common code of the day.

One could make a good case for saying the older brother was "prodigal" too, in that he gave his entire life over to being a "slave" for his father. Or so he says. His anger certainly suggests that he thinks he's wasted his life and is now envious of his brother.

But the prodigal nature of their behaviour isn't even the heart of the story. Each of them has been lost, in their own way. The young son lost in the life he thought he could have by himself. The father sadly lost in a life without his son. The older brother bitterly lost in the life he got which was not the one he wanted.

I think the heart of the story is something so big, so alive, so life-giving, that it’s become a character itself in the story, a larger than life one, even. It’s grace. 

The young son finds grace for himself enough to return home where his father offers him grace in welcome. They are found. But, rather than a happy-ever-after for all, Jesus leaves us with the father's explanation to the older son, without indicating that the son accepts it. I can imagine the father continuing on from "this brother of yours was dead and has come to life" with "and I, too, have found new life and you also can find new life in grace. Will you embrace it and live it?" Maybe that question’s for us, too.

This is the Journey

There was a time when one could reasonably assume that most anyone who attended church regularly knew at least one thing from memory. The Lord’s Prayer or The Prayer of Jesus or the Our Father, depending on your tradition, was one of the first things learned by children and adults.

That may not be true anymore, but I don’t necessarily think that has to be a bad thing. It does present the opportunity to look at it more closely and wonder if, in learning it by rote, we may have lost some of the depth of its meaning.

For me, regardless of traditional or contemporary language or the various biblical and liturgical versions of the text, the prayer encapsulates what Jesus is all about: our relationship with God, which is both intimately personal and communal, and our participation in that relationship. By that, I mean that God is held to be holy, the kingdom of heaven can be here on earth and we are fed - in body, mind and spirit - not simply by God's will alone, but by our participation in it. What we understand as God's will, God's purpose, God's desire for us for a life of wholeness, filled with love and compassion, peace and joy, requires us to be active in living it, in living as Jesus teaches in his life.

Nobody, especially Jesus, ever said that was going to be easy, just that it’s going to be worth it. Of course, we tend to see so many things in life as problems to be overcome, tests to pass, battles to win and opponents to be defeated rather than challenges to be engaged, experiences to be shared and life to lived fully. Even our idea of justice is adversarial and based on retribution: those who are judged to have acted wrongly are punished. And that's more often about the law, which is not always justice.

Jesus, though, teaches that being "just" is about equity. Justice, for Jesus, is distributive.  It's about living what is true with equity, fairly sharing all things so that everyone has what they need, with respect, love and compassion for all.

That all sounds wonderful, doesn't it? And utopian. Which it is, literally. It would be a world of such perfection that it would have to be, well, heaven. But the kingdom of heaven is near, says Jesus, and can be brought here on earth when we participate in living The Way that Jesus showed us. “Perfection” isn’t required, except in the sense that we are perfectly made to be who we are. We will strive and sometimes fail, we will not be the arbitrary “perfect” as society defines it, we will sometimes feel lost, sometimes feel like this heaven is forever out of reach. So why bother?

Simply, because this is the journey. It's not the beginning or the end, it is the journey and, as theologian and author Brian McLaren observed, we are "in the making,” an observation he made in the appropriately titled book 'We Make the Road by Walking.'

We aren't called to an earthly understanding of perfection, we're called to living.  And that means we're called to do our best at living into wholeness with each other and the earth, with love and compassion and grace.  Yes, I know, that still sounds so impossible, but the point is the trying, the engaging and the living - we make the road by walking.

Life is More

There’s a lot of anxiety out there right now. People are worried about what’s going on in the world. And there’s a lot going on.

There was already a host of social, political, economic and justice issues to be faced when the pandemic hit. That’s created its own worries. And now, our hearts hurt for people of Ukraine and places in the world where tyranny, conflict, anger, hate and bitterness are breaking more lives.

In a moment like this, many people - religious, spiritual or none of the above - might look to the Bible for a word of comfort or support. Or justification. Some may be tempted to turn to Revelation or Ezekiel or any of the apocalyptic stories and see the end times coming. What’s happening now, they might say, is the prelude to the Second Coming and the end of the world. It’s all right there, predicted in the Bible.

Please don’t. I know it’s tempting, but if you’re looking for some direction from the Bible, please look to Jesus instead because, well: love wins.

Jesus even talks about worry in the Sermon on the Mount. He gets to it about a third of the way through (Matt. 6:24-34), but, right from the beginning, with the Beatitudes, he talks about many things that we might be anxious about, including the law, anger, reconciliation, divorce, loving you enemies and other things. Then he says you have to choose, because you can’t let your life be led by God and material things.

Life is more than wealth, more than material things, more than “stuff.” Look at the birds, he says, or the flowers in the fields. They aren’t anxious, they just “be,” trusting in God. The point is, Jesus says, if you live with God at the centre of your life - that is, God which is the spirit of life and love that is grace and compassion, respect and care, creativity and positivity - if that’s what you put at the centre of your life and live that out into the world, then everything else will be what it needs to be. Trust in that, have faith in that, and we won’t be locked down by anxiety, paralyzed by fear or lost in worry. We’ll know that God is with us and working through us: we are not alone and we are empowered and inspired by love.

There are things we can do. Birds fly and flowers grow, remember. No matter how seemingly small an action may feel, each of us has something to offer. It may begin with thoughts and prayers, but that’s just a beginning, action follows according to our ability. For some that might be direct personal action, for others a donation of money or goods, verbal or visual support, letters to governments, what things you buy or use, even consideration of what you wear or where you travel. Even in moments when we feel there’s nothing we can do, love can inspire us to action.

It’s easy to get caught up in material things and in the very real grief and hardship of a struggling world. I think Jesus knows that. And our modern world is so much more complex than birds and flowers. But I bet Jesus would say “don’t worry. Love is in you. The divine spirit of life is in you. All that other stuff’s outside. Strive to be the truest you and you’ll be what you need.”

A Long Forty Days

The season of Lent is the forty days before Easter. It originates with the story of Jesus fasting for forty days in the wilderness, where he’s tempted by the devil. Matthew, Mark and Luke each tell the story, though their details vary a bit. For most people, Lent is a time for reflection and self-examination, a time for finding solitude, a “wilderness” time, following Jesus’ example. We might even fast like Jesus, or at least give something up for Lent. Once we’ve had our pancake supper on the last day before Lent, of course. Ah, traditions.

I’m feeling a little different this year. Like me, you might be feeling a little like this is still Lent of 2020, a little like we’ve been having a “wilderness” time for two years now. By the way, in the Bible, the number forty doesn’t necessarily mean exactly forty anything, it’s shorthand for “a long time.” And it’s been a long time, with lock downs, masks, sanitizer, and all the protocols designed to protect us, but which also isolate us and disconnect us from the daily life we knew.

Isn’t that the point of what Jesus was doing, though? I think he went into the wilderness to find himself - the testing or tempting is just a way to describe Jesus coming to terms with who he was, so that he could face the world.  In order to do that, the wilderness he needed was simply a place where everyday life was not. The story makes it a geographical desert, but for you and me it might not need to be that. It could be a living room, a house, an apartment, a garden. It could have been any place where we can disconnect from the everyday.

And, while the story says Jesus is tested the whole time, Luke and Matthew give three specific “temptations” from the devil at the end, kind of to sum things up: food, power and safety. Each time, Jesus responds with trust in God. It’s as if the temptations are the earthly stuff our human selves value, the very thing Jesus went to the desert to get away from, the very things that ought to be governed by love, not the other way round. Love before stuff, Jesus seems to say. Then he leaves the wilderness behind and begins to live it in his ministry.

I don’t imagine for a minute that the wilderness - or wildernesses, depending on how you experienced it - of the last two years was welcome, or that we necessarily all made use of it rather than simply experienced it and survived it. Many were able to engage the time, many adjusted, but just as many struggled with loneliness and grieved the loss of life, even the end of life.

So this year, I’m trying to see Lent as an opportunity to spring back to life. The word “Lent,” after all, is derived from a word meaning the “lengthening of days” or even “spring season.” The earth is coming back to life and so should we. What has been resting is ready to appear, it’s waiting for the snow to turn to water, the ground to warm and the sun to shine, and it’s making its way to the surface, to emerge and blossom. What if you thought of your life like a garden, rather than a desert? How would you nourish it, care for it and help it grow? How would you prepare for the summer days which lie ahead?