Sermon – “How are we to believe?” (John 14:1-14)

In the opening words of the Acts of the Apostles, Luke informs us that Jesus “presented himself alive to [the disciples] by many convincing proofs”. We read about half a dozen such incidents in the gospels: Mary Magdalene outside the empty tomb; Cleopas and his fellow traveler along the road to Emmaus; the eleven disciples and later Thomas in the upper room; Peter, John and five others on the lakeside in Galilee… To these Paul adds an occasion when Jesus appeared to more than five hundred of his followers.

My suspicion is that Jesus’ relationship with the disciples following his resurrection was quite different from what it had been before. When you think of it, how could it have been otherwise? While they had once admired and followed him, now they could only worship and adore him. The one in their midst was no longer just the carpenter from Galilee. He was their crucified and risen Lord.

Besides that, I picture Jesus’ presence with the disciples not as a continuous experience as it had been previously, but rather as a series of fleeting, often unexpected, interchanges. In between those appearances there were periods, perhaps of days, when they had time to contemplate all that they had experienced over the previous three years. I imagine too that in those weeks between Easter and Pentecost they must have gathered numerous times. And on those occasions they must have spent much of their time bringing to mind Jesus’ words, discussing them, puzzling over them and relating them to their experience as they awaited “the promise of the Father”. Among those words, spoken perhaps in the very room where they were now gathering, were the ones which formed our Gospel reading this morning: “Do not let your hearts be troubled. You believe in God; believe also in me. In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places…”

In many ways what we are embarking upon in these verses is John’s equivalent of the Sermon on the Mount. Over the next three chapters Jesus gives his disciples some concentrated teaching as he prepares them for his death and resurrection. It was only in the days following the resurrection, however, that the disciples would have had either the opportunity or the coolness of mind to go over what Jesus had said—and I imagine that that was what they spent much of their time doing, again and again and again.

Jesus begins with an invitation—an invitation to trust him. Have you ever noticed that John’s gospel never uses the noun “faith”? For John believing is always a verb, always an action word. In the New Testament the word denotes believing in someone, trusting someone, relying on someone, entrusting yourself to someone. In the verse before us, the action is especially clear because, translated literally, Jesus is saying, not just, “Trust me,” but, “Trust into me.” There is that sense of casting ourselves into his arms, of giving ourselves totally and utterly over to him. On the eve of the crucifixion that would have been a hard sell. But now, after the resurrection, it all began to make a little more sense. And in the verses that follow, Jesus begins to tell them a little bit about what that faith looks like and where it leads.

A place for the homeless

I think that for most of us a sense of place, of having a place where we belong, is an important part of who we are. I am told that the average American moves 11.7 times over the course of his or her lifetime. (I’m not sure what it means to move .7 times!) In my own case I remember as a child moving every two to four years. There can be benefits to that, but it can also lead to a sense of rootlessness, of not having anywhere that you can really call home.

Years ago, when I worked as a student intern in a psychiatric hospital, a number of the patients were Hungarians who had left their country as refugees nearly a generation before. They had not parted with their homeland willingly or voluntarily. They had been forcibly uprooted, and ever since there had lurked deep within them a sense of homelessness. I can only imagine that the same must be true of many of our Karen refugees, who have had to leave everything behind to begin a new life in a strange land, in a foreign language, amid an alien culture and in a forbidding climate. It is a formidable challenge and it reaches right into the core of who we are as persons.

Yet when we read the Bible we discover that at a much deeper level we are all refugees. The cherubim still stand at the gate of Eden brandishing their flaming swords. Generations after Adam and Eve, God promised to Abraham and his descendants a home in the Promised Land. More than three thousand years later Jews still claim Israel as their home. Yet Israel is only a temporary home; and Jerusalem but a type of that city whose architect and builder is God.

If they didn’t know it already, the disciples would soon come to discover their own homelessness in a very blunt and physical sense, as they were driven from the familiar surroundings of Jerusalem and Galilee into the far corners of the Roman world. So it is that Jesus assures them, “In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places… I am going there to prepare a place for you.”

Faith begins, therefore, with the recognition of our own homelessness in any ultimate sense—and the parallel recognition that at the same time that we have an eternal, unshakeable home that no one can take from us in Jesus Christ and in our relationship with him. That does not mean that we need to become ascetics or that we sever all attachments to this world. But rather, amid the transitoriness and even the outright evil that we experience in this world, it gives us an anchor, a guiding star, that rock of which we will sing later in the course of this morning’s worship, on which to base our lives.

A way for the lost

Jesus gives us the promise of a home, permanent, safe and secure—and Thomas’s question that follows it is a natural one. “But Lord, how can we know the way?” To which Jesus replies with one of the most quoted verses in all of Scripture: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

I am afraid that more often than not Christians (myself included) have used these words of Jesus as a kind of club to beat down the followers of other religions. We concentrate on the second half of what Jesus said and give too little attention to the first. As I read them today, it seems to me that Jesus is offering a wonderful, exciting invitation here and we have turned that invitation into a message of “You’re not welcome.”

Now please don’t get me wrong. I am not saying that there are other ways to the Father, or that we can find ultimate truth or genuine life outside of Jesus. What I am saying is that so often we have concentrated on telling other people that their ways won’t work, that they are dead ends, and somehow in the midst of it all we have neglected to focus on the one way that does bring us to God. The result is that Christian faith ends up looking from the outside as exclusionary. To many we appear to be more interested in shutting people out than in inviting them in—and in many cases we are doing a very good job of it, too!

No doubt there are times when we need to alert the world to the fact that it is on a collision course with destruction, that there is indeed a way that seems right to a person, but its end is the way to death (Proverbs 14:12). The apostle Paul wrote about warning everyone. Yet that is not the focus of our message. The focus is on Jesus in all his transcendent beauty and majesty. I think Graham Kendrick puts it well in the words of his song:

Knowing you, Jesus, knowing you,
there is no greater thing.
You’re my all, you’re the best,
you’re my joy, my righteousness,
and I love you, Lord.

When Isaiah stood in the temple and had his great vision of the Lord seated on his throne in all his heavenly glory, no one needed to tell him he was a sinner. He simply cried aloud, “Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips and I dwell among a people of unclean lips” (Isaiah 6:1-5). When Peter pulled in his miraculous haul of fish after Jesus had told him to let down his nets on the other side of the boat, he didn’t need anyone to tell him how sinful he was. He fell to his knees before Jesus and exclaimed, “Depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” (Luke 5:4-8)

I do believe that the great majority of people in their heart of hearts and if the truth be told, know that their lives are not right. And I believe that if we, as individual believers and as the community of Christ’s followers were living and proclaiming him in power, they would come to him as the way, the truth and the life.

A power for the faint-hearted

This brings us to a third and perhaps the most puzzling of Jesus’ statements in this morning’s passage: “Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father.” It seems impossible to believe. After all this was the man who cleansed lepers, gave sight to the blind, gave paralyzed limbs the power to walk again—who even raised the dead. What did Jesus mean?

People have put all kinds of interpretations on these words. Some point to the foundation of hospitals and other charitable institutions by faithful Christians that have brought Christ’s healing and love to millions all over the world. Others point to the miracles that continue to happen in our own time, well-documented accounts of remarkable healings and even people being raised from the dead. New Testament scholar Leon Morris thought of Jesus’ words in a numerical and geographical sense. He wrote,

During his lifetime the Son of God was confined in his influence to a comparatively small sector of Palestine. After his departure his followers were able to work in widely scattered places and influence much larger numbers. But … they were in no sense acting independently of him. On the contrary in doing their ‘greater works’ they were but his agents.[1]

I believe that all these interpretations are valid, and no doubt there are other ways in which we might understand Jesus’ words as well. But underlying them all is the power of the Holy Spirit.

So often as Christians we allow our vision to be limited by our resources. We look at the world around us and we compare ourselves with the vast wealth of governments or multinational corporations and we sigh and say, “We could never do that.” Yet we forget that our God is the one who (in the words of the psalm) owns the cattle on a thousand hills, whose resources are limitless and whose power is infinite. It was not that long before those first Christians who sat in the upper room musing over Jesus’ words were being accused of turning the world upside down—and I suspect that no one was more surprised than they were.

Today, as we continue to rejoice in our risen Lord, may we rest in the assurance of an eternal home, may we show him to be the way, and may we know his power, which is able to do immeasurably more than we can ask or imagine, at work within us.

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[1]     The Gospel According to John (New International Commentary on the New Testament), 646

Sermon – “Cleopas” (Luke 24:13-35)

In all the Bible I don’t think that there is a more engaging story, a better-told story, than our Gospel reading this morning. It is recounted with such realism and detail that it is difficult not to imagine ourselves there, walking along the narrow, dusty road from Jerusalem to Emmaus on that first Easter afternoon. The time is almost exactly forty-eight hours since Jesus has been crucified. His lifeless body had been taken down and temporarily laid in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea, a prominent Jerusalem citizen and a member of the Jewish ruling council. That morning it had been discovered that the final insult had occurred. Jesus’ corpse had been taken from the tomb and nobody was aware of its whereabouts. And so it was not even possible to pay Jesus the final respect of a decent burial. Yes, there had been stories of angelic appearances. But that did not alter the fact that the one on whom they had pinned their hopes was now dead and gone. Not even his body was to be found.

There did not seem to be any point to remaining in Jerusalem, and so the two decided to make the seven-mile walk back to their home in Emmaus. It was natural that both their thoughts and their conversation were dominated by the uncontrollable swirl of events that had brought Jesus before the Sanhedrin, before Pilate and finally to his death. We don’t know at what moment it happened, but somewhere along the journey the two became three.

I suspect that their discussion had become quite animated, to the point where they weren’t really aware of anyone but themselves or of how loud they had become, where anyone walking anywhere near them would have heard every word they were saying. So it may have given them a bit of a jolt when suddenly there was a third voice in the conversation. “What’s all this you’re talking about as you walk along?” Luke tells us that they stopped dead in their tracks, but their surprise could not erase the sadness that was written across their faces.

“Are you the only visitor to Jerusalem who does not know what’s happened there over the last few days?” And once again they went over the tragic litany of events that had taken Jesus from them. “And we had hoped that he was the one who was going to redeem Israel.” They were to learn that this stranger knew far more than they had at first imagined. In a matter of moments they found themselves being caught up into the whole sweep of Old Testament revelation. What had happened to Jesus at Calvary was not a cruel twist of fate, but the outworking of God’s plan from the very beginning.

It must have seemed like no time before they were on the outskirts of their village. The time had come for a parting of ways. Yet there was so much more that they wanted to hear. So they pressed upon him (translated literally, “they forced him”, “they pressured him”) to stay with them. Once inside, they brought out some bread and reclined around the low table. As their guest took it, gave thanks for it and broke it, something (and Luke does not tell us what) caused them to realize that they were in the presence not of a stranger but of Jesus himself. They gazed at each other in amazement; and when they turned look again at Jesus, he was gone. Their hearts pounding within them, their legs could not take them back quickly enough to Jerusalem and to the other disciples, to tell them how Jesus had made himself known to them in the breaking of the bread.

A Fable?

Now I use those words very specifically because I believe Luke specifically chose them. They are technical words. We have heard them two chapters earlier in his account of the last supper: “Then [Jesus] took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to them, saying, ‘This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me’ ” (Luke 22:19). And he uses them again in Acts 2:42 in his description of the earliest church: “They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.” It is clear that Luke is using sacramental language—and from earliest days the church has drawn the connection between what happened at Emmaus and the Holy Eucharist. St Augustine, for example, writing around the close of the fourth century, states, “No one should doubt that his being recognized in the breaking of bread is the sacrament, which brings us together in recognizing him.”[1] And we find it captured in the words of our post-communion prayer: “You have opened to us the Scriptures, O Christ, and you have made yourself known in the breaking of the bread…”

There is a wonderful truth contained in that teaching. The Reformers of the sixteenth century were accustomed to speaking of the sacraments of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper as the visible words of God. Just as Christ speaks to us through the Scriptures, we also believe that he comes to us and reveals himself to us in a different way, yet no less real—in a tactile, visual way—as we break bread together in the sacrament. Gathered around his table, Jesus meets with us just as he did with Cleopas and his friend nearly two thousand years ago.

So it is that the story of Emmaus provides us with a wonderful parable of the mystery of Holy Communion—and that is how it is taught and preached again and again today. The problem and the tragedy is that for many in the church today it is just a parable and no more. I remember when we were translating this passage from the Greek, my New Testament professor asked the question, “Suppose you were there with a camera as the two disciples walked along the road to Emmaus. How many people do you think the camera would capture: Three? Or two?” And he made no bones about the fact that he stood firmly on the “two” side.

For him and for many others, accounts such as we have read this morning are fables—wonderful fables, no doubt, powerful fables filled with rich imagery and deep significance, that teach us about the experience and perceptions of Jesus’ earliest followers—and yet, when it comes down to it, just fables nevertheless. In Jesus Seminar founder Dominic Crossan’s words, “Emmaus never happened; Emmaus always happens.”[2]

A Fact

I believe that the apostle Paul had exactly such people in mind when he declared, “If Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain… If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins… If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.” The he asserts (and we echo loudly), “But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep.” (1 Corinthians 15:14-20)

The disciples who arrived breathless back in Jerusalem were not there because they had had some mystical experience breaking bread. No, they were there because they had seen Jesus bodily there before them with their own eyes. He had picked up actual bread and broken it with physical hands. He had spoken to them in an audible voice—and their hearts burned within them.

The good side of the story of my New Testament professor was that his successor was none less than N.T. Wright. His 800-page book, The Resurrection of the Son of God, has been described as the clearest, most thorough and comprehensive study of Jesus’ resurrection in more than a century. Of that conversation that took place along the road, he has said,

Now, suddenly, with the right story in their head and hearts, a new possibility—huge, astonishing, and breathtaking—started to emerge before them… Suppose Jesus’ execution was not the clear disproof of his messianic vocation but its confirmation and climax? Suppose the cross was not one more example of the triumph of paganism over God’s people but was actually God’s means of defeating evil once and for all? Suppose this was, after all, how the exile was designed to end, how sins were to be forgiven and how the kingdom was to come? Suppose this was what God’s light and truth looked like, coming unexpectedly to lead his people back into his presence?[3]

No wonder their hearts burned within them. Their whole world had been turned upside down. They had come to see everything that matters in a new light. And their lives could never be the same again. This is the difference that Jesus’ resurrection makes—and I want to say, it is all the difference.

A Fire

That difference had put a fire within their hearts. Centuries before, the prophet Jeremiah had written in similar terms about his encounter with God’s word: “If I say, ‘I will not mention him, or speak any more in his name,’ then within me there is something like a burning fire shut up in my bones; I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot” (Jeremiah 20:9). Throughout the book of Acts and the remainder of the New Testament we see that fire breaking out in new and sometimes surprising ways. The message of Jesus’ resurrection was one that the church could not contain, even if it had wanted to, so that within a generation there were believers stretched all around the known world.

For those of us who have heard the Easter story for years, there is always the temptation to become blasé about it, for it to lose its newness, its freshness, its radical challenge to all the world’s treasured assumptions—for the fire to grow dim. Even in New Testament times the apostle Paul had to warn the believers in Thessalonica not to quench the Holy Spirit’s fire. And towards the end of his life he found himself writing to his young protégé Timothy, “I remind you to rekindle the gift of God that is within you…” (1 Thessalonians 5:19; 2 Timothy 1:6).

John Stott told the story of Methodist preacher W.E. Sangster interviewing candidates for the ministry. One of them was a rather nervous young man who said he felt he ought to explain that he was rather shy and was not the sort of person who would ever set the River Thames on fire, that is, create much of a sensation. “My dear young brother,” Sangster replied. “I’m not interested to know if you could set the Thames on fire. What I want to know is this: if I picked you up by the scruff of your neck and dropped you into the Thames, would it sizzle?”[4]

I wonder how many of us, if we were really to be honest with ourselves, would be forced to admit that for us the fire has grown dim. Like the believers in Ephesus, we have lost the love that we had at first. We have become lukewarm in our faith. Then I believe we can learn from the two disciples and their experience along the road to Emmaus.

St Augustine observed that when they opened their hearts to Jesus, “unwittingly they showed the doctor their wounds”. May we reveal what lies deep within us to him. May we listen to him and allow him to minister to us by his living and enduring word. And then may we find ourselves saying, “Did not our hearts burn within us?”

Let us conclude by bowing before the Lord and praying together in words from one of Charles Wesley’s hymns.

O thou who camest from above
the pure, celestial fire to impart,
kindle a flame of sacred love
on the mean altar of my heart.

There let it for thy glory burn,
with inextinguishable blaze;
and, trembling, to its source return
in humble love and fervent praise.

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[1]     Letter 149, quoted in Ancient Christian Commentary on the Scriptures, NT III, 382

[2]     Quoted in N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, 656

[3]     N.T. Wright, “The Resurrection and the Postmodern Dilemma”, Sewanee Theological Review 41.2, 1998

[4]     John Stott, Between Two Worlds, 285

Sermon – “Mary” (John 20:11-18)

I wonder how many of you have seen what many regard as British comic actor Peter Sellers’ greatest movie. Being There was produced less than a year before his death in 1980. It tells the story of a guileless, simple-minded man named Chance. As the film opens, Chance’s entire world has been the protected environment of the townhouse of a wealthy man, where he spent his time doing nothing but watching television and tending the garden. When his employer dies, Chance is forced to leave the only environment he has known. He wanders out into the streets of Washington, D.C., dressed in one of his benefactor’s expensive tailored suits. I will not go into all the details of the story, except to say that, through a series of coincidences and confusions, Chance the gardener is transformed into Chauncey Gardiner. His simplistic and meaningless utterances are taken to be arcane statements of profound insight. People assume he is speaking in enigmatic metaphors, when in reality all he is talking about is flowers and gardens. He becomes the most sought-after guest at every socialite soirée. He is a media celebrity. And before the film reaches its conclusion he is being touted as the next likely candidate for the presidency.

I can’t imagine that the story’s author had today’s gospel reading in mind when he wrote Being There. Yet I cannot escape the correspondence between the two. In Being There, a gardener is mistaken for a savior. This morning we have been presented with the Savior being mistaken for a gardener.

All Mary saw was the gardener

You can’t blame Mary, really. Less than forty-eight hours before, she had been one of those standing by, watching helplessly as Jesus hung dying on the cross, as he gasped for his last breath, as the javelin was thrust into his side. She had been there as Jesus’ body was laid in the sepulcher and as the huge round stone was rolled across the entryway. She had also been the first to arrive at the tomb where Jesus’ body had been laid to rest. The other gospels indicate that she did not come alone. There were other women with her: Mary the mother of James and Joseph, Salome, Joanna, and others unnamed as well. They had brought with them spices to complete the hasty anointing that had been given to Jesus at the time of his death. Mark tells us that they were in a quandary about how they would manage to move the stone away from the opening. Perhaps the soldiers whom Pilate had placed on a security guard might be willing to give a helping hand.

As it turned out, however, there was no need. The stone had already been rolled away. John doesn’t mention it explicitly (although he does imply it and the other gospels do tell us so) that they went into the tomb and were confronted by the horrifying reality that the body had been removed. Mary did not stop to think twice. She raced back to where the disciples were staying and breathlessly announced to them, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.”

Moments later John and Peter were there, peering inside the tomb—and they too witnessed what Mary and the other women had seen. The tomb was empty. All that was left of Jesus were his grave cloths.

Peter and John went back, as quickly as they had come, to tell the other disciples. Which left Mary alone, standing outside the tomb, sobbing and trembling in grief and bewilderment. Then something (and John doesn’t tell us what) something prompted Mary to take one more look inside the sepulcher. There she saw two angels. Or was it one angel, or a young man, or two men, in white in dazzling white clothes? At this point the various gospel accounts don’t entirely coincide. I can imagine that the shock and amazement of it all would have made it impossible to recall the precise details even hours after the event, much less decades.

“Woman, why are you weeping?” they ask. “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.” For some reason (and again John does not tell us why) Mary turns around to look behind her. Did she hear a footfall? Did she sense the presence of another? We do not know. What we do know is that she saw Jesus, but she did not recognize him for who he was.

Perhaps it was her tears. Perhaps there was still a little of the early morning mist in the air. Or alternatively perhaps the sun was glaring into her eyes. Frankly, I’m not sure it was any of these things. Again and again after his resurrection people were unable to recognize Jesus: not only Mary, but think of Cleopas and his friend on the way to Emmaus or the disciples in the upper room. I think the real reason was that there was a little bit of Thomas in each of them, as there is in us. Resurrections just don’t happen. It never occurred to them that this really could be Jesus.

I think that there is something of a parable in Mary’s inability to recognize Jesus, in her mistaking him for the gardener. How many times has Jesus come to me and I have not recognized him? We are accustomed to talking about Jesus coming to us the marginalized, about recognizing him in the face of the poor—and there is a truth in that. But I am thinking about something different. I am thinking about those times when God has done something powerful and we ascribe it to coincidence or simply ignore it. We are much more comfortable in a world of mechanical regularity, where things are predictable, explainable—in a world where God does not intervene in power. But Jesus’ resurrection tells us that is not the world in which we dwell. “In fact Christ has been raised from the dead,” the Scriptures tell us, “the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep.”

God the gardener

The resurrection of Jesus turns our world with all its naturalistic presuppositions on its head. The man who stood in Mary’s presence was Jesus. Yet, stop for a moment and think. Was there not a sense in which Mary was right? Was he not also the gardener? Take a moment to look at the Renaissance paintings of this scene by Fra Angelico, van Oostsanen, Lavinia Fontana and Rembrandt. What they all have in common is that they depict Jesus with a spade in his hand (and in some cases with a gardener’s broad-brimmed hat!). The one Mary saw was indeed the Gardener (with a capital “G”) returning to his garden. “She did not mistake in taking him for a gardener,” declared Lancelot Andrewes, the Bishop of Winchester, in his Easter sermon of 1620.

Though she might seem to err in some sense, yet in some other she was in the right. For in a sense, and a good sense, Christ may well be said to be a gardener, and indeed is one. A gardener he is then. The first, the fairest garden that ever was, Paradise. He was the gardener, it was of his planting. So, a gardener.[1]

“No wonder at the empty tomb, Christ came to Mary Magdalene as the gardener,” reflects contemporary theologian Vigen Guroian. “For he is the Master Gardener, and we, we are his apprentices as well as the subjects of his heavenly husbandry.”[2]

The Old Testament prophets looked with anticipation to the day when God would return to his garden:

The Lord will comfort Zion; he will comfort all her waste places, and will make her wilderness like Eden, her desert like the garden of the Lord; joy and gladness will be found in her, thanksgiving and the voice of song. (Isaiah 51:3)

They shall come and sing aloud on the height of Zion, and they shall be radiant over the goodness of the Lord, over the grain, the wine, and the oil, and over the young of the flock and the herd; their life shall become like a watered garden, and they shall never languish again. (Jeremiah 31:12)

They shall again live beneath my shadow, they shall flourish as a garden; they shall blossom like the vine, their fragrance shall be like the wine of Lebanon. (Hosea 14:7)

In the final chapter of the Bible John the Seer is given a vision of the world that is to come:

Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. (Revelation 22:1,2)

As Mary turned around from the empty tomb and looked up, the figure she saw was indeed the Gardener returning to his garden—and his work is in the soil of our hearts, yours and mine, planting the seed of his word in its furrows, pruning away the unfruitful branches, producing within us the luxuriant fruit of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.

Christ the second Adam

What Mary was the first to witness was the new creation irrupting into the old. The garden that had become a wilderness was beginning to bloom again. But before we leave this passage this morning I would like to take us one step farther. It has to do with the fact that the one whom God entrusted to till and to tend the original garden was Adam. So when Mary turned from the sepulcher the one she set her eyes upon was the second Adam: humanity fully transformed, you and I as we will one day be, victorious over sin, evil and death.

For the time being we groan, as Paul says, with the whole of creation. In the Spirit’s power we wrestle with the sin that has become so deeply implanted within us. We wait eagerly for the day when Christ’s redemption will be fully revealed.

Yet at Easter especially we recognize that by God’s grace, by Christ’s redeeming work on the cross, by the power of the Holy Spirit within us, we are at the same time in some mysterious sense partakers in the new Adam. Yes, we continue to sin. Yes we stumble and fall, sometimes spectacularly. Yet we are the gardeners, called and empowered to mediate the beauty of God, to be agents of his shalom, in a world corrupted by sin and death.

Our Christian communities ought to be places where loveliness of Christ is evident in our lives and relationships. Right now in our front lawn there are snowdrops and crocuses blooming. Passers by walking their dogs or pushing their strollers stop to admire them. That is how it is to be with us—that people may see the difference in our daily lives, in the quality of our relationships, in the undying hope that is within us. That is how it was with our earliest forebears. Luke tells us that they enjoyed the favor of all the people (Acts 2:47). Tertullian, writing at the end of the second century, observed how the pagans would say of their Christian counterparts, “Look how they love one another … and how they are ready to die for each other…”

As we stand with Mary, may it be with a profound wonder and joy that the Gardener has returned to his garden. And may it be with a willingness to let him do his work in us and through us. “For we are to God the sweet fragrance of Christ…” (2 Corinthians 2:15)

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[1]     Sermons of the Resurrection, Preached on Easter-Day, 1620

[2]     The Fragrance of God, 47

Seven Stanzas at Easter

I intended to put this arresting poem by John Updike on my blog at Easter. Better late than never, I suppose—and it is still the Easter season. Christ is risen!

Make no mistake: if He rose at all

it was as His body;

if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules 

reknit, the amino acids rekindle,

the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers, 

each soft Spring recurrent;

it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled 

eyes of the eleven apostles;

it was as His Flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,

the same valved heart 

that—pierced—died, withered, paused, and then 

regathered out of enduring Might 

new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,

analogy, sidestepping transcendence; 

making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the

faded credulity of earlier ages:

let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache, 

not a stone in a story,

but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow

grinding of time will eclipse for each of us 

the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,

make it a real angel, 

weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair, 

opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen 

spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,

for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,

lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are

embarrassed by the miracle,

and crushed by remonstrance.

© 1961 by John Updike (Written for a religious arts festival sponsored by the Clifton Lutheran Church, of Marblehead, Mass.)

“He is not here…”

What you thought you came for

Is only a shell, a husk of meaning.

[T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding] …

Easter occurs … when we find in Jesus not a dead friend but a living stranger. … Some writers have—carelessly?—spoken of Jesus being raised ‘as’ the believing community, or alleged that the risen-ness of Jesus consists essentially in the persistence of Jesus’ own faith and trust in God within the Church. Yet this sidesteps the whole issue of the strangeness of the risen Jesus. … We have already noted that Jesus as risen is a Jesus who cannot be contained in the limits of a past human life; the corollary of this is that Jesus as risen legitimating and supporting memory of a community. The church is not ‘founded’ by Jesus of Nazareth as an institution to preserve the recollection of his deeds and words; it is the community of those who meet him as risen and the place where all the world may meet him as risen.

Human beings long to be assured that they are innocent. … The gospel will not ever tell us that we are innocent, but it will tell us that we are loved; and in asking us to receive and consent to that love, it asks us to identify with, and make our own, love’s comprehensive vision of all we are and have been. That is the transformation of desire as it affects our attitude to our own selves—to accept what we have been, so that all of it can be transformed. It is a more authentic desire because more comprehensive, turning away from the illusory attraction of an innocence that cannot be recovered unless the world is unmade. Grace will remake but not undo. There is all the difference in the world between Christ uncrucified and Christ risen…

Archbishop Rowan Williams, Resurrection