Easter 2 A

In the story from John for the second Sunday of Easter Jesus shows his wounds to his fearful disciples. It has always amazed me that educated adults with theological degrees want to take this story with flat-footed literalism instead of common sense. The Gospel of John is masterfully imaginative. I am suggesting here that John heightens the tension between images of living and dying in the manner of a Petrarchan conceit. Petrarch, a poet of the Italian Renaissance, would employ jarring metaphors that brought two seemingly incompatible images together, oxymorons, actually, like peace and war or fire and ice, to create startling and vivid imaginative turns. John Donne, more familiar to English readers, did the same in comparing marriage to a flea or separated lovers to the extended arms of a compass.

The tradition was intensely visual. The poetic conceit was closely related to “emblem” literature, for instance, verse that would be accompanied by an actual visual image, a wood engraving, say. Christopher Harvey published a book of emblems called The School of the Heart in which one emblem, “The Heart powred out”, expands on a verse from Lamentations (2.19): “Pour out thy heart like water before the face of the Lord.” The engraving shows a young man pouring from a large hot water bottle-like heart into a stream while an angel looks on, an intense literalisation of the image in Lamentations, which is accompanied by an epigram and a longer poem.

John sets life and death together like a Petrarchan conceit. In the face of death, loss, defeat and fear John gives us life in the jarring hyper-reality of an encounter that becomes an invitation to actually touch the wounds that Jesus displays. This is a resurrected body that eats grilled fish. You can’t take these stories any more literally than the verse in Lamentations about the heart being poured out like water, though some do, and, indeed, the intensity of Harvey’s literalisation adds to the perspicuity of the image. But it does so as an intentional device to pull our attention away from dead literalism and flattened, predictable language to reinforce the energy of the original imagery. This is what John is doing. He is saying that whatever the “risen-ness” of Jesus means in the life of the disciples, it has to do with the woundedness of crucifixion, and any appropriation of the living body of Christ in the life of discipleship is going to have to experience like woundedness in some form. The new life we are given in Christ, our resurrection, is going to include suffering and perhaps literal wounds and possibly even crucifixion. The jarring oxymoron in this conceit is the sense that death is life, the ability to pour ourselves out in our discipleship, to suffer, is what the new life in Christ is all about. It is a new way of seeing things that has to do with the way we accept the life of Christ as the shape of our own life (John 1.12). When Thomas does touch the wounds and kneels and says, “My Lord and my God”, it is not to make a confessional statement about the identity of Jesus in some theological, doctrinal sense, but to speak words of submission spoken in the context of conversion and transformation. This is my Lord and my God.

The jarring tension between the substantial and the insubstantial is of course set up from the beginning when Jesus walks through the door into the locked room to bring peace where there is no peace. The disciples are huddled in a fellowship of paralysis in a story that becomes John’s version of Luke’s Pentecost story. In a move that looks a bit like Harvey’s literalised image of the heart poured out, John has Jesus “breath” on the disciples, literalising a pun in Greek on the Holy Spirit (pneuma means both breath and spirit). The gift of the spirit enables the disciples to forgive sins, an extraordinary claim that gives them the power to live out the grace of God in ordinary life. Disclosing the presence of God, then, becomes the exercise of our ordinary humanity and common compassion. We don’t need all this religious folderol in order to forgive sins. We just do it, and we have to realize that when we don’t do it, it doesn’t get done. Christ ‘R’ Us. God is actualised in faithful human relationships.

The Gospel of John is alive with extravagant, vibrant metaphors that have confused the fundamentalists of this world to no end. Even Raymond Brown gets hung up on the need to take such images as literal events occasionally. Our reading concludes with the observation that Thomas has believed because he has seen. Given the way the idea of “seeing” has been developed, we may be assured that “seeing” her is that new way of seeing that is gained by a transformed life. Certainly John is not caving in to small-minded empiricists like Richard Dawkins and their mirror images in American televangelists like Pat Robertson here. Nor does the play on seeing and not seeing in verse 29 have anything to do with blessing the credulous. Either this verse vibrates with the essential paradoxes of this reading or it has nothing to do with the gospel it seems to sum up. The truth comes somewhere between seeing and not-seeing, and has more to do with how we live as embodied beings bearing the life of Christ in the world through what we do than it does with what we believe, in the conventional meaning of that word. In John, belief is always connected with action or it is nothing. No understanding of resurrection has any validity outside of the witness of our discipleship.

Easter A

The Easter story from the Gospel of John (John 20.1-18) tells of the visit to the tomb in the early hours of the morning. It is still dark, and by the time you have reached this point in your reading of John you know he is not just telling you something about the time of day. Darkness in John is always meaningful, even when it only seems to be descriptive. Insofar as it is the darkness in the prologue that never overcomes the light, as well as the darkness covering the visit of the benighted literalist, Nicodemus or the darkness into which Judas goes when he leaves the Last Supper to do his dirty work, this is the darkness against which we see the light of the dawning resurrection.

In the church I served in Birmingham (UK) we always held the Easter vigil in the pre-dawn darkness of the otherwise empty sanctuary, the small circle of worshippers lit by their own hand-held candles as they read those long Old Testament lessons of the vigil, intertwined with psalms and prayers and Taizé chants. As the service slowly progressed the stark blackness of the night was gradually overcome by the still colourless grey light of early dawn. The sanctuary furnishings around the fellowship slowly became visible, and finally a stronger light pieced through to the chancel where white linen cloth lay draped over the communion table like discarded clothing.

The story in John has this same slow, gradual movement toward Mary’s joyful exclamation, “I have seen the Lord!”

Notice how the story is layered. First Mary and her companions (only indicated by the use of the word “we” in verse 2) come to the tomb and see that the stone that had sealed it has been rolled away.

Then Peter and the beloved disciple move toward the tomb. The beloved disciple runs ahead of Peter and looks into the tomb. Then Peter arrives at the tomb, looks, and goes in. Then the beloved disciple goes into the tomb. Then they both go home.

Mary, still disconsolate, is standing outside the tomb. Now she, like the two disciples, goes into the tomb, where, unlike the two disciples, she meets two angels. It’s idle to ask why the two disciples hadn’t noticed the angels. The pattern has been established. Each move in the story adds something new.

Why do you weep? the angels ask, and Mary tells them what she had told the disciples. They have taken her Lord. Then she sees (but does not recognize) Jesus, who asks, as the angels had, why she weeps, adding another question, “Whom do you seek?” Mary gives him the same answer she has given before, then Jesus speaks her name: “Mary!”

The manner in which John builds the scene incrementally is a standard stylistic feature of his gospel. Each movement in the story adds a little bit more, teasing us, as it were, until the powerful emotional climax of the recognition, and then comes the denouement in which Jesus explains his coming ascension and Mary runs to exclaim to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord!”

Drama is the thing here. I will never forget that Easter at St James United Presbyterian Church in Chicago when Ann Faulkner got us to perform the 10^th century liturgical drama, the Visitatio Sepulchri. St James was a church that itself was experiencing the early stages of a remarkable rebirth. Ann had come to us emerging from a battle with cancer, her chemotherapied head covered in a scarf to hide her baldness. She’d taken on the job of organist among us as a bold move back into the world of the living. She’d borrowed white albs from a local Episcopal church to dress all the players, the small group of young adults who had only recently joined this church. All the parts, of course, were singing parts. When the young man playing Jesus chanted Mary’s name and she looked up from her desolation in recognition, we all felt a lump of emotion in our throats. Doretta actually wept that morning. Whether it was because of the emotional power of the scene itself, or for Ann, or for our own re-birth as a church—it was all the same.

In John, the resurrection story collects rebirth moments that have come throughout the gospel and weaves them together in this moment of encounter. Jesus calls his disciples “brothers” here, recalling the prologue (1.12). To all who receive him . . . he gives the power to be children of God, born not of blood or the will of the flesh but of God. This is not just John’s virgin birth story (the story of our virgin birth). It is our resurrection story. When we take the Word as the pattern of our lives, we are reborn into a new life. Our rebirth is linked with the story of Jesus’ ascension, through which we are brothers because we are all children of the same Father: “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God” (20.17). The ascension of Jesus is the birth of a new community—or a new family.

In John, resurrection has to do with intimacy. In the prayer following his farewell discourse Jesus says, “And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent” (17.3). Those who love Jesus do the things Jesus does, and as they do these things, they abide in him, and he abides in them, and so does the one who sent him (15.1-11). Sin in John is thus less like breaking rules and more like withering on the vine.

The light that is such a central motif in John is the light of our deepest humanity, life itself, fullness of life, life abundantly (John 10.10). The resurrection “moment” in our story is the moment Mary hears her name spoken. Think of the Good Shepherd (10.3-4), who knows his sheep and his sheep know him. He calls them by their names. Resurrection in John summons out what and who we most deeply are—this is what abundant life is—just as Lazarus is summoned out of the darkness of the tomb into new life (“Lazarus, come out!”). Those who have made the journey of integrity out of the closet into the full light of day can testify to such a resurrection experience.

As the resurrection stories in John (not just the resurrection story, but all the other ones) are embedded in experiences of encounter, the resurrection of Jesus seems to be connected to the experience of transformation in the life of the believer. Mary’s rejoicing that she has “seen” the Lord is built upon when Peter, later, sees the Lord in an encounter that becomes his experience of vocation (in John the calling of the fishermen is placed at the end of the story, not, as in the Synoptics, at the beginning). “Seeing” Jesus in John is a matter of transformed vision and transformed life, a new way of seeing and being that comes through the kind of discipleship that does what Jesus does. In the beginning of the gospels the followers of Jesus are responding to an invitation to “come and see”. The Greeks who would “see” Jesus must learn to die as the grain of wheat must die before it bears much fruit (12.24). They must learn to live as Jesus lives.

It seems, therefore, to me, that resurrection in the Gospel of John has very little to do with what happens to us after we die, as if the preservation of the self was what the good news were all about. John is all about how we live now in a transformed humanity that has taken on the image and likeness of God. Resurrection in John is an incarnational sort of thing, putting flesh on God, a rebirth into the world, a commissioning, as Oliver Davies says in Transformation Theology (55), to serve and act here and now in relation to that specific time and place where a particular faithful people constitute the living body of Christ. Christ ‘R’ Us.

In her acclaimed book, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200-1335, Caroline Walker Byrnum traces the the ways in which the early Church and medieval Christianity turned the idea of resurrection from an image of transformation to one of nervous continuity. I think it is is critically important to recover the earlier sense of the experience of transformation, giving our people the genuine hope that comes with other-directed discipleship, rather than the false hope of holding on to what they have.

Good Friday A

John 18.1-19.42

I think the central motif of John’s Good Friday story is what Tillich would call the “courage to be”, seen in the ability of Jesus to say “I am” at the time of trial and condemnation.

“Whom do you seek?” Jesus asks the soldiers and police who come to arrest him (the question is fundamental to the journey of discipleship). They tell him, and he says, “I am he.” This interchange is repeated for emphasis (18.4-8). The trial itself revolves around his identity, and in John Jesus remains in control of the trial throughout. Jesus is confident and even assertive in his sense of identity. In the background, Peter denies who he is.

The strength of Jesus’ identity is of course something more than mere self-actualisation. The theme of individuation that runs throughout this gospel as the challenge to discipleship is at the same time a challenge to discover our deepest identity as God-bearers to the world. John’s Jesus may unashamedly identify himself as the revelation of the Father, but he expects the disciple’s life to do the same.

I find it useful, in this context, to look at the background of the “I am” sayings of John’s gospel in Exodus 3, where Yahweh identifies himself as “I am”. Clearly, as Jesus says, “I am the bread of life”, “I am the good shepherd,” or “I am the resurrection,” we are meant to recall this story about the divine name. In Exodus 3 God’s revelation of his name as “I am” is clearly contrasted to Moses’ lack of self-confidence: “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” (3.11). God will not deliver the Israelites independently of Moses. Moses must act with the assurance that God will be with him, as a divine presence. So in all continuing discipleship God is present. This is a fundamental theme in Johannine theology. It is not only explains Jesus. It explains Lazarus and the rest of us. The prologue’s proclamation that “The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us” (1.14) will be seen to apply to all believers. God dwells in the faithful, abides in them as the shekinah, God’s tabernacling presence in the people of Israel. The trial and condemnation of Jesus in the gospel of John is, in the last analysis, our story. We, too, are invited to say “I am”.

Maundy Thursday A

John 13.1-17, 31b-35, 1 Corinthians 11.23-32

Maundy Thursday, like Palm Sunday, begs dramatic re-enactment by the congregation. One can hardly imagine meeting for worship on this night without celebrating the Lord’s Supper. Here at City United Reformed Church we do so around a large table set with white linen, sharing a pot-luck supper by candle-light. The Sacrament is fully integrated into the meal and yet the gospel set for this service is the gospel of John (13. 1-35), which, glaringly, has no meal.

In the companion reading from 1 Corinthians 11.23-32 we get what we call “the words of institution”, a recollection of the words of Jesus spoken in the context of the continuing celebration of this meal fellowship in his name. “Do this remembering me,” he says. The absence of the meal in John is not just because John shifts the celebration of Passover from this night to the day of crucifixion, when the sacrificed paschal lamb coincides with the death of Jesus. We don’t have a meal in John because he wants to shift attention away from ritual action to the content of that ritual action— the invitation to live as Jesus has, as God-bearers to the world.

The reading for Maundy Thursday is nevertheless full of “do-this-remembering-me” commands. The foot-washing that was so shocking to the disciples is meant to illustrate a way of life that the disciples should continue (13.14). This is what you might call basic John. Those who do what Jesus does do what God does, so whoever receives those Jesus sends receive Jesus, and receive the one who sent him (13.20). This is the new commandment, that they should love one another as Jesus has loved them (13.34). Such discipleship embodying the presence of God in the world is what John means by the Pauline formula for the institution of the Lord’s Supper. It is not just a command to continue to celebrate a given ritual action; it is, more fundamentally, a command to live out what is beneath that ritual action— to live as Christ, to put flesh on God’s Word, to live as God’s dwelling place..

In John this story is framed by references to betrayal. When Martin Luther King, Jr., celebrated the Lord’s Supper the first Sunday evening of every month at Dexter Avenue Church in Montgomery, Alabama, he assumed the role of Jesus, seated in the company of deacons dressed in dark suits and wearing white gloves. He would read the words “And he said unto them, ‘One of you shall betray me,’ at which point the organ would cease its quiet, mood-setting background and the congregation would be plunged into a moment of awed silence before the pastor continued his recitation. (Lischer, The Preacher King, 80.)

Set in the darkness of night, the Dexter celebration emphasised the poignancy of a fellowship gathered in an atmosphere of betrayal and danger that becomes a metaphor not only of what the life of Jesus had been but of what the life of King himself would be. And yet the overriding theme here is one of grace, as it would be in King’s philosophy of non-violence. Bread is broken and shared with all, regardless. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness does not overcome it. Ritual becomes discipleship, or it is empty of meaning.

Paul calls the cup the new covenant in my blood. By the time Mark wrote the meal that comes in between the bread and the cup seems to have disappeared, so Jesus is made to say “This is my blood” to make a neater parallel with “This is by body”, a move that shifts the emphasis from the sharing of a cup to the cup’s contents. The shift allows Mark to add ‘. . . which is poured out for many’, a phrase which connects this action with Isaiah’s Suffering Servant, who “poured out himself to death “and was numbered among the transgressions” (Isaiah 53. 12).

Mark, incidentally, leaves out the command to do this “remembering me”, presumably sharing John’s concern for that repetition of ritual action that can easily become empty. Instead, Mark locates this phrase in the story of the woman who “pours” the costly ointment onto the head of Jesus, in effect pouring out herself, and Jesus comments, “wherever the good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her” (14.9).

The action of “pouring out” cannot be located in the person of Jesus alone, as in that mechanical, transactional, legalistic theory of blood atonement. This gesture is the fundamental act of all Christian discipleship. In Philippians 2 the Christian is called to “have the same mind that was in Christ Jesus”, who “emptied himself” (Philippians 2. 5,7). In John, at the death of Jesus, his side is pierced and blood and water flow out – not just symbols of the Church’s sacraments but references to the way the death of Jesus – his life poured out – continues to be acted out in a Church that has learned to love as he loved. Maundy Thursday, like Palm Sunday, begs dramatic re-enactment by the congregation, re-enactment that must not end in ritual but become a way of life performed in memory of him.

Palm Sunday A

The gospel lesson for this Sunday is Matthew 21.1-11. In The Last Week Marcus Borg and Dom Crossan say the Palm Sunday story is a piece of street theatre meant to contrast with a Roman military procession into Jerusalem. They say Pilate would have come into Jerusalem for Passover to keep a lid on things, and he would have come in with a typical display of Roman power. Jesus, in a street theatre reference to Zechariah 9, reminds the crowds of a king who comes into Jerusalem in humility, on a donkey, to banish war and bring peace. While in Mark the reference remains implicit, carried by the structure of the narrative, here in Matthew the reference is explicit. Matthew quotes Zechariah 9.9: “Tell the daughters of Zion, look, you king is coming to you, humble, and mounted on a colt, the foal of a donkey.”

I find the thought that Jesus is challenging what Borg and Crossan call the “domination system” compelling and preachabe. But the Zechariah story properly belongs to the Jewish festival of Sukkoth, in the autumn, not Passover. So I have always wondered if the Palm Sunday story might actually describe something that had happened half a year earlier. Was the timeline collapsed in order to heighten the dramatic tension of what, liturgically, we call “Holy Week”? Surely half a year would have given a more reasonable amount of time for the Galilean Jesus to develop a reputation in Jerusalem and get in trouble with the authorities.

Or what if the Palm Sunday story is simply Mark’s midrsh on Zechariah? What if the Palm Sunday story is Mark’s way of interpreting Zechariah’s prophetic, messianic hope by re-telling it in a narrative starring Jesus, in the same way that Mark’s crucifixion story is a midrash on Psalm 22, or in the same way that Mark’s baptism story is an interpretation of the Exodus story?

The Jewish practice of interpretating a verse by re-telling it in a different form was fundamental to its rhetorical culture. Nothing could be left alone. Everything had to be told twice. I love what Gerald Bruns says about the rabbinic passion for interpretation by re-telling:

The rabbis themselves…were never embarrassed by hermeneutics: “the rabbis said: Solomon had three thousand parables to illustrate each and every verse [of Scripture]; and a thousand and five interpretations for each and every parable”—which computes to a total of three million fifteen thousand interpretations for every scriptural verse. From a modern standpoint, which pictures a solitary reader isolated with the scriptural text and trying to divine an interpretation…this interpretive extravagance is outrageous; but the rabbis are not to be pictured this way. Their relationship to the text was always social and dialogical, and even when confined to the house of study (beit midrash) it was never merely formalist or analytical. They saw themselves in dialogue with each other and with generations of wise men extending back to Koheleth and Solomon (and even beyond to Moses and to God himself, who is frequently pictured as studying his own texts) and forward to the endless openings of the Scriptures upon new questions that are put to them. Gerald Bruns, ‘Midrash and Allegory: The Beginnings of Scriptural Interpretation,’ in The Literary Guide to the Bible, ed. Robert Alter and Frank Kermode (Fontana, 1987), 630.

You see this need to repeat and clarify in the most familiar texts, in Psalm 24, for instance, where everything needs to be said twice in order to clarify:

The earth is the LORD'S, and the fulness thereof;
the world, and they that dwell therein.
For he hath founded it upon the seas,
and established it upon the floods.
Who shall ascend into the hill of the LORD?
or who shall stand in his holy place?
He that hath clean hands, and a pure heart;
who hath not lifted up his soul unto vanity, nor sworn deceitfully.
He shall receive the blessing from the LORD,
and righteousness from the God of his salvation.

We get this in Zechariah. The king comes “mounted on a colt, the foal of a donkey”. And this leads to one of the most bizarre details of Matthew’s Palm Sunday story. Matthew, making explicit what was merely implicit in Mark, quotes Zecharaiah 9 and seems to take it literally:

"Go into the village ahead of you, and immediately you will find a donkey tied, and a colt with her; untie them and bring them to me. … This took place to fulfill what had been spoken through the prophet, saying, “Tell the daughter of Zion, Look, your king is coming to you, humble, and mounted on a donkey, and on a colt, the foal of a donkey." The disciples went and did as Jesus had directed them; they brought the donkey and the colt, and put their cloaks on them, and he sat on them. Matthew 21:2-7

Does Matthew imagine Jesus to be riding into Jerusalem straddling two beasts at once? Or is he deliberately throwing into the story an element impossible to take literally, in order to teach how to read it, not literally, but as a narrative whose function is to serve as an interpretation of Zechariah?

Can an obsession with what actually happened to the historical Jesus lead us to overlook how first century writers actually wrote and thought? The wealth of sociological and historical research over the last twenty or thirty years has added immeasurably to our understanding of the Christ event. But we can;t allow that to obscure what is happening from a literary point of view. It seems to me Matthew saw Mark’s story as the midrash it was (an interpretation in narrative of the Zechariah that helps us understand the Christ event) and wanted his readers to get the point. The point is proclamation, not history.

Interpretation is the key in another sense. Our response to the text is an interpretation. As the reformers said, Scripture doesn’t become the Word of God until it is preached, and even then not until it is lived out in the lives of the faithful (the end point of the interpretive process in praxis).

First of all, simply as a story, Palm Sunday begs “interpretation” in dramatic action. This Sunday is customarily played out in our churches with dramatic processions enacted by the congregation. At University Church in Chicago the whole congregation would make a public procession around the block on Palm Sunday. I remember one hazardous Palm Sunday when the sidewalks were covered with a thin hard sheet of ice. Back inside for worship, the dance choir pranced energetically down the central aisle shaking noisy palm branches which they then laid on the steps at the front of the sanctuary as they bowed in reverence at the conclusion of this entrance rite.

Here in the UK, in Birmingham, at Weoley Hill Church, the Scouts and the Guides and the Brownies and the Cubs would process in while the rest of us were singing loud hosannas. One of the Venture Scouts, with long auburn hair—the recognizable kitsch image of our Lord—would dress in a white alb and be carried on the shoulders of his fellows while all the rest of the young people in the parade waves palms. Here at City Church the young people come in waving branches while the choir sings a version of “76 Trombones” (“Jesus rode into town in a big parade”, see worship resources on the church website) then act out the story as it unfolds from Palm Sunday through the crucifixion and death of Jesus. (Unlike Mark, Matthew has the Palm Sunday procession flow into the rest of the story, highlighting the theme of confrontation in driving out the money changers from the temple.)

In Matthew’s version of the story, on Jesus entering Jerusalem, “the whole city was in turmoil, asking, "Who is this?" (21.10). In Birmingham, I would use a roving microphone to interview people in the crowd, asking what this hoopla was all about. Jack Thompson, one of the theologians teaching at West Hill College, was particularly hilarious in giving an absolutely opaque Christological discourse as a way of parodying the theological take on Jesus. My favourite interview of them all was with Chris Mayhew, who wore a donkey mask and spoke in a rough Kentish farm labourer’s accent to give the donkey’s eye view of the excitement. We were convinced that this is what the donkey would sound like, could he speak.

We did these interviews in order to convey the sense in Matthew’s version of the story that no one really knows what is going on. It’s like the parable of the final judgement, Matthew 25.31-46, in which no one knows who Jesus is when they see him. The crowd thinks it is all about triumph. What the Palm Sunday procession really stand in contrast to is the via dolorosa, the way of the cross. It does this in two ways. On the one hand, as a triumphal, messianic entry into Jerusalem it stands in contrast to the way of the cross as the way of defeat and shame. But on the other, it actually prefigures the cross to which it stands in contrast. It reveals, in the tension of Zechariah’s conflicting messianic images—the king who rides a donkey—the paradox of the cross as the real moment of triumph that re-interprets all messianic expectation. Insofar as Jesus, crucified in the company of the condemned (the three crosses make an image of a new community of solidarity and inclusion, or "at-one-ment"), is demonstrating unflinching fidelity here, fidelity to God and to neighbour, even at the moment of his suffering and death, the cross affirms the Palm Sunday celebration rather than contradicts it. This, of course, is the fundamental Christian paradox. As the reformers said, the kingdom of God is hidden under its contrary, the cross. Neither the people nor the disciples nor the authorities understand what is going on at Palm Sunday. The process of interpretation needs the cross, and what we might call the discipleship of the cross, to be complete. As the fidelity of the cross is lived out in the fidelity of the people, the stories of tradition have a chance to become the Word of God, not just proclaimed but understood and lived. The Palm Sunday story begs dramatic play, and more. The story calls us to "interpret" it by the way we live, in our own confrontation with the powers and principalities of our world. Without living through the whole story the fundamental mystery of Christianity is lost. Sadly, more often than not our congregations are like the crowds in the original story. They just don;t get it. All they want is Easter, so they never eally get what their faith has to offer.

In Matthew the procession reaches a triumphal climax in the dramatic conflict experienced at the temple. The procession begins at the Mount of Olives, which in Zechariah 14.4 is identified as the location for the final struggle of the day of the Lord. This eschatological dimension of the story is not to be missed. The coming of Jesus into Jerusalem is like the coming of the Son of Man. The stories of judgement and conflict that are part of the vision for the Day of the Lord are told here in the life of Jesus and in present-time, in the life of the believer. It is like the confrontation people feel on the path of conversion. There is confusion and disorientation. There is praise, but often for the wrong reason, and we won’t know the right reason until we see the story all the way to the end, and say Amen to it with our own lives.

“Hosanna” is a Hebrew word that means “deliver us!” or “save us!”. It’s the kind of word one shouts out loud or deep inside the soul when one becomes conscious that the way things are isn’t the way things ought to be. Deliver us from the domination system, Borg and Crossan would say. We want a messiah who will rescue us. It’s one of the stages on the pilgrimage to conversion. On Easter we shout something different: “Alleluia!”, another Hebrew word. This one means “praise the Lord!”. It’s the kind of thing we shout when we see that our salvation is tied to our discipleship, and the way we learn to empty ourselves, as Christ did, for others. Christ 'R' Us. On Easter, the baptized, those who have died and been reborn with Christ, shout “Alleluia!”

5 Lent A

The gospel lesson for the 5^th Sunday of Lent (John 11.1-45) illustrates every minister’s nightmare of being late for a funeral. I had a funeral myself yesterday as I write this, and all the night before I had tossed and turned with dreams about being late for it. Though the morning was filled with the usual pastoral crises and difficult logistics, through a grim determination practised in many years of ministry I managed to be ready on time. And then my driver failed to show on time, so I was late for the funeral anyway. The nephew of the deceased, reading from John 11 in the service, remarked how fitting it was that the reading should be about Jesus being late for a funeral.

Martha is disconsolate. Have you ever had to deal with grief like this that is at least in part a result of your own incompetence? Jesus mutters some palliative sop about the resurrection to deflect attention away from himself—that seems pretty much what the doctrine was invented to provide—and Martha replies by trotting out the standard theological take on the resurrection she had learned in Sunday school. Blah, blah, blah. It doesn’t help, she says. She doesn’t feel comforted. Her grief is raw.

Thus far the encounter between Jesus and Martha replicates a lot of the pastoral encounters with which we are too painfully familiar. Our incompetence leaves a cloud of unrequited grief in its wake. It happens to the best of us.

But fresh light shines into the scene when Jesus says, “I am the resurrection”. Two things are interesting here, both of them central to the Gospel of John. One is the boldness with which John has Jesus repeat the “I am” phrase he uses elsewhere (I am the bread, I am the light, etc.), betraying the depth to which God, whose name is “I am” (Exodus 3.14) is fully present in Jesus.

The second is what is often called John’s “realised eschatology”—resurrection is not just something for the end of history, as Martha had been taught, or even something that has to wait for after we die. It is a new way of life that Jesus lived, a way of life that embodies God. The Word became flesh in what Jesus did. We can at least say this confessionally, as proclamation, as John does. As Willi Marxsen says in The Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, Jesus was resurrected long before he died. The same is true for the ordinary believer who puts flesh on the Word of God through discipleship. Faithful discipleship makes what is hoped for a present reality. This is “realised eschatology” as the discipleship of the people of God. Those who take the wisdom of God (the logos, in Greek) as the shape of their own lives (John 1.12), as Jesus did, become, like him, sons (or daughters) of God, born not of a human father but with God as our father. Or, as Jesus put it to Nicodemus, we are born again. These images coalesce into one vision that interprets the meaning of resurrection in the Gospel of John. Resurrection is a way of life, life that abides in the presence of Christ as Christ abides in us in our discipleship, and so we abide in the presence of God. This is bodily resurrection; it is a matter of the whole person and what the whole person does in history. The gospel that defines eternal life as knowing God and knowing Jesus Christ (John 17.3) affirms that eternal life is realised in life as it is presently lived, the re-born life, the life of the resurrection. Life is not a waiting room. Life is not an ante-chamber to the real action. This is where th language of our funeral services needs to change. Life doesn’t start for us as our friends retreat to the bun fight after the service at the crematorium. William Stringfellow (Instead of Death) said nothing new happens when the undertaker calls that had not already happened on the day of his conversion.

The idea of “resurrection now” as an experienced reality for the born-again disciple interprets the Lazarus story. The Lazarus story never hit me so powerfully as when the gay comedian Peterson Toscano performed at our church here in Cardiff. His show had been built around his own closeted struggle as a conservative evangelical trying to be straight—he’d spent several years in a church-sponsored community dedicated to converting gay men to heterosexuality. During the course of the show, in a parody of preaching on this text from John that began with hilarity but gradually took on increasing gravity, Peterson, with spine-chilling drama, called to Lazarus in the voice of Jesus, “Come out!”. The command was spoken with electric energy, and, for some in the audience, as I learned in conversations in later months, life changing. This was, as H. A. Harrison called it, “true resurrection”. No wonder it is the resurrection of Lazarus that gets Jesus into trouble with the authorities in the Gospel of John. The mandarins of social stability want mechanical conformity and feel threatened by individuation and liberation. This is the conflict in our own world that the Gospel of John wants us to think about. The courage to say “I am” should have primary place in our discipleship and not be isolated in the person of Jesus. Tillich called it the courage to be. This is the kind of life-transformation that is the heart of Christianity. Paul said, if this never happens, then our faith is futile and our preaching is in vain. If it is only for the closeted life of social/political conformity that we live, then we are of all people most to be pitied (John 15.14, 19).

This sense of the Lazarus story opens up when we learn its origins in an early version of the Gospel of Mark. To help understand its place there I’d like to sketch a brief analysis of that gospel’s construction. Mark starts out with the baptism of Jesus, which is linked through various verbal connections to the crucifixion (the splitting open of the heavens and the splitting of the curtain; the declaration of the voice from heaven and the centurion that Jesus is the son of God), giving us something like Paul’s association of baptism with the experience of dying and rising with Christ. In a sense, Mark can be said to be about baptism from start to finish. At mid-point James and John ask Jesus if they can sit at his right and left when he comes into his glory (Mark 10.38-40a). Are they willing to be baptised with the baptism that Jesus himself will undergo? At the end of the day those who are found at the right and left of Jesus in his glory are the two thieves crucified alongside him.

The aspirations of James and John represent the aspirations of the reader, the catechumen for whom this text was written as a way of exploring the nature of the Christian life. The gospel is a manual for those who would be baptised. It tells their story. The figure of a young man is woven through the story who represents such readers. He is the rich young man whom Jesus loved who cannot give up his wealth to follow in the path of discipleship. He is the young man stripped naked the night Jesus is put on trial. Remember that the baptised would have been stripped naked before coming into the water at the time Mark’s gospel was written, and in baptism we are under trial just as Jesus was. The young man at the tomb dressed in white is the baptised, the only witness to the resurrection because he has died and been reborn with Christ.

Helmut Koester in Ancient Christian Gospels shows this story of Lazarus was originally part of this string of references to the “young man” theme in Mark. Clement of Alexandria had a copy of Mark which contained a story that became lost in the version we know. The story comes following Mark 10.34:

There was a certain woman whose brother had died….Jesus stretched out his hand and raised him, grasping his hand. And the young man, looking at Jesus, loved him….they went into the house of the young man, for he was rich.

The Lazarus story in John brings with it this fabric of meaning woven through the Gospel of Mark, a meaning that centres on the experience of conversion, transformation, baptism and resurrection. The Church, with its small-minded, nervous focus on nailing down what actually happened to Jesus on Easter, as in N. T. Wright’s big book, The Resurrection of the Son of God (the title betrays his attempt to distance himself from Marxsen’s book, The Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth), too often blocks the path of truly discerning this central Christian mystery as something that happens to us. For the orthodox, it’s all something that happened miraculously to Jesus, no thanks to Richard Dawkins. It has very little to do with the life of the disciple, unless the life of the disciple is limited to wonder at the working of big miracles and never grasps the invitation to live as Jesus lived and do what Jesus did, reborn to live, as he did, as God-bearers to the world. It’s a pity that at Easter the pressure of a stiff orthodoxy stands so strong that many preachers feel condemned in their efforts to proclaim this liberating gospel of resurrection that lives at the heart of Christian faith.