When
it comes to resurrection scenarios, St. Matthew seems to have taken a page out
of the book of Cecile B. DeMille--maker of epic movies with religious themes of
my youth.
By
contrast, in St. Mark’s resurrection scenario, the stone is already out of the
way when the women arrive. A young man in white seated quietly inside the tomb
tells them Jesus is not there. The scene ends in dumbstruck silence with the
women running away, afraid to tell anyone what they had seen.
But
Matthew is all high drama. An angel in blazing white descends from heaven
before their very eyes, single-handedly rolls a mighty stone out of the way…
and triumphantly sits on it. The men on guard duty—not the women—the men… swoon at the sight.
Then
the angel makes his magnificent proclamation, the women turn to go—according to
Matthew, in fear and great joy… and suddenly… Jesus himself stands before them.
The women fall at his feet and worship him.
But
I left out a very important detail. Matthew puts his high drama in motion with
nothing less than… an earthquake.
Can
it escape our notice that just yesterday, at high noon, an earthquake
punctuated the last breath of Jesus the Christ… on a cross… in a place of death
called Golgotha?
Can
we forget that in 2015, almost 9,000 people died in an earthquake in Nepal?
That
in early March 2011, an earthquake in the Pacific sent a giant tsunami wave of
destruction crashing into Japanese shores, killing almost 16,000 people,
injuring more than 6,000 and leaving utter devastation in its wake?
Or
that one year earlier, an earthquake leveled the capital city of Haiti, killing
thousands and leaving millions homeless?
We
are all too familiar with earthquakes, and the human tragedy they cause. So
what in heaven’s name is one doing, here, right in the middle of our
resurrection story?
Nora
Gallagher is a novelist who has also written several books about her own
spiritual journey. One of them is called Practicing
Resurrection. It is an account of how the loss of a beloved brother throws
her life into a tailspin, and of her return from walking straight down a wrong
vocational path, dragging a failing marriage.
Gallagher’s
struggle back requires her to re-examine everything: her call, her work, her
marriage. It leads her finally to an exploration of nothing less than life
after death. She finds that “experiences of resurrection are not believing six impossible things
before breakfast.” Rather, she proposes, “Maybe resurrection, like everything
else, needs to be practiced.”
We
have all been there, in one way or another. Human existence is a series of
earthquakes, large and small. Some are beyond our control. I have never
experienced an earthquake of the natural kind, but I understand that little can
be more terrifying than to feel the very earth move under our feet. It is the
ultimate loss of control.
Other
earthquakes are of our very own making. We march resolutely into dead ends and
struggle to find a way back out again.
And
as Matthew illustrates by putting an earthquake smack dab in the middle of the
resurrection story, joyful events can also create upheaval in our lives. A baby
is born, and mom and dad must create a new marriage out of the ashes of the
honeymoon, a marriage in which gazing into each others’ eyes is replaced by advanced
skill in “keeping an eye on” 16 things at once, from the shrinking pile of clean
diapers to the toddler about to stick its finger in the puppy’s eye.
We
don’t have to be “control freaks” to long for some control, some ability to
maintain our balance as we face big challenges and small ones of daily life.
But we have so very little. Fr. Richard Rohr defines human suffering precisely
in these terms. “When are humans suffering?” he asks. “When they have no
control.”
It
often seems to me that it is precisely when we think we finally have it
together, that we are finally on top of our game, that life hands us the most
deadly, life-destroying blows. And we suffer.
Someone
we love dies. A spouse or lover leaves us. A friend betrays us. We are
downsized by our employer. Our company fails. An economic downturn takes much
of our nest egg. Our politics turn nasty. Our children and grandchildren are
sent half way around the world to fight a war that we are just not sure is worth
the sacrifice of young, beautiful lives.
We
aren’t in control, and much of the time it looks like God isn’t either.
But
God chose to become human, to suffer and die on a cross in order to rise again
in power over death. How do we understand that? As a one-time event? An
economic transaction in which Jesus “paid a price” to God.. or was it to the
devil? ..so that we can live happily ever after.. some day in some glorious
future?
That
kind of thinking certainly creeps into our religion, but it is wrong-headed. It
diminishes the meaning of resurrection by making it a mechanical transaction
trapped in history, and our lives something to be “gotten through” for some
period of time while we await the coming of Glory.
As
Fr. Rohr observes, it makes our religion a mere “evacuation plan for the next
world.”
The
fundamental story of our faith is that something always must die before
something new, better, more beautiful can be born. And the thing that must die
is typically our own beloved ego.
Earthquakes
are destructive, but the human ego even more so. It is the human ego that leads
us to destroy others in myriad ways, physically and emotionally, individually
and as nations, with our need to be right, to save face, to feel secure, to divide
the world into black and white, good and evil, us vs. them… to take sides and
to believe that God is on ours.
About
two weeks ago, the ULM Canterbury group I serve spent some time together
examining our baptismal covenant—the one we are all about to witness and renew.
We had no trouble with the first three promises. You know: Go to church. Confess
your sins. Be a good example.
The
last two promises we make—the ones about seeing Christ in all persons, seeking
justice and respecting the dignity of every human being led us straight into a
discussion of refugees from war-torn countries and our response to them.
I
listened in awe as those young people spoke of their struggle to find balance
between the heartbreak they feel for the people and their fear of consequences
of people of different beliefs and values living among us. They want to be like
Jesus, but the scary political rhetoric of the day plays on their very human
fears. And so they struggle.
In
Matthew’s resurrection story, the women fall down and worship Jesus. But in
fact Jesus never once asked us to worship him. What he asks is that we follow him. And to follow Jesus the
Christ, we must practice dying so that we can practice resurrection.
To
let go of our need to be right, our need to be in control, to be safe and
secure… not only feels like dying, but is a form of dying. And if we can do
that, if we can follow Christ through the suffering and through the ashes of
our hurts and losses and failures, if we can accept the healing that the
infinite love of the cross offers us, the earthquakes of our lives become the very
path to living our faith and sharing God’s love with a hurting world, which is
to say, the very path to practicing
resurrection.
In the name of God, Father, Son and Holy
Spirit, AMEN.
