This Joyful Uncertainty
When you look at the gospel accounts of the Resurrection, at the details themselves, it seems to me there are several implications.
The first is that we have to live with uncertainty and ambiguity.
I could ask you, how many of the gospels describe the Resurrection itself, whatever really happened in that moment, inside the tomb, and there could be only one right answer. None.
The words are the words. They only say what they say.
I don’t mean that Jesus didn’t rise from the dead. I just mean that the Resurrection itself, as an act, is never described. We only get there after the fact. All we see is the empty tomb, the bare, hewn rock, the great stone rolled away, and we only see it from the outside, through the eyes of the dear, believing women, who are both astonished and afraid.
“He is not here,” the angels say.
Those moments Jesus comes as a gardener, a traveler, a man broiling fish, all those happen later and happen fast. Jesus disappears. At first we’re not sure who he is. We never are.
Most of the mystics, most of us ordinary people who pray, we never actually experience Jesus in the flesh, in person. The word many of the mystics use is a feeling of “presence.” Or often the image is of something like a feeling of “warmth,” or a “glow.” Is this Christ? This intuition? This sudden thought? Is this the Risen Lord?
Yes. No. Yes.
In a way everything has changed because of the Resurrection and in a way nothing has. The disciples still suffer and die—that’s the story of Acts. There are still wars and sadness and grief.
For us, too–and we just have to live with that.
The second implication, I think, is that there’s something greater than what we see, a “kingdom stronger than war and terror,” in the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a life beyond this life. Christ in the Resurrection gives us a glimpse of a love and joy vaster than the stars, vaster than the galaxies, a love that will never die, that will over countless billions of years unfold, will tend always towards love and will in the end find fulfillment in Christ, in the Omega—and we are caught up in that, we are a part of that evolution, we are a part of what so far 14.7 billion years have been leading up to.
Go out and look up at the stars. Feel that sense we always have of being both overwhelmed and exalted, flattened and lifted up.
The light of the stars has been reaching us forever, the universe is vast beyond imagining, but this is a moment and we are in it. We are aware of it. We are standing by the mailbox at the top of the driveway. It’s very early, still dark. We smell the earth, the leaves.
Stars die and give rise to new stars. There are great explosions, and all those atoms are scattered across space.
Maybe we feel this affinity for the stars because we are made of them. They are our mothers and fathers. Our brothers and sisters.
Astronomically speaking, as a friend puts it, we are insignificant. But astronomically speaking, we are the astronomers.
The third implication is that here and now and every day we glimpse the Resurrection—just glimpses, just flashes, but they are everywhere, and they are glimpses of something. It’s good news/bad news. The bad news: the triumph and creativity of God aren’t obvious and beyond doubt. The good news: the triumph is all around us in tiny pieces, there are lovely hints and echoes and anticipations of this triumph in every beautiful thing we see, in the spring, in the leafing out of the trees. In laughter. In a loving touch.
“God is beyond in the midst of our life,” Bonhoeffer wrote in prison a year before he was hung by the Nazis. That’s the paradox: “beyond” and “in the midst.”
As my friend the poet Lex Runciman puts it:
We have the word for it,
here and after: two words, one idea.
“The politics of illusion, of death’s money, possess us,” Wendell Berry says in one of his Sabbath poems.
In our current context, it’s not hard to understand what that means. It has a special resonance for us now.
But then Berry goes on, alluding to the story in John of Mary Magdalene outside the tomb on Easter morning.
The politics of illusion, of death’s money,
possess us. This is the Hell, this
the nightmare into which Christ descended
from the cross, from which also he woke
and rose, striding godly forth, so free
that He appeared to Mary Magdalene
to be only the gardener walking about
in the new day, among the flowers.
This is the Good News, that every day we glimpse the gardener, in all the ordinary people we meet. This is the Good News, that we are the gardeners, only the gardeners, and that through grace we too can rise, we too can be free, we too can walk among the flowers in the light of day.
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In the Passion narrative in John, the one we read on Good Friday, Pilate asks the people, “do you want me to crucify your king?”
And they answer: “We have no king but Caesar.”
We answer–the congregation answers.
For a moment it’s as if the president is the only the king, the congress, the judges, all the rulers of the world: they are the only reality, the reality of the country, the state, the reality of this life on earth. For a moment we lose sight of the greater reality, the greatest reality, the reality of God, whose love endures forever.
That’s when we panic. That’s when we are afraid. That’s when we think there’s no hope: when we let our Caesars be our only kings.
But they’re not.
However fleetingly we glimpse him, however subtle he is, however hidden in our own lives, the Lord Jesus, Our Lord Jesus Christ, in his great tenderness and compassion, is the reality that endures. Forever.
And when we know that, when we choose to believe that, when we hang on to that conviction, however pressing the problems of the world, we are free.
“We shall not seek to escape,” Teilhard de Chardin says, “this joyful uncertainty.”