Resurrection and Torture

by Debra Dean Murphy
Luke 24:36b-48
(Third Sunday of Easter)

"Torture may be considered a kind of perverse liturgy, for in torture the body of the victim is the ritual site where the state's power is manifested in its most awesome form." - William T. Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist

The government memos released last week, detailing acts of torture carried out by C.I.A. operatives in the Bush administration, make for interesting reading in light of the gospel narratives' about Jesus' post-resurrection appearances to his disciples. That human bodies matter is a central truth of the Easter proclamation.

But this is less than obvious in an age when Christians more often associate Easter's meaning with "the immortality of the soul" than with "the resurrection of the body." When we spiritualize Easter—when we imagine disembodied souls reuniting with loved ones in heaven—we miss this point about bodies and we also, as Tom Wright has observed, “cut the nerve of the social, cultural and political critique.”

Resurrection is about the undoing of death and of all our death-dealing ways. But if our deepest Easter metaphors have mostly to do with butterflies, we will miss this. The undoing of death that Easter accomplishes creates a people who do not flinch from the tortured body of Jesus, but who also know that the marks of violence carried in his broken body are now signs by which we claim resurrection as a counter politics to state-sponsored violence that denies the dignity of any human body anywhere.

We know this most fully in the Eucharist. When we consume Christ’s broken body we become it. We enact a politics—a way of being in the world—rooted in witness, in suffering. Eating and drinking at the Lord’s Table become acts of resistance against any false power that would diminish the humanity of other eating and drinking bodies.

Where torture as liturgy is a kind of “scripting of bodies into a drama of fear” (Cavanaugh), the liturgy of the Table is the creation of a body which lives by hope and loves by a power not of its own making.

When Jesus stands among the disciples and declares peace to them (Luke 24:36b), he gives voice to what his resurrection has already accomplished: the end of violence and the undoing of death. And when he goes on to talk about flesh and bones, hands and feet, and to eat a piece of broiled fish, we see how we can never again talk about resurrection apart from bodies—our own; the violated bodies of torture victims; Jesus’ raised body; and his body, the church—sign, servant, and foretaste of the peace he has made possible.

And we give thanks that we “are witnesses of these things” (24:48).

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World Out of Balance

by Brian Volck
“’Jesus was the only One that ever raised the dead.’ The Misfit continued, ‘and He shouldn’t have done it. He thrown everything off balance.’” (Flannery O’Connor, "A Good Man is Hard to Find")

I don’t understand Easter. I think I stand on firm theological ground saying this. Mysteries are necessarily beyond comprehension, a scandal and embarrassment in a scientific age. It’s far more satisfying to make of mystery a problem to be solved. In “mystery” novels, for instance, a criminal death is explained, ending (generally) with the restoration of justice and order, or at least the order we’ve come to expect in this world, from the things we rely on. Mercy and transformation, which might throw everything off balance, must wait for another day.

Attempts to smooth over the mystery of the Three Days have intellectual and emotional appeal. Liberal Protestantism and the Jesus Seminar restore balance by spiritualizing Easter. “Jesus rose in the disciples’ hearts,” we’re reassured, though his corpse, like any other, rots in the tomb. Orderly minds reject a God who breaks the rules.

Gnosticism (in both paleo- and neo- forms) and Islam keep Jesus (Isa in the Quran) and death at a safe distance. Balance is restored by having him merely appear to die or by finding a lookalike to take the fall for him. Furthermore – and even more decisively – the messiness of Incarnation is done away with, leaving Divinity unstained by impermanent matter.

Many conventional Christians habitually stress one aspect of the passion, death and resurrection (usually the last) to the near exclusion of the remainder. “Yeah, he died,” we say, “but, being God, he knew he’d triumph in the end, which is what happened – and pretty quickly, too – so we can all get on with enjoying our normal lives.”

New Testament accounts, however, refuse such comforts. Jesus knows full well the cost of his revelatory and saving mission. He offends too many to live. With scientific precision, the Imperial authorities torture, humiliate and kill him, understandably taking the Galilean peasant for a petty insurrectionist, a threat to public order. It’s for law and order matters just like this that Pilate’s in town for the holidays.

While the four gospel passion accounts vary in detail and tone (Mark’s isolated and troubled Jesus contrasts with John’s serene king, for example), the physicality and horror of crucifixion is inescapably emphasized. Jesus is beaten, scourged, nailed, and pierced. He bleeds, stumbles, speaks, thirsts, and wails. If this Messiah is playacting, it’s one heck of a show, completely without Jewish precedent, and startlingly unlike pagan deicide myths.

And he dies. Like Marley’s death in “A Christmas Carol,” “There is no doubt whatever about that.” Mark’s Pilate confirms the rumor with the centurion while John’s Pilate reassures himself through more efficient means. There’s no need to break his legs so he suffocates on the cross from his own weight. Friends come, take down the dead body and lay the God of the Living’s corpse in a, specific, identifiable tomb.

There it lies on the Sabbath, the day God rested: “the Word,” in Alan Lewis’ phrase, “Incarnate and Interred.” Other accounts (1 Peter 3:19-20 and 4:6; Eph 4:8-10; and perhaps Acts 2:27, 31) tell of Christ preaching to the dead, the “harrowing of hell” (“harrow” means to pillage or plunder; it also names a tool used to turn up and smooth hard soil before planting). The Apostles’ Creed says, “he descended into hell,” and Orthodox Pascha icons typically portray Christ leading Adam, Eve and all the righteous to freedom through the trampled gates of hell. God Incarnate upsets the entire cosmos, assuming even the most alienated extremity of our humanity in order to redeem it.

On Sunday, the tomb is found empty (“He is not here.”), not a proof of the resurrection so much as a necessary gesture towards it (“Why do you look for the living among the dead?”), a push into an encounter with the truly risen Lord. If Mark’s gospel truly ends with 16:8, the rest really is left to us to discover. John and the others, however, manifest the tangible reality of resurrection. The Risen Jesus speaks, breathes, eats, and tells friends to touch his wounds, His resurrected body at once radiant and torn.

One thing’s painfully clear: none of the disciples expected or even imagined the resurrection. Nothing in their experience prepared them for a world so out of balance, so beyond the familiar. An encounter with the empty tomb and Risen Lord disrupts everything: one’s reading of Torah and the prophets, the way one lives under Imperial occupation, whom one eats and associates with, the way in which one worships and praises God, and so on. The gospels themselves narrate Jesus’ earthly life re-imaged through the lens of the Three Days. Absolutely everything is reassessed. Justice and mercy kiss, order dissolves into transformation, and mystery invites us to explore its bottomless depths.

This account of the passion, death and resurrection of the Lord sets Christians apart, not by making them more special, more deserving or even, perhaps, closer to God than others. It does so by inviting us into this unique story, to pick up our own cross, follow Him, and be transformed through obedience to the Father and by the power of the Holy Spirit.

How will you consent to Easter’s unbalancing transformation of your life? Of our shared life in Christ?

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Spoilin’ for a Fight

by Joel Shuman
Mark 11:1-11 (John 12:12-16); Psalm 118 (Palm Sunday/Liturgy of the Palms)

In her wonderful autobiography An American Childhood, Annie Dillard fondly recalls her Sunday School days in her parents’ mainline Protestant church. She notes of her introduction to the Bible, “The Bible’s was an unlikely, movie-set world alongside our world. Light-shot and translucent in the pallid Sunday-school watercolors on the walls, stormy and opaque in the dense and staggering texts they read us placidly, week after week, this world interleaved our waking world like a dream.”

Although my first memories of church are of a one-room frame building at the foot of a West Virginia hollow a mile from the house where I grew up, Dillard’s narrative resonates with me. For the longest time the way I read the stories of Jesus, including his final, “triumphal” entry into Jerusalem, was shaped, if not determined, by the Sunday-School images of my childhood and early adolescence; Jesus was a kind, quiet, and exceedingly humble man who rode into town on a colt – perhaps so as not to appear too intrusive. He loved children and animals, and almost everyone loved him. But he was grossly misunderstood and ended up being crucified by some bad men who felt threatened by him.

I was twenty-one and a good six months into my first “serious” attempt at Christian discipleship before it occurred to me that there might be more to Jesus than the teachers and preachers of my childhood let on. One afternoon I saw footage on the news of a Mennonite man, younger than I was, who was on trial in Federal Court for refusing to register for the draft. He was immovable, and he attributed his position to Jesus.

Hearing that young man speak that afternoon summarily disassembled whatever theological assumptions I had managed to cobble together to that point. I started learning to read the Bible in a completely different way, and I met a whole different Jesus, whom I am still trying to understand.

When Jesus rode into Jerusalem that afternoon on the back of a colt, he was, quite literally, looking for trouble. At a time when Jerusalem was full of Jewish pilgrims and Roman soldiers, when political tensions and the potential for a popular uprising were both swollen by circumstance, Jesus enacted messianic prophecy, proclaiming to anyone who cared to hear that God’s messiah was entering the city. The people who threw down their cloaks and the branches from nearby trees understood and became part of the unfolding drama, chanting the Psalm (118) that says “Save us, we beseech you, O LORD! O LORD, we beseech you, give us success! / Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the LORD. We bless you from the house of the LORD.”

We know the rest of the story. We know Jesus spent the week in the Temple courts, agitating and teaching, proclaiming the Gospel of the Kingdom and inviting all hearers to participate in that kingdom by following him. We know he got the fight he was looking for. And we know things did not go well for him.

It is always tempting at this point to rush headlong toward the resurrection, to say “Yes, Jesus was arrested and beaten and eventually killed, but God raised him from the dead and it’s all OK.” And of course, our haste is understandable. The cross is not exactly a pleasant thing to contemplate. But Jesus challenges us to wait a minute, to take time to consider the days leading to his arrest and crucifixion. He reminds us that his death was no accident, but rather something provoked by his faithful embodiment of the Gospel. He reminds us that the Kingdom entered history not only in his resurrection, but also as he remained faithful even as he was arrested and lied about and beaten and crucified. He invites us this week to join him as he enters Jerusalem, preparing once again to empty himself, and in so doing making present the peaceable Kingdom of God.

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This Year in Jerusalem!

by Kyle Childress
I’m back from the Holy Land; tired and exhausted yet inspired, challenged, and eager to share the stories with you. My experience of pilgrimage to the Holy Land was almost overwhelming. Every day, everywhere we went, there were biblical sites, holy sites, and historical sites, piled upon one another and impossible to see them all.

Galilee was beautiful. We were there during the rainy season and everything was green (green by Galilean standards). Standing on the top of the Cliffs of Arbela overlooking the western edge of the Sea of Galilee (which is no more than a modest-sized lake) one can see the very route from Nazareth to the Sea of Galilee that Jesus walked. Furthermore, clustered along the lake’s coastline, all within view because they are no more than a few miles from one another are the remains of the villages of Magdala (the home place of Mary Magdalene) and Capernaum. Beyond that, up where the Jordan River runs into the Sea of Galilee, is Bethsaida. All of these villages are easily within walking distances of one another and most all of Jesus’ Galilean ministry happened within these few miles.

Besides how close everything is – it is a very small country – I was struck by how hilly it is. Nothing is built on flat ground; even Jerusalem is built upon a series of hills. Those Galilean villages, so close as the crow flies, are separated by hill after hill. It made we wonder if Jesus walked on the water because it was the only flat and direct way to get somewhere.

We spent a week in Galilee, each morning taking bus rides to different sites and each afternoon we were free to explore more sites or to rest and reflect, pray and write in our journals. The second week we stayed in Jerusalem in a hotel across the street from the wall of the Old City. Outside the city wall, Jerusalem is a bustling modern city. Inside the old walls it is an ancient city with narrow streets made for walking, crowded with tiny shops selling everything imaginable to tourists and pilgrims, the shop owners all yelling, “Come into my shop!” “Very cheap!” and, “This rug is $80 but for you, my friend, I sell it for $40.”

We visited the holiest shrines in Christendom: the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem (inside are the traditional sites of both the crucifixion and the empty tomb of the resurrection). We viewed Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives and walked across the Kidron Valley, through the Garden of Gethsemane, and the Via Dolorosa (the way of suffering). We saw Nazareth up in Galilee and the Mountain of Temptation down near the Dead Sea where Jesus fasted for forty days and was tempted (there’s a restaurant for tourists built on the traditional site of Jesus’ fasting!).

But the highlights for me, without a doubt, were the conversations with Palestinian Christians who are seeking to be faithful to Jesus of Nazareth and his Way of Peace, in face of powerful oppression, violence, and injustice. For example, I visited with Rev. Mitri Raheb, pastor the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church in Bethlehem about the ministries of education and empowerment for the Palestinian people. Mitri said there were five things about this Holy Land we needed to know:

(1) There’s too much “peace-talking” and not enough “peace-making.” Like Jeremiah, there is talk of “peace, peace but there is no peace.”

(2) There’s too much politics and not enough care for the polis (the cities where the people live). He said that Condoleeza Rice visited Israel and Palestine 28 times and not one checkpoint was moved.

(3) There’s too much religion and not enough spirituality and real faith.

(4) There’s too much humanitarian aid (it tends to go to agencies and organizations and the Israeli government) and not enough empowerment of the people.

(5) There’s too much “pess-optimism” and not enough biblical hope. “Pess-optimism” is the back and forth between how people feel about the situation in the Middle East. It is up and down, back and forth. But biblical hope is more solid, foundational and leads to the transformation of people from spectators to participants.

I discovered much of the same on a free day visit to the village of Ibillin in Galilee and the home of the Mars Elias School and the work of Archbishop Elias Chacour, whom many consider a modern-day Martin Luther King in Israel. Father Chacour, whom I had the great honor to meet, is a Palestinian Christian who witnessed as a boy his childhood home and village bulldozed by Israel. Nevertheless, he has spent his life and ministry working for the reconciliation of Jews, Muslims, and Christians. His school has Christian children and Muslim children learning how to respect one another. Jewish children are welcome but none come. The Israelis are deeply suspicious of all the school does and what Father Chacour does, although the school does have Jewish teachers along with Muslim and Christian teachers.

A Mennonite friend of mine and I went by car over to the village and toured the school and church. A young Mennonite woman intern from the U. S. greeted us. I got out of the car and she hugged my neck, telling me that she graduated from Elkhart Seminary last May when I gave the commencement address. She and a Palestinian Christian man, who is active in the church and is in charge of construction and maintenance at the church and school, gave us a tour. At one point, we paused in the beautiful Melkite Catholic Church (Roman Catholic but Greek Orthodox in its liturgy, doctrine, and tradition) and he asked me to stand in the back to hear the acoustics. Standing in front of the iconostasis (the screen between the altar and the nave) he began to sing and chant the ancient liturgy. I heard those old, old words, from the back, surrounded by icons of biblical heroes as well as contemporary ones like Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, and Archbishop Oscar Romero, and I was mindful of the witness of these Palestinian Christians who at great sacrifice and risk pointed to Christ. And I knew that I was near Jesus.

It was among those Christians where I found the holy land. Or as Father Elias Chacour says, “It is not the ancient stones and shrines which make this land holy but the living stones of Palestinians and Jews who sanctify this land by what they do to make God present.

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Flunking Lent

by Debra Dean Murphy
Jeremiah 31:31-34; Psalm 51:1-12; John 12:20-33 (Fifth Sunday in Lent)

"I have flunked Lent. I flunk it every year."

Fleming Rutledge writes these words in one of her many fine Holy Week sermons. But they're my words, too, this week, and perhaps yours also. We've flunked Lent. We always do.

But this is not the bad news it may at first appear to be.

When we set out on Ash Wednesday every year to observe a holy Lent, we pray Psalm 51 together, asking for mercy and cleansing, for wisdom, for an erasing of the record that stands against us—a blotting out of our iniquities. We pray that God will "create in us a clean heart and put a new and right spirit within us."

And then we often act as if we must accomplish these things ourselves. We embrace Lenten disciplines—a good thing—but we easily mistake them for what they are not: self-improvement programs meant to make us better (thinner, smarter, nicer) people. We come dangerously close to narcissism, shifting our gaze from Christ and our neighbor in need to ourselves and our trivial preoccupations.

And so this week, as Lent is rounding the homestretch, we return to Psalm 51—back to where we began. We re-assume the posture of the penitent one who knows she cannot do the work of transformation by her own power, who can only cry out from the depths: "Do not cast me away from your presence, and do not take your holy spirit from me."

In their own way, each of the appointed texts for the fifth Sunday in Lent reminds us that the work of transformation is God's and not ours. In Jeremiah, Yahweh dreams of a time when the people of Israel will live by the law of love he inscribes on their hearts—when they will live and love intuitively, without striving, with effortless joy, deep in the heart of God.

In the gospel lesson, after Jesus struggles momentarily with his destiny (this is John's gospel, after all; no prolonged agony here), he declares firmly that when he is lifted up from the earth, he will draw all people to himself. God, in and through the cross and resurrection, will do the saving. Our task, to borrow a line from Marilynne Robinson's beautiful novel, Gilead, is to "put ourselves in the way of the gift"—to be still long enough, to pay attention carefully enough so as to avail ourselves of the Spirit's power to reform, conform, transform.

In another of her Holy Week sermons Rutledge relates this story:

"During the Persian Gulf War, one of the New Yorker writers was reminded of an incident described by George Orwell during the Spanish Civil War. Orwell wrote from the front lines that he saw a man from the opposing, Fascist forces jump out of the trench and run along the parapet in full view, presumably carrying a message to an officer. He had nothing on but a pair of ill-fitting trousers, which he held up with one hand as he ran. Orwell wrote, 'I refrained from shooting him . . . I had come here to shoot at "fascists," but a man who is holding up his trousers isn't a "fascist," he is visibly a fellow-creature, similar to yourself and you don't feel like shooting him.'"

"When God looks at us," Rutledge goes on to say, "he does not see titles, bank accounts, club memberships, vacation homes, net worth. He sees frail, vulnerable creatures trying to cover up our spiritual nakedness. When Jesus came down from heaven to live among us, he lived among us at that level. The Son of God gave up all his divine prerogatives and came into the world to be a fellow-creature with us in our deepest need. We were God's enemies, deserving of death; but he looked on us trying to hold up our trousers with one hand and declared that we were not enemies but friends."

“Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” (John 12:24). Leave it to John’s gospel to interpret Jesus’ death liturgically, sacramentally—to see that the gift of Christ’s body on the cross and the gift of Christ’s body in the Eucharist are the same gratuitous, divine self-giving that makes friendship with God possible. “When I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all people to myself” (John 12:32). When the gift of bread, made from the wheat that falls to the earth, is lifted up at the Lord’s Table, it draws us together in friendship and love, in unity and hope. This is not our doing. We don’t make Eucharist—Eucharist makes us.

We've flunked Lent. But it turns out that in not making the grade, we are now free to see our failure for what it is: the freedom to give up the illusion that we are in control; to make visible our vulnerability as pilgrims on the Lenten journey toward friendship with God; and to learn what it means to live and love intuitively, without striving, with effortless joy, deep in the heart of God.

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For God So Loved the World

by Debra Dean Murphy
Numbers 21:4-9; John 3:13-21
(Fourth Sunday in Lent)

With a group of friends, I'm reading a new book entitled Why Go to Church? The Drama of the Eucharist. Written by a Roman Catholic priest--Dominican and Englishman Timothy Radcliffe--and commissioned by the Archbishop of Canterbury as his Lent Book for 2009, this text is interesting reading for us American Methodists in the suburban south.

In a chapter on preaching (the book takes in the whole of Word and Table), Radcliffe warns against taming the Bible's strangeness in the Sunday sermon. "The beauty of the Bible," he says, "is that it is not clear, simple and unambiguous. Its words are puzzling, intriguing and slippery."

He could have been talking about the appointed texts for this week, especially the Revised Common Lectionary's appointed reading from Numbers (Catholics read from 2 Chronicles on Sunday). The account of the plague of snakes and the serpent on a stick in chapter 21 is puzzling, for sure. (Let's face it, it's plain weird). It has perplexed Jewish and Christian interpreters for centuries, and no single, definitive interpretation has won the day.

The Numbers passage is paired with the gospel text because John mentions the strange, puzzling incident: "Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life" (John 3:14-15).

And here's where the text gets all tame again. These words from John are so familiar, perhaps especially so in the revivalist culture of southern Protestantism, that we assume that everything in this text is "clear, simple, and unambiguous."

Isolated from all that precedes and follows it, John 3:16 has become the gospel distilled to soundbyte, to manageable bumper-sticker slogan--the whole truth and nothing but the truth, all you need to know to be a Christian. Believe in Jesus. Accept him into your heart. (The phraseology, interestingly, is found no where in the Bible).

As another great churchman, Peter Storey, has put it: "Some tell us that following Jesus is a simple matter of inviting him into our hearts. But when we do that, Jesus always asks, 'May I bring my friends?' And when we look at them we see that they are not the kind of company we like to keep. The friends of Jesus are the outcasts, the marginalized, the poor, the homeless, the rejected--the lepers of life. We hesitate and ask, 'Jesus, must we really have them too?' Jesus replies, 'Love me, love my friends!'"

John's gospel knows something about friendship. And it knows something of friendship's connection to "belief" (a word that appears five times in these eight verses from John 3). "Belief," says Radcliffe, "is the beginning of friendship with God." It isn't mere intellectual assent to doctrinal talking points. It isn't "head knowledge" that culminates in "heart knowledge" (accepting Jesus).

We are friends with God, according to Radcliffe, not because we think or believe certain things about God but because we see things with God--through God's eyes, as it were. Learning to believe in God is learning to see all things in the way God sees them: infinitely worthy of our understanding, interest, and care. It is to love the world as God so loved the world.

Jesus did not come to tell us about friendship with God. He is God's friendship with us made flesh and blood. Of course, they killed him for this. "People loved darkness rather than light," observes John. But the good news we are making our way towards this Lent is that the light has overcome the darkness, and God has saved us for friendship with himself.

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