Agreement with Death Disannulled

From Wellington Cathedral of St Paul

Agreement with Death Disannulled 1 May 2011

The Revd Dr Raymond Pelly

• Psalm 30:1-5
• Daniel 6:1-23
• Mark 15:46-16:8

http://wellingtoncathedral.org.nz/index.php/Sermons

We have made a covenant with death, and with Sheol we have an agreement. Isaiah 28:15

The message of Easter is that this covenant with death - this complicity with death, dying, deadness, the pseudo-gods that rule so many lives - is broken, disannulled once & for all. ‘Your covenant with death will be annulled. Your agreement with Sheol will not stand’ (28:18). In its place, the freedom to live, to explore life in all its dimensions as gift of God: the new covenant of life that is bestowed on us, in-with-through Jesus.

I.

If we look at Mark’s account of the Resurrection we learn more of what this means.

First, we shouldn’t underestimate or trivialize what we’re up against. The story begins with Jesus dead & buried, a stone rolled against the door of the tomb (to keep it shut). Anyone who loses a loved one will know the overwhelming power of the onslaught of grief. They are no longer with us, no more communication possible. Just a void.

But it’s in this total breakdown that the breakthrough occurs. The void turns out to be an empty space in which something awesome happens. As the women enter the tomb – now mysteriously open – to embalm the body of Jesus, they are addressed by a figure in white, an angel or messenger of God – their vision - but a vision of something real. And the message, ‘He has been raised. He is not here’. Not a survival story or a near-death experience, but an act of God, the true & living God, the One who raises the dead. ‘He has been raised’ – by God.

Immediately new perspectives open up. ‘He is going ahead of you to Galilee’, the newly risen Christ who is always ahead of us: beyond our grief, beyond our skepticism, beyond our understanding, beyond all that would pressure us to lapse into faithlessness, hopelessness, lovelessness – the whole covenant with death.

Awesome. And their reaction? Terror, amazement, fear – all emotions that signal they are in the near presence of God – like the disciples on the Mount of Transfiguration when the cloud of the divine presence overshadowed them. ‘They were terrified’ (Mark 9:6-7). If death is not trivial, even less so is God, the Lord of the living and the dead. ‘Holy, holy, holy’, we might say.

II.

But because all of this is so far beyond us – as Aristotle put it, like trying to look directly at the sun with a bat’s eye – we have to find ways of looking obliquely or indirectly at the mystery of God acting to raise the dead – in this first, archetypal case, Jesus – into God’s own superabundant, overflowing life.

That’s where, I suggest, the reading from Daniel can help us. For in the story of Daniel in the Lions’ Den, there are many echoes – or better, pre-echoes – of the Resurrection of Jesus. Let’s look at some of them.

As with the Resurrection, the fundamental issue is Sovereignty. Who rules? is the question: the God of love & justice, of ever-new life; or the whole human complicity with death?

In the Daniel story we have the figure of Darius, who now, according to ‘the law of the Medes & Persians’, is to be worshipped as God. In Jesus’ day it was similar: the Roman Emperors were held to be divine, requiring total obedience & worship. But Daniel, like Jesus, refuses. Both knew that once some idol –whether it be King of Persia, the Emperor of the Roman Empire, a corrupt judiciary or set of religious practices – is de facto enthroned in place of God, then the result is bad news, what Isaiah calls ‘the covenant with death’. Death all round.

This comes out in other details of the story. Those locked in a power struggle with Daniel – basically over the rule of life or the rule of death – have to resort to trickery to get rid of him – just as the negative outcome of Jesus’ trial could only be engineered by bringing in false witnesses. We might compare too, the ineffectual sympathy of Darius for Daniel with Pontius Pilate’s washing his hands of Jesus. Neither potentate cared enough about life to intervene effectively on behalf of the innocent victim, even though it was in their power to do so. They too are complicit with death.

And it’s just this, the threat of death itself, which is the ultimate weapon in this confederacy of death, this covenant or complicity with death. In Daniel’s case, ‘Whoever prays to anyone, divine or human, except to you, O king, shall be thrown into a den of lions’ (Daniel 6:7).

At Jesus’ trial, Pilate says, ‘Do you not know that I have power to release you, and power to crucify you?’ (John 19:10). Death, then, is the supreme means of religious or social control. In this idolatrous covenant with death, death itself reigns supreme, is worshipped as all-powerful. This, as we know, has always been the underpinning of every dictatorship in history.

Nowadays it is no different –witness what is going on in the Middle East. If I have the power of death, threaten you with death, you will do what you’re told. If you don’t, face the consequences.

But what Daniel & Jesus have in common is that they don’t buy this. In fact they defy it. They are both people of faith. They are both grounded in the knowledge that all true life is the gift of God; that all human arrangements will one day fail or disappoint; may turn toxic or become demonic. Both were thoroughly grounded in the first commandment: ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind’ (Matthew 22:37). Their trust was in God. They knew that life is a perpetual exodus journey from death to life, from slavery to freedom. They would have prayed the beautiful prayer of Psalm 30:11-12, ‘You have turned my mourning into dancing; you have taken off my sackcloth and clothed me with joy, so that my soul may praise you and not be silent’.

In Daniel’s case, the lions, the ‘teeth’ of the threat of death, turn out to be paper tigers, pussycats. Or not quite. To understand what’s going on, come with me for a moment to Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Russia. In the Gulag Archipelago, he describes the kind of person who couldn’t be cracked under interrogation and torture. ‘What do you need to make you stronger than the interrogator and the whole trap? From the moment you go to prison you must put your cozy past firmly behind you … “From today on, my body is useless and alien to me. Only my spirit and my conscience remain precious and important to me.” Confronted with such a prisoner, the interrogator will tremble. Only the man who has renounced everything can win the victory.’

Here we have the moral & spiritual stuffing that make the Daniel stories – the Lions' Den & the Burning Fiery Furnace – so moving, so true to life. And Daniel, as has been the burden of this sermon, throws light on the terrible testing at the trial and cross of Jesus as he enters the Lions' Den of sin and evil; but also on the Burning Fiery Furnace of the Resurrection when, in the fire of God’s greater love, life and freedom and joy break through once and for all, never to be extinguished.

III.

For on that first Easter morning it was clear that something wonderful, awesome, glorious had happened. The reign of death had ended; and we know who did it, Jesus. It was all to do with life, with new and abundant life. We struggle to express it, yes. But just consider the implications of failing to grasp it: of slipping back into the old ways; of becoming biddable people whose master is everything but the living God. But if we are (or want to be) believers, we have this new and eternal covenant with life as gift, the gift of the very life of God. We enter this on Easter Day with Jesus – and of course, in every day.