RESURRECTION (1) Perception/Recognition & (2) On-going

From Wellington Cathedral of St Paul

Becoming a DIY Believer / 5

RESURRECTION

(1) Perception/Recognition & (2) On-going

• Do you find that most people don’t know what they really live by? This ‘perturbatio animorum’ spreads amazingly. Dietrich Bonhoeffer

• It’s from the resurrection of Christ that a new and purifying wind can blow through our present world. Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

• ’The theological theme “Who is Christ for us today?” and the Christological answer “Jesus, the man for others” are expressed in three different forms in Bonhoeffer’s life. First, it was the cause of peace against nationalistic militarism; then, the fight against anti-Semitic racism; finally, the “being below” of the Church’. Ebehard Bethge, Bonheoffer’s friend & biographer.

Recap ‘The only answer [to meaningless suffering], as Job found out (esp. 38:1; 42:5), is in encounter with the living God. We might say in effect to Christ, the crucified one, and God’s representative in our human condition, “Here I am, bereft of beloved children, divorced, unemployed, hurt, angry and deeply resentful that life has ‘done me over’ in this way. Have you anything to say?” Initially there is a prolonged silence in which we are forced to sort out whether we believe in principle that any answer will come from this quarter and, more particularly, what our question really is, to get it clear: what in our tragedy was our fault and what wasn’t. Then, at a moment not of our choosing, we might hear something like this. “Here I am, more bereft than you will ever be, more of a failure, more dysfunctional, more hurt at a vast and unjustified accumulation of rejections, more in pain over what it has been given to me to be and do. I accept and understand your experience. Do you want to join me in mine?’ To answer ‘yes’ however stammeringly is to make the act of faith, to enter that dimension of the Passion of Christ that we call Resurrection, to penetrate (or receive) those deeper levels of existence that are not concerned with explanations but with the gut willingness to grab hold of the raw potential for life that is there for us and give it ethical profile’. Touched by the Wounds, p.78

Read this carefully. Which of the models of Atonement – victory, exchange, example – make best sense of the above? Or all three?

1. RESURRECTION, Perceived, Recognized.

If we want to ‘get into’ resurrection belief, the method largely adopted by the New Testament is to tell a story – a story that conveys ‘the’ story. These stories in the Gospels are told so that we ‘get the message’. Whether it happened exactly as narrated is a secondary question that we can pursue. But this must not detract from the main (or central) point. So now I propose to tell one of the prime resurrection stories in John’s Gospel – Mary’s encounter with Jesus in the Garden (John 20:11-18) – and show how it works

I / Turning & Ascending

Basic to the story of Mary Magdelene’s encounter with the risen Jesus are the motifs of turning & ascending. ‘Ascending’ because Jesus, the crucified Jesus, is now ascending (or returning) to God,

I am ascending to my Father & your Father, to my God & your God [1:17];

& ‘turning’ because as Mary turns towards this Christ, the Jesus who is now ‘spirit & life’[6:63; compare Paul, ‘a life-giving spirit’, I Corinthians 15:45], she is able to recognize him for who he is. In this interaction of turning & ascending, Mary gains ever-deepened insight first into who she is & secondly into who God truly is.

Let us see how this works out in the text.

II / Darkness

The story begins in darkness, disappointment & death. Mary is standing outside the tomb weeping. She is a person, let us say, who is open-hearted & vulnerable; also courageous & loyal. For just as she stood with Jesus at his crucifixion [19:25], so now she is there at his grave.

Her name for God at this point might be a slew of negatives: hidden, occluded, absent, impotent, hopeless, in love with death.

Yet it only gets worse. She finds the tomb empty. ‘Where is he?’ she asks; & her answer, ‘Someone must have taken the body away’. She is perplexed, bewildered, full of questions. She has no name for God. Everything has gone blank.

That’s her mind. In her heart Mary is grieving the loss of her beloved, Jesus. So strong was that love, its ending leaves her breaking apart, in a state of total breakdown.

III / Questioning

The text, however, hints that this may not be the end of the story. Could it be that ‘breakdown’ is prelude to ‘breakthrough’? We are told that Mary is ‘standing’. Weeping, yes; but also standing. In this word ‘standing’ John lets us know that she herself is very much alive. She is a fully embodied woman with strong emotions, a questioning mind, persevering, affectionate, perceptive & (of course) human & fallible. Could it be that she’s got it wrong? that as yet she hasn’t grasped what is going on?

The thing is so unimaginable that it can only dawn on her gradually. Still weeping, she stoops & looks inside the tomb [20:11]. This ‘stooping’ symbolizing perhaps the humility ready to acknowledge that there may be more to this than she knows.

What does she see? Not the bare empty tomb that she had anticipated, but a vision: two angels in white spanning the space in which the body of Jesus had newly lain. By means of this vision the text signals that the energies of God, the energies of love, are at work.

In this moment, Mary is addressed as the person she is. ‘Woman, why are you weeping?’ [20:13] But the vision forces her to go one step further. She is forced to question whether grief & bewilderment can plumb the depths of what is going on. In response, Mary articulates her question: ‘They have taken away the Lord…, & we do not know where they have laid him’. [20:13; 20:2]

Now her name for God might be: the question that has no answer; the name that has no name; the mystery that forever gives onto the next question. Now we might see her beginning to doubt her doubts, to question her former certainties. Among them we might surmise the conviction that Jesus was dead & buried, his cause forever over & gone.

IV / Turning

In this mode of questioning & doubting Mary is now ready for what is to come: two crucial moves from death to life. The text says, ‘she turned around’ [20:14], turned, that is, with her whole self, body, mind, emotions, spirit from all that had just occurred to what was still to come. Was she – already in her visionary depths – beginning to turn from death to life, from a sense of the absence of God to a sense of the presence of God? In any event she now sees not a dead body but a living person, Jesus, to her incognito. Again the text uses this word ‘standing’ signaling thereby that this is indeed the risen one. But as yet Mary does not recognize him. She is still preoccupied with her own grief at the loss of Jesus & her question as to the whereabouts of his body.

Be this as it may, she is now speaking with a living one, a person who, like her, is ‘standing’. Now God for her might be ‘the God of the living’, but not yet the God of the living & the dead. [Romans 14:9]

V / Breakthrough

So far all the energy – grieving, standing, questioning, visioning – has come from Mary. Now, at this watershed point in the narrative, Jesus openly takes the initiative. He repeats the question of the angels, ‘Woman, why are you weeping?’ Once again her full embodied self is taken seriously & addressed. ‘Woman’. [20:15; cp. 20:13] Yet the question has a new edge. Was this continued grieving still right, still appropriate, in the presence of a living one? This is followed by an even more searching question, ‘Whom [who/personally] are you looking for?’ The question is not ‘What are you looking for?’ implying the corporeal remains of a crucified man - Mary’s question hitherto [20:13;15] – but, ‘Whom are you looking for?’ a question that inquires after the identity, the true & continuing identity of the person in question – Jesus.

The right question has been asked, but Mary still can’t make the leap of faith, name the true God. Her own very integrity demands that she remain down-to-earth, pragmatic. She takes Jesus to be the gardener – her understanding of God & self still not adequate to the recognition of the Jesus who was truly there. Hence her question, ‘Sir, if you have taken him away, tell me where you have put him, & I will go & remove him’. [20:15] It’s as though an impasse has been reached.

But now, suddenly, & against all her expectations, Mary is faced with the second & decisive initiative of Jesus. One word, ‘Mary!’; & in this one word the whole logjam is broken, broken through. In this one word, ‘Mary’ from Jesus, powerful & loving, a whole new God-given order of things is conveyed. She is freed, we might say, from the terrible narrowing & distorting effect of human egocentricity & blindness in the presence of God. Now she recognizes Jesus for who he is. It dawns on her that this is not the language a gardener, but that of her beloved, Jesus.

Many centuries later, another woman, Julian of Norwich, had a similar experience. Here’s how she describes it:

And I watched with all my might for the moment when Christ would expire, & I expected to see his body quite dead; but I did not see him so, & just at the moment when by appearances it seemed to me that life could last no longer, & that the revelation of his end must be near, suddenly, as I looked at the same cross, he changed to an appearance of joy. The change in his blessed appearance changed mine, & I was glad & joyful as I could possibly be. And then cheerfully our Lord suggested to my mind: Where is now any instant of your pain or grief? Revelations of Divine Love, XXI

The ‘sudden appearance of joy’ is the heart of Julian’s revelation. Mary’s response –just one word – is similar. ‘Rabbouni/Teacher!’ ‘Mary – Rabbouni!’ Instantaneous & electrifying. Heart calling to heart. The breakthrough. And to convey the depth & utterly radical nature of what is taking place, the text tells us for the second time that she ‘turned around’. [20:16; cp. 20:14] She turned, that is, from partial to full awareness, from grief to jubilation, from asking inappropriate questions about the mortal remains of Jesus to asking the real question: Who is this person, this living one, who is speaking with me now?

VI / True God, true self

This breakthrough into faith is once again the action of a fully embodied woman present in all her faculties. ‘She turned around’ - & in this we are seeing the resurrection of her whole body-self. This is who she now is: the person Jesus calls into being for the first time. She, for her part, recognizes, let us say, the one who loved her & gave himself for her. [Galatians 2:20] Now, finally, she is able to name the true God, the God of the living & the dead. ‘My Lord & my God!’ [20:28] In other words, as Jesus ascends, so she turns; & at each turning sees more of the true & living God at work. In so doing she finds ever-increasing wholeness & life in herself.

VII / Letting Go

The compelling nature of what is happening comes out in Mary’s spontaneous gesture of homage or adoration. Like one in the presence of the authentically sacred or holy, she prostrates herself & reaches out to embrace or kiss his feet [Matthew 28:9]. Jesus, however, distances himself from her. ‘Do not hold onto me’ says he [20:17]. It’s as though Mary Magdalene is tempted to be ruled by nostalgia, to slip back into an earlier phase of their bonding – to seek to control the new found glory of the risen Christ. But now, post resurrection, it’s for all people everywhere, not just for her.

VIII / Sending

As the narrative ends Mary learns one further name for God: that God is the One who sends. Breakdown & breakthrough now give onto break-out. In the instant of recognition, Mary is told – realizes – that like Jesus she has a mission, that she too is being sent. ‘Go & find my brothers & tell them …’ [20:17] Jesus, now claiming the full authority of God, the God of the living & the dead, gives her, the first & prime witness to his resurrection, the crucial task of handing on the good & joyful news to the disciples. ‘So Mary Magdalene went & announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord”, & that he had said these things to her’. [20:18] More than that, in the turning around of her life, we see Mary whole, healed & in resurrection mode, given over to the overcoming of evil in all its forms. No more arduous, no more joyous task can be imagined.

We are now in the presence of what later tradition would hold her to be: the Apostle to the apostles, the ‘apostola apostolorum’. But, as John’s other resurrection narratives make clear, she was not alone. For in the moment when Jesus’ resurrection ‘dawned’ on her – ‘dawned’ being the right word, for all this happened early, just as it was getting light – she realized that the new day had dawned for all.

2. RESURRECTION, On-Going

If perception/recognition (aka ‘faith’) is getting to first base, making the crucial transition from death to life – in our own life as in our perception/recognition of Jesus -, then there is the equally important challenge of making this reality on-going in the world we inhabit. The ‘on-going’ praxis of resurrection then becomes a key element in the credibility of the original message. What follows, then, are some of the nodal points around which the practice of resurrection might revolve.

The following sequence comes from matching up the five key categories for speech/praxis of resurrection in the New Testament – maximum life – with key features of the Holocaust – death at its worst. Thus,

Image of the Shoah/NT:Resurrection/Theology

1. Empty Space/Empty Tomb/Standing

2. Black Smoke/Appearances/Communicating

3. Mutilated Body/Thomas/Touching

4. Forgetting/Remembrance/Remembering

5. Silence/Proclamation/Prophecy

How this works will become clear in what follows.

(I)‘Standing’, means the standing of Christ with the victims. Recall what has been said last week about ‘co-passion’. ‘Standing’ (or ‘standing up again’) is the direct English translation of the Greek anastasis, which, usually translated ‘resurrection’, derives from a verb meaning to ‘stand up’ or ‘to stand again’. In the light of this notion of ‘standing with’, many questions press forward to be voiced. Who do we – if we are willing to stand with Christ in God’s world - stand with concretely, here and now? Is it with Christ and contemporary victims? Or, moving on from there, what do we stand for? In whose name are the values involved grounded, in Christ’s or that of some other? Or, we could ask, how do we withstand evil? We might further compare resurrection to the uncanny ability of a mother to hear the cry of her child in need and to bring succour to him or her. The empty space of defeat and death thus begins to be filled with life, life, moreover, that is ethically and spiritually grounded in the overcoming of evil, in selflessness and respect for the other

(ii)‘Touching’. In the immediate aftermath of the crucifixion, as the story of Thomas reveals (John 20:24-29), there was the question of who dared touch the mutilated, ‘untouchable’ body of Jesus – given that he had been criminalized and executed by the Romans and declared ‘accursed’ by the Jewish authorities – ‘cursed be he who hangs on a tree’ (Deuteronomy 21:22-23; Galatians 3:13-14). Like Antigone in Sophocles’ tragedy, drawn irresistibly to care for her slain brother Polynices, the disciples (and the women) in the Gospel narrative risk falling victim to the ‘Creons’ of the time. In resurrection (or life) perspective, we can talk about ‘touching’ in a double sense: our daring to touch (or be ‘in touch’ with) the mutilated-cremated bodies of the victims; and, equally, our touching or being touched by the crucified body of Christ. In the mutilated (or incinerated) bodies of the victims we may find the authentically modern sense of the sacred, the holy. In the body of Christ, all of that and more: a force-field of life that draws believers – he or she who has been ‘touched’ in their heart of hearts by the cries, the mutilated (or absent) bodies, of the victims – into the very life of God. We could say that this has to do with ‘living memory’, of the victims, and of Christ; the two always needing to be ‘in touch’, in communion or communication (or connection), with each other. The remembrance of the victims can thus be done in context of the living memory of ‘a living one’, Christ. In Christian art we could see this theme of touching in the Pietà. Mary is the living, flesh and blood icon of the love of God. In holding (or cherishing) the newly crucified/mutilated body of her beloved Son she images the way God cares for all, especially the victims.

(iii) Communicating. Resurrection here means recovering a sense of the living God, the God whose gracious self-communication is in speech and act, and finally, in Christian perspective, in the person of Christ, his life, death and resurrection. The negative side of this lies in the Nazi attempt not only to obliterate all evidence or memory of Judaism – even the cemeteries were bulldozed and flattened – but also, in the process, to silence and obliterate God. ‘Living’ now stands for the fact that, for all the proper mystery of God, God communicates actively. This shows itself, in resurrection perspective, in the way in which the cries of the victims are heard in living memory, that in-with-through Christ we are all in the ‘bundle of the living’ together – standing, touching, communicating, remembering, prophesying – in defiance of the Nazi death-cult and in favour of all that is truly human, and therefore ‘of God’. Resurrection is then the suggestion that the hub (or centre) of this inter-communicating network is in fact Christ. For is not communication central to any healthy creative relationship? Is not an ability to communicate richly in all the vulnerability of real life a vital and central part of what it means to be human?

(iv) Remembering. We could call this ‘interceding in the dark night of western civilization’. In some Carmelite communities there is a Night Office, a time around 2:00 a.m. when the Sisters, in all the charity of the vowed life, bring before God the sufferings of our blood and tear-stained world. Few have the stomach for such a thing. But, at the heart of the human community, at a time when human life is at its lowest ebb, and with no other agenda than that of love, the Sisters hold and uphold all those who are in pain, who are sick or dying, starving, or who, for whatever reason, have lost all hope. Like washerwomen with mops and buckets – and again, in-with-through Christ as source of the ‘excessive’ life essential to so onerous a task – they undertake the nightly assignment of cleansing the moral and spiritual atmosphere of the world in which we live – the destructive ‘space’ we have made of the place so graciously given to us - of becoming in some way conduits of a love that is of God. Theirs is the never-ending task of enwombing the world in an ‘envelope’ of care; of ‘remembering’ in the ‘night’ of weeping and suffering with a view to the ‘breaking of the day’, and this in the spirit of the Christ who, on the first Easter morning, was ‘up and gone with the Father in the breaking of the day’, the dawn.

(v) Prophesying. This is the birth-yell of the new humankind coming to life. ‘To prophesy’, like other resurrection-words, is an active verb, one that conveys continuous or continuing action. Once again, ‘dawn’ or the early morning is key. In the post-Easter church, the Resurrection was likened to cock-crow, the time of resurrection thus associated with the dawn (or pre-dawn), when after an appalling night of betrayal and death, something new and unheard of emerges and is proclaimed. The true prophetic voice, in other words, is heard in the ‘time’ of the resurrection; that is, not only before the world has woken up to begin another day’s work, but also at a time when the general assumption is that ‘today’ will be basically the same as ‘yesterday’, that there is nothing new under the sun (or moon), that ‘as things are’ so they will remain. If for us moderns Auschwitz is the root of that assumption, one can see how dangerous it can be. Like the plague bacillus in Albert Camus’ The Plague, it – the plague of death, of genocide – is always lurking unseen, concealed, undetected, waiting to break out once again. The resurrection-inspired prophetic imagination, by contrast, points the way forward for the human community (and the material creation) with unheard of, surprising suggestions, shocking in their newness.

Appendix 1 Mary Magdalene, 1st Witness to the Resurrection St. John’s Gospel, 20:1, 11-18

20,1 Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the tomb … 11 Mary stood weeping outside the tomb. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb; 12 and saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet. 13 They said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping?” She said to them, “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.” 14 When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus. 15 Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?” Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.” 16 Jesus said to her, “Mary!” She turned and said to him in Hebrew, “Rabbouni!” (which means Teacher). 17 Jesus said to her, “Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’” 18 Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord”; and she told them that he had said these things to her.