Tuesday in Easter
Gary Hall
Seabury-Western
April 10, 2007
One of the occupational hazards of preaching is the sense of obligation to “explain” things. I like to watch cop shows, and one of the ways clever policemen and attorneys always trap their perpetrators is by getting them to propose plausible explanations for the way things happened. “How do you explain, Mr. Jones, how the murder weapon got into your sock drawer?” “Well, maybe the butler put it there when he was finished airing out my garters.” This kind of conversation happened on Columbo all the time, and I always wanted to shout out, “No, don’t fall for that. Only a guilty person tries to make up explanations!”
This it seems
to me is one of the problems with the Resurrection. Living as we do in
a flat-footedly empirical age, many of the people we clergy encounter are people
with questions about the resurrection—not to mention the virgin birth,
walking on water, and casting out demons. You know you’re on the
losing end of a dialogue when someone turns to you and says, “Tell me,
padre (or, I guess, madre) exactly how did Jesus rise again from the dead?” I
remember a friend of mine in seminary being asked by his standing committee if
he could have had taken a picture with a Polaroid camera at the empty tomb would
he have a photograph of a physically risen Jesus? His reply, better than
what I would have come up with, was, “Yes, if the camera had the lens of
faith.”
For you and
me who gather this week at the empty tomb, the resurrection is a fact of our
experience and not a phenomenon to be explained. The point of Easter, at
least for me, has always had to do with God’s final “yes” to
Jesus and to us in the midst of a world which always wants to say “no.” Just
as God would not be stopped in reaching out to Israel over the long haul of its
experience in history, so God will not be stopped in the search for us which
takes Jesus to the cross and the empty tomb. Easter is not about the mechanics
of a miracle; it’s about God’s indefatigable persistence in God’s
quest to reconcile you and me and the human community and all creation to God. And
the job of us preachers is not to explain how resurrection happened but to point
to signs of it in our own time and to sketch out its implications in the here
and now.
Today our
Gospel is the familiar story of Mary Magdalene mistaking Jesus for the gardner.
[“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.’” –John
20] Somewhere, sometime I recall reading a line of Frederick Buechner’s
to the effect that humanity was both lost and found in a garden. We were
lost in Eden and found in Gethsemane. What Buechner means I think is that
Jesus’s obedience in Gethsemane redeemed Adam’s disobedience in Eden. I
agree and would take it one step further: when Mary Magdalene mistakes
Jesus for “the gardner” her act of misprision makes that connection
between Adam and Jesus even more explicit. The garden is the place we were
lost and found. If we want to see signs of risen, resurrected, renewed
life, if we want to experience God’s unstoppable search for us, we should
look beyond and through the text into the garden.
I do not mean to say this in the sense of proclaiming Easter as the rite
of Spring with bunnies and eggs and flowers. I mean this in the sense that creation
itself, if we look at it closely enough, has something to tell us about God and
us and God’s purposes for us. Two of my favorite poets, Stanley Kunitz
(who died last year at the age of 100) and Charles Wright (a poet of about my
age who writes about what he sees in his own back yard) have had a lot to say
about what God is up to in the garden. Here is Charles Wright:
Death’s still the secret of life,
the
garden reminds us.
Or vice versa.
--Charles
Wright, “Disjecta Membra” in Black Zodiac, p. 73
If death and life are each other’s secret, then what gets lived out
in the garden—a dance of death and life—is the key to what
creation is all about. And here is Stanley Kunitz, who at age 99
was still writing poetry and tending his garden in Provincetown, Massachusetts:
[By working in the garden I have come to realize] that death is absolutely
essential for the survival of life itself on the planet; [without it] the
earth would become full of old wrecks.—New York Times 5/19/05
It is not just in the profusion of new life which we see budding all around
us that the garden teaches us about resurrection. It is in the elegant
way in which death and life coexist in creation that we learn something
of what Easter is finally about. When Adam and Eve ate the forbidden
fruit they came to define death as their problem. Our common human
tendency is to rebel against our finitude, our limitedness, and to long
for a way to transcend them. What Jesus showed us in his garden moment
was a willingness to face death because he would not let his fear of death
define him. Jesus realized that there are things worse than death. Standing
with the powerful against the poor is worse than death. Turning those
deemed impure away from your table is worse than death. In going
willingly to the cross, Jesus stepped into death in a way which gives you
and me the courage, finally, to live.
And that
is what resurrection is about. It’s not about the resuscitation
of the body. It’s not about rabbits and eggs and flowers. It’s
about God’s search for us with the news that it is o.k. for us to be
finite, fragile creatures living our moment in the garden and making way for
those who will come after. Death and the fear of it are no longer our problems. Life
and the living of it are our gifts. Jesus decided he would rather be compassionate
and faithful and just. And in so deciding he opened for us the way of
freedom and life. Resurrected living is what Jesus opened up for us. It
is what Easter is about. And it is why we proceed, in the Eucharist,
to give thanks. Amen.