In 1978, science fiction writer Philip K. Dick wrote a… “galaxy brain” essay about what it means for something to be “real”. I don’t mention that essay to endorse its philosophical and theological arguments (like I said, they’re pretty out there), but because of a powerful image he uses in the course of that argument: “what if, one night, someone snuck into Disneyland and replaced all the fake things with real things?” It would be apocalyptic, of course. They wouldn’t be safe, anymore. They couldn’t be controlled. The park would have to close down.
In 2010, historians did a DNA study and concluded that about 1 in 200 men have Ghengis Khan as a direct ancestor. But even if you aren’t Genghis Khan, every dug grave returns a body to the earth, returns carbon to the ecosystem - the substance of the dead lives on in the living. We don’t need to imagine the gasoline in our cars as the fats of long-dead dinosaurs; our connection to ancient life is much more visceral than that.
…sometimes we need a hug. To hold, or to be held. And sometimes we need to shake something, to punch something. To physically, viscerally express the strong emotions in our hearts. Sometimes verbal expression, intellectual expression, things like that aren’t enough to work through our feelings.
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Over the Easter season, we've heard the good news of Jesus's death and resurrection, and then, of his return to his "father", and then, of the coming of the Holy Spirit.
If a twenty-first century Christian finds something strange about this, I suspect it'll usually be the miracles themselves, not the cast of characters involved.
But in Jesus's time and place, in the Judah and Galilee of 2000 years ago, to describe how he talked about himself and the Father and the Spirit as "strange" would've been an understatement.
Consider this: what was the most often repeated, most stressed, most belabored point in the Sinai covenant? "No other gods but God."
What is the "greatest commandment", confirmed by Jesus in his final debate in Jerusalem? "Hear, o Israel, the Lᴏʀᴅ is God, the Lᴏʀᴅ is one."
Surrounded by polytheistic cultures, Jewish culture – shaped as it was to be different, set apart from everyone else – was uncompromising on this point.
And yet Jesus claims, on the one hand, equality with God the Father (“before Abraham came to be”, “the Father and I are one”…), and on the other hand, converses with God the Father (”I know you always listen to me”, “into your hands I commend my spirit”…) and talks of the Spirit as something that can only arrive if he's steps back to make room for it.
How can we resolve this apparent contradiction? How can Jesus be divine, and distinguishable from the Father… and how can the Holy Spirit be divine, and distinguishable from both of them… and have them all still count as being "one", a monotheistic God?
We can start by digging into the notes and conclusions of the early Christian communities, who had to solve this riddle first.
Three hundred years after Jesus's human life, Christian leaders from across the whole "known world" met twice to debate certain points of doctrine: once in Nicaea in 325, then again in Constantinople in 381.
One of the products of their debate was a document we now call the "Nicean Creed", a summary of what everyone (other than a few Arian holdouts) had been willing to agree about, with regard to the contentious doctrinal issues of the time. And on the topic of the mysterious, seemingly impossible relationship we now call the "Trinity", it had this to say":
Jesus was “begotten, not made” – not a creation of God the Father, but rather, naturally following from his existence. This happened before anything else was created – “before all ages“.
Jesus and the Father are “consubstantial” – sharing one substance.
The Holy Spirit “proceeds” (with connotations of origination) from the Father – again, logically following from his existence.
So the Son and Spirit’s existence, in some way, is a natural consequence of the Father’s existence.
This… doesn't do much to clarify things, does it?
But it becomes more enlightening when we make use of another mysterious fact we know about God, which we discussed at Easter: God is love. "Love" in the peculiar sense that we use the word when talking about the Kingdom, yes. But love.
And that kind of love – the loving care for another which drives a person to action – can't exist alone. It doesn't make sense unless someone else exists to care about. Every example we're given in the Good News of the kind of love which defines God and God's Kingdom is a relationship with the other.
So the Trinity – the idea that God can be Father, Son, and Spirit while still being "one" – far from being a paradox, a doctrine invented to patch up a logical contradiction in the Good News… is, instead, almost a logical necessity if God is who we believe him to be.
What else could God be, to know love before Heaven and Earth were made? What else could God be, than either intrinsically in a relationship, or (if you parse it differently) intrinsically a relationship himself?
We can take this line of reasoning further. Consider what it means that the Father and the Son are not just distinguishable, but different. Different enough to have different preferences, different perspectives (as we saw, painfully, in Gethsemane). God’s love, the relationship of love that God embodies, is not the mere love of one's own reflection, or of a friend so joined-at-the-hip that you already agree with her about everything, but the love for someone that has distinctions from you.
And so what does this mean for us? If God has always known what it is like to love and be loved, if the particular love between all three distinct divine persons is part of who God is… what lesson can we draw from it?
If that’s part of who he is…
…and if we’re made in his image…
…then he wants us to know that kind of love too.
Love for each other. Love for those different from ourselves, which nonetheless unites us. Love like the Spirit enabled at Pentecost, when everyone heard the good news in their own native tongue. Love like Jesus had for the Caananite woman. Distinction without disunity.
Throughout the world, and throughout history, people tell stories of a time when the human race was a single tribe or family.
The Torah goes a step further: once upon a time, it says, God made us, as creatures like him; our family resemblance is because we have a common ancestor in our Creator.
Throughout the world, and throughout history, we also tell stories of a time when the human race grew from that single family, and in doing so, grew apart. Where those different parts, separated, became, in time, incomprehensible and alien to each other. Became set against each other – seeing each other as “barbarians” – as gibberish-speakers.
The story passed down to us in the Torah is one of God “confusing their languages”, splitting them each from each.
But if this is not the caprice of an insecure and neurotic God – if God is who we believe he is – then what would be the purpose of him doing something like that?
What was the danger, of a humanity united like Babel was united?
It's been six weeks since we began our celebration of the Resurrection, of this new paradigm in which death is not the end.
Today, many Catholics celebrate the feast of the Ascension: the next part of that story, where we celebrate when Jesus, in his resurrected but human body, left our world and returned to heaven without having to die.
It's an interesting moment, an interesting miracle. Jesus hardly shied away from breaking new ground with his miracles. Indeed, even before the Resurrection, many of his miracles were called out by the evangelists as literally unprecedented. But "a holy person is brought into heaven alive" isn't one of these. Enoch walked with God. Elijah got a ride from "Israel's horses and chariots". And we have centuries of Jewish commentaries which argue there were others who got the same treatment.
In that light, Jesus being allowed to do the same is almost expected, right? Now that he's resurrected, it would be strange for him to die again.
But it's still worth celebrating… and I think there's still something to learn from the stories we hear as we celebrate it.
All of those stories, today, circle around the topic of Jesus's "authority". This is one of those subtle topics, when talking about the Kingdom of God - one of those words that we use as a best-fit, but that could get us confused if we keep assuming that the Kingdom works like our world does. Authority, in the Kingdom, is a property of service, and cannot exist without it.
So we read, in Luke's good news, Jesus talking about God's authority. And Matthew writes about how this authority has been handed over to Jesus. And Paul writes to the community in Ephesus that this is the authority Jesus reclaimed when he reentered heaven - the authority he had set aside in order to have a human life.
But if he's "reclaiming" that authority in his ascension, then he is also, in a way, (because Heaven is outside of Earthly time and history), claiming it "for the first time" - proving that the authority of God is not, and never was, the Earthly authority of "might makes right", but rather, a river whose origin is Jesus's service in ministry and his sacrifice on the Cross.
So if Jesus has this authority, how did he use it, in that moment when he returned to his "seat at the right hand of God"?
The first way, was to pass it on.
Matthew and Luke frame the "great commission" - Jesus's urging that we tell people the good news he's been telling us - as an extension of Jesus's authority. And that has implications for how we do it! If we want to "tell the Good News" in that context, it means that the authority to do it must also be found in service. By being willing to serve, we also become able to speak what we've heard as eyewitnesses and specimens, in a more convincing way than could be accomplished by simply quoting scripture.
That's… not an easy job, admittedly. Which is why the second part of how Jesus exercises his authority in today's readings is so important: the promise of the Holy Spirit. This was a mysterious promise, for his inner circle at the time. Jesus had alluded to something called "the Holy Spirit", or to "an advocate", a defense attorney. He had described it as being how they would learn the things he couldn't teach them himself. But they wouldn't have to wait long to find out what it was. Luke tells us that Jesus waited until 40 days after the Resurrection to depart, and that he told them to stay in Jerusalem until the Spirit would come. That was Shavuot, 50 days after Passover - only a week or two, give or take, from the time that Jesus departed.
…we are lucky, in comparison. We know what's coming. We have all sorts of established doctrine on the nature of the Holy Spirit, of its power to drive us to action - to the kind of service that aerates the soil for miracles to sprout. That's why we're still celebrating, right? Why today's commemoration of Jesus's departure hasn't quite ended this season of celebrations and wonders.
So let's take this story of the Ascension in that light. Jesus left the rest to us - delegated to us, so that living the kind of lives that earn authority in the logic of the Kingdom might also benefit from the power that was handed over to Jesus in his own life. Today is the beginning of the rest of the story of this world - the story of how the Kingdom shall come. We've been made a part of it.
As we celebrate the remaining feasts before dropping back into Ordinary Time - the feasts that shed light on how the Kingdom exists in the here and now - let's remember that, and choose to live in the same homeland to which Jesus returned, on that hill, all those years ago.
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At last, with Pentecost only two weeks away, our readings this morning begin to turn to discussions of the Holy Spirit.
I intend to talk more about the Holy Spirit – who I think is the most often forgotten person of the Trinity – more in the coming weeks. But for now, our focus is on the first we hear of such a being: people in the early Church, “filled with the Spirit”, acting on the message they had received.
And then, as they acted, wonders taking place, because the Spirit was present within those actions.
Our first report on this topic is, once again, from Paul's testimony about how the Way was walked in its early years. We visit Samaria again – where they also clung to the God of Abraham, but in a way that set them at odds with the Jews. And in that visit, we see echoes of Jesus’s own ministry there – the message intertwined with works, and with wonders, and framed by the shocking acceptance he receives from these people who, half a decade earlier, his disciples might have seen as enemies.
We hear also, from the correspondent Peter (who may or may not have been Simon Peter, but seemed comfortable writing in his name), writing to small Christian communities fearful of local persecution. And he also reminds them that the good news must be paired with goodness and gentleness, to avoid bringing shame upon the message they preach.
And finally, we hear from Jesus – in another deeply layered excerpt from John – where he promises the Spirit to those who maintain their love for God and their adherence to the commandments.
…if the logic of the Kingdom of God is something alive, then like any living thing (as Paul observed in his lengthy meditation on Aesop's fable of the belly) you can't divide it up and have just one part of it without the other parts. Underneath what we can see, the Holy Spirit's presence is a great unifying factor, which means that the loving care with which we minister to our neighbors, and the good news we've been sent to share, and the miracles that God works through us, are all components of a greater, living whole.
On some level, this should be obvious, right? They’re all part of the faith as we understand and have been taught it, and yet “nobody can serve two masters at once”, so for these seemingly competing priorities to not actually be in competition, well, there needs to be some explanation as to why they're not really as separate as they seem.
But I think it bears repeating, and remembering, both as a source of hope - if it’s all one thing, then there are many ways to get onto the Way – and as a cautionary tale not to end up in blind men and the elephant territory, touching its leg and saying “oh, an elephant is a kind of tree”, or touching its trunk and saying “oh, an elephant is a kind of snake”. If it’s all one thing, then the truth of what Jesus has passed on to us, and what the Holy Spirit is keeping burning in us even now, is something deeper than any single facet we can see. And to truly understand it, we need a hollistic approach – to see and know it as a whole, just like Jesus promises us today that we will one day see God as a whole, who is as intertwined with us as with himself.
Today, the story of the early Church community – or “the Way”, as it was called back then – continues. And like last week, it’s paired with one of Jesus’s more symbolically dense sermons, as recounted to us by John.
Appropriately, the sermon this week is the one where Jesus calls himself “the Way”. He does this in response to Thomas’s now-familiar pessimism: in this case, lamenting that he and his fellow apostles don’t even understand Jesus’s final destination, much less how to get there with him. And his response, his reassurance, is this: you know me, so walk with me, and you’ll get there.
It's natural, I think, for many of us to balk at an instruction like that – to say, "well, easier said than done". But consider this, exemplified by today's excerpt from the Acts of the Apostles: much of what the folks walking the Way did back then was, essentially, played by ear. They didn't really have a plan; they were more often reacting to circumstances as they arose, and letting the Holy Spirit guide those reactions.
Indeed, the fact that "ordination" – the deputization of people as priests and nuns and friars – exists at all in the institutions we now call Christianity, is shown today as a nearly accidental innovation, invented to deal with the narrow issue of a procedural dispute. The Apostles, faced with this dispute, realized that they didn’t have time anymore to properly oversee both praxis and preaching, so they instead called the Holy Spirit down upon people from the community who could be trusted to take care of the former, so that they could focus on the latter.
And once again, we're told this furthered the cause. Even though the point was never to "attract followers", but merely to do right by their community as Jesus taught them… somehow – just as Jesus hinted last week – that action built up the Kingdom nonetheless.
Jesus speaks of the Way, which we can walk even if we can’t see it, and the dwelling that will be prepared for us the end of that journey.
Peter the correspondent writes about the structure that we are building ourselves into, even if we’re still so in the dark that the brickwork of this structure will be tripped over from time to time by those who can’t accept it.
In our Easter joy, we are traveling somewhere that “eye has not seen, and ear has not heard”. We don’t start out knowing it. Or, if we do, we – like Thomas – don’t realize that we know it, don’t recognize it for what it is. Rather, it seems that it’s in the walking itself – in the living out of it day by day – that we discover the true nature of the Way, and where it’s leading us.
Today, too, is a moment when we don’t understand where we’re going. The world is confusing. It’s hard to get any kind of clear picture.
But if we walk the Way, day by day, then we’ve been promised, reassured: sooner or later, one way or another, we’ll make it where that road is going.
This week, we're still hearing about the first acts of the Apostles, as reported by Luke. We're hearing about those early days when the message of Jesus was spreading, explosively, miraculously.
And what a miracle! Somehow, the people listening to Peter that day understood him at a level of fidelity that even Jesus only rarely managed. Somehow, the preaching of Peter on Shavuot was accompanied by a miracle of understanding, of overcoming the curse of Babel which separated us.
I wrote, last week, about why this is so frustrating, here in our era. "Why can't we hear such words? Why can't we be trusted with the clarity that Cleopas received on the afternoon of Easter Sunday?" And the answer I came to, was that we, too, have the Spirit within us - and thus, we have our own "exclusive content" to discover, if we listen.
But… listen to who? Jesus is a household name worldwide, these days. We have practically reinvented the "prophet problem" of the old Kingdoms of Israel and Judah: its infestation of everyone with an opinion running around saying "thus says the LORD" to give it more credibility… or even people with no opinion of their own at all, piling up clout and money by cold reading what their listeners wanted to hear.
This is in many ways the same situation we have today, when trying to figure out which of our "priests" or "pastors" or "preachers" are speaking God's word, and not just their own.
That's why today's excerpt from John's Good News is so important. That's why, hot on the heels of healing the blind beggar - an episode, as we heard in Lent, redolent with examples of self-deception by the supposed theological experts - Jesus gave us a roadmap for finding our way through the problem of discerning true prophets from false.
And the trick is surprisingly simple: try to figure out, from the way they act, why they're in the "shepherd" business in the first place.
Jesus proposes three tests:
“Is this person behaving well themself?” Are they doing things honorably, or dishonorably? Do they approach their ministry by being careful to keep their own behavior morally sound (thus entering through the “gate” proposed by Jesus’s own teachings), or are they willing to cut ethical corners on the way to winning you over? Paul wrote about this at length; when discussing his own evangelical activities, he emphasized the lengths he went to (typical of Paul and his lifelong struggle to escale the paradigm of Rules) to not do anything that might bring dishonor to the message he was trying to share. The easiest test of whether someone really believes what they're saying is whether they practice what they preach.
“What personal risks are they willing to take, for the benefit of their 'flock'”? To be clear, this has nothing at all to do with "what risks are they taking to convince people". Rather, it's about risks that have nothing to do, in and of themselves, with their doctrinal agenda. Jesus spoke about this at length, in John's account of the Last Supper, as one of the foundational pillers of the Kingdom of Heaven: the true meaning of authority, which exists only within service.
"Are they saying something we can believe in?” This is the most tricky, most subtle part. As the blind beggar’s story reminds us, there’s a tendency for people to reject anything unfamiliar, anything too different from what they’ve heard before. As in the era of the prophets, grifters like to tell us what they think we want to hear. People trying to cheat their marks of their minds, not just their wallets do it, too: simplistic, pre-digested messages of "you are good, and they are evil", or perhaps "you are evil, and I will make you good", which are both the type of snake oil that gets its potency from echoing the original venom of the Garden of Eden. And yet… there's something. Something that transcends those easy paths and yet speaks to us anyway. Something that made Cleopas exclaim "didn't his words set our hearts on fire?" Something that Jesus alludes to, when he talks about his sheep knowing his voice. Something achingly familiar. Something we can keep our ears pricked for, in exactly those places where we wouldn't expect them.
In the twenty-first century, the era in which we live, the "Good News" has (by all appearances) spread across the whole world. But the greatest danger of grand projects to change minds and hearts, grand visions of metanoia, is that they create a landscape which is terribly effective camouflage for pied piers and wolves. Couching a message in our religious vocabulary, or our deeply-held-moral vocabulary even if it’s not “religious” per se, can hit us in the heart. Leap straight over our normal walls of skepticism and common sense and get us following without really stopping to think.
It’s happened a lot, over the years. It also happens today.
We’re still in Easter, a joyous time.
But let’s still walk with care - trusting but verifying - acting in hope but guarding ourselves against disaster if we stumble.
And today, there's a special, extra message for those of us with moral authority. For those of us who are looked up to as shepherds. Because every question Jesus gives us to recognize true shepherds is also a question we can ask ourselves, to check whether we're doing the job right, or whether we've lost our way.
May that help and advice keep us all faced the right direction in our Easter joy: still walking with the Holy Spirit, towards the world to come.
Yes, it's still Easter. Not with the same intensity as last Sunday (the last day of the Easter "Octave"), and certainly not with the intensity of Easter Sunday itself. But the season of Easter lasts about as long as the season of Lent. It stands to reason; we have a lot of rejoicing to do! And so, we continue to hear stories about Jesus as he was after his resurrection, when the disciples - trying to understand what had happened - are repeatedly met by Jesus at the moments they least expect him.
This week, in particular, the readings focus on that attempt to make sense of the miracle that we remembered and celebrated two weeks ago. They show Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit at Shavuot and speaking in words that defy the normal limitations of human communication, preaching in the streets of Jerusalem about what Jesus's resurrection accomplished, using the words of the Psalmists and the prophet Joel to explain what had occurred, and how it relates to the covenant his listeners and their ancestors have been keeping since Sinai.
But something about how he said it is lost in translation now. We don't get the benefit of the original miracle; Luke's account of this moment amid the birth pangs of the Church is written his usual literary Greek, not words that cut through to the soul through language barriers, so sharp that they convince three thousand people to be baptised on the spot. We, like the Apostles were in the early days after the Resurrection but before Pentecost, are left with a frustratingly partial picture.
And nowhere is that partial picture more frustrating than in today's excerpt from Luke's good news.
It feels like it shouldn't be frustrating, y'know? It's a beautiful scene, a beautiful story of Jesus's reunion and reconnection with his disciples, of him restoring their hope.
But if some of Peter's Spirit-inspired preaching is lost in translation… that's still nothing compared to what Jesus said, there, on the road to Emmaus. Those disciples got the whole package, the comprehensive explanation: how it all fits together, the Jewish prophets right alongside Christ’s new paradigm.
As for us? We have to somehow content ourselves with what Luke actually wrote down about the conversation. Which is… almost nothing. Somehow, by the time reports of that meeting made their way to him, the actual content had vanished, and all he could report was the metadata: the topics discussed, the effect after Jesus vanishes again. It feels like reading a mystery novel, and getting to the end, and reading “and Picklock Holes explained to them all how Snidely Whiplash had committed the crime, and the clues that undoubtably proved his guilt.” That’s all well and good, but couldn’t you tell us that reasoning too?!
…there’s so much of what happened, back then, that we don’t know about here and now.
Stories lost to time. Details John’s account alludes to, when it ends with “there wouldn’t be enough books in the whole world to tell the whole story”.
Maybe that’s why this week’s story and its lacuna is paired with Peter’s later letter: a reminder that, as precious as the Resurection was, it’s not like God isn’t telling us things today, too. The revelation continues. Just as the past has much it didn’t have time or bandwidth to pass on to us, God has much to tell us, now, that Jesus didn’t have time or bandwidth to explain to his own disciples.
In some sense, isn't that the whole point of Penecost - the next great feast of this season?
So maybe that’s the theme of this week’s Easter celebration: to rejoice that we, too, as those ransomed by Christ, have a God who still draws near to us, who still speaks to us. Perhaps we don't always recognize, at first, what he's saying, or that he's the one saying it. Perhaps it's only after the fact that we realize what we've heard. But once we realize… what a blessing! What new and wonderful things we'll discover, if only we open our ears to listen.
A week into our celebration of Jesus's resurrection, we have a Sunday whose readings pack in a lot of themes at once.
We hear about St. Thomas's initial doubt of that miracle, until he saw Jesus for himself: the resurrected Jesus, bearing the same wounds of his slain body, yet healed of pain and returned to the living.
We read Peter the Correspondent (who might have been Saint Peter or might have just been one of his posse) extolling the mercy Jesus showed us by his death and rebirth, echoing St. Faustina's later visions of Jesus which have led to today's special commemoration as "Divine Mercy Sunday".
And we're reminded of the practices of our earliest siblings in Christianity (or "the Way", as Luke calls it in his account of those early days).
These themes come together in a special message of hope and a special challenge to us, which builds on the message of Easter and roots it to the world we live in today.
What we believe in this Easter season – the central point by which we can even call Christianity "good news" – is that death is not the end. That the Resurrection is real, or else nothing else we believe makes sense.
Thomas was slow to believe that. He was slow to understand the Resurrection, to accept the good news he was hearing; it seemed too good to be true. He was too early for the Letter of Peter – too early to see the otherworldly wonders waiting in the wings that were even greater than what Jesus was working during his earthly ministry. Yet, even without believing in the Resurrection, Thomas has this to his credit: he was willing to walk the Way anyway, even though he thought he wouldn't survive it, right up until that last-moment flinch in Gethsemane.
Riddle me this: what else do we hear today, that seems too good to be true? Let's take a look back at what Luke reports about the first community to gather around Easter's good news…
All the believers devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching, and to fellowship, and to sharing in meals (including the Lord’s Supper), and to prayer.
A deep sense of awe came over them all, and the apostles performed many miraculous signs and wonders. And all the believers met together in one place and shared everything they had. They sold their property and possessions and shared the money with those in need. They worshiped together at the Temple each day, met in homes for the Lord’s Supper, and shared their meals with great joy and generosity— all the while praising God and enjoying the goodwill of all the people. And each day the Lord added to their fellowship those who were being saved.
This is a consistent description throughout Luke's account; in other years, we hear another excerpt from his Acts of the Apostles describing much the same thing.
And the good news we're being asked to believe today, above and beyond the Resurrection itself, is the good news of that vision. That such a world – a world operating on the logic of the Kingdom of Heaven – is not too good to be true, no matter how strange it may seem now, or might have seemed then. On the contrary, if Jesus has already conquered the logic of this world, then it's something we can have here and now, if we want it. Which is more unbelievable: that a person can survive that way of life, or that Jesus has risen from the dead?
Like all of this difficult-to-believe news, we are called, like Thomas, to believe without seeing. To believe the good news that Luke's testimony spent so many pages building up, that this kind of life is possible even if it doesn't exist in the world today. That if we focus on living in the Kingdom, the rest will fall into place and we don't need to worry so much. That the proper use for the light we received at Easter, and the best way to pass it on, is to build the city on the hill. That if neighborhood-scope "baseline communism" (as David Graeber once called it, and may he rest in peace) has worked for cultures across the world and throughout history, as well as for our own Apostolic founders, then it can work for us as well, and that incomprehensible blessings await those who can trust in it.
But even if we can't believe, we can still follow in Thomas's footsteps: Thomas, who was willing to walk the Way even when he couldn't believe, and who was eventually blessed to see the proof with his own eyes.
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And there’s all sorts of good news packed into it.
But if there’s “the” good news, it's the good news of this morning:
That as painful as death is, as sorrowful as death is...
...death is not the end.
Not as a special one-off favor of a faraway God.
Death is never the end. Death is never the last word. Not anymore.
How do we know?
John’s telling of the Good News talks over and over about testimony.
The reason we know that death is not the end is not just that we heard it from someone - it’s that, when Jesus came back, he went and visited dozens of people.
It’s the testimony of that crowd of people - their testimony that, “no, really, I saw him, we talked, we ate lunch together, no it was definitely him, he still had the wounds, just somehow with all the pain and danger gone...” that allowed the good news to spread in the first place.
But Jesus is divine. Death obviously wouldn’t have been the end for a god. How do we know the logic that raised him from the dead applies to us? How do we know that death is never the end?
Well... what did Jesus teach us were the most important commandments?
Love God.
Love each other.
What did he urge us most frequently?
Share with the needy.
Welcome the outcasts.
What did he warn us against most urgently?
Hoarding.
Judgment.
Love is the core of his message.
Paul goes further, and says: love is eternal; love remains even when everything else has passed away.
John (the one who wrote letters) goes further still, and says this: God is love.
But “love” is such a broad word in English that it's hard for us to understand what this means just from the face value of an axiom like that. And even if we look into the original Greek or Aramaic – even if we start talking about “חֶסֶד” or “ἀγάπη” instead – it still doesn't become entirely clear. When we say all these things about “love”, what are we really referring to?
...instead of using single words for such a subtle matter – instead of trying to sum everything up by finding a word in our language to fit this concept from another dimension – perhaps we should use parables, like Jesus did.
We could say that we're talking about what that Samaritan felt when he passed a Jewish mugging victim lying half-dead on the side of the road.
Or that we mean what Jesus felt when, hot on the heels of his cousin John's death, he nonetheless fed the five thousand instead of hiding up a mountain.
Or his defeated laugh in Tyre, when a Caananite woman reminded him why he had come to Earth at all.
This is the mysterious motive impulse of the heart that lies at exactly the foundation of the Kingdom of God.
And it's also why Jesus's resurrection serves as both evidence for us that death is not the end, and a direct argument as to how and why.
Because if God is “love”,
and if God is forever,
then the part of us that loves like God – not conditionally or transactionally, as this world would have it, but as an intrinsic outpouring of action for others' intrinsic worthiness of love – that part of us is also forever. The part of us that can love like they love in the Kingdom of God, is already living in that kingdom, where the power of death has been broken forever, and the wedding feast does not end.
Jesus came to Earth to prove it, and to set it as a precedent that cannot be overturned.
Out of that kind of love for us, he gave up his life.
And so the seed which fell to earth sprouted.
And so he is alive, and will never die again.
And we all have the capacity for that love, no matter how inexperienced at it we might be.
So let’s train it. Let’s increase it. Let’s practice it, in every sense of “practice”.
Let’s love more and more, so that more and more people can come to understand how precious they are to us! So that, filled with that love, they may have the freedom to love too!
(“I have come to light a fire on the Earth, and how I wish it were already ablaze!”)
Today, my dear friends, I hope you can know how beloved you are.
We begin outdoors, around a bonfire, some time after sunset. The moon hangs in the sky, just beginning to wane, and the stars twinkle, cold and distant.
Each of us holds a candle. One candle is special – bigger than the others, and destined for use in further rituals throughout the Easter season.
The priest lights the paschal candle from the bonfire, and then we all walk into the darkness of an unlit church at night.
A light appears. It’s the special candle, at the back of the room, carried by the priest.
We hear a voice sing: “Christ our light”.
The crowd sings back: “Thanks be to God”.
The priest begins lighting the candles of those standing nearby.
As he slowly makes his way to the altar, each lit candle ignites its neighbors.
Bit by bit, the light spreads through the room, until everyone’s candles are lit.
…it’s not much light. But it’s enough to see by – enough to break the darkness in which we’ve been waiting.
If all goes well, it’ll be enough to get us through the time ahead.
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