They were gathered at a reserved table in a rented room, that night, to remember great deeds that had been done long before their time. During supper with his friends, Jesus himself did something, hardly a great deed in and of itself; but his action was part of the unfolding revelation of love that we in the church have been commemorating ever since. Annually, we take three days, his last three earthly days, to intentionally meditate and pray on the meaning of this love. From water poured in the servant act of foot washing, to waters flowing from the side of the crucified Jesus, to Red Sea waters parting for our baptismal crossing into New Life: what do we remember, gathered at table in this room on Easter morning?
He gathered his friends. However, before they became his friends, some of them were his vocal skeptics; and a few of them continued to whisper even after joining in. Yet, because they themselves already had ample experience in being on the receiving end of society’s skepticism, they made themselves available. About Jesus, some of his enthusiastic friends exclaimed “Come and see.” Others deemed it more prudent to adopt an attitude of ‘wait and see.’ That appears to have been more than enough for Jesus to gather up the human elements needed for fashioning his body—a fellowship of reconciliation, a community of compassion.
The ligaments that took shape to hold these disparate parts together were generated by Jesus’ responsiveness to their needs. On one occasion he remarked, almost lamentably, that the son of man had nowhere to rest his head. These new friends could relate to this. Their tattered fishing nets were testimony to a simple life (though, yes, the likes of tax collector Matthew would have been among the sort looking to improve the standard of living; that is, until meeting Jesus gave him pause to consider the value of the currency he professed to seek and serve). So Jesus offered them a kind of hospitality in a very unkind, inhospitable world—a world in which nobody is really home. These people were inheritors of dashed hopes, sons and daughters of Diaspora—dispossessed of their promised land, detached from the glory days of King David and tethered to a sinking sense that things were going to get much worse. And we do not need to know the history of the Ancient Near East to know, firsthand, that under such ambiguous social, political and economic conditions we long to nestle in our homes and secure our land all the more. Yet now, as then, no one is really home. Claims to householding and nation status are anxious insistencies against the exigencies of history and the ever-shifting, unstable grounds of all power. So Jesus didn’t have a pillow and his friends were short on blankets and nil on beds, yet they began to sense that their nomadic existence on this earth is not a fatal flaw but more a pilgrim journey; that home, community, commonwealth is constructed in the very willingness and openness to the real presence of God in Christ. To be at home is to be in Christ. To live in the homeland is to serve as the presence of Christ through servant love. Look at Jesus, after all, on that Passover night. If you had been told you had only a few days to live, what would you have done? Don’t sell yourself short. You’d probably do what he did: taking your last night on this earth to have a meal with your friends, to make clear how much you love them and how much this love is the flesh and blood, the bread and wine, of life.
Could it be, then, as you consider the unfolding events, that what the powers of the day (of any day) resent and fear is not the miraculous, the once in a millennium’s inbreaking of the divine into the conditions of the human, but rather the very mundane practices of every day life? It is very basic: Who we are and what we do around table—how we get the food on the table, who we invite to the meal, the topics of conversation during the time together, where we go and what we do after we excuse ourselves. In a sentence, what we celebrate and perform around table—Eucharist/Thanksgiving—is the source and expression of power.
Life and meaning are already in the hands and hearts of the people, which is a threat to the likes of Caiphas, Pilate and Caesar. They wield, control and authorize. The religious arrogance of Caiphas and the political empire building of Caesar shake hands in the local management of the self-interested Pilate. Together they carry out a plan, the points of which they sharpen along the way, using nails and spear: It is good that one should die to maintain the status quo.
Caiphas, Pilate, Caesar. Over time, the names change; however, the violence of that Friday noon is replicated any day of the week. Infighting, casting out, knocking down and setting up: strategizing the fight for power instead of exercising the power of love. Forgive them Father for they don’t know what they are doing!
Of course, in the core of our being, we do know. We know what they are doing—trying to keep God in a somewhere else heaven so that they can say with more facility how people should fall in line with more docility in the here and now. We also know what we are doing: just trying to hang on; tired, disillusioned, but trying to do the best we can without hurting anyone. That’s what Joseph of Arimethea and Nicodemus were doing when they asked for the body of Jesus; and what Mary was up to when she appeared with spices. Let’s bury him, let’s reverence him. Let’s remember him. And then let’s get on as best we can.
No, no, no and no!
Those kinds of “best efforts” mean perpetuating the world of Caiphas, Caesar and Pilate. Everybody busy bandaging wounds, trying to survive the “as is,” is not Resurrection Life. Christ’s compassion is not just about tending the sick unto death but promoting healing and health. Doing your best to make sure you don’t hurt anyone—that could end up being an elaborate timidity that allows people to suffer violently at the hands of someone else. So then, what could you and I do about the crucifixion of Jesus?
Mary went to the cemetery expecting to pay her respects to the dead. She misrecognizes the presence as the gardener. Then, in being addressed by name, she recognizes the face of Christ, experiences the love of God and, in reply, desires to reach out and touch the Lord. Then Christ is quick to say “Don’t touch me; I have to return to God.” Why would he say such a thing? Is her desire to embrace him somehow going to sully him? No, but perhaps she is still misrecognizing. In that face Mary sees Christ; that is, Mary sees only Christ and maybe a reflection of herself in his eyes. Thus Mary is warned not to hold on to Christ, Christ must be allowed to go to the Father so that Resurrection will be for all people; so that Mary, you and I, addressed by the face of Christ, will see in Christ all people; so that whenever addressed by the face of humanity, we will see Christ.
The Resurrection is life and Resurrection life is now, in our faithfully risking the practices of every day life—from the way you peel a potato or pray your morning prayer, from the manner in which you hug your child leaving for school to the attitude you bear towards the person who is crossing your border, in your deliberations over who should be the next president and the deliberate patterns in which you planted your spring blooms.
We know from every day life there are no guarantees. The child can come home from school with a virus just as easily as she can learn the lesson that one day enables her to negotiate peace. The Resurrection is not an inoculation against the risks of every day life. The Cosmic Body of Christ still has the marks of the wounds in the hands and side. But the Resurrection does rescue us from the tombs, from the ways in which we accommodate ourselves and consign others to shadow living, to getting by. In a world more and more given to survival scenarios and protocols about which bodies are going to matter, the Resurrection is what it has always been: God’s celebratory call to New Life for all.
What do we celebrate around this table today? The great deeds God will yet do through us in our Christ embrace with others! Take these elements of our faith and set them out on your home altars this Easter meal. Celebrate these practices of everyday life; live them; share them, hospitably. Alleluia. Amen.