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The Hope We Cannot Hold
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis April 11, 2004, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Isaiah 65:17-25; II Corinthians 4:7-12 John 20:1-18
He is risen! He is risen indeed! For two thousand years, the shout has gone up and for two thousand years, standing before the open grave of one loved well…or facing the hopelessness of the best of human intentions gone awry…or doing battle against the powers of darkness with no evident help…human beings have attempted to grasp the meaning and truth of this unimaginable claim. How can we take into our hearts and minds and real lives the truth of Christ’s rising and therefore the hope that death finally shall have no dominion? I must confess, given the cliff of disbelief upon which my own faith seems destined to dangle, the claim will never cease to astonish me. I have come to understand only this: that there are no words able to bear the weight of the news that “He is risen…He is risen indeed!” As one Scottish theologian put it, “the very substance of the Christian faith itself, its forthright appeal beyond the natural reaches of our language and thought forms to a creation which is wholly ‘new’, forces the admission that such talk is in the strictest sense impossible…But of God and God’s promised future, speak we must unless we would be content with agnostic silence.” Curiously, it was not a theologian but a scientist who teased my mind into quitting the usual ways of knowing this Easter. In an op-ed article published on New Year’s Day, Brian Greene, professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University, set out to unsettle our settled notions of time and space, the same notions unsettled, I think, by the claim that Christ has risen from the dead. Somehow in his saying of the unsayable scientifically, I found my heart pointed toward the hope my head cannot hold: the hope of the resurrection. Greene reflects first on the now discarded claims of Newtonian physics. Newton’s mechanics were the earliest modern bet human beings made about the nature of time and space. This bet holds that “the universe is equipped with a kind of built-in clock that ticks off seconds identically, regardless of location or epoch.” But the cost of adhering to Newton’s description of time is high for “our willingness to place unjustified faith in immediate perception or received wisdom leads us to an inaccurate and starkly limited vision of reality.” So it was that Einstein’s theory of relativity “saw through nature’s Newtonian façade and revealed that the passage of time depends on circumstances and environment.” That is to say, time’s passage, in Einstein’s astounding mind, was “in the eye of the beholder.” “He shows,” says Neils Bohr in Michael Frayne’s play Copenhagen, “that measurement—measurement, on which the whole possibility of science depends—…is not an impersonal event that occurs with impartial universality. It’s a human act, carried out from a specific point of view in time and space.” This belief led Einstein to write a curious letter of consolation to the widow of his long time friend Michele Besso. “In quitting this strange world,” Einstein wrote, “he has once again preceded me by just a little. That doesn’t mean anything. For we convinced physicists, the distinction between past, present and future is only an illusion, however persistent.” It was as though the relative mystery at the center of the known universe had reordered Einstein’s personal universe, leading him to an unimaginable hope, a hope concerning time and eternity. Though in our “time”, the scientific imagination has wondered into new fields by way of the counterintuitive challenge of quantum mechanics, whose “uncertainty principle” questions the concept of time itself. Scientists now believe that “the more precise the measurement of one [subatomic] feature (a particle’s position, for example) the more wildly uncertain a complementary feature (its velocity) becomes.” The implications for what we can truly “get a hold of” in time and space are such that conventional notions of “left/right, backward/forward, up/down and before/after” become meaningless.” Green goes further to say that science is “on the verge of another major upheaval…one in which scientists will be compelled to trade the space-time matrix within which they have worked for centuries for a more basic ‘realm’ that is itself devoid of time and space.” My mind leaps, of course, to the realm of God where “the wolf and the lamb shall feed together, the lion shall eat straw like the ox…and they shall not hurt and destroy in all my holy mountain.” Could this be the realm we glimpse but cannot grasp in the risen Christ? Yet more than all the scientific details of Greene’s reflections, what caught my own pastoral heart of an Easter Sunday were Greene’s personal conclusions as he, himself, peered into an unnamed empty grave. “In moments of loss,” Greene concluded, “I’ve taken comfort from the knowledge that all events exist eternally in the expanse of space and time, with the partition into past, present and future being a useful but subjective organization.” Propelled, then, by a physicist and mathematician into what one theologian called “the hope, imagination and the rhetoric of the unsayable,” we turn to the astounding account of Easter morning in John’s 20th chapter where the categories of time and space seem suddenly and seriously askew! “Early on the first day of the week, when it was still dark,” wrote John as he begins to dare human speech in the face of the unsayable. His words mean to return us, I think, to the word with which John began his gospel: to the beginning of God’s Word before time and space, to the light that had come into the world in the fullness of time which now had apparently been overcome by those who preferred the darkness. When it was still dark, says John, Mary came to the tomb. We begins in familiar territory. Mary’s grief does not escape our Newtonian ways of knowing where time is allotted, the present fleeting, the past irretrievably lost, the future fated. We can imagine how it was, why it was that she rose before dawn on the first day of the week, for most of us have done the same; though at the door of this particular tomb more must be said. Later creeds would say much more, but before they forsook him and fled, a few had dared to say the unsayable: that in Jesus, they had had to do with what it really meant to be human…and in His presence, they somehow believed they had to do with the God who was not only with them but for them. So His death meant the end of a hope whose dimensions they had only begun to grasp. Mary had come to the tomb while it was still dark to grasp the fact of his death, but in a mere sentence, the imaginable world begins to vanish no less for those ancient characters than for you and me. The stone inexplicably is rolled away, the tomb is empty, the grave clothes folded, as though another purposeful yet unseen hand had entered in. While it was still dark, a truth from outside their understanding was insisting they account for its reality. John claims immediately that the Beloved Disciple saw and believed, though the next sentence admits neither he nor Peter had any inkling as to the substance of their belief, “for as yet they did not understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead.” Therefore, Peter and the Beloved Disciple simply turn toward home, or as W.H. Auden put it in For the Time Being, they returned to the time and space “where Euclid’s geometry and Newton’s mechanics would account for our experience.” But Mary, instead, stood weeping outside the tomb. The speech John dares on the boundary of all we cannot imagine is the wordless tenderness and vulnerability of inconsolable grief, which is the underside of a humanly inconceivable love. This is the boundary at which most of us eventually turn toward home, for to continue is to leap into a time and space no merely human way of knowing can contain. Mary alone leapt. Refusing to accept the evidence of her immediate perception, she enters the empty tomb in utter vulnerability. There she is met by two angels seated one at the head and the other at the foot of an empty grave slab. The detail of empty space is not an idle detail according to the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowen Williams, but is meant to recall the Hebrews’ ark of God flanked by two cherubim. “Enshrined or carried into battle, the ark…marked the presence of God with an empty space—the space between the cherubim”: the presence of an always invisible God who could not be possessed or contained or held, but “who is where [God] is not.” By this empty space, John means to tell us, our every space has been transfigured by his rising. “Why,” the angels ask Mary incredulously from the realm of God, “are you weeping?” From out of Newton’s time and space Mary answers, “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.” Then as though the hand unseen that had rolled away the stone and arranged the burial linens had hold of her too, Mary turns toward that realm devoid of time and space where her Lord has gone and out of which he now appears. At first, she mistakes Jesus for a gardener as John traces the garden on Golgotha redeemed over the garden in the beginning of our fall. But then, in a moment of astounding tenderness, the risen Lord simply speaks her name, “Mary,” and she turns again saying, “Rabboni.” The leap is quantum. The categories of time and space do not avail. The realm revealed is the realm of God, glimpsed for a moment in a time that transfigures time, in a space beyond space wherein our every space is redeemed, is glimpsed in Him whom death could neither hold nor the grave contain. Our temptation, of course, is to hold him, to return him to the space and time of Euclid’s geometry and Newton’s mechanics where God exists because, short of the leap faith is, we can believe this received wisdom and go home. But to those who have remained at the empty grave weeping for want of faith, the gospel is simply and astoundingly this: the one whom you have mistaken for a mere mortal and so dead now lives eternally. Take comfort, for in the realm glimpsed at his appearing is hid, beyond the conventions of past, present and future, those whom you have loved well and can no longer hold. Go and tell the rest, the ones who have gone home believing, that the hope you could not hold has hold of you, now and forever. For He is risen! He is risen indeed! |