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A Nevertheless Hope
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis March 27, 2005, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill I Chronicles 29:10-15 Matthew 27:62-28:17
On this Sunday, when throughout the world the shout goes up “He is risen!” and there resounds in glad alleluias “He is risen indeed!”, we come to the end of a season spent on the Lord’s Prayer with one final acclamation before us: “For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever!” It is shorthand for the counter-truth claimed by Christ’s church against the kingdom and power and glory of this present age; it is a synopsis of the subversive story proclaimed in the face of death by those who have hoped against hope, believing in spite of the evidence, that finally the Lord God omnipotent reigneth! Of this ancient endgame doxology, borrowed by early Christians from the liturgies of Israelite worship, John Calvin says, “This is firm and tranquil repose for our faith. For however miserable we may be, …we will yet never lack a reason to pray, never be shorn of assurance, since the kingdom, power, and glory can never be snatched away from our Father.” Never snatched away, that is, except as we dare honestly to inhabit the final three-day weekend of Matthew’s gospel wherein God’s glory first is denied by the kingdoms that seem to reign on Friday; and then is buried beneath the religious powers and principalities that appear to take hold on Saturday; and finally is doubted on Sunday by those who, when left with an empty tomb, find robbery more plausible than resurrection. Still, of course, these are the recognizable means-politically, religiously, intellectually-employed in our every vain attempt to snatch from God the kingdom and the power and the glory, if not forever then for the humanly foreseeable future…or at least for the sake of a nice three-day weekend. “We know,” writes the Cambridge don George Steiner concerning the first of these three days, “of that Good Friday which Christianity holds to have been that of the Cross. But the non-Christian, the atheist, knows of it as well. This is to say that he knows of the injustice, of the interminable suffering, of the waste, of the brute enigma of ending….We know, ineluctably, of the pain, of the failure of love, of the solitude which are our history and private fate.” Of Friday we could construct a litany this morning, could go pew by pew naming the brute enigma of the endings, the losses we have known individually and, especially in this season, collectively. Furthermore, we know the darkness of human existence as it falls under the rule of earthly powers, kingdoms whose brutality and stupidity echo down the long corridor of human history parsed both politically and ecclesially. Or do we? For in the midst of these human kingdoms on any given Friday, things are not always so clear to those who receive just enough in benefits to assume the firm and tranquil repose of civil religion or political advantage. On one hand you could say, of that Friday long ago, that it was the beginning of a long weekend—a religious weekend to boot-the time when politicians head for second homes and a bit of distance from the madding crowds. In fact, the denial of life’s brute enigmas is what most three-day weekends are about. On the other hand and on this particular Friday, Pilate was like a politician caught in the headlights: we have seen our share of them lately on both sides of the aisle. Matthew, full of mixed motives himself, is careful to let us know that Pilate was a politician trying to do the right thing. In fact, in an unconscionable echo of this week’s headlines, the governor of Palestine does everything under his power to prevent Jesus’ death, but to no avail. Forced in the end to order Jesus’ crucifixion (capital punishment, after all, changes everything), he washes his hands of the political fallout foretold by his wife’s nightmare. Nevertheless, the kingdom on that Friday appears to belong to Pilate and to those shouting the loudest in the throng. What Pilate did not know, of course, was that he was playing into the hand of the God whose kingdom is forever, the God who chose death and not life for his Son, that death would never again have dominion. On that Friday this was not evident. “Have a good weekend,” Pilate must have said to the crowd as he handed this vulnerable Messiah over to death. Once he was crucified, dead and buried, the other accounts immediately resume the story on Sunday at dawn. As for Matthew, the appointed pericope for the day suggests the same leap: “After the Sabbath, as the first day of the week was dawning…” he continues, but then something very distinctive is told that sends us back to Saturday. Whereas in the other three accounts, the first witnesses find the stone already rolled away from the tomb, Matthew tells us, in no uncertain terms, that the stone was very much in place when Mary Magdalene and the other Mary arrived at the tomb. Then, according to Matthew alone, the earth quakes, an angel of the Lord descends from heaven, rolls away the stone and sits on it. The Roman guards conveniently faint dead away, but the women are told by the angel that Jesus is not there: he has been raised. The empty tomb, in other words, has not been tampered with. On the way to tell the disciples of the empty tomb, the risen Christ appears to them. Believe and do not doubt, Matthew seems to be saying between the lines. Two thousand years later, in fact ever since the Enlightenment, we have demanded more of the story than its details can bear, but Matthew comes closest to obliging. One gets the impression he was beset by his own group of skeptics who believed the body had been stolen. Or as Matthew presumed, he was saddled with an entrenched political and religious order intent on debunking this dangerous narrative, a story which threatened to wrest from them the kingdom and the power and the glory! Matthew suggests there was a plot. Religious leaders in cahoots with the guards spread the rumor not of angels but of robbers at the empty tomb. Hence the earthquake and the stone rolled away before eyewitnesses! Even so, Matthew admits that the disciples were not universally convinced. “When they saw him,” Matthew writes, “they worshipped him, but some doubted.” “We know also about Sunday,” says Steiner. “To the Christian, that day signifies an intimation, both assured and precarious, both evident and beyond comprehension, of resurrection, of a justice and a love that have conquered death. If we are non-Christian, we know of that Sunday in precisely analogous terms. We conceive of it as the day of liberation from inhumanity and servitude….The lineaments of that Sunday carry the name of hope (there is no word less deconstructable).” The hope of the resurrection, the hope that the God who began a good work in you, in those you love, in the child who lives but a few days, in the woman no longer on hold before heaven, in the young people gunned down without reservation, in the million slaughtered Sudanese, the hundreds of American soldiers and the thousands of uncounted Iraqis, the plagued-haunted AIDS victims in Africa and the races run but kept from the finish by cancer: the hope of the resurrection is that this precious life of ours and those we love (and those we will one day know) will be completed in the love of God which never ends. This can only be believed “in death’s despite,” or what Czech theologian Jan Lockmann has called “a nevertheless hope.” Which turns us finally to the day of this three-day weekend mentioned only in Matthew’s gospel: it is Saturday, the day when Matthew staged that last ditch effort of human power to snatch from God the glory of the Easter faith. What is evident on Saturday, he says, is the alliance of priests and politicians against the dangerous power of God’s reign. Nothing has changed in two thousand years! “An impostor,” the priests call Jesus, and have Pilate post guards at the tomb lest the disciples steal his body and then try to spread the lie of his rising. If this were to happen, they say, “the last deception would be worse than the first.” Pilate readily complies and we, who can no longer tell the truth from the lie, fall into line. But the real action of Saturday is hidden: the action of Him who was crucified, dead, and buried. He descended into hell says the creed. The One whose crucifixion signaled his descent into the place where God’s face could not be seen, where God’s praises could not be sung, where the Sabbath could not be kept, goes to the place of exclusion from God, where we are given what we seemed to want from the beginning in the garden! Yet in Christ’s descent behold: even hell ceases to be God-forsaken! Nevertheless I think, for the most part, we have chosen to do our believing on Saturday, when evidence would lead us to believe our weekends are as God-forsaken as hell. “Ours,” says Steiner finally, “is the long day’s journey of the Saturday. Between suffering, aloneness, unutterable waste on the one hand and the [promise] of liberation, of [resurrection] on the other. In the face of the torture of the child, of the death of love which is Friday, even the greatest art and poetry are almost helpless. In the [glory] of Sunday, the aesthetic will, presumably, no longer have logic or necessity.” But on Saturday, by the apprehensions in the play of our imagination, by the intimations we are given in this story that tells the truth, “where our future emerges out of Saturday if it emerges out of anywhere,” says Walter Brueggemann, “out of Saturday, that forlorn but haunted place of God’s own residence,” we are given not facts but “the poem and the music, which tell of pain and of hope, of the flesh which is said to taste of ash and the spirit which is said to have the savour of fire.” These imaginings, I read, “are always Sabbatarian. They have risen out of an immensity of waiting…” “…an inescapable, always demanding Saturday wait until the next morning, early the next morning, a wait for joy to come in the morning, a wait until mourning is turned to dancing and sackcloth is displaced by joy, a long wait, a wait of candor.” As we wait, in the end, we pray the unimaginable…“thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever.” In a sense these words have tutored our imaginations until, with the help of poet and painter, of musician and playwright, of novelist and gospel writer, we find ourselves on a mountain in Galilee, part of us believing and part doubting, but hoping, nevertheless, that we can trust our ears, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given unto me,” we hear him say. If this rings true in our hearing, then it must finally be Sunday, for he is risen. Let the people say, “He is risen indeed!” Thanks be to God! |