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The Story We Choose to Believe
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis April 8, 2007, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Joshua 24:1-15 Matthew 28:1-15
On this morning when the shout goes up throughout the world: “He is risen!” and the cry comes back “He is risen indeed!”, Joshua’s address and Matthew’s gospel compel us reaffirm, in light of the life we have been given to lead and the death we all must die, the story we choose to believe. Is Jesus dead as a doornail or is he alive? Is the Easter claim a lie or a truth beyond all telling? Those are the two possibilities posed by Matthew’s dueling narratives, and this is the morning to do business with both. The question is the question as to which story has the power to order the disparate facts of our human existence into a coherent whole; which story provides the clue that will enable us to inhabit the universe with meaning, with purpose, with grace…even in our darkest hour? Yet how are we to go about our believing in an age where every truth claim-once deconstructed-lands us in a private subjective stew or yields its wisdom only to scientific proof or relegates belief to an evolved complexity that offers no adaptive value of its own? “You are holding in your hand a tiny book which has shaped whole civilizations” writes novelist A.N. Wilson of Matthew’s gospel amid his own raging doubt. “And you are bound to ask, because you are born out of time in a post-Christian age, into a world of newspapers and investigative reporting and science—‘Is it true?’ Did a Virgin really conceive?…Did he grow up to be able to walk on water…to perform miracles…to rise from the dead? “Stop, stop” Wilson insists. “Don’t ask. They are all questions which seem reasonable enough, but they will lead you into the most pointless, arid negativism. Your educated, scientific, modern mind will decide that no one ever walked on water; no Virgin ever conceived; that corpses do not come to life. And by rejecting this Gospel, you will reject one of the most disturbing and extraordinary books ever written; not, as you might think, on intelligent grounds, but because you (and I, alas) are too hemmed in by our imaginative limitations….” Let us consider, then, the story this tiny book tells not only in the face of our imaginative limitations, but also in the face of the life and death we have witnessed since last we did business with the God who raised Christ from the dead. Close at hand I think of the births announced (some with bated breath) or the miscarriages quietly borne alone; a nest left mercifully and menacingly empty; marriages begun, a divorce finalized, an affair ended, an engagement broken; comfort abandoned in favor of some distant, if not terrifying, calling; a door closed, a window opened; cancer returned, a stroke endured, a body worn out; a fall from hope redeemed in halting words and a step taken; the hand of a mother, a father, a sister, a friend held for the last time in death. At a bare remove, our litany also must include a war that has only increased the terror it allegedly was begun to abate; medical breakthroughs as well as a planet gasping for breath at the apocalyptic scenarios of scientists; genocide in nations of color ignored; the poverty our largess could address blamed on its victims; earthquake, wind and fire occasioning glimpses of a common humanity. Mostly we seek a story that will make sense of the endings, of the death stalking every moment of our waking. Mostly we are listening for a word that will enable us to stand fast, keep on keeping on, rejoice even as we are perishing. So Matthew begins the end of his gospel by daring to place the outrageous truth of Jesus’ rising from the dead alongside the only reasonable explanation for his missing body. Choose this day what story you will believe and so the God whom you will serve! The interminable Sabbath ended, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary go to see the tomb. Here there is no conversation about someone to roll the stone away, no plan to anoint Jesus’ dead body. The women simply have come to resume the vigil interrupted by the Sabbath. The stone--according only to Matthew--is in place that morning, as are the guards when the women arrive. Guards, you will remember, had been ordered to secure the tomb on Friday night, sealing the stone and standing watch lest the body of this imposter be stolen and “the last deception be worse than the first.” Suddenly the earth quakes as it did at Jesus’ death. Those of us who have been reading the Old Testament since the first of the year cannot help but think of God’s appearance at Sinai when the whole mountain shook violently. An angel, a messenger of God descends in glory and rolls away the stone. Matthew’s details mean to tell those whose story is contained in the Hebrew scriptures that the Living God has come near. The guards immediately faint dead away from fear whereas the women are addressed with the usual angelic admonition: “Do not be afraid!” Apparently they are not, for with aplomb they accept as true the very story the religious establishment has done everything to silence: He is not here, for he has been raised! “Come, see,” the angel says, inviting them into the tomb. “At this point” writes New Testament scholar John Nolland, “it becomes clear that the rolling away of the stone has not been to let Jesus out, but rather to let the women in.” Indeed, Matthew has told the story of Easter morning so as to let us in too! For he uncannily addresses our modern and post-modern struggle to believe in his addition of disinterested witnesses; in the cause and effect explanation of the stone rolled away, sparing us an abrupt encounter with the mystery; in his implicit acknowledgement of the “considerable doubt that had to be overcome for the conviction that Jesus was alive to take root,” says Nolland. Matthew’s words do all words can do to address our imaginative limitations and turn us toward him who has been raised from the dead. Still, we have neither turned nor come to the heart of the matter. Therefore to Mark’s terrified women fleeing the scene in silence, Matthew directly juxtaposes women running with joy to tell the disciples. But Matthew, and only Matthew, says more. “Suddenly,” he writes, Jesus meets them—appears first to the women--and says, literally, “Rejoice!” The initiative is all God’s. In response the women come to him, take hold of him and worship him who, from the other side of the grave, has taken hold of them. In other words, choosing to believe this story is to enter into a relationship with him who is alive; to realize he has hold of you; to trust that, in your darkest hour, he is standing by your side; to expect his intercession when others have forsaken you and fled; to call upon his name when your heart and mind are awash in joy and gratitude. It is to know, as we can only know beyond the limits of our imagination, that he lives. My mind stands on tiptoe to believe. The story never ceases to astonish me! “Could I dare confess” asks the Lithuanian poet Czeslaw Milosz, “that I am a priest without faith,/That I pray every day for the grace of understanding,/Though there is in me only a hope of hope?” I am grateful the story that has chosen me still astonishes after all these years! As for the reasonable story, Matthew tells us that the guards went from the scene they had witnessed with the women, though they had experienced the morning in contrasting ways. They went, says Matthew, to the religious authorities where they were bought off to suppress what they knew. Perhaps. Yet theirs is the story the world really believes, the story that requires nothing more of the believer than the assent of the mind. There is, after all, no one to follow, no cross to bear, no purpose to pursue beyond one’s own bliss. Two millennia later, the logic still holds, according to evolutionary biologists, that the resurrection appearances, not to mention our own sense of Jesus’ presence, occur to us because the human mind is simply primed to presume the presence of agents, even when such presence confounds logic. “Believing in God and the afterlife, they say, is how we make sense of the brevity of our time on earth, how we give meaning to this brutish and short existence, [how we] offer solace to the bereaved and comfort to the frightened.” Precisely my point! So ironically the guard’s story represents the counterintuitive explanation, the logical albeit lonely conclusion, the academically plausible surmise that blithely abandons us at the edge of every death-dealing fact without a God on whom to call. My friends, we each will bet our life on a story, be it told by evolutionary biologists or first century evangelists--that takes the reality and the fictions we tell ourselves, the good times and the bad, the beginnings and the endings--and fits them into the framework of chance and accident, of cause and effect, of thesis and antithesis or of grace and destiny. Casting his own doubtful lot with the latter, A. N. Wilson returns us, in the end, to what he considers the most haunting passage in the entire New Testament--not the 28th but Matthew’s 25th chapter--where the eternal implications and the mystery of our choosing to believe God lives are revealed: “Neither the blessed, nor the damned in this tale, understand during their lifetimes that in so far as they responded to the depths of human need in others, they had responded to [the Living] God. It is in the context of this story” says Wilson, “that we begin to understand the sense in which this book is true,” the sense in which this story provides the clue that will enable us to inhabit the universe with meaning and purpose and grace, the sense in which choosing to believe Jesus was raised from the dead will find us standing fast, keeping on, rejoicing even as we are perishing. Though finally in the face of death’s reality, it is a poet who wrestles our imaginative limits to the ground and invites us, from the other side of the tomb, to live in relation to the God who raised Jesus from the dead. “I divested myself of despair/and fear when I came here” writes the dying Jane Kenyon in “Notes from the Other Side”:
one’s own eye in the mirror, there are no bad books, no plastic, no insurance premiums, and of course no illness. Contrition does not exist, nor gnashing of teeth. No one howls as the first clod of earth hits the casket. The poor we no longer have with us. Our calm hearts strike only the hour, and God, as promised, proves to be mercy clothed in light. |