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Most of us preachers would prefer to be somewhere else on Easter Sunday, but this year there was no dodging it… --Art Lester
A lot of my colleagues have begged off today’s service, too. It’s just too problematic, Easter. It’s like Remembrance Sunday. Not only has everything been said about it—more than once—it’s too full of uncomfortable references to unresolved feelings about Jesus and all that. The rest of the year Unitarian preachers can get away with a light treatment of the issue, call Jesus a great teacher and pick and choose from among the minefields of Christianity a few nuggets of acceptable wisdom. But Easter seems to demand something else. It seems to urge me to take the myth of crucifixion and resurrection head on. The church has always been clever about stealing the clothes of other religions. We know that Easter was an established holiday three thousand years ago, among what we now call pagans. The goddess of spring was named Eostre. Paintings exist of people chomping eggs on the date before Judaism itself got started. There would always have been a celebration of the returning of life to the wintry earth, and with a little spin doctoring and quite a lot of guile, you can see how the story of Jesus rising from his grave got started. The early Christians were uncertain about the alleged events of Easter Sunday. Mark, the earliest of the gospel writers, left out the bits about Jesus appearing to the disciples. When Mary Magdalene and friends turned up at the tomb at the first acceptable moment after the Sabbath, they found the grave empty. That was that. There was a young man present, who had one strangely unforgettable line to say: “Why do you seek the living among the dead?” With this Socratic question I believe the whole resurrection myth must have begun. Other writers took over, with more and more elaboration. Jesus turned up on the road, in a boat and in people’s houses. Only Elvis Presley has enjoyed more after-death sightings. Some earnest believer added eight verses to Mark’s book at some later date, filling in the blanks and insisting on the veracity of these miraculous appearances. The resurrected Jesus was made to eat fish, catch fish, and somebody even stuck his hand into the open wound on his side to prove he was the same physical being who had suffered crucifixion. One interesting passage occurs in John 20, when the weeping Magdalene actually sees Jesus near his tomb. She doesn’t recognise him. In fact, she thinks he is the gardener, and asks where the body has been taken. After some prompting, she is convinced that Jesus is there before her and calls him “Rabboni,” or master. In a similar incident in Luke 24, Jesus approaches two grieving disciples on their way to Emmaus, but again they don’t recognise him. Luke explains this by saying that their “eyes were restrained.” Whoever these people were talking to, we are made to understand, he must not have looked very much like Jesus. In the most dramatic account of all, reported in Acts, Jesus actually rises into the air and disappears into a cloud. All the remaining disciples are gathered with the resurrected Jesus forty days after his death—the very first Ascension Day. After he disappears two angels appear and ask another intriguing question: “Why are you gazing into heaven?” They insist that when Jesus comes again, he will do so in the same manner as when he was taken up. The scenario creates a riddle. Being told not to look up into heaven to see Jesus return means that is not the way he will next be seen: i.e., descending from a cloud. If the line means anything at all, it must mean that when Jesus is next on the scene, he will reverse the process of physical death—in other words, be born. Maybe even as someone else. It seems as if the sightings of Jesus were problematic because he didn’t look very much like himself. Even with two days of decay following death, he still surely would have some of the same features. That means that whoever they were seeing was a different body, and his relationship to the buried master had to be established by the intuition of the disciples. Leaving us with an intriguing question: was Jesus taking over the bodies of some hapless bystanders, like the zombies of some fifties sci-fi film? Or, more to the point, were the disciples able to see something in others that reminded them of the vanished Christ? This mystery has always interested me—I brought it up in Bible studies at Birmingham University once, and had my point massaged away by the lecturer. They seem always able to rely on the fuzziness of translation when it suits them. I would have left it there had it not been for a strange recent development. Scene: a rain-swept London morning not long ago. Me, hurrying to catch a bus, hunched over against the wind, and in no mood to see miracles. Crossing a small railway bridge I saw a man approaching. I noticed him because he was stepping lightly, as if strolling through a park on a sunny day. He was a slight man, I would say in his sixties, with a white curly beard and white hair poking out of what seemed to be a Russian sailor’s uniform cap. He had on a wool pea coat and carried one of those odd leather briefcases that are square but have a shoulder strap. This was strapped across his chest, so that the case was wedged almost into his armpit. Just before we passed each other, I glanced at his face. He was looking at me, too. Now, in London, as you know, people don’t look at each other unless they want something. It might be to ask directions, to borrow a light for a cigarette, or some sort of sexual advance. We are all trained to resist such approaches, consciously or unconsciously. But what I saw was a kind of merry expression with the kind of expectancy you might find if you were recognising someone you know. In fact, I did think for a second that he looked familiar. I looked away, and, still just feet from each other, looked back again. The man was smiling at me. In the microseconds in which we analyse the world, I thought: gay? Is this a come-on? Schizophrenic? Another product of “care in the community” that needs to be registered and forgotten? I shrugged these off and saw a smile of a peculiar quality that I have seen a few times before. It was a smile made with the whole face, involving all the wrinkles around the eyes and mouth. That kind of smile makes the smiler vulnerable. It is subject to rejection because it is “inappropriate.” It lit up his face, and as we passed, I felt a corresponding smile forming on my own. But by that time he had gone by, and I knew he couldn’t have seen it. To my regret I walked on briskly, shoving it out of my mind. I just made the bus, and then, when I sat down, the image of the man’s smile returned. If I had been on foot I think I would have gone back and found the man, just to check my reality. A word formed itself in my thoughts. The smile had been Christ-like. There isn’t any other way to describe it, and that in itself is strange, because who has ever seen Christ smile? I told a friend about it. She said that it must have been an angel, turning up in this hard time of change for a little bit of reassurance. But I don’t know if I can deal with that. As much as I like the idea, seeing an angel in London Bridge at ten on a Wednesday morning is a bit too much of a fairy story for me. All my clever psychological training has come into play. It was someone quite ordinary, who thought briefly to ask for directions before seeing my closed, storm cloud face. I projected onto him, and onto the moment, a quality that I sorely needed. That explains it, and explains it away. But not quite. Not quite, because the after image of the moment is still with me. If I were an artist I would paint that smiling face. If I were Michelangelo, I would put it on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. If I could re-create it for you this morning, I would. But all I can do is say, really, that the face expressed the calm and—yes— the merriment of God. It fills me with a kind of irrational happiness that I would like to share around. I thought about the sightings of Jesus in the gospels, and I felt I could understand them without the need for cynicism. Of course Jesus didn’t go shambling about with rotting grave clothes on. Even David Jenkins, former Archbishop of York, once agreed with the poet W. H. Auden that that notion is a mere “conjuring trick with bones.” It is also unlikely that he appeared in some semi-transparent ephemeral body, like the Last Supper of Salvador Dali. But that doesn’t mean that people couldn’t have seen him on the road. Not even him, but the presence that he most represented to people, the one who all of us really are. Whoever that man was on the bridge the other day, he was carrying something with him. That smile simply could not have been faked. So whether he was a cruising homosexual or street loony, or just a happy fellow who had just won the lottery or been given a clean bill of health at the prostate clinic, he was smiling the smile of Christ. And that made me think this. The idea we have inherited from the Christian tradition is that the magic of resurrection is limited to special people—sons of God or whatever. And the ideas we have from the other traditions—even Sheldon Kopp saying, “If you see the Buddha on the road, kill him,”-- seem to refer to the idea that we are passive and powerless, dependent upon the magic of the super-powerful for salvation. But who says we can’t all be like that? Not all the time, of course. We still have our little egos to tend twenty-four hours a day. But just sometimes, when life seems to be a place worth being, when the light that gives us all existence isn’t too distorted by self-concern, we could be Christ-like for somebody else. Like George Fox, founder of the Quakers, we could try to “walk cheerfully over the earth, greeting that of God in everybody.” Because that’s what the old guy did; he greeted that of God in me. And the God in me longed to reciprocate. We could look at resurrection in a different way, you see. We could take it not so literally and not too cynically. We could do that whether we are Jewish or atheist, or so turned off to the Christian story that it makes us sneer. We could do something completely irrational, un-theological, even quixotic. We could indicate with our faces and voices and manner that we are aware that the smile of something far beyond our understanding is not so distant that it cannot sometimes be glimpsed in all the ordinary moments of our days. We could make Easter mean something other than jack-in-the-box saviours and chocolate eggs. We could learn to smile like that old man did, and give away the simple truth that’s much bigger than religion or theology.
Rev.Art Lester |