Christ is Risen! Alleluia!
Greetings to the Order of Jesus Christ, Reconciler, in the name of Jesus Christ, whom God raised from the dead on the third day, and who, through the Holy Spirit, guides us into all truth.
I took the season of Lent to read through the four Gospels. As we celebrate the resurrection of Christ and prepare to remember and celebrate the descent of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost, I encourage us to take up this regular reading of the Gospels, as enjoined for us by our rule of life. I didn’t gain any great insights to bring to you from reading through the four Gospels during Lent. However, my experience is instructive for us. Namely, I found facing Jesus of Nazareth as presented in the Gospels challenging. The challenge was that I couldn’t make the Jesus I found in the Gospels fit tidily in my own expectations, nor in any systematic presentation of theology or morality.
What is the role of the regular reading of the Gospels for us as an order with this charism of reconciliation? I think it can vary over time, but at root it is that we are always in service to the Gospel. We read the Gospels so that we never wield the Gospel and Christian faith for our own particular ends. Rather, we read the Gospels so that we may find ourselves overtaken by the Gospel.
God in human flesh, Jesus of Nazareth, as we find him in the Gospels is not an easy human being. I can’t make Jesus conform to my own expectations or what I would like Jesus to say. Jesus isn’t subject to any theology or system. If we take seriously the full witness of the four Gospels, it is very difficult to domesticate Jesus.
I’m not sure how to understand all that the Gospels report about Jesus’ words and actions. The difficulty is in part due to the fact that the four Gospels each have their own take and interpretation of Jesus. Yet, In reading the four Gospels concurrently Jesus of Nazareth broke through even each evangelist's own framing. Jesus insistently refuses even the evangelists own view of him.
This runs up against attempts to make Jesus a model, or someone we should be like. Making Jesus a model to follow after is itself a domestication. We as an order don’t seek to read the Gospels so that we may model ourselves after Jesus of Nazareth. Rather, we read the gospels over and over again to be transformed by our encounter with God incarnate, as we read the Gospels. God did the thing in Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ. We don’t seek to appropriate that work to ourselves, rather in coming to Jesus Christ, we open ourselves up to God incorporating us into Christ.
Yes, we share in the work of Jesus Christ, but that isn’t our work. Reading the Gospels as a practice encouraged for us by our rule of life, is at base that continually have before us that we are not Christ, but that God incorporates us into Jesus Christ. In regularly allowing ourselves to come face to face with the ‘untamed lion’ who is both fully God and fully human we ever more open ourselves to the work of God in Jesus Christ, begun in baptism and sustained in the breaking of the bread and sharing of the cup.
As we enter into the fifty days of Easter, I encourage us to sit with Jesus who can neither be appropriated to whom we’ve been taught he is nor to whom we’ve represented Jesus to be for ourselves.
Mark Charles on his podcast “My Second Cup of Coffee” for Good Friday encouraged Christians, especially Christians of European descent, to not rush to the celebration of the Resurrection. He pointed out that especially white Christian remembrance doesn’t face the confusion, the doubts, the pain, and the waiting of that first Easter. We are not well served by reading the first chapters of Acts alongside the Gospel stories of Jesus’ resurrection appearances. When we read accounts of the Resurrection alongside stories of the boldness of the apostolic church after Pentecost ,we can forget that Peter's preaching and the boldness of deacons Stephen and Philip and the other apostles after Pentecost came about over time (fifty days) and after the descent of the Holy Spirit..
I think Mark Charles point, as a Navajo Christian to us white Christians, is important. Part of what allowed our ancestors to commit genocide and enslave others in the name of Christ, was our assurance of our triumph and our being on the side of the truth of the Resurrected one.
If you are like me, the more I sit with the realities of institutional Christianity that has its origin in European Christianity, the more troubled I become. I ask what is the power of the Resurrection? How do people who name the name of Christ, again and again act so confidently, and yet without any reason for that confidence as they betray the very reality they purport to serve?
The preacher at the Maundy Thursday service for Saint John’s Episcopal Church (Chicago) encouraged us gathered to sit with the realities of the Three Days leading up to Easter Sunday. To sit with Jesus’ command to Love as Jesus loved, to not run ahead though we know the ending. This is also the challenge of Easter. As we celebrate the fifty days we know the Holy Spirit will come with power. We know that the cowering small band in the upper room will boldly go out and preach the Gospel and turn the world upside down. Yet, that wasn’t the feeling of that first fifty days between Easter and Pentecost.
First, there was doubt and attempts to explain the empty tomb. Then there was joy, but also fear and confusion. In Luke, Jesus takes time to expound the Scripture to two disciples, who don’t really understand anything Jesus says until Jesus blesses and breaks bread with them, and then disappears.
The resurrected Jesus of Nazareth, the one crucified and raised to life on the third day, can’t be contained: Jesus appears and disappears, walks through walls and eventually bodily ascends and passes away from sight into heaven. At first, Jesus’s followers don’t know what to make of any of it.
Let the celebration of Easter open up questions for you. Don’t rush to the answers. Sit with the bewildered, joyful, doubtful, and overwhelmed disciples.
Do not let the celebration, blind us to the lamentable reality of the reason Jesus Christ was crucified. Let us remember that Peter, the beloved Disciple, and Mary Magdalene, all close and dear to Jesus of Nazareth, were baffled and dismayed and continued to weep on that first Easter Sunday. Jesus meets his disciples ,and us, not in celebration and triumph, but in bewilderment and grief.
On the Second Sunday of Easter we recall the deep integrity of Saint Thomas the apostle whose doubt refuses any erasure of the terror of crucifixion. “Unless I can put my fingers in the wounds of Jesus, I will not believe!” The Resurrection of Christ, doesn't erase the lamentable state of our humanity, nor are we called to excuse and downplay evil that continues to be perpetuated in the world, especially when done in the name of Christ.
Let Easter be complex. Sit with what is lamentable in our world, even as there is joy. Be bewildered by this Jesus of Nazareth, who isn’t easily contained, who walks through our barriers and containers. Embrace Jesus, who appears to us and just as suddenly disappears from view. Jesus Christ the incarnate word doesn’t belong to us, but we can be gathered under her wings, like chicks to the mother hen. Our comfort is not in understanding, but in being held by the God who so loved the world that God sent God’s very own, one like an only heir, the word made flesh, Jesus Christ, that we might have life and be whole.
In the name of the one who raised Jesus Christ from the grave,
Abba Basil Irenaeus, OJCR
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