Life Against Death

Ezekiel 37:1-14; John 11:1-45

“What do you think really happened to Jesus in his tomb?  I mean (I know you don’t know but guess)what do you think?”

“Oh I don’t know,” he said.

I growled.  “That’s your first response.  What’s your second?”

So Joe and I sat across from the desk we share and got into a discussion about resurrection as I was beginning to compose my Easter sermon.  I had no idea back then in 2012 that it was going to change me.  For one thing, it was nothing new, my asking this question. I’d been posing it for no fewer than forty years, intrigued since at least seminary with the notion of what it means to live the resurrection.

In the course of our conversation I pulled off the shelf a book I’d had since 1970, Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death.  Brown was a literary Freudian.  The final chapter in that book is entitled “The Resurrection of the Body.”  Here is a snippet of Brown’s argument that I shared:

The time has come to ask Christian theologians…what they mean by the resurrection of the body and by eternal life.  Is this a promise of immortality of life after death? In other words, is the psychological premise of [Christianity] the impossibility of reconciling life and death either in “this” world or the “next,” so that flight from death—with all its morbid consequences—is our eternal fate in “this world” and “the next”?  For…that perfect body, promised by Christian[s]… is a body reconciled with death.

In the last analysis [Christianity] must either accept death as part of life or abandon the body.[1]

So we talked on, Joe and I, about the acceptance of mortality, and about how Jesus embraced the body and the body’s inevitable fate, death.  We chewed on the notion of how resurrection is impossible outside the body, and thus of how the body is central to any discussion of resurrection, while it can easily be tossed aside if immortality of the soul, for example, supplants it.  That happened when Christianity exchanged its twin foundational doctrines of incarnation and resurrection for a pervasive suspicion of the human body and a campaign to classify anything material as inferior to anything “spiritual.”

I grabbed another book, one that I love.  It’s C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, in his Chronicles of Narnia.  I flipped to that passage where Aslan, the great lion, willingly goes to the Great Stone Table to let himself be sacrificed in place of pitiful Edmund, who’s run afoul of the White Witch.  It’s much too long a passage to read to you, or even to sum up.  Suffice it to say that the little Pevensy girls stand in the shadows watching a jeering, mocking, cursing crowd of fiends and brutes cruelly shave, muzzle, and finally bind the great cat to his death on the cold stone slab. 

Lucy and Susan manage in the darkness to remove the muzzle from the dead lion, and sob and cry until at last they notice that little mice have appeared. The mice, perhaps hundreds, have come in the darkness just before the sun has risen and are gnawing through the ropes binding Aslan’s corpse.

A great crack then breaks the stone table in two from top to bottom.  The frightened girls, who could not bear to look any longer at the horrible scene, turn and, seeing no Aslan, imagine that something awful has happened to his body.  One asks a question and they hear a voice behind them.  “Yes!”  There shining in the sunrise is Aslan himself. No, not a ghost, but fully alive, even with his mane grown back.  He tells the girls to catch him if they can, and the three run, romp, laugh, and play until girls and lion lie panting in the sun, not the least tired or hungry or thirsty. [2]

I was in tears.  I put the book down.  “Joe,” I said in awhile, “I want to live like that.  I want the rest of my life to be nothing but resurrection.  I want to taste it, feel it, love it until—until I die.”

            I

We are at the beginning of Holy Week when we get to follow that dolorous way of the cross, watching another rabble mock and scourge and spit upon and string up the Son of Man.  So we’re not quite ready entirely to ponder the resurrection just yet, are we? Instead, let's look at two stories. One is a vision, Ezekiel’s celebrated vision of the valley of dry bones. 

"Our bones are dried up, our hope is lost..."

A voice says that they are the whole house of Israel, as good as dead, dismembered, bleached dry, useless.  But the vision of new life unwinds. Bones rattle together.  Muscle and sinew and skin cover them.  Then the ruah, the wind, the spirit enters them and becomes their breath.  It is a redoing of creation.  The spirit that moved over the face of the deep when there was nothing but a watery darkness now moves into the slain and brings them to life.  What does it mean? 

Then another story, even weirder than the vision because it purports to be factual.  Jesus gets word that Lazarus, a man whom he loves, is ill.  Instead of rushing straightway to Bethany, Jesus delays.  By the time he arrives, Lazarus has died and has been buried for four days.  Jesus is deeply moved, weeps even.  They take him to the tomb.  He prays.  He calls.  “Lazarus, come out!”  And the man whom he loves comes out not as a corpse, but alive, still wrapped in the grave-bonds.  “Unbind him,” commands Jesus. “Let him go.”  What does it mean?

Ezekiel tells us the meaning of his vision.  What happened in the valley of dry bones is what Yahweh will do to Israel.  They say that they are no better than bones, their hope clean gone, their future cut off completely.  Yahweh will breathe the Spirit into them, bring them home to their own soil.  And they will know who has recreated them.

And the meaning of the raising of Lazarus?  In John’s narrative it is the last straw for the authorities, the overwhelming impetus for putting Jesus to death.  In a larger sense, one cannot read the story without hearing overtones of the story which is yet to come, a story of a tomb sealed with the customary stone, a dead man inside covered in grave-clothes down to a napkin over his head, a voice shaking the world like thunder coming from heaven. 

Henry Ossawa Tanner, "Resurrection of Lazarus," 1896

What does it mean?  You get to figure it out.  But I think I can give you a hint.  There is only one thing deeper than death, and that is the power of pure love.  To put it in C. S. Lewis’s metaphor, it is the Deep Magic. Magic deeper than death decreed before the world began that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor’s stead, the Table would crack and death would start reversing itself.  As Jesus says before his own death, “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” 

            II

So all of these stories, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the “Valley of Dry Bones,” the “Raising of Lazarus” are like so many sparks emanating from a single bonfire burning at the heart of human experience.  They all get at the truth differently, but the truth they get at is a truth about embracing mortality.  It is the  Truth himself who oddly says, “If you care about saving your life, you will lose it, but if you lose your life for my sake, you will find it.”   Every instinct in us wants to save our lives, beginning with our bodies and spreading out to everything material that props them up.  We love our things, our systems, our habits, our idols, our money, our pedigrees, all that stuff.  And, ironically, not always but often, much of that stuff comes between ourselves and our plain old bodies, our natural naked vulnerability.  We have a hard time even believing that we would ever be safe, let alone whole, if we once stopped worrying about it all.  We’ll make a thousand excuses to hold on to what we’ve got.  We’ll do our best to fend off change, mistaking change as life-threatening.  And the irony is that death is defanged the moment we begin to embrace the inevitability of death.  That’s not the moment when we know we are on our way out of this life, but the moment when we can behold our own bodies and love them the way God loves them.  St. Bernard of Clairvaux once said that the highest form of love was not the love of God for God’s sake, but the love of self for God’s sake.

That’s where new life is born.  And it does not stop where it starts. When we begin to love our bodies, our senses, without which the knowledge of God is impossible, we begin loving the things and people around us as we love ourselves.  Start practicing that kind of love and you’ll find that it’s a lot more fun than arguing, fussing, and fighting.  Begin loving profligately rather than measuring love out cautiously and you’ll find yourself laughing more than controlling.  Gradually shed your fixations and get playful and you’ll see how right Jesus was when he said that unless you become as a little child, you’ll just miss the boat to the kingdom.

III

Here’s the secret, and it is a pretty well kept one.  There is a difference between making a pact with death and embracing death.  On the one hand, making a pact with death is to resign oneself to the ways of death, most of which are pretty good at masking as life-sustaining, like that list of things we desperately want to cling to.  On the other hand, embracing death is facing into the wind, stepping out into space trusting that there’s a Love strong enough to hold us close and never let us go. 

You can’t be the Body of Christ without embracing death.  You can’t be the Body of Christ and opt out of facing the cross.  And that means more than persevering through suffering, though that might be in the cards.  It means affirming the physical, your own bodily life.  It means you let go of the fantasy that life is in the past.

What this troubled world needs is a community that doesn’t just recite a creed about the resurrection, but one willing to risk living the resurrection.  Show them by your life how to have a little more, or a lot more, Eros, and less strife. Form or reform communities where dreamers, mystics, poets, singers, artists, political idealists, social workers, healers, psychoanalysts, theologians, philosophers, writers say no to dead polemics and yes to reimagining a world living with its bodily senses wide open.[3]  Teach others how to live soulful lives the way you tend to your garden and the way you prepare and serve fabulous meals.  Look for opportunities to love and serve those hard to serve and harder to love.  And, in Norman Brown’s words, a little consciousness might help: “a little more self-knowledge, humility, humanity, and Eros.”[4]

And every time you stand on a gray day before some apparently dead end, listen carefully for a Voice that will shake your life like thunder.  It’s the old incantation fixed from all eternity by him whose Body is one with yours:  “I am resurrection.” 

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2017

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[1] Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death:  The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History  (Middletown, CT:  Wesleyan University Press, 1959), pp. 308-9. Alterations mine.

[2] C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, vol. 2 in The Chronicles of Narnia (New York:  HarperCollins (Harper Trophy), 1950, 1978), pp. 150-164.

[3] Brown, p. 322.

[4] Ibid.

Body Awareness

 Luke 24:36b-48

            Last summer a friend of mine told me that she had written a book that had just been published under the title Losing Sight, Gaining Vision.  Sheridan Gates has a form of macular degeneration the onset of which happened when she was quite young.  Her adult life has been a progressive adjustment to the gradual loss of sight. 

           

            I immediately got and read her book.  In recounting her steady loss of vision, she writes about how she learned to listen to her body.  Little by little she learned to shift from seeing her loss of vision as a liability to seeing it as a gift.  Sheridan began to see herself not as a victim of illness, but rather as a healer.  And healing for her and through her for others has taken the form of learning how to embrace her body, learning that though it was losing the capacity to see, the body was learning a new way to have vision.  The body has its own wisdom.[1]

            For the last three years I have been on a pilgrimage to explore ever more deeply what the resurrection of the body actually means.  Sheridan’s book, and more recently Sheridan herself, have helped me in a process of what she and I call “spiritual coaching” to grasp that resurrection of the body is a way of life.  It is a way of embracing the body, of listening to it, of taking seriously that it may be not an impediment to spiritual life but indeed the key to it. 

            I believe that affirming the body is the central point Luke wants us to get in the gospel for today.  The risen Jesus has appeared on the road to Emmaus to two disciples who are discussing the events that ended his life—and the strange tale that some women of their group had told about going to the tomb and learning that his body was missing.  The wayfaring stranger proceeds to explain all the things concerning himself that the scriptures had foretold.  Still the two disciples do not recognize him.  They invite him in to dine with them when they have reached Emmaus.  While he is at table with them, he—the guest—takes bread and blesses and breaks it.  Then their eyes are opened, and they recognize him just before he vanishes.  They rush back to Jerusalem and tell the Eleven and their companions what they have experienced and hear from them that it is true:  the Lord has risen and has appeared to Simon Peter.  Suddenly Jesus comes and stands among them, saying, “Peace be with you.”  They are terrified, thinking they are seeing a ghost.  He invites them to look at his hands and feet, saying that a ghost does not have flesh and bones as he does.  While they are still wondering and disbelieving for sheer joy, he asks them for something to eat.  They give him a piece of broiled fish, which he takes and eats right before them. 

            Whatever else may be said of this story, it quite clearly establishes four things.  One is that the resurrection body of Jesus is not to be confused with his spirit in a non-physical appearance: he is not a ghost.  Second, the resurrection body is not a resuscitated corpse, because he is able to appear and vanish at will, regardless of space, time, and circumstances.  Third, there is continuity between Jesus of Nazareth who was crucified and the risen Jesus, inasmuch as the resurrection body bears the scars of his passion and death.  Fourth, a transformation has taken place, because, though the body belongs to Jesus, it has changed to the point that he is not readily recognizable.

            Now we will never know until we get to the great seminar in the skies exactly what happened to Jesus between his death on Friday and sunup on Sunday.  But one thing is for certain.  Something happened to the physical body of Jesus.  And thus any resurrection we want to talk about has to do with the physical body, our physical bodies.  And we know well enough what is going to happen to them, don’t we?  They are going to die; and one way or the other they are going to return to the stuff out of which they came:  earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.  But the church has been letting itself off the hook of talking about the physical body for too long by transmuting resurrection into immortality.  The issue of what happens after death might be of great importance, but the more important thing is what the resurrection means for this life, here and now.  Even the most devoted believer in an afterlife, of whatever kind, will tell you that what happens there is directly tied to what we do here.  From that I conclude that it is wise to make a short list of things not to worry about and put afterlife first on that list.  Concentrate on living life joyfully, lovingly, gratefully, kindly, and the afterlife, whatever shape it takes, will take care of itself.  You have my word on that.

            So what does the resurrection have to do with this body, yours and mine?  Well, first, remember your baptism.  What do we remember when we forget everything else about baptism?  It is “down under and back up again.”  It is a ritual death and resurrection.  (We are in the land of metaphor and symbol here.)  When we are, as it were, pulled up out of the water we are united with the Risen Lord in the resurrection.  Yes, it has a future, that resurrection life, beyond our mortal death.  But it certainly does not wait for death in order to begin.  So whatever we do with our life in Christ we do in the very body that is speaking and listening to these words right now. 

            Let’s be honest.  For centuries Christians have distrusted the body, sidelined it, repressed it, despised it, all on the theory that the body is a great big problem for anybody wanting to live a spiritual life.  So we have been quite good at developing rationales for asceticism, denying our physical selves for the sake of becoming spiritually disciplined.  We have a whole gallery of people whom we honor and pretend we want to emulate—virgin mothers and other virgins, desert fathers and mothers, saints of one kind or another who practically lived as if the physical body was of no importance whatsoever.  None of that, by the way, do we see reflected in Jesus, who by his own admission came, “eating and drinking” with all manner of folk, to the point that people accused him of being a glutton and a winebibber.  Yes, he fasted and prayed, but we have no record that he spurned the body that he lived in.  That body prayed, fed, healed, taught, walked, loved, ate, drank, sweated, slept, dreamed, and all the other things (you know what they are) that bodies do, and finally died.  And all of it, all of it, was life as God, in God, with God, and for God.  So what gets in the way of our living like that?

            We have not only some Christian history to reckon with, but a good deal of secular history as well.  And generally that has led us in two directions, sometimes almost indistinguishable.  One is to believe in the exaggerated importance of the body.  The other is to repress it and all that is associated with it, especially its sexual dimensions.  And here is where resurrection can actually help us.  Resurrection is the radical affirmation of the physical, the assertion that the Creator knew exactly what the Creator was doing by making a universe where matter and spirit (energy) are not opposed, but indeed two different manifestations of the same reality.  We do not have to repress the body, even as we are disciplining it.  You can diet, exercise, do yoga, martial arts, and engage in a host of other beneficial disciplines, all without disparaging your body.  More than that, you can actually keep the second of the two great commandments—you can love yourself as you love your neighbor.  And you do not have to be ashamed of or embarrassed about doing so; for in loving your body you are loving the greatest gift that your Creator has given you.  At its best, it can be the portal of delight you can only describe as divine.

            And you can affirm your body as mortal.  Wherever you are in life right now, your body is on its way to the grave.  That has been true all your life.  Get used to it.  On that list of things not to worry about, add “my death.”  Doing away with anxiety and fear of death is not so easily done as said, but it can be done.  It takes practice.  Take a tip from Sheridan.  Don’t imagine that your body’s loss means your own diminishment.  You may very well gain vision as you lose eyesight, or gain comprehension as you lose the faculty of hearing. 

            Ironically, the more we accept and honor our physical, mortal bodies, the more we are free to let go of the useless and neurotic effort to stave off their death.  And the more we let go, the more ready are we to move into the joy of a life unencumbered by fear, powered only by love.   Living that way is living the resurrection.  Life powered by love is the Kingdom of God, where there is no more sorrow nor sighing nor repression, because the sting of death is gone, and there is no need to repress anything anymore.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2015

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[1] Sheridan Gates, Losing Sight, Gaining Vision: Thriving Throughout Life's Losses (Purpose At Work, Kindle Edition), see especially p. 91.

No End

 If ever there was an Easter story cut out for the skeptic, it is what you just heard from Mark. That may well be true because Mark might have been writing to skeptics. Some things that Mark says in his gospel hint that he was writing to Christians who were being tested, and very likely persecuted. Nearly everybody who studies Mark seriously concludes that he was writing to folks who were under considerable pressure. And not just ordinary pressure, but life-threatening pressure. Jesus spends a couple of chapters in Mark teaching his disciples about suffering, beginning with a heads-up about his own impending passion, which he predicts and discusses no fewer than three times. Suffering and betrayal, wars and strife, displacement and terrorism have a way of making one a zealot, a martyr, or a skeptic. A great many of us, hauled off by police or threatened in court, not to mention possibly staring our execution in the face, are prone to become skeptics, wondering if what we have been giving our lives to is really worth the bother, feeling that the system that presses the juice out of human beings is rigged against us permanently. There are many reasons to lose faith. There are many reasons not to trust.

Maybe that is why several Easter stories begin in the dark, for that is where we find ourselves at least some of the time, especially under threat or pressure. In Mark, the sun had risen, and in English this comes off as a pun, though I doubt that Mark had English in mind. It was “very early,” and the three women braved it, carrying a load of spices, padding toward the cemetery. No matter how much light was breaking over the purple east, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome were positively in the dark. They, like all lovers on their way to see a corpse for the last time, were dark with grief. And they were in the dark, too, about what had happened during the night.

It happens with some frequency to the skeptic that clouds of one kind or another gather, keeping out the light. You may think that by noting this I have a black eye to give the skeptic. Not so. I assume that you, like me, are one, or have been one. Skeptics are not those who are mean or dull or stupid, nor those who lob grenades into intellectual discussions just for the fun of the explosion, or who delight in smacking down others’ piety. Skeptics (we get that word from a Greek one that nowhere appears in the New Testament) are those who are thoughtful and reflective. They are not ready to jump into believing something just because somebody says to, or because it might make them feel good. Sometimes the skeptical were born skeptical, probing and questioning and challenging and suspending judgment from the beginning. Other times, however, events and other people teach us to be skeptical. People that we once trusted let us down. People who we thought we could count on don’t show up. Systems that we once pledged allegiance to turn out to be run by those who care nothing about us. Ideals that once gleamed in our eyes become relics of disenchantment. Any of those clouds can bring on gloom. And though a skeptic need not be gloomy, give one enough clouds a-clustering and they will pry loose the firmest grip of simplistic faith.

These women go to anoint the body of the dead Jesus because that it what the situation requires. We can excuse them for wondering who will roll away the stone, for one does not necessarily create in advance a plan to deal with all the eventualities when one is distressed. We can appreciate their not jumping to conclusions about the stone having been rolled back. They enter the tomb.

Interestingly, the stories of the empty tomb seem to have come into Christian lore later than stories of the resurrected Jesus. Paul, for example, makes no mention of the empty tomb, which had nothing to add to his experience of meeting the Risen Lord on the Damascus road. The Letter to the Hebrews, another product of very early Christianity, says a good deal about the temple, but nothing about the tomb. This, of course, means nothing about the factuality of the tomb—but it does suggest that, with the passage of time, people, like Mark’s readers, began to connect their lives to those lives in the old stories about the resurrection. That is the way any of us begins to get meaning, and inspiration, and guidance. We see or hear something, often a story, that sheds light on the very dark we are going through. More frequently, we form a relationship with a person—perhaps even a person in a photograph, a movie, a book—some human being that we can bond with. I once knew a man who, when he was a boy, grew up in abject poverty, without caring parents, without friends, without encouragement from any human being. But there was stored in the barn an old 19th century framed picture of some Scottish ancestor, dressed in Highland garb. When he would sneak away to the barn to avoid the noise and abuse going on in the house, he would look for hours at the old Scot in the frame, who became his model of manhood.

These women entering the tomb form such a picture—one of ordinary people in a bleak, but not uncommon, situation, one that we can relate to. They were expecting to find a corpse, but instead they saw someone very much alive. They were expecting silence, and instead heard a proclamation. “Go tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.” So they went out and fled from the tomb, overcome with terror and amazement, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” And that is the end of the Gospel according to Mark.

Scholars have speculated and argued for a long time about whether that is the last of it, or whether we are missing a page. You will notice in some Bibles two attempts to supply what clearly Mark did not, a hodge-podge of resurrection stories with a few new details thrown in. But I think, if there were anything ever inspired in Scripture, it is the ending of Mark’s gospel with the women fleeing from the tomb, terrified and amazed, unable to say anything to anybody. Why? Because the ending of the story has to be written by you. You get to decide whether you simply adopt somebody else’s ending or supply your own. And the way to do it is to go to the tomb yourself.

There is a tomb, and it is right here where you are. We call it the baptismal font. In it we are buried with Christ in his death. Water comes up over us when we are being baptized just as real as the forces of death that overtook Jesus on his cross, just as palpable as the cold stone of the tomb in which his dead body lay. Down under that water we go, as if for a minute we were breathing the last breath of a ruined creation. And suddenly, the stone is rolled away. The power of God seizes us, and draws us up out of the death-waters into the light of day, so that the death-waters become the birth-waters of new life, and the tomb becomes a womb. From that moment on, our feet are firmly planted in the Way of Christ. What we do with the rest of our lives is in a very real sense what we make of the resurrection of the body.

You would think that a church full of flowers, trumpeting its best music, clad all in the white and gold of joy would have no room for skepticism in all this. You might say that the deck is stacked against any who would look the least bit askance at the proclamation that he is risen. You would be wrong. Don’t forget that we remember. We remember that at least this Easter story tells us that the prospect of a Risen Lord, not to mention one who brings us body and all into his own New Life, is startling, amazing, even terrifying. No less a woman than the Magdalene, known elsewhere in gospel tradition as forthright and courageous, flees from the tomb, afraid to tell a soul—at least for the moment—she is so shaken. And that is sometimes what one must do when one has come out of the water of baptism, or more likely, when one has renewed the baptismal promises to follow Jesus along the Way. And it is especially true once we really do begin to believe it, heart and soul. To be a part of a community that actually vows in all earnestness to love as Jesus loved, to pray, to give, to serve, to forgive: well, all of that is enough to shake us like an earthquake and to shut our mouths to any easy platitudes.

 But do you want to stop the gospel story there? Stop with nothing more to say than a faint, “I doubt it”? Or do you want to finish the chapter, or write another, telling of how you went home, as if to Galilee, and found him there just as he said he’d be? Do you want to search for him in the world among the poor and the war-wounded and the dispossessed? Do you want to learn on deeper levels what actually happens when you go from symbolically washing another’s feet to the place where you actually pour out yourself not only for the sake of people you like or love but equally for people you really can’t stand? Do you want to know the power of resurrection if that power unleashes in you talents that you get nervous thinking you might express? Would you really forego the possibility that, trusting in the power of the Spirit that raised Jesus and raised you, you could have a life that would take you to places you would rather not go, but where you would find inexpressible joy? Can you write in your life a story of resurrection that is about how you learned in the last quarter of your life how to let go of control and put yourself in the hands of others, without fussing, without whining, and without fear? Do you want to follow the Truth you hear in Jesus, even if it means getting arrested, offending your family, taking up a politically unpopular cause? We need not fewer but more skeptics, people who are thoughtful and reflective, people who, like Jesus, question authority, people willing to entertain the notion that the conventions everyone else seems to live by are not all there is to God’s universe. And if, like the three women in the chill of a Jerusalem morning long ago, you find yourself fleeing the dark tomb and its promise of New Life, write the story you want to be a part of. Compose something that you can believe. There is a Galilee out beyond unquestioned faith and endless faithless questions. He will meet you there, as he said.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2012