Resurrection?

Many years ago I read two books which described very similar events experienced by two different people. The first person was Brian Keenan and the second John McCarthy. Brian was a writer from Northern Ireland who was teaching at the American University in Beirut. John was a British journalist working in Lebanon for CNN. In April 1986 they were both kidnapped by extremists of Islamic Jihad and held captive until 1990 and 1991 respectively. They describe their experiences in separate books.

They were held under the most appalling circumstances and were regularly ill treated and tortured. For much of their captivity they were held in solitary confinement below ground often blindfolded in cells hardly bigger than their height and width. They were transported from place to place often strapped to the underside of vans and trucks. Both describe their experiences in terms of feeling buried alive and being entombed.

Brian currently teaches in Ireland and John is still a journalist.

I have wondered from time to time how I would deal with that kind of captivity. Assuming I survived the initial panic and fear of possible immanent death; that I did not go completely gaga from sensory deprivation; that I did not lose hope as the days dragged on into months and the months into years; would the scar tissue of such a time leave me in chronic pain for the remainder of my life?

Would anyone know, would anyone care, would anyone remember me? Would I have been worth remembering? Perhaps I don’t want to take the risk of finding out. Perhaps I would be more comfortable remaining hidden, slide back into my tomb and roll the stone - shut!

Thank God Jesus didn’t take the route to safety and death! Don’t get me wrong, he died but we claim that he is risen! How to explain that? Many folk understand these stories to be historical whilst others have difficulty with that and see them as metaphors pointing to truth. However you resolve that, the question is, What do the stories mean?

Jesus was born in a colony of the Roman Empire. He belonged to a class of people who were economically exploited, political oppressed, socially fragmented and ritually unclean within their faith. All conditions were maintain by the use of force and violence. Into this maelstrom came Jesus preaching a new kingdom, a new Empire. On what we call Palm Sunday, Jesus is portrayed riding into Jerusalem from the east on a donkey, while Pilate rode in from the west with a banner flying armored cohort of foot soldiers and cavalry. (After Dom Crossan in The Last Week). It was an acted parable by Jesus challenging the dominating power of Empire and the complicity of the religious establishment.

When we say in our recitation of the Lord’s Prayer, whatever translation we use, “your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as in heaven,” we are making a political, as well as a religious, statement. Jesus was making a statement about religious inclusion, political power sharing and economic equity. He had to go! The Jesus kingdom would mean the end of the Roman, Greek, Islamic, British, American Empires. Those worlds of domination would be at an end. He had to go! No human empire can tolerate political rebels. Execution was the punishment that fitted the crime. So it was, so it happened and by that very act control and dominance was restored. But no, the genie is out of the bottle! Or rather the prophet, the Son, the Savior, is out of the tomb.

For centuries, and you have been hearing it in the lectionary readings this year, the people of the Hebrews struggled for independence from one oppressor or another. Greeks, Romans, Persians, Assyrians, Egyptians ruled over them one after the other. Where was justice? When would their God punish the evil oppressors? One day! One day!

So Jesus was not plowing fallow land. There was an ever present hope of deliverance and the deliverer would be the incarnation of compassion and justice, which almost feel like strange bedfellows.

In one of the Eucharistic Prayers we say, “Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.” Notice not Christ has risen, as if it were some distant event in the past. Christ is risen. Jesus died as an historic event, Christ is risen as a present reality and will continue to be so, is what we are affirming. We say it as a present reality with future consequences.

But how? How is the Christ to be risen now? How is that justice and compassion to be seen in the Christ risen? In the Communion service we come to the altar to receive bread and wine. It is the bread of justice. It is the wine of compassion. We say, “You are what you eat.” If that is so, then YOU are the Christ. That’s how the Christ is risen! In the bread of justice in your life. In the wine of compassion in your living. You are the bread, you are the wine. Is that justice and compassion entombed in you, or will you let the stone be rolled away that your life may burst forth with the risen life of the Christ – become bread and wine –for the world.