Jesus of Mystery: An Easter Sermon

Offered at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Lafayette, Indiana

Sunday March 27^th, 2005

By Rev. Hilary Landau Krivchenia

Readings

From the Gospel of Mark

When the Sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome, had bought sweet spices, that they might come and anoint him.  And very early in the morning the first day of the week, they came unto the sepulcher at the rising of the sun.  And they said among themselves, Who shall roll us away the stone from the door of the sepulcher?  And when they looked, they saw that the stone was rolled away: for it was very great.  And entering into the sepulcher, they saw a young man sitting on the right side, clothed in a long white garment; and they were affrighted.  And he saith unto them, Be not affrighted: Ye seek Jesus of Nazareth, which was crucified: he is risen; he is not here: behold the place where they laid him.  But go your way, tell his disciples and Peter that he goeth before you into Galilee: there shall ye see him, as he said unto you.  And they went out quickly, and fled from the sepulcher; for they trembled and were amazed: neither said they any thing to any man; for they were afraid. 

From the Gospel of Thomas, Passage 77

 Jesus said, "I am the light that is over all things. I am all: from me all came forth, and to me all attained. Split a piece of wood; I am there. Lift up the stone, and you will find me there."

from a song by James Ahrend

Open the Tomb of our Lives

Open the tomb of our lives
that we may behold grace.
Open the door of our minds
that we can perceive justice.
Roll back the stone from our hearts
that we can be free from fear.
Show us a bow in the sky,
and remind us that love is here.

Open the clouds to the sunshine
that melts all of life's frozen tears.
Open our hearts to the mystery
and wonder throughout the years.
Open the leaves on the branches
and let them receive the rain.
Open the flowers of the garden
and let there be joy again.

Open our eyes to the glory
that we can reclaim our truth.
Open our ears to the story
that we may regain our youth.
Open the hand of forgiveness
that we may reclaim our worth.
Open the gates to the kingdom
that there may be peace on earth.

Sermon

Easter reminds me of going into Unity Temple in Oak Park, Illinois.  You can’t see the entrance from the main street but you enter on the west side.  Walking forward you then turn east and pass through the doors, then turn north toward the sanctuary and then choose a sharp west or east to pass through another set of glass doors and to find, along a dark, compressed passageway, staircases that will bring you up and into the high-ceilinged, multilayered sanctuary.  Frank Lloyd Wright designed that Unitarian Universalist Church in the first decade of the twentieth century to evoke a sense of moving more deeply into a place of meaning and truth – of entering into mystery.

And Easter is a mystery.  We can read the texts of Easter every year till Kingdom come – but the mystery’s larger than that.  It was a relief to me when a friend said, quite matter-of-factly the other day – we won’t ever really know what happened after Jesus died.  They returned to the cave and lo – the stone had been rolled away and the linen shroud with which he had been covered remained draped over the stone where he had lain and…?   What we know is that, to the people who knew and loved Jesus – the Easter Event was an amazing moment in the midst of utter desolation – when the new world that they had awaited looked in shambles and the Messiah in which they’d believed was gone – hope emerged – the remnant felt a sense of purpose and life was among them again.

Jesus had died on the Cross and disappeared in great mystery -- but the living Jesus, the Word Everlasting – appeared to them.  That’s the story of Jesus.  Scholars debate the texts which are authentic and the ones that aren’t – they point to the book of Mark as the earliest and most authoritative – and claim that the story ends where the reading earlier ended – “And they went out quickly, and fled from the sepulcher; for they trembled and were amazed: neither said they any thing to any man; for they were afraid.”  Or maybe the Greek word means in awe!  They had experienced mystery.

            I ask you – my dear and rational community of thinkers – should a mystery in the life or death of Jesus be a surprise?  I think not!  He’d lived his short span as a teacher of mystery, a great portion of his life was hidden in mystery, he’d preached the greatest mystery – which is love – and he’d died without resolving the persistent mystery about which his disciples had repeatedly questioned him – when will the kingdom of heaven be ours?  When will the kingdom of heaven – the world to come – arrive? 

            We don’t truck much with mystery here at the Unitarian Universalist Church – but life does toss us the odd mystery anyway.  Peter Gomes, the minister at the Memorial Chapel at Harvard University, put it well – he said: “Mystery has a bad reputation in religious language as an all pervading, argument-proof cop-out when something cannot be explained; when there is a problem to which there appears to be no answer, the temptation is to call the entire thing a mystery.  Mystery in this sense is the frontier between what we know and can explain and what we experience and cannot explain.  Mystery can be seen in the American sense of a frontier, a …place that remains to be settled or conquered.  [It’s] merely an unsolved problem, and unsolved problems do not provoke awe or devotion but merely irritation, intrigue, and persistence.”

            Gomes and I agree on this – to call something a mystery in a religious sense must not be to cop out of an explanation for sheer laziness – at the same time it can’t be shorthand for that for which we haven’t yet found the proper equation.  For a feeling of awe to exist, for poetry to be written, for love to be experienced, for the heart to be transformed – there are mysteries which can’t be reduced to equations.  Questions that can’t be reduced to simple answers.  Sometimes I’m overwhelmed by a feeling of love for someone in my family and I don’t want to reduce it to words or just express my appreciation for something they’ve brought into my life and I’ll look at them and say “Chava, or Mark or whoever..” and they’ll say “Yes?” and I’ll say “you know…” because I am at a loss for words and they’re usually sharp and say – “yes”.  Sometimes we’ll hug and sometimes just finish the homework or cleaning out the garage or whatever.  There are experiences which shouldn’t be reduced to words – and yet we are creatures of symbol and story and we write our stories to feel our way, to speak our way not in a literal description of a thing – but a figurative attempt to capture a mystery.

            Gomes also quotes Diogenes Allen, a theologian … I can’t resist when someone puts something into words better than I could – and in this case neither could Gomes.  He quotes Allen: “When a problem is solved, it is over and done with.  We go on to other problems …but a mystery once recognized is something we are never finished with.  Instead, we return to it again and again and it unfolds new levels to us.  Mysteries to be known must be entered into.  We do not solve mysteries.  The deeper we enter into them the more illumination we get.  Still greater depths are revealed to us the further we go.”

            That does remind me of Unity Temple and also of Easter.  Easter always seemed to me to be like some sort of problem – what really happened?  Why are there different versions?  As a kid my parents had a slogan button in the house that said – I’ve probably shared this with you before – but it means something different to me at different times – the button said: “No Easter this year – they found the body”.  As a kid I never really understood that button.  As a teenager I finally realized that the button referred to the belief that Jesus had died and risen in body up to heaven and that if the body were found well that would mean that he hadn’t risen like that and that miracle hadn’t happened.  But I’ve come to see that it wouldn’t matter if the body were found – the miracle of Jesus’ resurrection is not the literal rising of a body – it’d be cool – but it’s not necessary to the deep meaning of the story of the man who taught radical love and was killed for the threat that was to an occupying power.  He was willing to die for that and his death did not destroy his teaching – only his body. The miracle is the rising of hope. 

So I can begin to enter into the mystery: to feel that time of despair particularly with Mary Magdalene who returned to the cave to anoint him.  I’ve handled corpses and it’s not easy.  But it was something that she could yet do for him out of love.  I can feel sorrow with her – the despair that this exemplar was gone and the remnant were alone with the mysteries that he had taught.  And the mysteries seemed – as they do for us all in times of loss – like such a small portion of what we wish that we could hold onto of that person we have cherished with all our hearts. 

In the midst of the shambles of their world and the loss of the sacred beloved: hope emerged. This couldn’t be cheap hope – one that comes with a sign that says: Hope: this way.  Answers: over here.  Paul said “hope which is seen is not hope.  For we are saved by hope: but hope that is seen is not hope: for what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope for?”  And I think, damn it, once again, I’ve agreed with  Paul.

The mystery of Easter is the mystery of hope that emerges when hope is hard to find.  That’s the mystery that tormented the disciples who were forever asking Jesus – where and when is the kingdom of heaven?  Who will taste death and who will not?

And Jesus would answer with mysterious parables and remind them that those who have ears will hear and those with eyes will see.  My favorite Gospel isn’t in the Bible we normally read – it’s the Gospel of Thomas – written around the same time as the other gospels but it didn’t get into the canon.  But there’s a difference – in the Bible you can pick up at any church – the kingdom of heaven is a place beyond this world – hope deferred to the afterlife.  Whatever you suffer now something better will come to you later in Heaven.  The place to which the body of Jesus rose.  In the Gospel of Thomas the kingdom of heaven is beneath your feet, in your heart, shining through your eyes.  This is echoed in Matthew 6 when Jesus says: The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be one, thy whole body shall be full of light.”  This is much clearer in the Gospel of Thomas, passage 3 Jesus said, "If your leaders say to you, 'Look, the (Father's) kingdom is in the sky,' then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say to you, 'It is in the sea,' then the fish will precede you. Rather, the kingdom is within you and it is outside you.”  And he repeats this again in passage 51: His disciples said to him, "When will the new world come?" He said to them, "What you are looking forward to has come, but you don't know it."

In Hebrew the word for world is olam – now Jesus would have been mostly if not entirely a speaker of Aramaic but the teaching would have been the same, the sense of the world would have been shared by Jesus and his ancient kin.  Anyway Olam means world and there are sort of two worlds – Olam Hazeh – this world right here and now manifest before our eyes and to our touch and Olam Ha-Ba – the world to come.  Now I was wrangling this idea out with Rabbi Pollock the other day and she said the world to come is not like heaven exactly – it’s also here and now.  Now – that sounded familiar to me.  The world here and now is a good world – it has birth, beauty, flowering, and love.  It is good.  But there are also bitter things in this world.  The world to come is not a later world – not in time – it’s present right now if we see and we live by its light.  It is the world to come when God establishes peace and justice.  At the same time it is the world to come – the world at hand if our hands shape it.  Like my teacher Thich Nhat Hanh says: The kingdom of God is here in the present moment.  Okay – so here’s the world – the globe and that globe is saturated like baklava with honey – with the sweetness of the world to come – it is present but we can’t taste it because we’re tasting the dirt – we expect to taste dirt and we do.  But inside the taste of dirt is the taste of honey. 

When Jesus said “the Kingdom of heaven is at hand” it wasn’t around the corner at hand – it wasn’t the boogey man’ll get you at hand – it wasn’t come the millennium at hand.  It was At Hand right here.  People just lacked eyes to see and ears to hear. 

Have you ever had a fight with someone you love?  Might be your spouse, partner, child, your best friend.  You quarrel – perhaps they did something that evoked pain for you.  Like three years ago my dear friend said something that I thought hurt my feelings.  There we were stuck on the Massachusetts Turnpike headed to some Buddhist Retreat.  I was so hurt and I kept driving and my focus had narrowed down to this single point of anger and hurt.  Like a microscope I was looking through and the world was reduced to this point.  Years of friendship and affection were minimized in a flash.  I could just see this narrow spot.  Beautiful countryside flashed past – I didn’t see it.  My friend was reaching out – I could hear her but I couldn’t feel it.  I had to figure out what to do and this is the part that won’t be an equation – I had to work through the hurt to remember the love that has passed between us.  To know her as greater than her words of that moment.  Each time I did that remembering it was like my line of sight grew.  I knew that I, myself, have said thoughtless things that I didn’t mean to hurt anyone and yet hit a sore place.  I was able to feel my way to the importance of this friendship.  The hard interaction became a new thing we were learning on a path together.  It brought us closer with deeper understanding.  The lovely countryside was back, my friend was dearer than ever, and the world was sweet – saturated with honey – with the world to come. 

Or I think of things we experience here in this community.  Last week when the little girl was found dead of abuse I know that many people suffered keenly on her behalf.  The draw can be to keep replaying the tape of sadness and tragedy.  Now – some of that’s vital – we feel our anger and grief to heal and see life afresh with real eyes and not rose tinted glasses.  The heinousness of the murder of that girl could consume – even paralyze you – particularly if you had survived abuse yourself.  A person might want to make a difference to the lives of children suffering but pain – born of compassion one might feel – could be too intense to move.  The focus would narrow and perhaps for a day the sense of injustice would paralyze.  But just as one might call a friend for support, take a healing bath, or love one’s own child – inner or outer – as the lens widens more sweetness enters the world – heaven, the world to come arrives.  And one finds oneself calling the local crisis line to help out or becoming active healing oneself and others.

We’re deeply affected by the struggles of people in our lives with life threatening conditions and facing serious physical challenges.  The stages that people go through in dealing with these challenges are complex and seem to reflect choices that each person makes at points along their journey.  Worlds that they inhabit at different times.  I know there are times when the world narrows down – perhaps to pain, to suffering, -- even to fear.  The writer Audre Lorde, who faced cancer in a time when there were far fewer options, wrote: “Once you have faced that death which can come from cancer you can give full rein to your rage and your love and become fearless.”  To me she’s describing that widening of the lens – the ability to reach for the world to come – not release in the afterlife – but release and peace here and now.  When the lens widens you live again – no matter what.  It is a resurrection of the heart.  Facing the challenge of a life threatening illness – it’s no less miraculous to pass out of that sorrowing and into a new life.  It’s not a process that takes a few minutes or a few days – it takes living your way into the mystery of your own suffering and challenge -- living into the mystery of living which includes always the face of suffering and the specter of death.  There’s no simple equation for this process or passage.  No crane you can hire to roll the stone aside and emerge from the cave into the world to come that is available in the present moment – for only the present moment.  Heaven is awaiting not after this life – but here – now – it takes only – only your heart and hand to reach for it.  That is the Easter Event. 

Because we are humans – strong and vulnerable – divine and earthbound – we live in this world of the present – this precious world with all its beauty and all its struggle.  Because you are human the mystery that is celebrated at Easter is in each one of you -- it is hidden in the shadows of your sorrows, your pain, your mistakes, your Good Fridays, your moments of anger, your demons, your suffering, your losses.  You have to hang with those in the hope that cannot be seen.  Inside the mystery that cannot be reduced to an equation.  Inside that mystery there is still something new and sweet.  Something good, creative, pure, and fine.  It is in your being, in your Easter heart, in your mind of light, your velvet darkness, your fresh eyes.  Behold said the prophet – I am doing something new – that something new is inside you and together we can celebrate it at Easter.