April 8, 2007 - Are you in this movie?

Easter
8 April 2007
Luke 24.1-12
Are you in this movie?
© J. Christy Wareham, 2007

It was always just before Easter that in my family we sat down to watch the annual broadcast of The Wizard of Oz. We watched it on our black and white TV, so we didn’t see the radiance of the Land of Oz revealed in color, when Dorothy woke up to its splendor. Kansas had been plain and gray, but Oz was bright with its whimsical gnomes and magical possibilities. Yet, even before we could see Oz in color, we children were captivated. There was a good witch with a wand and wondrous powers. There was a bad witch who shot lightning from her fingertips. There were trees that hurled apples at unwitting trespassers. Once we let go of any notion that such things could not be, everything became possible.

We fell in love, every year, with the idea of that artless girl, whose sulky resentment against the dreariness of life led to the accident that cast her lost into Oz. We loved the idea that she might yet again find her way through the dangers and snares of that unpredictable realm. We’d seen her do it before, of course, but every year, we also saw again that she wasn’t sure she could do it. Every year, Dorothy, Scarecrow, Tin Woodman and Cowardly Lion had to find out again if they could believe their way to safety, to home, to the fullness of their hope, to the fulfillment of their humanity. Scarecrow’s great challenge to work out thoughtful solutions to the most difficult problems of life. Woodman ached to be able to care and hurt and love, while Cowardly Lion had to face his fear of fearfulness. If they could keep hoping and keep seeking, would they become real and whole? We kept wanting to see, every year, if they would. We loved the story of their finding out.

When the women who have loved Jesus go, every year, to the tomb, we watch to see what they’re going to find out. They, too, had parts of them they hoped would become real and whole. They wanted to be fulfilled, as much as Dorothy, as much as her three fellow seekers. Come to think of it, we all of us want to be fulfilled as much as any of them. We want to be real and whole. We want to think out our most impossible problems. We want to banish our fear. We ache to feel in our deepest self the truest goodness and widest love of the human heart. Maybe the women at the tomb long for these, and it could be why they followed Jesus. It could be why they come to bring the tender care of preparing his beaten, torn and dead body. They have wanted so much to be fulfilled—to see the fulfillment of their greatest hopes, not only in themselves but in the world—that visiting Jesus in death is a way of sweetening the sorrow of the death of those hopes. If you can no longer have your hopes, they may have thought, at least you can love the memory of them as they die.

So we have this scene before us—we, like children huddled again before the glow of the television—and we are ready to love again the story of desperation and loss interrupted by a rekindled hope for life. The women arrive at the tomb, their fingers grasping bottles of oil and jars of spices, burial cloths half falling out of their arms, dust kicking up from their feet. Somebody stayed behind to watch the children. Maybe they should have brought the 12-year-old nieces, at least—they’ll have to learn to do this someday—but this particular day it is all the women can do to get themselves through it all. Sometimes a death is just another death, but some deaths open a wound in the universe so wide and deep it’s all you can do not to fall through them. Still, here they come, the women.

But now at the tomb, the stone has been moved. This is not good. Has there been mischief? Or did some other women think they were meant to make up the corpse? Who do some people think they are? And at a time like this. Who needs that nonsense? But the women go in. They look; no body. Great. (I heard Paula Poundstone on the radio saying that, being a bit obsessive-compulsive herself, her favorite part of this story from another gospel is that the linen wrapping is rolled up and set tidily in its place. We love the details, because they remind us of how we feel like we’re in this story.) So there they are, the women, and us with them, staring at nothing, where death was supposed to be.

This is the part where we find out if we’re in this movie or not. The women, they have a choice. Was Jesus and his teaching about the salvation of humankind for real or not. Was it a scam? Probably not. Jesus was nothing if not sincere. But was it all, in the end, such a grand vision that it could only fail? Jesus’ idea of salvation was so ambitious—the idea that the creation should be about harmony and not dominance, that abundance be the hope of all and not the privilege of the few, that peace might come from honoring the dignity of others rather than asserting the primacy of ourselves, that love shall become the one core value against which any other values must be measured. If Jesus meant the salvation of the world to rise that far above the world as we have made it, then he should have had at least the normal span of a natural life to get us there. So he didn’t live his natural life, and so we can’t see getting there. End of vision.

But if Jesus is not in the tomb, then what? Luke reports the presence of two figures standing “suddenly” there with the women; in dazzling clothes. When sudden dazzle appears out of nowhere, you pay attention. Someone would later suppose that either their eyes were deceiving or their story was deceit, but that’s what you get when you believe in more hope than other people can handle. Still, the women, while they’re still at the tomb, have to choose between the big hope of Jesus’ vision for the salvation of humankind or no hope at all.

If you’re in this movie with the women, you go with the big hope. You decide. You look at the empty place where the body was supposed to be, and instead of seeing a theft of hope, you see a gift of life. If you need to see two figures in dazzling clothes to believe, you look around until you do. If it terrifies you to hope that much, then you bow down your face to the ground. But you don’t stop yourself from hoping, not if you can help it.

I see people who can’t hope anymore. Some of them are proud of it. Some people can’t hope that war can end. They glory in their self-style valor and deal death while they may. Some people can’t hope that broken relationships can be healed. They glory in their resentments and cast their disdain for others in bronze for all to admire. Some people can’t hope that a society of common women and men can find a purpose and bind themselves together to achieve it. They brandish their social cynicism and condemn the culture with the invective of false religion. Some people can’t see the good in philanthropy and compassion toward the poor. They flaunt what they like to pass off as realism and comfort themselves with selfishness.

The world is rife with people who can’t hope. They get a lot of mileage off of those who fear they’d look stupid if they did hope, but a little hope from even the most tentative nobodies does an amazing thing. When the women—code, in the New Testament world, for nobodies—when the women go back to tell the apostles, the male disciples, that in a vacant tomb they saw the proof of hope, “it seemed to [those apostles] an idle tale.” Okay, we could have expected that.

But then one of the apostles holds off his skepticism just a moment longer. It was Peter: Gung ho Peter, always excited at the first hint of heroic drama; Peter, who turned tail at three out of three opportunities to act like a hero. Peter weighed in his mind just long enough the decision of whether to live with hope or without it, and the decision seemingly made itself. The others did not believe the women, Luke says, “but Peter got up and ran to the tomb.”

Peter could have sat there with the rest of the apostles. He could have stewed in his disillusionment a little longer. He could have questioned what he ever saw in Jesus and why he would consider giving Jesus another chance, if Jesus was even around somewhere to give it to. Peter could have let someone else take the risk for once. He could have decided he’d had it with 25 percent of the apostles doing all the work—Peter, James and John; seems like it’s always those three. But Paul leaves all his cynicism and all his skepticism and all his disillusionment to float out there in the air until just the lightest gust of a hopeful breeze blows it away. Then, while the air was clear, Peter got up.

Are you in this movie?

There’s always been a lot of fussing about the facts of Easter. People say all sorts of things. It wasn’t Jesus body, some have guessed, that got buried. Or it was his body, but someone stole it. Paul says the resurrection is about a “spiritual body,” not a “physical body.” Others say that you have to have believe in the resuscitation of a literal physical body, or you’re not faithful. The resurrection, some reckon, was made up. Or, the resurrection wasn’t exactly made up, but it was “seen” by people who so desperately needed to see it that they thought they did. Some people, over the last few months, have thought they’ve found where Jesus was buried, and, uh oh, his bones are there. Lots of fussing.

Me, I can’t be distracted by that stuff. Those people seem to have time to argue about it all. I don’t have that kind of time. Here’s how I look at it. If the hope of the world’s salvation that Jesus brought is true, I have a lot of work to do to live out my part of it. I can’t be distracted. There are hungry to feed and naked to clothe and prisoners to visit and water to carry to thirsty millions. And there is everyone who hungers and thirsts for righteous, and those who mourn, and the meek, and the poor in spirit. I could spend my lifetime in ministry to any of these that Jesus called blessed. I have a lot to do, if I am in this movie.

I am in this movie. I’ve decided. I am in it even when I barely have the brains or the heart or the courage to get out of bed. Make fun of me for skip-stepping down a yellow-brick road, for all I care. I am in it, with or without an argument for the proof of what happened to the body. I am in it, even when people call me idealistic and foolish. I am in it, even when people condemn my compassionate embrace of those whom most of my own co-religionists despise. I am in it with my heart and its conflicted wants, with my mind and its misdirections, with my soul and its dark regions, with my strength and its weak moments. I am in this movie.

If Peter got up, I guess I’ve gotten up, too. Look! Yes, it seems that I have. And you, what have you decided? Maybe you’re tired of sitting in that pew after all this talking and can’t wait to get up. Good for you! Maybe that’s your decision! Here, there’s a hymn to sing! The church has been singing this very hymn for sixteen centuries! You’re fidgeting, and you’re itching to get up and sing a one-thousand, six-hundred-year-old song to the new life of Christ!

O Jesus, King of gentleness,
do all our inmost hearts possess,
and we to you will ever raise
the tribute of our grateful praise.

Well, you’re on the set. The cameras are running. Get in the movie. Amen.