Seeing the Father on Mother's Day

“Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. In my father’s house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you I go to prepare a place for you?” (John 14:1-2)

As we shelter quietly in our respective dwelling places this Mother’s Day weekend, Jesus’ words are comforting. Our hearts may well be troubled, but Jesus assures us there is a better place being prepared for us.

Jesus is being very motherly, don’t you think? Love and comfort are the traditional roles of motherhood. Count yourself blessed if your mother is still here to fold you – physically or, perhaps, virtually – into her loving arms.

But also count yourself blessed if you have memories of a comforting mother. My mother died 37 years ago this month and in times of trouble I can still hear her soothing voice. 

Once, at a funeral for a young colleague, I watched as the widow, tears streaming down her cheeks, gathered her weeping children into her arms. The pastor who presided over the funeral paused and said, “Look at this woman and don’t forget it. God weeps when we are heartbroken and embraces us with love and reassurance. This woman is showing us God.”

We are richly blessed if we have – or had – mothers who showed us God.

And that is why Jesus seems to be acting motherly in this passage from John. Earlier, he told his flock that he would be with them “only a little longer” (John 13:33a), but in the end all would be well. 

Jesus is trying to show his disciples God’s love but but they are slow to understand his words.

Philip said to him, “Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.” Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.” (John 14:8-9)

What is Jesus saying? That one can find God by looking at Jesus’ human face?

That may not be as preposterous as it seems, especially for those who believe humans were made in God’s image. 

You may have read recently about Ohio Representative Nino Vitale who refused to comply with the state’s requirement to wear a facemask to protect against the Covid 19 virus.

“This is the greatest nation on earth founded on Judeo-Christian Principles,” he wrote on his Facebook page. “One of those principles is that we are all created in the image and likeness of God. That image is seen the most by our face. I will not wear a mask.”

Now there’s a guy who takes a literal interpretation of scripture to extremes. I wonder if he thinks the prettier we are, the more vividly we show God’s image. And if so, do homely or tragically disfigured persons preach the same message?

When I was a teenager I loved to attend the Madison County fair in Central New York. That was back when side shows were still a cultural phenomenon and barkers would stand outside the tent urging you to spend a quarter so you could go inside and see astounding sights.

My buddy John and I could never resist that kind of temptation and we’d drop two bits into the basket so we could see exotic marvels like a five-legged calf or Lydia the Tattooed Lady.

One of the exotic exhibits was a middle-aged man named Billy* who was born with a cleft palate so severe that he had a deep gash in his head from his upper lip to his hairline. A human eye had been crudely painted in the hollow of his forehead so it looked like he had three eyes. Billy was billed – paradoxically – as “Cyclops Man.”

As the crowd gathered around him, Billy began to speak with a deep southern accent.

“Thank you for coming,” he drawled. “I give thanks to my Lord Jesus Christ for my many blessings. If Jesus loves ugly me, he loves you, too. Believe on the Lord and you shall be saved.”

The crowd shuffled out of the tent in silence. We Central New Yorkers weren’t accustomed to public Christian witness but I never forgot Billy. I was stunned by the fact that a man born so disfigured, a man who might have been justified in cursing God, could instead praise God for his blessings. I must have been stunned, because I’ve remembered his testimony word-for-word for 60 years.

Billy knew a great truth that eludes so many: that because humans are made in the image of God, it does not mean God has human form. It does not mean that human beauty has anything to do with godliness, or that human ugliness is a sign of God’s wrath. 

And, as Jesus tried to convey to Philip and the other disciples, it is not Jesus’ human form that enables us to see God, but the love of God that was incarnate in Jesus.

Jesus’ ministry on earth showed God’s unconditional and enduring love for all human kind. 

Jesus’ ministry on earth revealed God’s singular love for the poor, the disabled, the despised, and especially for sinners.

Jesus’ ministry on earth was one of servitude, grace, and, at its climax, self-sacrifice on the cross. 

Jesus’ ministry on earth was as clear a lens as we will ever get of God’s love for each of us, and for all God’s creation.

“Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me?” Jesus asks Philip.  “The words that I say to you I do not speak in my own; but the Father who dwells in me does his works. Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me.”

Billy the Cyclops, exploited, disfigured, mocked gawked at, knew a great truth. God loved him categorically. And it was not his face that God loved but his beautiful, loving soul, created in the image of God.

There is great comfort in this truth. And on this Mother’s Day Sunday 2020, when we are physically separated, fretful, and anxious about the future, we have God’s motherly assurance.

God has lovingly prepared a place for us. So be not afraid. In the end, all will be well.
 ___
* Outside of Madison County, William Durks (1913-1975) was billed as “The Three Eyed Man” or “The Two Faced Man.” Durks was born in Jaspar, Ala., with frontonasal dysplasia, a rare developmental defect caused when two halves of an embryo’s face fail to knit together. “Billy” began traveling with carnival circuits at 14 and continued working until his death, making an average of $100 a week. He was happily married to a fellow carnival worker, Mildred Lasher, “Milly the alligator skinned woman,” until her death in 1968.

Wifts of Wandering Sheep

Updated

Strangers on the Road

The Twilight Zone encounter on the Road to Emmaus is one of three appearances of the resurrected Jesus in Luke’s gospel. 

Two travelers are walking together when a mysterious stranger appears.

Only one of the walkers - Cleopas - is named. The other walker is the second mystery in the story. Some scholars think  Luke either had a lousy copy editor or that the unnamed person was a woman and, by first century standards, not worth identifying.

What we do know is that both travelers had known Jesus for years and knew what he looked like. But when a stranger approached them they had no clue who he was.

That’s understandable. For one thing, Jesus probably looked a lot better than he did the last time they saw him, when he was scourged raw, his face twisted in the agony of crucifixion. The stranger may also have been wearing a keffiyeh, the traditional Arab covering that would hide his face. Many artists and cartoonists have drawn a keffiyeh into the picture when they portray this scene on the road to Emmaus.

But I think the traumatic events of the past several days also played a role. Death is disorienting. When I was 15, my mother’s 32-year-old brother, my Uncle Maurice, died after a painful bout with cancer. At his funeral, I noticed my mother and other family members watched me intently as I approached the open casket to pay my respects. I learned later that everyone thought Uncle Maurice in the casket looked exactly like me – straight brown hair, high forehead, black horn rimmed glasses, pursed lips, a proper double chin. They thought I was going to see myself in the box and freak. But under circumstances like these, people may not see what others expect them to see. I looked at my uncle sadly and thought, “He was a good looking guy.”

We can only speculate why the two travelers – Cleopas and what’s-her-name - didn’t recognize Jesus. Not only did they not recognize him, they actually seemed to feel superior to this obtuse stranger.

“What’s up?” Jesus asked, all friendly-like, and they snap at him. “You don’t know, man? Or, as the New Revised Standard bible puts it, “Are you the only stranger in Jerusalem who does not know the things that have taken place there in these days?”

And Jesus – who could resist many temptations but not the urge to bait his friends – said, “What things?” So Cleopas and what’s-her-name immediately begin to proclaim Jesus’ resurrection, which is ironic when you think about it, because their first efforts at evangelical witness were to grab Jesus by the robe and tell him about Jesus.

At the end of the story, Luke reports that “their eyes were opened” and they recognized Jesus. As soon as they did, Jesus, apparently still playing them, abruptly disappeared.

As our friends on the Emmaus road demonstrated, it’s not easy to recognize Jesus in our midst at any time in history, whether we know what he looks like or not. But one thing is sure: if we’re going to pick out Jesus in a crowd, we'll have to ditch the blonde image of Sallman’s Head of Christ, and we’ll have to ditch our own presuppositions, the “my Jesus” that limits him to our personal biases and makes him hard to spot.

A pastor friend of mine once told the story of having a late-night visitor at the Manse. The visitor was a homeless woman who obviously hadn’t bathed in weeks. “Please, Reverend,” she said. “I hate to bother you but I’m living in my car and I haven’t eaten in days. I’m not a druggy, Reverend. I need food.”

Pastors hear stories like this all the time. But it was late at night and my friend was tired, so he went to a box in his office where he kept The Deacon’s Fund, ready cash for emergencies. The only cash in the box was a $50 bill – far too much for a meal. But he sighed, and handed it to the woman.

The woman gasped at his unanticipated generosity and grabbed my friend's hands.

“The hands of Jesus,” she said. “The hands of Jesus.”

Embarrassed, my friend freed his hands and sent the woman on her way. But as he lay awake in bed, he had a sudden thought. “Was she talking about my hands?” he wondered. “Or were my hands grasped by a stranger I didn’t recognize as Jesus?”

In that same church there was a regular worshipper named Dick Jalopy. He started drinking as a teenager and in high school his friends called him Sloppy Jalopy. By the time I knew him, Dick was a recovering addict and more than a little eccentric. He believed too much of the national budget was being spent on the Vietnam War and too little on services to the poor, and he carried his protest to political meetings dressed in a false white beard, red cap, red jacket, Bermuda shorts and decaying high tops. He called himself “Santa Cause.” And even without the costume, he looked creepy with his pock-marked skin, long snarly hair and bandy legs. He also smoked constantly, explaining with a cough, “A lot of addicts beat the drugs but never the cancer sticks.”

I used to watch Dick come into church on Sunday mornings. He had his preferred pew (as most Baptists do) and members of the congregation tried to sit far away from him. But he was tolerated because that’s what Baptist do, or try to do. I don’t think he ever joined the church but he never missed a Sunday.

One Sunday during the organ prelude, I stared at the back of Dick’s head. What’s up with you, Dick? I mused to myself. Sure, you love God and you love people and your faith keeps you clean. But you’re strange, man, smelly, and you make people uncomfortable. And no one knows where you live.

Suddenly the organ swelled with the strains of, “Stand Up, Stand Up for Jesus,” and in the process of standing I was so surprised I lost my balance.

My God, Dick, I thought. Are you Jesus, man?

Sloppy Jalopy? Jesus?

It’s the kind of thought one has when one misses the morning coffee, and I quickly dismissed it. But for years, every time I saw Dick, I’d think: that’s exactly what Jesus might look like to us. Strange. Eccentric. And he would make us uncomfortable.

Okay, probably Dick Jalopy was not Jesus. But that’s also true of the Jesi we carry in our hearts, white and blonde and holy like Sallman’s head, or glowing and red-bearded like the Holman Hunt figure standing at our door and knocking.

These images don’t make us think of the Jesus who violated religious traditions by healing the sick on the Sabbath, or by declaring to his followers that none of this is about you, but about the poor, the imprisoned, the disabled, the oppressed and those drowning in economic injustice.

No wonder Cleopas and what’s-her-name didn’t quite grasp who Jesus was when they fixed their gaze upon him.

“Oh, how foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets declared,” Jesus told the couple, and they still didn’t recognize him. “Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into his glory?”

In a strange way, Jesus was more Santa Cause than Sallman’s head. His defiance of tradition and convention made people uncomfortable, and they turned away from him.

That’s why the Emmaus Road story can be disturbing. If I’m honest, I’ve got to wonder. Would I recognize Jesus if he joined me on a stroll through Times Square? Or would I dismiss him as a strange and eccentric figure who failed to meet my expectations. Would my heart burn within me as he talked? Or would my mind wander because he was saying things I didn’t understand?

And when this stranger went on his way, would I go with him to the judgment?

Or would I put him out of my mind as soon as possible, thinking to myself:

That was a weird dude.

And walk on alone.

Magdalene Knew

Some say Dan Brown was on to something.

In his controversial 2003 novel The DaVinci Code, Brown builds a mystery thriller around the myth that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married and their descendants now live quietly in modern France. 

Thousands of angry Christians condemned Brown for his heretical idea, but – as he is the first to admit – the idea had been around for years. 

Some readers of The DaVinci Code were reminded of a 1982 volume called Holy Blood, Holy Grail, by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln, which claimed the messianic descendants are protected by a secret society called the Priori of Sion. 

The book is unconvincing and unintentionally amusing when it offers photos of the alleged grandkids of Jesus: pear-shaped, balding, middle-aged hommes with bulbous noses and rheumy eyes. 

Writer Anthony Burgess said the book’s far-fetched claims would make a great novel but he never got around to writing it. Dan Brown did.

To be sure, The DaVinci Code is a page-turner. But apart from the fictional notion of a holy blood line, the novel’s main contribution has been to revive interest in a long misunderstood biblical figure: Mary Magdalene.

Mary has been the target of so much derision, in fact, that one of Brown’s claims rings true. It seems plausible that the patriarchs of the church were so disturbed by the special presence of this mere woman in Jesus’ life that they went out of their way to misrepresent and dismiss her.

The most common calumny about Magdalene, of course, is that she was a hooker.

In Jesus Christ Superstar, the 1971 rock opera by Sir Anthony Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, Mary’s bawdy background torments her as she struggles with her love for Jesus. “I don’t know how to love him,” she sings.

I don't see why he moves me. 
He's a man. He's just a man. 
And I've had so many men before, 
In very many ways, 
He's just one more.

Mary’s profession is even more explicit in the 1988 film, The Last Temptation of Christ, based on Nikos Kazantzakis’ novel of the same title. Portrayed by Barbara Hershey, Mary is actually shown turning tricks seriatim as sweaty customers line up at her door.

In the film and novel, Jesus is tempted on the cross by his love for Mary and his desire to break free from messiahship to start an ordinary family.

“Barbara Hershey is so beautiful,” a Baptist minister whispered to me after he saw the movie, “I’d have been tempted, too.”

And for the record, there is nothing heretical about Kazantzakis’ story. Jesus was indeed led into temptation, as the author of Hebrews makes clear:
For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested, as we are, yet without sin. (Hebrews 5:15)

It’s logical to assume that being tested in every respect includes sexual tension, and most extra-biblical traditions about Mary Magdalene suggest she was uncommonly beautiful.

But she was no whore.

Magdalene is mentioned in the gospels more than a dozen times, and it is never stated or insinuated that she was a prostitute.

The notion that she was a sex professional originated with Pope Gregory I in 590 C.E.

Gregory, dubbed “the Great” and canonized a saint by popular demand as soon as he died in 604, was a monastic mystic. He devised an enduring style of Christian worship that included the harmonious chants that bear his name. He is the patron saint of musicians, and was a respected  evangelist and church administrator. John Calvin, the 16th century reformer not known for his public relations sensitivity, called Gregory “the last good pope.”

Gregory was also a prolific writer whose cataracts of words were sometimes preceded by trickles of thought. In one of his homilies, he confused Mary Magdalene with the prostitute who anointed Jesus’ feet with oil in Luke 7:36-50, and also with Mary the sister of Martha and Lazarus, who performed a similar act in John 12:1-8.

Susan Haskins, writing in Mary Magdalen: The Essential History, quotes the pope’s dubious exegesis:

“She whom Luke calls the sinful woman, whom John calls Mary, we believe to be the Mary from whom seven devils were ejected according to Mark. And what did these seven devils signify, if not all the vices? ... It is clear, brothers, that the woman previously used the unguent to perfume her flesh in forbidden acts.” (Homily XXXIII).

What was clear to the brothers had no basis in logic, but the confused words of popes are rarely forgotten. The church maintained for 15 centuries that the prostitute who went to Jesus, Mary of Bethany, and Mary Magdalene were the same person. In 1969, Pope Paul VI – usually reluctant to question the infallibility of his predecessors – corrected the error. Still, millions still embrace the notion that Mary Magdalene was a reformed hooker.

And if she was not, what was she?

No one knows the nature of the seven demons Jesus cast out of Mary, and they could mean almost anything. One theory is that demons represent an illness or menstrual tortures that Jesus cured.

Whatever they were, the point is that they were cast out, and Mary was sufficiently relieved by their absence that she became a faithful follower of Jesus.

She became, in fact, one of his leading followers. And in the most important events in Jesus’ ministry, she was the bravest, truest, and closest disciple Jesus had.

She was present at his crucifixion and refused to move from his side when all but one of the male disciples escaped into hiding from the Roman authorities.

She was present at his burial.

She was the first to discover early Sunday morning that his body was missing from the tomb.

She was the one to whom Jesus chose to appear before he announced his resurrection to the world.

She was the harbinger who sought out the male disciples in their hiding place to tell them the Lord had risen.

She was, as Augustine famously said, the Apostle to the Apostles, the first to whom the good news had been given and the first herald who shamed the boys out of their seclusion.

In patriarchal fashion, the boys promptly took charge of the gospel and Mary Magdalene faded from church history.

In fact, the church treated Mary badly. She was the one to whom the risen Lord first appeared while Peter and the boys were still trembling in isolation. When Mary came to Peter with the good news, he should have knelt and kissed her ring before be followed her to the tomb. And apostolic succession over the next 2000 years would have been very different.

But the boys did not give Magdalene the respect she was due, and we are left to wonder what happened to Mary, the first Apostle.

Did she marry Jesus?

No. That is certainly not the secret the old boys tried to cover up by dismissing Mary as a cypher and a whore. The secret they wished to cover up is that a Jesus had given a woman a vitally important role.

Did she love Jesus?

Of course she did. Her behavior during Jesus’ last hours was a testimony of love and caring that surpassed anything the male disciples did.

Did she love Jesus in a romantic sense? Did she want to marry him?

Perhaps. If so, her encounter with the risen Jesus at the tomb must have elicited both profound and conflicted emotions: incredible joy that the man she loved was alive, and unspeakable sadness that he would never be available to her in ways a woman might desire:

Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?” Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.” Jesus said to her, “Mary!” She turned and said to him in Hebrew, “Rabbouni!” (which means Teacher). Jesus said to her, “Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’”

Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord;” and she told them that he had said these things to her. John 20:15-18
Those would have been difficult words to hear by one who yearned to embrace a loved one thought to be lost forever: “Do not hold on to me.”

But Jesus was alive, and now his circle had expanded beyond a few earthly apostles to the whole world.

The Lord had risen and death had been defeated and salvation was available to everyone who believed.

Mary would have known as soon as Jesus spoke her name that she was uniquely special to him and he wanted her to be the first to hear it.

She was the first evangelist of the good news.

She was the Apostle to the Apostles.

And despite the fact that salient details of her life were ignored by her contemporaries and distorted by early bishops, Jesus made sure the story of his resurrection could never be told without mentioning her name.

Hers was the first name to pass his lips as he stood in the garden outside the empty tomb.

And she was the first to utter the phrase Christians use to greet each other every Easter Morning:

“The Lord has risen.”

The Lord has risen indeed. 

That's the good news the gospel proclaims. And we can never forget the woman who proclaimed it first.

Hail, Mary.

Contemplating Resurrection

The Lord has risen!

But what does that mean exactly?

The Gospels offer few clues to the riddles clinging to the celebration of Jesus’s resurrection.

In Luke 24:36b-48, the resurrected Jesus startles the disciples by an abrupt appearance, walking ghost-like through a solid wall. But Jesus insists he is no ghost, and he demonstrates the solidity of his flesh by eating fish. How does he do it? What is  going on?

Even for lifelong mystics and dedicated theologians, the resurrection of a dead Jesus is hard to accept. I have known Christian educators who confessed their doubts.

“The resurrection is just not essential to my faith,” whispered one such educator as we sat drinking beer in a darkened pub.

My drinking companion was several years older than me and seminary educated, which I am not. Otherwise I might have quoted Paul’s admonishment: “If Christ was not raised, your faith has nothing to it and you are still in your old state of sin.” (I Corinthians 15:17, REB). 

But I kept my mouth shut and my learned friend and I sipped our beers in silence. Recently he passed to the other side where eternal truths were surely revealed to him. For me, awkward questions persist. If Christ was not raised, what did happen that got everyone so excited that long-ago Passover week in Jerusalem?

Each year my Lenten devotions include readings from Jesus: A Pilgrimage by the Rev. James Martin, S.J. 

I was “gob-smacked” (to use Martin’s phrase) by his reference to a claim by New Testament scholar and archaeologist Jerome Murphy-O’Connor about whether the Church of the Holy Sepulcher is the actual burial place of Jesus:

The most important argument for the authenticity of the site is the consistent and uncontested tradition of the Jerusalem community, which held liturgical celebrations at the site until AD 66.

Martin speculates that these celebrations had been taking place since about AD 45, less than 15 years after Jesus’ crucifixion. Many of the celebrants witnessed that event and were so profoundly affected by subsequent events that they returned to the site for years to express their awe. What moved them so? Was it a contagion of hope? Mass hysteria? I prefer to believe they actually caught glimpses of a resurrected Jesus. But what exactly did they see?

Even the biblical accounts leave open questions. Immediately after his resurrection, Jesus’ closest friends didn’t recognize him. Mary Magdalene, the first to arrive at his empty tomb, didn’t realize Jesus was the man talking to her until he called her name.

In Luke 24, the resurrected Jesus joins two of his disciples on a walk to Emmaus, but Luke reports “their eyes were kept from recognizing him.” (v.16). Mark reports, a bit mysteriously, that Jesus appeared to them “in another form” (Mark 16:12) which, as author Garry Wills writes in What Jesus Meant, is “hard to interpret.”

“Jesus appeared in numinous form (Wills writes) … his body was not the earthly body any more, but one both outside time and space and affecting time and space.” 

The resurrected body of Christ could pass through walls and, ultimately, ascend into heaven, but Jesus could also allow Thomas to touch his wounds of crucifixion. Even more amazing, Jesus could eat with his companions.

From our 21st century vantage point, where digital media create virtual realities on plasma screens, the sensationalism of the resurrection begins to dim. Jesus’ strange post-death appearances, which galvanized his contemporaries into the fiery evangelical movement that transformed the world, no longer excite many modern minds. The figure in the Easter stories makes the media jaundiced think of a benign zombie or, perhaps, an exhilarating Elvis sighting.

Looking back on my unfinished conversation with my Christian educator friend, I wonder if his problem with the resurrection was that he knew beyond doubt that a dead body could spring back to life in the same form as when life dwelled in it. 

Most clergy see dead bodies all too often and have observed they are cast-off, useless shells of the creature that once occupied them. Whether an individual dies in bed or in a violent accident, it is obvious to witnesses that something essential has departed from the body. A young cop viewing a murder victim for the first time never forgets how similar the inert remains look to that of a dead raccoon decaying on a country road. Dead is dead. Funeral directors whose business it is to make the deceased look lifelike know they must act quickly because death is immediately and totally disfiguring. The millions of microbiota that dwell symbiotically within become ravenous foragers of decaying flesh.

The most convincing argument against the resurrection of Jesus is every dead body you see – especially the ones that have lain three days without benefit of the mortuary arts.  

Even so, something extraordinary happened that Passover long ago that kept Jesus’ contemporaries returning worshipfully to the site of his crucifixion and inspired his disciples to risk their lives to keep his story alive.

Whatever happened, Professor Wills’ offers a helpful clue. Jesus’ resurrected body was not precisely the same earthly corpus that was killed on the cross, but a numinous body both outside time and space and affecting time and space.

How closely did that numinous body resemble the body of Jesus his disciples knew and loved? That’s hard to tell. Resurrected Jesus was often not recognized until he did something to call attention to himself. Only on rare occasions could the disciples actually touch him, and Jesus – when he chose to affect time and space – could eat food and – when he chose to be outside time and space – could disappear in front of their eyes.

What is that to us?

According to Paul, the numinous body of Jesus gives us a glimpse of our own numinous bodies when he shed our earthly shells.
“So it is with the resurrection of the dead; what is sown as a perishable thing is raised imperishable. Sown in humiliation, it is raised in glory; sown in weakness, it is raised in power; sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body.” (I Corinthians 15:42-44, REB)

What will our numinous bodies be like?

We hope, of course, that our resurrected bodies will be young, attractive, and – God willing – sexier versions of the husk we carried through life.

But more than that, I think.

Our daughter Katie had a dear friend who, like her, was developmentally disabled on the autism spectrum. Joseph was a charming young man who, despite his limitations, was a loving and delightful presence in all our lives. He was a caring and giving person and I have no doubt he walked this earth exactly as God intended him to be.

When Joseph fell ill with leukemia, neither he nor Katie were fully able to understand what was happening. We loved him and when he died, we mourned him deeply.  

Not long after his death, I dreamed I was sitting at a table with a young man I slowly recognized as Joseph. He was relaxed and his eyes twinkled and we engaged in light conversation. It was only after I woke up that I realized Joseph and I were conversing at a level he could not have attained when he was alive, a conversation filled with humor and subtle nuance. He demonstrated insights and understandings that would have been beyond him.

I like to believe I was receiving an important message in that dream. I was introduced to Joseph as he will appear at his resurrection.

I certainly do not suggest that Joseph was incomplete when he lived among us, but there were many things his disability prevented him from understanding. But so it is with all of us: while we live on this earthly plain, there are many mysteries we will never comprehend. 

But the promise of Jesus is that God will restore us to a higher level of understanding when our own numinous live outside time and space but continue to experience the affects of time and space. 

Exactly how that will happen, as Professor Wills acknowledges, is “hard to interpret.” 

But for those who view death as an inevitable result of the time and space in which we are imprisoned, it’s good to be reminded that God transcends our earthly limitations. 

And we cling to this hope: that what has been sown in us in weakness will be raised in power.

A Virtual Palm Sunday

As Palm Sunday nears in Christian calendars (April 5 in most western traditions and April 12 in most Orthodox traditions), most of us will be celebrating the parade in socially-distanced seclusion. The Washington Post reported March 31 that U.S. deaths attributed to the Covid-19 virus have exceeded 3,000, more than the number of people killed in the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. As the virus slithers around the globe, billions are taking drastic measures both to avoid exposure to the virus and to avoid exposing others. People now sheltered in their homes are following government guidelines to stay there. Persons of conscience will not budge out of their homes except for urgent needs which, most ethicists agree, do not include excess toilet paper.

As a result, U.S. churches have been empty since early March. Many pastors have attempted - with varying degrees of success - to bring their congregations together electronically by telephone conference calls, FaceTime, Skype, and Zoom meetings.

But - and it is a big but - it's difficult to see how traditional Palm Sunday processions through neighborhoods and into churches will work on Zoom. Whatever happens, Palm Sunday is not going to be the same this year.

Happily, there is one tradition that is still available to us: the Ignatian practice of using our imaginations to place ourselves in the midst of bible scenes. It's a game of pretend on a high order, but it's extremely satisfying if your imagination is up to it. There you are, a wedding guest in Cana, raising another cup of the marvelous new wine. There you are on the mount, cupping your ears to hear the words of Jesus float down the hill. And if you can't imagine yourself requiring a change of underwear when Jesus orders Lazarus out of the tomb, you need to try harder.

This year, the best Palm Sunday parades will be in our heads. Close your eyes and imagine the crowds ripping fronds from the palm trees and waving them in jubilation. Listen to the people shouting their vociferous but, as it turns out, shallow hosannas. And watch as Jesus makes his way through the bustle of crowd, riding on an ass.

An ass? If you use your imagination to the fullest, this image alone will seem strange. Jesus, the Messiah, the son of God, riding on a silly beast of burden? And once that image is fixed anew in your mind's eye, your fancy may take you further than you have ever gone.

You may find yourself asking new questions. For example, why didn't Jesus walk?

And if he didn't walk, why ride on an ass? Why not a horse?

Most likely you will suppress that image quickly because most people have difficulty imagining Jesus on Trigger.

I think Jesus chose not to walk because that would have placed him on the same level as everyone else, just another pilgrim in the dense Passover crowd. That would have made him virtually invisible unless he was a lot taller than everyone else, which - if so - was not mentioned in the bible. If an average size Messiah required a triumphant entry into Jerusalem, he had to ride in on some conveyance that set him apart from the crowd. Strolling wouldn’t do it. A cart ride would have been silly. A chariot would have been out of the question. 

So why not a horse?

Horses don’t make a lot of appearances in the bible, unless they are the stuff of visions, such as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. But horses were surely common in Jerusalem and would easily overcome sheep and goats in the excremental sweepstakes. According to a cache of credible Internet information, riders of the Roman Equites Legionis were used as scouts, messengers, and defensive screens when soldiers were surrounded by overwrought Goths. Horses also served to make Roman officers look big and scary. 

Horses were beasts of war. Any king who rode a horse through the streets of an ancient city had either already conquered or was signaling his intention to take the city by force of arms.

This is hardly an image fit for the Prince of Peace.

In ancient times, the donkey was regarded as an animal of peace, and on the first Palm Sunday the pacific intentions of a king on a donkey were unmistakable to the teeming crowds.

The donkey also provided another advantage for Jesus. A person straddling a donkey attracts more attention than someone merely walking, but that person is not lifted too high above the crowd. Seated on a donkey, Jesus was accessible to the masses. They could reach out to touch him as he passed. The donkey permitted him to pass through the people as one of them, not as a king on a horse whose prancing hooves would frighten them out of the way. 

It’s obvious that Jesus had given careful thought to the sermon he wanted to preach by riding on the donkey. Somehow he knew a donkey had already been arranged for him in a suburb of Jerusalem before they entered the city.

When they were approaching Jerusalem, at Bethphage and Bethany, near the Mount of Olives, he sent two of his disciples and said to them, 

“Go into the village ahead of you, and immediately as you enter it, you will find a colt that has never been ridden; untie it and bring it. If anyone said to you, ‘Why are you doing this?’ just say this: ‘The Lord needs it and will send it back here immediately.’” (Mark 11:1-3)

One thing we might conclude by the promise to return the creature unscathed is that used donkeys do not depreciate in value during a test-drive.

Another thing we might conclude is that Jesus knew exactly how the sermon on the donkey would be remembered through the millennia. Neither a horse nor a stroll on foot would say it as clearly: here, on a humble ass, is the monarch of the universe, who was in the beginning with God, who took on human flesh to experience all the joys, pains and travails of humanity, who was one of us, who came to rescue us from sin, who came in peace to reconcile us with the God we had rejected.

It’s impossible to envision Jesus on the donkey and mistake him for a shock-and-awe conqueror. He rode on the ass through the streets of Jerusalem to say, my time is near. Raise your palms and spread your cloaks before me as signs you know who I am. Then depart in peace and ponder this revelation in your hearts. Leave the violence and flogging and crucifying to others.

Five days later, we know, the fickle frond wavers joined the vicious crowds to call for a brutal end to the sermon. They stood outside Pilate’s palace shaking their fists and chanting, “Crucify him.” 

It’s an excruciating story to hear every Passion Week, all the more so because it set a pattern of church brutality and carnage that has lasted to the present day. Even the peaceful donkey ride through Jerusalem was re-invented by the church as an opportunity for mayhem. According to another credible online source:

In the 16th and 17th centuries, Palm Sunday was marked by the burning of Jack-o-Lent figures. This was a straw effigy which would be stoned and abused. Its burning on Palm Sunday was often supposed to be a kind of revenge on Judas Iscariot, who had betrayed Christ. 

What a travesty of the sermon Jesus was preaching, but less a mockery than other incidents of church history: the Crusades, stake burnings, beheadings, disembowelments, and other hideous tortures of Christians who didn’t believe what the Christians in power believed. 

Christian persecution of Christians continued relentlessly throughout the centuries. The Mennonite Martyrs’ Mirror records countless examples of Christian-on-Christian cruelty. 

For example, a Mennonite named Dirk Willems who was jailed for heresy by his Dutch Lutheran neighbors in 1569, and sentenced to die. Willems escaped from jail and was hotly pursued by angry Lutherans, one of whom fell through thin ice and was about to drown. Willems, a true Christian to the end, stopped running  and pulled the man to safety. It was just enough time for the crowd to catch up with him. They arrested Willems and burned him at the stake. 

No wonder we cannot repeat Tertullian’s Apology without snickering: “‘Look,’ they say, ‘how the Christians love one another, and how they are ready to die for each other.’” The quote is from an essay written in 200 C.E. And looking back, one wonders if it was ever true after that.

As we begin the last week of Lent, Passion Week, it will be good to reflect on these matters. Lent is a time of reflection and repentance. It’s a time to remind ourselves of the reasons Jesus came to us. It’s a time to recommit to the commandments Jesus said were the essential ingredients for human behavior: to love God with our heart, mind and soul, and to love our neighbors as ourselves.

Jesus expressed all of this in the simple symbolism of riding a donkey through the gates of Jerusalem. 

And as we watch him in our minds eye, making that astounding passage one more time, may we remember the message he intended.

And may our imaginations allow us to join the cheering crowds in that cleansing refrain:

Hosanna!

Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!

Blessed is the coming kingdom of our ancestor David!

Hosanna in the highest heaven!

Then Who Can Be Saved?

Thanks to Pastor Jim O'Hanlon for the opportunity to preach March 1 at Saint Paul's Lutheran Church.

In today’s Gospel reading in Mark, a rich man asks Jesus for the path to eternal life. Mark says he was so eager to hear the answer that he ran up to Jesus and knelt before him.

But the man is disappointed. He may have been expecting the roving rabbi to tell him he was well on his way to heaven. Instead, Jesus tells him that the best way to close the deal is to sell all he has, give the proceeds to the poor, and follow Jesus.

Matthew adds (19:20) that the man is young, and that is the image most of us have of this unnamed salvation seeker. In North Baptist Church in Port Chester there is a copy of Heinrich Hofmann’s famous picture of “Christ and the Rich Young Ruler” showing the young man turning his head away in disappointment as he places his hand despairingly on his hip. Martha and I like that picture because our daughter Katie often strikes that resentful pose when we tell her she can’t have a second piece of cake. Hofmann captures the universal human reaction when we are told we can’t get what we want – at least not easily.

Both Mark and Matthew report that the salvation seeker went on his way grieving because, we are left to assume, there was no way he was going to give up his temporary luxury for eternal life.

Too, there is Jesus’ famous clincher that it would be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to get into heaven. (Mark 10:24).

Of course Jesus was kidding. Right?

Scholars have tried for millennia to figure out what Jesus meant, sometimes pointing out that the Aramaic words for “camel” and “rope” sound alike, or that wooden needles used to thread tents were fairly large. I tend to think he was using a preposterous hyperbole to drive his point home, and perhaps he was making a joke. If you read this passage about camels getting through needles to a group that has never heard it before, such as a third grade class, they will laugh.

During my undergraduate years at Eastern University in the sixties and seventies, I recall many spirited discussions between evangelicals and social-gospelers about whether a rich person could achieve a heavenly reward. We shrugged off the camel-through-a-needle analogy as hyperbolic humor on Jesus’ part, and we noted his codicil that “with God all things are possible.” What was harder to explain away was Jesus’ assertion that the rich man had to sell his many possessions and give his money to the poor, because it didn’t sound like he was kidding.

In point of fact, theological issues rarely got solved at Eastern Baptist College. In many ways, the social divisions of the sixties took on an odd confluence at Eastern where the biology department explained creation in the literal terms of the Genesis account, while the religion department insisted God’s creative modus operandi was evolution.

While we undergraduates were arguing camels and needles, we sometimes failed to notice that the bible offers little comfort to the rich. Jesus routinely lambasted persons of wealth.

Especially unpleasant is Luke’s anecdote of the rich man who basks in luxury, scarcely noticing Lazarus, the wretched beggar who is dying of hunger and psoriatic ulcers beneath his table. Lazarus dies and goes to heaven, while the rich man dies and is consigned to the torments of hell. The rich man is condemned because he lived in luxury and never gave a moment’s thought to the suffering poor. (Luke 16:19-31). 

Bad news for billionaires. Bad news for Trump and Bloomberg and Steyer. Bad news for Ken Copeland and Creflo Dollar.

And bad news for most of us. Because millions of us who fall far short of the celebrated one percent are nevertheless richer by modern standards than any first century fat cat could possibly imagine.

Worse, many of us in that category are as indifferent to the 45 million U.S. residents who live below the poverty line as the rich man was indifferent to Lazarus.

These are biblical warnings we should keep in mind the next time we wait hopefully in line to buy multi-million dollar lottery tickets. There’s almost no chance we would win, of course, but what if we did win? It would ruin our lives. To be rich would be a terrible fate.

The other-worldly fate of the rich – almost certain hellfire – is sobering, but perhaps it is too finely drawn. Also dubious is the blissful eternity assigned to the poor. It’s too easy to take these verses and design a dialectic that all rich people are hell bound. And it is equally wrong to anesthetize desperately poor people with a promise of pie in the sky when they die.

Perhaps the message Jesus was conveying to the rich young ruler is that his good deeds and his meticulous following of God’s law are not the path to salvation.

The path to salvation was his faith, which he could not earn and could not buy. Faith is not something you ask for; faith is something God grants to each of us through God’s loving grace. As Luther put it, faith is the act of believing God’s promises.

The young man who came to Jesus could not be saved by his good works or his obedience to God’s law; and Jesus reminded him he had no need for earthly riches, either. God who loved him unconditionally would take care of him.

Martin Luther systematically excised biblical books he didn’t like, declaring them “Apocrypha”. In particular, Luther didn’t care for the letter of James, which he called “an epistle of straw.” 

Luther objected to the church’s habit of extorting “good works” from its beleaguered congregations for its own profit, and he declared that a gospel of works was a tool of the devil.

Given the corruption of the church in Luther’s day, it’s hard to disagree with him.

In our day, however, James seems to be raising urgently legitimate questions:

“What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works? Can faith save you? If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,” and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.” (James 2:14-17.)

That’s another way of saying that if one truly has faith, good works must follow automatically. There can be no good works in the absence of faith. And if faith is present, good works cannot be stifled.

That’s a sobering thought for any faithful Christian who has stepped over a sleeping homeless person or brushed off a hungry pan-handler, as I have done and so many do.

But most of us ignore human needs far greater than that and assuage our guilt in precisely the fashion James warns us about: by praying for the desperate, as if to invite them to “keep warm and eat your fill.”

But for persons of faith, this good work should have been automatic. Naturally we have been praying earnestly for poor and endangered people, but some Christian leaders propose direct action – faith-based good works that can save lives. Pope Francis opened the doors of the Vatican to shelter families of refugees “fleeing death,” and he has called in Catholic parishes, convents, and monasteries across Europe to do the same.

There are, of course, an abundance of crises at home and abroad that cry out for us to prove the bona fides of our faith through good works.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, more than 45 million persons in the U.S. live below the poverty line, and most of them need more than our advice to keep warm and eat their fill. 

A 2012 speech by United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon could be both a prayer list and a call to action for persons of faith:

“Projections indicate that in 2015 more than 600 million people worldwide will still be using unimproved water sources, almost one billion will be living on an income of less than $1.25 per day, mothers will continue to die needlessly in childbirth, and children will suffer and die from preventable diseases. Hunger remains a global challenge, and ensuring that all children are able to complete primary education remains a fundamental, but unfulfilled, target that has an impact on all the other Goals. Lack of safe sanitation is hampering progress in health and nutrition, biodiversity loss continues apace, and greenhouse gas emissions continue to pose a major threat to people and ecosystems. The goal of gender equality also remains unfulfilled, again with broad negative consequences, given that achieving the MDGs depends so much on women’s empowerment and equal access by women to education, work, health care and decision-making.”

Most of the world’s churches have endorsed the U.N.’s Millennium Development Goals that were originally set to alleviate these problems by 2015.

Some economists, including Dr. Jeffrey David Sachs of Columbia University, point out that a nation as rich as the United States has within its means the ability to wipe out all poverty on earth.

But a good work of that magnitude will require a lot more faith than we can muster by ourselves.

We don’t need the parable of Lazarus and the rich man to remind us that God expects God’s people, saved by God’s grace, to be alert to the needs of the poor and suffering peoples around us.

You and I may not be essential parts of God’s plan to end the poverty that kills in our nation and around the world. And you and I may not be called to sell all we have to aid the poor.

But God does expect us to heed Jesus’ invitation to the rich young ruler: “Follow me.”

Because Jesus has already paid the price of the sin that causes us to be indifferent to the suffering around us.

Jesus called upon the rich young ruler to remember: God does not need his good works, but the young man’s neighbors do. And if he follows Jesus, he will discover he can stop obsessing about himself and his personal needs; and he will discover on his own what he needs to do to help the poor around him.

It may seem like a tall order to accept that kind of grace.

But, as Jesus said, “With God, all things are possible.