Empty Tomb or Empty Gesture?
March 24, 2008
One of Canada’s leading newspapers, the Toronto Globe and Mail, reported this past Easter weekend on a local church who decided not to sing, “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today, Alleluia,” but “Glorious Hope Is Risen Today.” As the reporter, veteran Michael Valpy, probed to find out in just what that hope consisted, if not Christ the Lord, he was told by the pastor, Gretta Vosper, that her church had no room for miracles. Just moralism.
No “Big God-ism,” as Valpy reported her putting it: “No petitionary prayers…. No miracles-performing magic Jesus given birth by a virgin and coming back to life. No references to salvation, Christianity’s teaching of the final victory over death through belief in Jesus’s death as an atonement for sin and the omnipotent love of God. For that matter, no omnipotent God, or god.”
The Subversiveness of Easter
March 21, 2008
What in the world is Easter about? It makes no sense to celebrate the gruesome death of a minor country preacher, making a virtue, as Nietzsche warned, of failure.
There’s no subtlety to the symbolism of the alternative celebration of fertility this weekend, all eggs and rabbits and rainbows and yeah, we get it. Yet the odd, dark events of that ancient Passover/Easter weekend warrant a closer look. For here some important matters are being transacted in disguise, in irony, in spite of the intentions of some of the lead characters in the drama.
As Jesus submits himself completely to leaders of the Jewish religion of the day, he finally tells them who he is—Messiah and the divine Son of Man—only for the light of this final revelation to expose the dark logic of their understanding and motives. Since they will not accept him as Lord, he must be a blasphemer. And since they will not worship him as God, they must destroy him as Beelzebul. For all of their great religious tradition and learning, their custodianship of what Paul sums up as “the oracles of God” (Romans 3:2), when their God finally comes to save them, they not only fail to recognize him, but take him to be exactly the opposite, the Enemy.
The Romans, representing the rest of humanity, the Gentiles, demonstrate the hollowness of their own purported glory. For as Jesus then submits to the Roman legal system, the pride of that civilization, it evanesces under the slight pressure of expediency. Jesus becomes a nuisance, and the massive integrity of Roman law is easily set aside, as a cardboard façade, to dispose of him. So much, then, for all those marble columns and domes and pavements (let the reader understand). Rome was, indeed, built on sand after all.
“Let There Be Peace on Earth…”
December 31, 2007
As 2008 dawns in the midst of the Twelve Days of Christmas, how we long for peace: for shalom, that great Biblical word for the flourishing of each individual, each relationship, and the cosmos as a whole in harmony with God.
Christians celebrate the birth of Jesus as the one foretold to be “the Prince of Peace” (Isaiah 9:6), the one who came to bring “shalom on earth,” as the angels declared to the shepherds (Luke 2:14). And it is only as we look to Jesus that we will have the peace he promised (John 14:27).
One doesn’t need to be a Christian, of course, to long for peace, to work for peace, and to enjoy seeing peace on earth–in part, here and there, for a while. And let’s acknowledge that we Christians are as capable of wreaking “non-peace” as anyone else.
The fundamental Christian hope, however, is of the “peaceable kingdom” to come, when Jesus returns to set things finally right. And the Christian joy is to experience something of that peace already in the present age of tumult and trouble.
So my kids are wondering, having spent the last week or so at home full-time with Professor Papa, why the theologian doesn’t radiate peace, why I don’t characteristically walk into the room as a soothing breeze of calm and delight, trailing clouds of quiet happiness in my wake.
Fresh Wind: An Advent Meditation
December 22, 2007
Hear the word of the Lord from Isaiah:
“Arise, shine; for your light has come, and the glory of the LORD has risen upon you. For darkness shall cover the earth, and thick darkness the peoples; but the LORD will arise upon you, and his glory will appear over you. Nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn.”
There is no Yuletide sentimentality in Advent. Peace will not come by wishing for it. Peace will not come by imagining it. Peace will not come by God waving a magic wand over it.
No, peace will come by God wielding a scepter—and a sword. Peace will come only in the drastic rearranging of the deranged, and if that sounds violent, it is. Today’s passage follows a prophetic promise of doom in chapter 59, that God’s justice will arrive like a hurricane.
So today’s promise of light, the almost-unbelievable promise that we ourselves can shine as we reflect the brilliance of the shaft streaming down on us from God’s kindly face, is breathtaking. Indeed, it is breath-giving as life and light come to the dying and dark.
What Do You Want for Christmas?
December 14, 2007
During my commute today, I listened to a lecture on CD by colleague Iain Provan, professor of Old Testament here at Regent, on the story of Jacob. That’s not a typical Advent story, of course, but it’s interesting to consider it in a Christmas context.
Brother Provan, superb expositor that he is, notes that God reiterates the Abrahamic promise to Jacob during Jacob’s famous dream of a ladder reaching to heaven: “the land on which you lie I will give to you and to your offspring; and your offspring shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south; and all the families of the earth shall be blessed in you and in your offspring” (Genesis 28).
But when Jacob eventually responds to God’s extravagant promise, he mentions nothing about gaining an entire land, or having numberless offspring, or being a blessing to the whole world. Here’s what he says instead: “If God will be with me, and will keep me in this way that I go, and will give me bread to eat and clothing to wear, so that I come again to my father’s house in peace, then the LORD shall be my God.”
Provan points out the shocking disjunction between what Jacob wants and what God offers. And as I listened, I was suddenly struck by the shameful disjunction between my own paltry desires and God’s great promises.
How Physics Killed Santa Claus
November 19, 2007
“Yes, Virginia,” wrote Francis P. Church, editor of the New York Sun, in 1897, “there is a Santa Claus.”
But when Virginia got a little older and took high school physics, her doubts returned. Big time.
Let’s see how she thought about the matter.
A correspondent recently wrote: “I’m more baffled than ever about the Atonement. I sometimes feel like banging my head against the wall because of the conflict between the emotion and the logic. Why do you think a loving, merciful creator would demand a blood sacrifice?”
As Christians throughout the world commemorate the crucifixion of a whipped-raw Jesus on Good Friday, and as they symbolically eat Christ’s body and drink his blood on Easter Sunday, one might well ask: What in God’s name is going on?
Taking Christ Out of “Kris-mass”
December 29, 2006
This time of year, preachers are constantly telling us to “put Christ back into Christmas.” Well, maybe.
My beloved and I watched the first Christmas episode of the old “Mary Tyler Moore Show” at lunch today. (For you youngsters, this was a very popular comedy that won multiple Emmys and would likely seem impossibly slow, dull, and predictable to you.)
Anyhow, the show was a telling statement of how fully Christ had already been edged out of what I call “Kris-mass” (the celebration of Kris Kringle, not Christ). In one scene, Mary’s desk at work is shown completely decorated with Santa stuff. Her boss jovially asks her, “Well, there isn’t room for anything else. Do you have a nativity scene in your drawer?”
Mary scores the quick laugh by ruefully opening a drawer to show her boss, indeed, a nativity scene. And the quiet punchline ensues: “I just didn’t have time to set it up.” No, perhaps not–but, by Kringle, you had time to do everything else that is Krismassy, didn’t you, Mar’?
