April 22, 2001
© 2001 Grant M. Gallup
Acts 5:12a-17-22, 25-29 Signs and wonders done among the people
or Job 42:1-6 Job answered the Lord
Psalm 111 Confitebor tibi, or 118:14-18
Revelation 1:(1-8)9-19 In the midst of the lampstands
John 20:19-31 Jesus said, "put your finger here and see my hands."
When we hear the three separate Scripture lessons read at eucharist each Sunday morning--one from the Hebrew Scriptures, one from the apostolic letters, one from the gospels, we get an astonishing kaleidescopic view of a thousand years of sacred history, usually. Sometimes we hear a prophet from seven or eight hundred years before Christ, then a snippet from an apostolic letter, then some evangel--a parable or gracious event in the Liberator's life. We try to fit it all together but the expansive view is vast, wrap-around and technicolor, an embracing panorama of the church laid out across time and eternity, "terrible as an army with banners."
But in Eastertide we have something different on the menu--all the writing is from what we call the "New" Testamnt--from a very limited time and space in the story of God's people. Instead of opening our telescope, we narrow down the focus of our microscope. The people who wrote all our readings today, from the Acts of the apostles, the portion of Apocalypse from Patmos, the snippet from John's Gospel, may all have actually known each other. The events, the interpretation of the events, the vision and meaning of the events--all come from people who lived within a few years of each other in the exciting Springtime of the Church.
It is as if the resurrection events are so breathtakingly vibrant that they come tumbling to us all at once and all together, crowding their way into our attention, like happy, eager children, elbowing others out of the way, afraid to be left out. The lectionaries for this season, rude as Marcionites, lay aside the "Old" testament and for the Lord's days of Eastertide substitute the Acts of the apostles. Even letters from the apostles are shown the door, and we get a peek at coming attractions in the Apocalypse, the Revelation to John. The Russian Orthodox Church has never even permitted it to be read in church, perhaps because its vision of the immanent reign of Christ seemed to threaten any absolutist government that had succeeded Rome. Its picture of the glory of the New Heaven and the New Earth outshines the glory of the Tsars, the Commissars and the Retread Russes of Putin. Absolutist institutions fear visions of change.
But the first thing noticeable in the stories that the church has remembered from those days immediately following the Resurrection of Jesus is that there was turmoil, change, confrontation, and the hope and expectation of further turmoil, change, and confrontation. The records have the excitement of socialist publications in the 30's and 40's, before the hope of revolution was tamed and the roaring young lions were found toothless and whipped back to their stools with the crack of the capitalists' whip.
But not in the time of the Apostles. It was not to be "back to business as usual" ever again in history. Jesus did not appear in the Upper Room to say, "Well, it's back to square one; we'll go ahead with our plans for a feeding program, and see if we can get some funding from Rome, which under the new Caesar seems disposed to help moderate religious groups, but let's forget the confrontations." The Resurrection changed everything. Easter meant change--it meant, as we heard today, that the disciples went from locking themselves into closets of fear into breaking themselves out of jail. They went from being fearful refugees to being political agitators at the government offices. The former timidity of the disciples is told in the gospel: "On the evening of that day, the first day of the week, the doors being shut where the disciples were, for fear of the Judeans, Jesus came." Fear is also mentioned in the lesson from Acts, but now it is no longer the disciples who are afraid: they have broken out of jail, with the help of others ("a messenger of the Lord", they said: well, yeah, wouldn't you? Anybody who broke me out of jail I'd call them an angel, too.) Phil Berrigan just got out of jail again, with the help of angels. The disciples broke out of jail and at once, at daybreak, they are downtown violating the law again, preaching the New Order, the New Day, telling that Jesus'reign has in fact begun, that now they had all the power that he had held, and that he was among them, and they were speaking this morning all the words of this new Life, this new way of life, this new lifestyle of the rule of God.
But now who is it that is afraid?
Now someone came and told the officers, "the men whom you put in prison are standing in the temple and teaching the people. Then the captain went with the temple police and brought them, but without violence, for they were afraid of being stoned by the people." (Acts 5:26) The officers are now afraid, and the council is now afraid--this is the reason for the non-violence! The fear has moved its location, from the apostles in hiding to the police in public. Always a salutary development in the politics of change: nonviolent cops. The Resurrection has changed everything, and the people have been enabled and empowered. Where before Jesus' trial and execution the people had been patsies, easily manipulated by government and media, now the world has been turned upside down. The inarticulate have found their tongues, the knocked down have stood up; gravestones have been toppled and prisons opened, disciples became apostles, cowards have become brave and joyous, running frisky and risky before breakfast, flickering candles have become firebrands.
The risen Jesus, according to the Revelation to John, is seen in the midst of the lampstands of the churches, and clothed as if for solemn eucharist, in a long robe with a golden rope around his breast, and white, white hair and eyes like flames, and feet like bronze, and with a voice like that of many waters--and good heavens!--Seven Stars in his right hand! and his preaching is like a carving knife, like a sharp double-edged sword, and his face--well it's like the Sun itself, shining in full stength. And he lays his hand upon me, and says "Don't be afraid" and "I've got it all together now, from beginning to end, I am the One who is really alive. I died and I am now alive for ever. And I have the keys."
"I have the keys." That's exactly how the apostles got out of jail! Jesus reveals that he has the keys, even the keys of death and of hell! The death-dealing prisons and the hellish torture chambers of the Empire, whether of Rome or the Jerusalem jail or the prisons of Nazi Germany or of the USA, or of the Israeli terror in Palestine, Jesus now has the keys. These are the keys that overcome the fear of death by which the Empire rules in history. Jesus used them to get into the Upper Room, where the disciples were hiding in fear, and Jesus uses those keys to get apostles out of jail. The keys are jangling on his hip as he heads for the nearest prisons, the biggest penitentiaries you are building.
"Now write what you see," the Risen one tells John on Patmos, "what is to take place hereafter." Sent to Patmos in exile, to an island prison like Nelson Mandela was sent to Robbens Island, John wrote his Revelation, and escaped from that island forever, in his vision and into our imagaination, for where in literature does the Risen One appear with more power than in that wonderful vision. Because he overcomes fear and terrorism, because of his vision, the church forever is able to see the Lamb standing amidst the candlestands of her worship, and in her praxis of gospel. The keys of death and hell are in the wounded hands of the Galilean rabbi who is our Cosmic Christ and Liberator.
The Church has wanted time and time to forget that. The Protestant religion has had a horror of looking at that, in its embracing of the post-Easter Christ it has preferred a denuded cross, and left the crucifix for Catholics, with the agonized body of the young Jew spatchcocked upon it in torture. With few exceptions, the evangelical church lost its voice in Nazi Germany, and the Roman Catholic hierarchy took a vow of silence.
There's an element in religion which prefers the crown without the cross, the ecstasy without the agony, the prize without the struggle, the congratulations without the achievement, social promotion to a one size fits-all heaven, a mail order diploma for everybody.
Early in April we will remember on the fourth the anniversary of the death of Martin Luther King Jr. Wait, that's not right. It shouldn't be called that, as if he had died of old age in a nursing home, surrounded by magnolia trees in beautiful old Atlanta. It is the anniversary of a murder, the date of a bloody assassination. We didn't notice anything like the events of February, when we remembered King's birthday--it's a national holiday. But so is Christmas, for all the good that's done to get people to live by Jesus'techings. Dr. King's life, like Jesus'own life, will make very litle difference to anyone, if we don't emember how and why they died, and it is in rememering their deaths--in the anamnesis of these events (the calling up into new life in our minds and hearts) that we are able to be get strength and grace from them. Both of them were martyrs to the imperial power of racism and nationalism.
It's thoroughly American to celebrate birthays, but it is in remembering their deaths that we are helped by our martyrs to live and have them live among us from generation to generation.
The church has always been leery of birthdays--everybody gets one, rogues and scoundrels as well as saints and heroes. The church celebrates only three birthdays in the calendar--Our Lord, Our Lady, and St. John the Baptist. All the other days are those that commemorate the death of the saints--because Jesus has the key of death and unlocks those deaths and all the suffering of humankind, and empowers them and us all with life. To change us from cowards to Cristianos. To break into our closets of fear with the words of "Peace" and the power of "Go". To spring us out of the jails of our oppression and to give us the courage to say with Peter, "We must obey God rather than men." The poet Richard Watson Gilder names ours the "Holy Land" in his lesson in geography:
This is the earth he walked on; not alone
That Asian country keeps the sacred stain;
Ah, not alone the far Judaean plain,
Mountain and river! Lo, the sun that shone
On him, shines now on us; when day is gone
The moon of Galilee comes forth again
And lights our path as his; an endless chain
Of years and sorrows makes the round world one.
The air we breathe, he breathed--the very air
That took the mold and music of his high
And godlike speech. Since then shall mortal dare
With base thought front the ever-sacred sky--
Soil with foul deed the ground whereon he laid
In holy death his pale, immortal head!
To avoid looking at the wounds of the Risen Jesus and the death of his saints is to avoid the venture of faith. " Put your finger here, and see my hands," Jesus said to Thomas. And says to us, "Put out your hand and place it in my wounded side. Do not be faithless but believing."
Timidity will keep the Christian community compliant with the movement towards zombie fascism that is taking place relentlessly in the United States, before our blinded eyes. The television and the newspapers will not show you the hands of Christ in the Holy Land today. The manufactured media events of the sports and entertainment industries will do their best to give you bread and circuses and turn your eyes away from the wounds of Jesus in all the Galilees of the Two Thirds world today, in Africa, in South East Asia, in Central America. You are bidden to make your peace with oppression and Be Nice, don't exaggerate, and stay in your place. Back to the prayer bench, back to the kitchen.
Don't avoid the wounds of Christ, don't avoid the relics of the martyrs. Kiss them, and talk about them, and talk to them. Kneel to them and sing of them. Don't celebrate King's birthday and forget his martyrdom. Don't avert your eyes from the Risen One, dazzling in his beauty, frightening in the power of his voice, the sound of a raging river in a flood. Don't avoid the flaming eyes, and the Life that is there for all. He has the keys.
John's gospel tells us at the end of the lesson for today that Jesus did many other Signs which are not written in his book, but these are written that we may believe. Jesus is today amongst us doing Signs and Wonders, breaking in to fearful hiding places and breaking out of prisons and out of lies, -- these are not yet written much, or noticed in our Murdoch managed media. But we preach--the pulpit being one of the last places where dissent is possible--we preach that you may believe that it is Jesus who is the Christ, the Heir of God and Lord of the New People, and that believing you may have life in this name.
GRANT GALLUP
CASA AVE MARIA
MANAGUA, NICARAGUA C.A.
gallup@tmx.com.ni
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