During a plague year, in the midst of a pandemic, funeral bells rang continually across London. The dean of Saint Paul’s Cathedral wrote this:
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.
[From Meditation XVII, John Donne, (1572-1631), and from the epigraph of Hemingway’s novel.]
I had not really meant to talk about this but the resurrection is really about death and then about resurrection. How to die, how to see a friend die, and then to understand how to live. That is the story of doubting Thomas really. Not about doubt at all but about how to grasp reality. His friend really had died. That is common fact, historical fact. He was crucified under Pontius Pilate (the Apostles’ Creed). “Jesus’ body decayed (.82 red)” - The Jesus Seminar’s consensus.
He had died. What did it mean? What did it mean, then, that he had lived, and how he had lived? That was the question, those were the questions, that occupied the disciples after Jesus’ resurrection.
And so they began to understand. Who he really was, who they really were, what there was to do next, after there had been nothing to do because after all he was dead and we were all going to die. But now, how are we to live?
Jesus’ reality comes stronger, now, knowing that he ‘had’ to die, to fulfill his mission he had to stay true, even though that could and did mean accepting death, execution at the hands of another corrupt administration. The chief priests and the scribes, the leaders so-called of the people, the people they were betraying, with their every breath, handed him over oh so gladly to the Roman authorities, the occupying authorities, who were the means, the instrument, the engine of execution.
But he himself was the engine of understanding. He took, as the gospels give him to us, all of human experience, humanity, life itself, into himself, and made it whole and wonderful and sane even as it hurt beyond belief. Yes, others have suffered more, as many were executed his way, as he was executed, by the Roman authorities, in their thousands. And that may be exactly the point.
He did not have to do it. He did not want to do it. He wanted to live and he wanted to live life in its fullness. And so he did.
And he did not keep it to himself. Miraculously he shared it with us.
And so we live. Knowing what it is at last to die, we begin to know what it is to live.
***
There is a book called "The Five Gospels" and a one-man play called "The 5th Gospel" - unrelated except by name, and perhaps by intention: to get to the human figure behind the stained glass or cultural images.
Craig McNair Wilson in his play imagined Jesus horsing around with the disciples, or doing other human things.
The book, by historians and Bible scholars of the Jesus Seminar, tried to get at what Jesus really said and thereby get closer to what he was really about. And is about, for us now.
Scandalous, really, to think that we can know much about a man who lived 2000 years ago - and that it matters to us today what he said and did and how he was truly human.
Seems to me that both play and book were trying to get at something that the first letter of John captures in a phrase: we speak to you of what we have seen and heard and held in our arms.
That was then. But you know what? That is also now. We experience Jesus as real, in our prayers, in our fellowship, in the eyes of total strangers, in our inner selves.
And we can bear witness to him as first-century John did; we have not touched him with our hands but we can encounter him nevertheless.
[On the road to Emmaus he appeared to two disciples in the person of a mysterious stranger, as he accompanied them on the way and in the breaking of bread.]
There are so many ways to say we have seen the Lord.
Many years ago at a youth retreat weekend in the Santa Cruz mountains I heard a new song - new to me and new then: "Have you seen Jesus my Lord?"
Mary asked such a question at the tomb, on the morning three days after Good Friday. "If you have taken him away, tell me where I can find him."
She is expecting nothing more than the pious duties of grief, to prepare the body for its long rest in the tomb. And perhaps as Michael Curry pointed out on Easter not even that: for who would roll away the stone? And yet - she went.
She is not seeking and does not expect to find the man she knew. Not as he was.
And she does not. For God is doing a new thing.
Resurrection, as Marian Budde reminded us on Easter morning, is - for us - a process, not a moment. Even if our life with Jesus begins with a moment of decision it continues as a process. A whole new way of living.
Mary is the first to experience this, to have it dawn on her that the resurrected Lord is more than the man she knew. He is not revived but remade. Born anew, as it were, into the fullness of life in God's house.
How are we to begin to live as if this is real? Some clues follow. Mary goes and bears witness to the men, the skeptical apostles, but they too come to believe, as they experience Jesus as real.
I first experienced Jesus as real not long after that weekend in the mountains. I had listened to the message, received from preachers, in songs, and in the gentle witness of an older friend. And even in the quiet hospitality of a neighbor. But it was when I woke up on Holy Saturday morning that he became real to me. And that is when I began to pray.
How are we to begin living as if Jesus is real?
Witness, yes, Mary did that first. He is alive! He is risen! He really is the Lord.
Then action. And that is when we collect together to - commiserate? - no, to celebrate, and to figure out what this means and what to do and to begin to encourage one another to live it out.
In the stories of acts of apostles we find them gathering all together, like a big family, every night, and still going to the Temple every day as they had when he was alive among them as a fellow human being, teacher, and healer. Now however a new era now begins, with these few, these befuddled, scared, and hopeful few, reborn themselves and calling others into new life.
It is as if they had to begin again. As if everything they knew now had a new significance, new meaning.
When at last Thomas showed up, he expressed doubts - the pragmatical dog! How can you know what he really said and did unless you were there? And he was not: so he says, I need to see him and hear him and touch him with my hands again. The Jesus I knew. But he does not meet the same man, not as he was, and for all we know, all his prerequisites for believing were thrown aside, as he met not the resuscitated man but the living Lord.
My Lord and my God.
Now he is here among us. What shall we do?
***
Christ with Us
The Love of Christ
Surround us
The Light of Christ
Lead us
The Peace of Christ
Fill us
The Power of Christ
Aid us
The Joy of Christ
Thrill us
The Presence of Christ
Be with us evermore.
David Adam, Tides and Seasons, SPCK, 1989, 76.
Resources: Commentaries by Herbert O'Driscoll, Fred Craddock, Stevan L. Davies, Arthur Dewey, and Raymond E. Brown, S.S. Prayers by David Adam. Self-guided retreat by Suzanne Guthrie, At the Edge of the Enclosure (http://edgeofenclosure.org/).
(All this came to me in part as I was listening to the comments halfway through the second episode of “Hemingway” the PBS series. One of the writers got it right, one got it wrong, about what “for whom the bell tolls” means: I think the latter had not understood where it came from. Albert Camus did, or would have. The plague. That is where it came from. John Donne, Meditation XVII, the epigraph to “For Whom the Bell Tolls”, as I memorized it in eighth grade (but had yet to understand). John Donne was writing about people dying in an epidemic, a pandemic, the plague, as it hit London in the 1660s, - as Pepys memorialized it in his diary - and so “the bell was tolling for all of us, in Europe and the United States” is wrong: it is about death, it is the mark, the memorial, the moment, the announcement, of some one particular dying. And Hemingway got it right, and his character Robert Jordan got it right, and John McCain reading it got it right, it is about that particular death and therefore, therefore, about our own, our own humanity, and therefore our own life.)
Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, Hemingway. NPR, aired April 2021. https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/hemingway/
Psalm 133,Acts 4:32-35,1 John 1:1-2:2,St Paul's Tombstone,BEaster2,John 20:19-31,Doubting Thomas.
St Paul's Church, Tombstone. [https://www.facebook.com/stpaulstombstone] April 11th 2021. JRL+
