That We All May Be One

Part of the significance of the Feast of the Annunciation is lost this year as it is celebrated today. The usual date of commemoration is, of course, March 25 but that was Good Friday this year. Hardly an appropriate day to remember Luke’s account of the announcement to Mary by the angel Gabriel that she would “conceive and bear a son and call his name Jesus.” (Luke 1:31)!

The March 25 date was originally chosen, of course, because it is exactly nine months before the church’s celebration of Jesus’ birth on December 25 and, even though this feast often falls in the Lenten or Easter Seasons, it begins once again the annual cycle of Jesus’ conception, birth, life and death which will lead to his eventual resurrection.

This year the feast of the Annunciation was delayed even longer than usual because of the early date of Easter and the need to “transfer” the feast not only until after Holy Week, but until after the days of Easter Week which also take precedence.

Be all that as it may, this is an important feast day to remember. It sets Mary on her path toward being the mother of the Messiah. It symbolizes the cosmic nature of this birth and the fact that humanity and divinity would meet in a special way in the womb of this Jewish teenager. It even provides the first line of famous mantra-prayer, “Hail Mary,full of grace, the Lord is with you….” (Luke 1:28)

Whenever I keep this feast, I am reminded of words from one of my mentors, Dean Alan Jones, sometime Dean of Grace Cathedral, San Francisco. He highlighted three dominant images of our Christian faith — a woman (and her baby); a ruined man (on a cross); and a community of persons (the Holy Trinity). And then he said something like,

“Confronted with these images — a woman and her baby; a ruined man; and a community of persons — how then shall we live?” 

How then shall we live? How indeed! We must surely work to protect all women and their children. We must stand with the last and the least, the broken and the ruined of this world. And we must be part of that community of love which is an earthly expression of that community of love found in the Godhead itself, that community which Christians call Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. That is how we at least begin to live.

And it all started with a woman and her baby…

Continuing our daily lectionary readings for Easter Week, we reach today the resurrection story according to Luke’s Gospel. (Luke 24:1-12) In it, we have one of the most powerful lines delivered in all the accounts. Coming to the tomb at dawn to anoint Jesus’ body properly for burial “the women” encounter two men (not simply the one man, as in Mark, or the angel, as in Matthew, but two men “in dazzling clothes!”). Their question to the women is profound, “Why seek the living among the dead?”

Far from being appreciated for the noble “act of corporal mercy” they were about to perform out of love for Jesus and grief at his loss, the women are gently upbraided for not remembering Jesus’ constant teaching that not even death would remove him, or his influence, from among them.

So, Mary Magdalene, Joanna (not Salome, as in Mark, and Mary the mother of James, perhaps “the other Mary” in Matthew) rush to tell the apostles who refuse to believe it until Peter ran to the tomb, found only the linen cloths, and returned to “mansplain” things to his buddies.

The point is, all of them…and all of us…need to stop seeking the living among the dead. That’s what participants in the “emergent church” movement and perhaps even the new Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, Michael Curry, mean by “the Jesus Movement.” It means that we Christians need to stop defining ourselves primarily by our membership in one of the tens of thousands of denominations which make up the church today, and start defining ourselves as “followers of Jesus” and actually begin doing what he commanded us to do — love God, love our neighbors as ourselves; and actually begin putting that love into action. We will never find the living among the dead!

It means that literalistic readings of the Bible which try to have us wrap our 21st century minds around pre-Copernican, pre-Newtonian, pre-Darwinian, pre-Freudian concepts are doomed to failure. As John Dominic Crossan has said, “The problem is not that the biblical writers wrote literally and we are now smart enough to understand them symbolically, but that they wrote symbolically and we are now stupid enough to try and understand them literally.” We will never find the living among the dead!

One more example: for all you constitutional “originalists” who want to maintain that the Constitution is best understood as a “dead” document the words of which can only be interpreted as the founders would have understood them in their day, rather than seeing it as a living, breathing document which must constantly be interpreted for new challenges, some advice from Luke: Trust me, you will never find the living among the dead!

The point of Easter is that it is much more exciting and challenging it is to serve a risen Lord than a dead hero. Much more exciting and challenging to follow Jesus to Galilee and meet him there than continue to spend all our time taking care of his dead body.

Why seek the living among the dead?

“A suicide bomber killed at least 65 people, mostly women and children, at a park in Lahore on Sunday in an attack claimed by a Pakistani Taliban faction which said it had targeted Christians. More than 300 other people were wounded, officials said. The explosion occurred in the parking area of Gulshan-e-lqbal Park close to children’s swings.” (Reuters)

Close to children’s swings…

If ever we needed verification that there is sheer, naked, unimaginable evil in this world, perhaps that phrase will do it. Close to children’s swings. Some hate-filled, misguided murderer strapped explosives to his body and decided to move close to children playing on the quintessential child’s toy — a swing — before he blew himself…and their little bodies…to pieces.

Much has been made of the fact that this was Easter Sunday, and that the vast majority of people in the park were of the 2% minority population (Christians) in the park. But Muslims died too. People of no particular faith died too. Hatred and barbarism know no political, ethnic, or religious bounds. We see that in the senseless acts of random violence (multiplied many times by the plethora of guns in our society) right here in the United States.

Yet, this was not a random act of a madman. This was a coordinated, planned attack on a particular group of people held on a particular day, holy to them, and to much of the world. And so 65 more souls (and probably many more in the next days and weeks as more of the injured lose their battle for life) join the “great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands…” (Revelation 7:9)

For “the white robed army of martyrs” of the Te Deum continue to “praise you, O God.

Because, in the midst of it all, Christ is Risen, He is Risen indeed. Alleluia!