Thursday, June 25, 2015
Sermon for Pentecost 5
Proper 8 B ~ June 28, 2015
Holy Trinity & St. Anskar
(first preached at Chjrist Church Bayfield, June, 2012,
not preached in 2015, but suggested as background commentary)
not preached in 2015, but suggested as background commentary)
God did not make death…righteousness
is immortal.
+In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity,
Archbishop
Tutu is fond of saying that we live in a moral universe. The Bl. Martin Luther
King, Jr. said that the arc of history bends toward justice. There is an
objective moral law, just as real as the laws of physics —maybe more so, since
they seem to keep changing. What is right may not always be so easy to figure
out either — and our apprehension of it is according to our own imperfect understanding.
But the right itself is objective. That's one way to interpret the declaration
that righteousness is immortal. What is right does not pass away with persons
or cultures. Even if some science-fiction, doomsday, apocalyptic scenario were
to happen, and our planet and everything on it were destroyed, righteousness
would not be destroyed, because righteousness is immortal. Righteousness does
not depend on us. It is of God.
Another way
to understand what it means to say that righteousness is immortal is to say
that death is not an aspect of what is right, what is just, what is fair.
Wherever it comes from, death is most definitely not a just punishment imposed
by God on sinners. That is nonsense, just as the idea that the generative
forces of the world are somehow unwholesome or poisonous God did not make
death…righteousness is immortal. In other words, death is not God’s will and
death is not just.
But we still
die. In fact all people die. Some of us die surrounded by family and friends,
full of years, and at peace. But most of us do not. The majority of people lead
miserable lives, characterized by suffering and oppression. Sad, pathetic lives.
Lives cut short, like Jairus’ daughter's, lives whose potential was never
reached. But then, who ever does fulfill their potential? The whole of life is
a series of decisions, forks in the road in which we have to take one or the
other and taking one means not taking the other, and forsaking it, leaving that
potentiality unfulfilled forever. Nobody ever lives up to their full potential.
Still, some lives are more pathetic than others.
And that
isn't fair. It isn't just; it isn't right. "Life isn't fair". No, it’s not.
But that's the mystery of iniquity. That's the contagion of death that
has mysteriously crept into the world. And God didn't make it. Nor did God ordain
that life shouldn't be fair, but just the opposite that life should be fair because righteousness – that
is justice – is immortal.
The Son of
God came to fix that: to destroy the “works of the devil”, to destroy death and
unrighteousness. That is the subject of today’s Gospel, in which Jesus saves
two dying people. It is really significant that both of these people are women.
That is, people of no account, of no public significance. Life is draining out
of both of them. The incident of the woman with the chronic hemorrhage is inserted,
like a parenthesis, into the story of the comatose girl. Blood was life itself
to the ancient Hebrews. Bloodshed was necessary for covenants and for
atonement, but – paradoxically – human blood was also defiling. Anyone who came
into contact with blood became unclean for a time, as did anyone who touched a
dead body.
That is why
the woman was so afraid. She had touched Jesus. No woman would ever even speak
to a man, much less touch him, in public. Moreover, Jesus was considered a
Rabbi, a holy man – especially
untouchable! For a woman known to be constantly defiled by a hemorrhage to
touch a Rabbi would be a real outrage. It would make Him unclean. It was
entirely reasonable for her to fear that He would be angry with her for contaminating
Him. Instead, He praised her and called her “daughter”, and told her that it was
her faith that had saved her. Faith
and fear, again. The woman trusted enough to overcome her fear of offending the
Rabbi, but her fear remained. Jesus cast that out, too.
Notice that
the woman did not say to herself: “Well, I have an affliction, and it’s not
fair, but then life isn’t fair, so I will just have to learn to live with it.”
There are plenty of advisers who would have told her so. Then as now there were
plenty of sages counseling her to develop the serenity to accept that which she
could not change, to give up her striving to be whole. But that is not the attitude Jesus praised as
“faith”. What He praised was her refusal
to give up hope that things could change:
her trust in the goodness of God, her trust that God is not content with the
unfairness of life. This trust not only heals her, but it causes the Godman to
call her “daughter”.
This is the
second time this word occurs in the passage. The first is when the desperate
Jairus asks Jesus to save his “little daughter”. On the way to do so, Jesus is delayed
by the woman He calls “daughter”, meanwhile Jairus’s daughter dies. The
counselors of despair advise Jairus to give up, but Jesus says “Do not fear,
only trust”. Faith and fear again. I
notice that this pattern occurs also in the Raising of Lazarus, in which Jesus
delays while Lazarus succumbs. The latter story, in the Fourth Gospel, makes it
explicit that the delay was intentional, in order to reveal the “Glory of God”, but in
both stories the bereaved people take a negative attitude toward Jesus: Martha
reproaches Him for being late; the mourners at Jairus’s house laugh at Him scornfully,
when He says that the daughter is only sleeping.
But God did
not make death; God sent His Son to destroy it. He does so, however, in
private. He puts the scornful mourners out and takes only the parents and the
closest disciples – Peter, James, and John
– into the room of the dead girl.
Then He ignores ritual defilement again, taking her by the hand, and restores
her to life. But was she dead, or – as
Jesus Himself has said – only asleep? It is the scornful mourners who say she is
dead, not Jesus. But then Jesus strictly commands the witnesses that no one
should know about what had happened. Why, if she had only been sleeping, as He
had just said?
It is also a
little hard to imagine how the witnesses were supposed to obey this strict
instruction. Were they supposed to bury the girl alive? Forbid her to go out?
Everyone knew she had been sick to the point of death. Jairus was a well-known
public figure, who had sought Jesus’s help in the middle of a big crowd, and
everyone knew that Jesus had gone to the house even after the report of the
daughter’s death had come. Then there were those mourning people Jesus had put
out of the house. Some of them, presumably, had actually seen the girl die. How could the fact that she was now alive be
kept from everybody, so that “no one should know of it”?
Perplexing.
Maybe it points to another theme of the whole passage about faith and fear. God
cannot compel faith. For if it were compulsory, it would not be faith, just as
we do not hope for things we can already see. In John’s Gospel, Jesus’ observes
that if people did not believe the prophets, neither would they believe if
someone rose from the dead. Dostoyevsky
elaborated: the doctors and scientists would crowd around the resurrected person,
withdraw and confer among themselves,
and then announce that they would reserve judgment. A few months later would appear scientific
papers, redefining death. The resurrected person was never really dead, but
only in a previously-unknown kind of coma. Resurrections, of course, do not
happen. So, the raising of Jairus’s daughter occurs in private. Dead people do
not wake up, and when the girl appears again among the living, skeptics are
free to believe what Jesus said to begin with “the child is not dead but
sleeping”.
Both of
these victories over death were private. The woman was anonymous in the crowd.
No one, not even Jesus, knew what had happened. He just felt that “power had
gone out of Him”. He didn't know who had been healed until she came in fear and
trembling, fell down at His feet, and told the whole story. I suppose the
people pressing close to them in the crowd might have heard something about what
the woman thought had happened, but in the large, excited crowd, only a few.
The healing, though not exactly private
wasn't really that public either,
even though it occurred in the middle of a big crowd. What really happened was
known only to the woman. The woman could not doubt that she had been healed,
but then, she trusted to begin with, and as Jesus said, it was her trust that
healed her. Everybody else could easily ignore it. So even in these two
spectacular displays of divine power over death and injustice, people remained
free – free to doubt the activity of God in the world, free to resign
themselves to the supremacy of death and to the loathsome cliché that tells us
“life isn’t fair”. Whatever else we may think about these incidents, It seems
clear that He didn't want the news to get out.
Why? I can
think of two reasons. The first is that the Divine project of liberating the
creation from death, is much larger than these local victories. These are signs of what is going on, but what
they point to is vast beyond imagining. The Victory over the usurper death will
take place on an even more mysterious, cosmic level. As the Godman travels
around Galilee and the Decapolis He cannot not help undoing death wherever He
goes. But these healings and resurrections and exorcisms are almost incidental.
They help to establish His reputation and to lend authority to His otherwise
fairly-conventional teaching (as Nicodemus said to him in his nocturnal visit, “we
know that you are a teacher sent from God because no one not of God could do
the wonders you do") but the point of these healings is that they are signs: signs of God's will to set
creation free from death altogether, for God did not make death and God's
righteousness has nothing to do with death. Righteousness
is immortal.
The second
reason I can imagine for Jesus’s insistence “that no one should know” is that God
will not interfere with our autonomy. God will not force us to hope by doing
wonders that we MUST acknowledge. Divine love requires that God remain incognito in the world, for otherwise,
we would be deprived of our freedom, and thus we would no longer bear the Image
of God. God is not like the American
strategist in Vietnam who thought he could save the village by destroying it. God
will not destroy His Image in order to save it. Indeed, even God cannot free us
by violating our freedom.
So, even the
Resurrection on the Eighth Day occurred secretly: not just in private, but in secret. There were no witnesses to the actual Event, only to its
consequences. People like Mary Magdalene saw Him alive again, shortly after the
Resurrection, but they did not see Him rise from the dead.
Nevertheless,
those who witness the results, like the Woman with the hemorrhage, Jairus and
his wife, Peter, James, and John, may – if they wish – celebrate the mysterious
hope that the bondage of death is undone. Those who are willing to live in this
hope may come together to rejoice, and to join in the common effort to advance
God’s justice, which has nothing to do with death. For “God did not make
death…and righteousness is immortal.”
AMEN
MARANATHA
COME, LORD JESUS!
