Preaching resurrection

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Preaching Resurrection

Thomas w. Currie Union ?resbyterian Seminary, Charlotte Campus, Charlotte, North Carolina

Although the chureh is at the present time hardly to be distinguished from a dead or at best a sick man, there is no reason for despair, for the Lord raises up his own suddenly, as he waked the dead from the grave. This we must clearly remember, lest, when the church fails to shine forth, we conclude too quickly that her light has died utterly away. But the church in the world is so preserved that she rises suddenly from the dead. Her very preservation through the days is due to a succession of such miracles. Let us cling to the remembrance that she is not without her resurrection, ٢ ٠ rather, not without her many resurrections. (John tlvin,Commentary on Micah 4:6, as cited by Karl Barth in his essay, “The Need and Promise of Christian Preaching”1)

As has often been noted, there is no account in the New Testament of Jesus’ resurrection. What we have are stories of the risen Lord appearing to his disciples. There is simply no telling the story of’Laster apart from the community of faith thaf the risen Lord engenders. Whether it is the terrified women fleeing the empty tomb or the despairing disciples encountering a stranger on the road to Emmaus ٢ ٠a painful conversation about feeding Jesus’ sheep, the Easter story astonishes in no small part because it has so little to do with Jesus alone and so much to do with those whom the risen Lord insists on pulling into this mysterious event. This fact ought to serve as a clue for the way we think about Easter and proclaim its message today. As the Calvin quote implies, whatever else we are as the church, we are a “resurrection people,” a community whose dying and rising, as made clear in baptism, constitutes our primary identity. The church lives in and from this dying and rising, the scariness of which the women in Mark’s Gospel rightly recognize and the joy of which pervades even the disciples’ disbelief (cf. Lk.24:41). Yet receiving and entering into the death and resurrection ofJesus is about more than terror and joy. What is created in this event is a community that is sensing for the first time its liberation from the hard labor ofsaving its own life. Self-preservation is the currency in which the wages of sin are paid. In being raised from the dead, the risen Lord radically deflates that currency. For, if death does not have the last word, what are we to do with our fear of death, with all our strategies of self-preservation, all our contrivances for avoiding foe inevitable, all our witting and unwitting tributes to this final tyrant? “He is risen!” can only mean that Jesus’ words to be not anxious, far from being at foe periphery are, rather, at foe core ofhis gospel message. Which oddly enough makes death rather useful. Being raised from foe dead is foe way God shapes a people, as Israel learned in foe Wilderness, as foe church has had to discover again and again. This way is so hard and so counter to our own selfpreserving inclinations that foe onty way we can see this miracle is, as Paul noted, through another, through foe gift of being baptized into Christ’s death, indeed, of being buried and raised wifo him (Rom. 6:3,4). What saves these words from being merely pious rhetoric is Paul’s insistence that there is no resurrection that is not a

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resurrection from the dead. The church has always wanted something less miraculous. We would like a resurrection that would be more like Cf-improvement, a resurcection that would not be so messy, so intrusive, so threatening. For that matter we would like a church that did not have to depend upon a accession of miracles, whether manna in the Wilderness or bread and wine at the table, for its own life. Yet the church’s life, as Calvin makes clear, is nothing ifit is not a miracle, as miraculous in its own way as the resurrection itself. Andjust as the resurrection was a resurrection from the dead, so the miracie of the church involves a lot of dying. Indeed, dying, as a witness to the Easter victory, is the service that death is allowed to render under the reign ofthe risen Eord. We come to see the gift of Easter injust this way, a gift that cannot be received in any cheaper manner. Death, as George Herbert knew, is the dust God blows into our eyes whose powder enables us to see.* There are some things that only death can teach us. It is that strange “learning experience” without which we cannot discern the dimensions ofthe risen Lord’s sovereignty. To be sure, the gospel never proclaims the virtues ofdying, the blessings of death. The kind of dying that is rendered serviceable here is not a despairing act of defiance , a self-chosen martyrdom that seeks in the end to have its own way. A suicidal church, even a noble and generous one, is only a witness to itself, not to the risen Lord. Resignation is not faithfolness anymore than despair is hope. No, death remains toe “last enemy” and an enemy against which we are powerless, butjust so it is an enemy which has something to teach us, and in light of Jesus Christ’s victory over death, it is not to be feared. Indeed, one can properly view the true threat and true mystery of death only in light of Jesus’ victory on the cross.That is why, though Faul does not flinch in talking about death and even more about the resurrection from the dead, he can finally do so only by singing: “Death has been swallowed up in victory. Where, 0 death, is your victory? Where, 0 death, is your sting?” (I Cor. 15:54, 55). ?reaching resurrection cannot be undertaken then apart from the cross, apart from the dirty, ugly fact of Jesus’ death. That is where the victory is won. On the cross. Easter is merely (!) the revelation ofthe Victor. The risen Lord identifies himself to his disciples by his wounds. They se^e to indicate that it is toe Crucified who has won this victory. Death, for all its power, has no power over him. So what does this mean for our preaching, our life together as those who have been pulled into this story by this same risen Lord? The Easter texts almost without exception indicate that the risen Lord found the disciples in a state of fear and anxiety. In any case, the women in Mark’s Gospel were terrified at toe message emanating from the empty tomb. The disciples on the road to Emmaus were in despair before having their hearts singed by the one who fed them with word and sacrament. The women in M ^hew ’s Gospel fled from the tomb with “fear and great joy,” an oxymoronic mixture of emotions that the Easter message continues to evoke. And in toe Fourth Gospel, Mary Magdalene, Thomas, and Feter all find the risen Lord a difficult figure at best, whose overcoming of their fear, resentment, and shame astonishes, even as they find themselves drawn into a more mysterious world of witness and service. “Fear ”آ سmay be the gospel’s most persistent message from beginning to end, but it is never an easy message to hear, and it is an even more difficult message to speak. The words are all too susceptible to bromidic reduction. The fears of these

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disciples were not nothing. A triumphant crowd did not go to the empty tomb, but a few apprehensi¥e women, and they were charged wife what must have seemed an impossible message from an unbelievable source. The pilgrims to Emmaus had witnessed the recent events in Jerusalem and saw all too clearly fee power of death’s own certainties. They had reason to despair. Mary, as fee gospel song only too eagerly c^ebrates, was in fee garden alone, and Thomas’ doubts grew out ofhis own separation from the others. Fears grow in fee night. Fears grow in isolation. Fears grow in fee face of death, whose power to render us ultimately lonely is fearful indeed. The “Fear not” of fee Easter message is not a declaration that there is no reason to fear or that our fears are illusions which we can ignore or wish away. It is not even a message that tells us that death has no ^w eL ·^,these £ ﻣﺲlories take the disciples’ fears very seriously. Their fears werc rooted in fee acknowledged power of death to render us all isolated and alone. That is fee fearful world in which death seems to role. The reason we are told to “Fear not” is not that there is no reason to fear, but that amidst our fears, amidst our running away in terror, our walking in discouragement and isolation, there is one who has broken through the imprisoning bonds of death, one whose fellowship has overcome that deep loneliness that death intends for all of human life, one whose risen life is always a life together. In fee Christian Year, it is Fentecost that is often called the “birthday of fee church,” but in troth, it is fee risen Lord who in his post-resurrection appearances mysteriously gathers the isolated and afraid and draws them into his fellowship and sends them into his service. The roots of the church are to be found here in the words “He is risen. He is risen indeed!” In fee largely affluent West, we find ourselves living in a strangely lonely culture, a world in which death seems to make more sense than rcrorrection from fee dead, a world where we have gotten used to our loneliness and have resigned ourselves to a general sense of hopelessness. It is not that hard.This way is broad, not nareow. There are comforts. Cur anger and resentments can be given full expression in fee realm of death in the numerous ways we contrive to separate ourselves from each other. In a lonely world, it somehow makes sense to do that, ^curing ourselves with the comforting truths we allow to be told to us by those wife whom we already agree. So we divide and grow smaller and more righteous, oblivious to fee gift of our life together made possible in the life of fee risen Lord. Resigned to fee realm of death, we not only lose hope and joy, but worse, we miss fee gift of Easter’s bracing reality and find ourselves falling for fee illusions that death is more than happy to purvey, fee chief of which is that we need not bother ourselves wife it, need not consider it, or even speak of it. So does our fear of death render us silent and teaches us to think about pleasanter matters. Modernity is in many ways founded on this denial of death. Strange that Easter should be so impertinent in this matter, blurting out its news of fee crucified Lord—“crucified, dead, and buried” as fee creed so unhesitatingly puts it—who is risen, who in being raised from fee dead, displaces death, making death serve him in the true reality of his gracious role. This world is suspicious, and rightly so, of religious or political exhortations to a hope that is not rooted in this resurrection from fee dead. Such exhortations have grown tired.That is why on Eater es^ci^ly,the churc^therthan growing anxious about its future or pretending to some strategy or program or therapy that will provide content to its hope, does better to celebrate the resurrection life that the risen Lord has drawn us into through fee eschatological community he has created. The church

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is its^f constitutive of the gospel’s story. It is not the whole story by any means, nor is it toe center of the story. But toe story of toe risen Lord cannot be told without it, and to a culture eager to celebrate its own religious virtuosity as well as its private resentments, the church can rightly be seen as the way the gospel cuts most incisively into our world today. It is toe church that is the risen Lord’s surprising Easter gift to us, the strange way he insists on giving himself to our world, seeding hope not through disembodied exhortations or programs of well-endowed foundations, but through his own hfe-engendered communities of faith whose witness to him breathes resurrection hope into this world, “?racticing resurrection”^ means, surprisingly then, to be the church and to be happily so, that is, to be that joyful people who, trembling in toe face of this risen Lord, bear witness to his presence in the world and celebrate that presence through their own life together. The primary calling of the church is simply to be a sign of this resurrection life, to be a witness against death and its many surrogates in our world. Here what is appropriate is joy. Here what it means to preach the resurrection is to sing. Here what Easter has to give us is a neighborhood ofhope, a communion of the saints. There is a kind of love for the church that is idolatrous, whether it be clothed in the prayers of piety or robed in the vestment of eccl^astical authority. But there is also a kind of silly arrogance that despises toe church and seeks a faith uncluttered with in^itutional baggage or ecclesial commitments, ft is true that the Holy Spirit gives no guarantee of denominational stability or even future witness. As Calvin might remind us, the church has known and continues to know many resurrections, and therefore many deaths. But the stories that rehearse the resurrection a^arances of Jesus do not direct us to an un-ecclesial life. Rather they tell us of Jesus’ gathering his own, breathing his Spirit upon them, feeding them with word and ^crament, and sending them into his world “to make disciples,” that is, to bear witness to the living Lord whose life is un-lonely and whose gospel directs us to toe community he calls into being and sends into his service. That community is not to be despised anymore than it is to be worshipped, ft is toe gift of his own body. And as that gift, it can only be received in gratitude and in love, as constitutive of toe gospel itself, the ^oclamation of which cannot be undertaken without it.

Notes lKarlBarth,“The Need andPromiseofChristian Prea.chingfTheWordofGodandtheWordofMan,trms. Douglas Horton (?ilgrim ?ress, 1928), 134-135, eiting John Caftin’s Commentary on Micah 4:6. 2 George Herbert’s, “Ungratefulness,” George Herbert: The Complet English Poems (London: ?enguin Books, 2004), 75, in whieh praising God for redeeming us from the grave, the poet notes that the gift of God’s triune life is hidden from us “till death blow the dust into our eyes: for by that powder you will make us see.” 3 Wendell Berr/s,“Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front,” The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry (Berkeley California: Counterpoint Fress, 1999), 89.