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Save Us ﻟﺪOur Spiritual^: Fleshiftg out Easter
Joshua Rice
Mount Paran North Church of God, Marietta, Georgia
Now when grace fUls tire soul, that soul rejoices and smiles and. dances,for it i٠s possessed and inspired, so tlrat to ﻹ1,ﻻﺀ1ا ٦ of tire, unenlightened it max seem to be. drunken, cra^x, a٠nd٠be٠si٠d٠e ٠itself. … For with tire. God-possessed rrot οηΐχ i٠s tire, sorrl. wont to be. stirred and goa٠d٠e٠d ٠a٠s i٠t were into ecstasy brrt tire, bod^ a٠l٠so i٠spushed andfiery, wartned bx tire. oversowingjox within !١lri٠c٠lr passes orr tire, sensation to tire, outer man, and thus many oftlre. foolislr are. deceived and srrppose. tlrat tire, sober are. drunk. Though, indeed, i٠t i٠s true, tlrat tlre.se. sober ones are. drunk in a. sense.. Philo of Alexandra, First Century CE
Being a Pentecostal on Easter is like being a first grade child on Christaas moming . The pent-up energy is overwhelming. The whole day is so enchanted. 1 am not always outwardly emotional, yet 1 stmggle to keep it together during the services. Every Easter Sunday, 1 fight tears fiom the first note of the gospel choir. But when those in my camp stand to preach on this holiest of days, we have to check our sensitive sides at the door. Christ has risen, and this calls for a sermon that might peel the paint off the walls. A little-known fact about global Pentecostalism is that we build our faith communities around the centerpiece of preaching. A lot of people fail to realize this because it’s our spiritual fireworks, not our sermons, that tend to get noticed and make our movement distinctive. But this is mistaken. The Jews have often been called the People of the Book. We Pentecostals might be called the People of the Preacher. It was Martin Luther who introduced preaching as the centerpiece of Christian worship during the Protestant Reformation, with his emphasis on ‘ /،/ ١٠ ״scripture! as the proper foundation of tme faith. Still, the difference between a Lutheran worship service and a Catholic mass is not immediately apparent today for the uninitiated. Although a radical, Luther held ontoabunch ofthe Roman church’s accoutrements: a high view ofthe sacraments, prayers of call and response, goblets, robes, lectionaries, glum paint, manuscripted sermons. Pentecostals, for better or worse, dispensed with all these things. If there is a Hammond organ andapreacher, church can be had. 1 once worked at one of the largest Pentecostal churches in Atlanta, with a huge staff and a fancy new building. Occasionally, our senior minister used to exclaim, “We don’t need this building. Just put me and the music director in the parking lot and they’ll come.” He was probably right. You might say that we Pentecostals have always held onto the protest in Protestantism with greater extremity than Martin Luther. As a result, it is practically a truism to say that Pentecostal preachers go all out. The message cannot be divested fiom the physical presentation, the force&l flesh and blood of the preacher. If you are not a Pentecostal, you cannot imagine the things that 1 have seen. There is the sheer decibel level of our preaching, of course. Many of our preachers do not believe that preaching is preaching unless the sermon is shouted at the top of the lungs fiom start to finish, always into a microphone. 1 have heard preachers in tiny sanctuaries with a dozen people, and they still use a microphone. The heightened
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decibe] level is often said to be that which distinguishes preaching ftom teaching. It’s perfectly fine if you aren’t shouting much; you’re just teaching, and we value that too. But if you claim to be preaching, then you’d better bring the heat. There is the athletic nature of Pentecostal preaching as well. In our tradition, preaching can take a toll on the body. Some of our preachers carry a towel on their shoulder throughout the sermon, like a heavyweight boxing coach, just to keep the sweat out of their eyes. I’ve seen our preachers sweat through double-breasted suits like they were undershirts, royal bluejackets deepening to midnight navy by the time of the altar call. Our preaching calisthenics are myriad: jumping, dancing, running, crying. Sometimes we create impromptu skits by pulling people ftom the congregation , like a comedy sketch show. تWhose line is it anyway?” There is the dialogical nature of Pentecostal preaching often associated with African-American Christianity but normative for Pentecostals everywhere. I was in Haiti two years ago teaching pastors at a Pentecostal seminary, and I was immediately taken aback by the intensity of the questions routinely shot at me ftom the class. It seemed to me that the students were sparring with me rather than creating discussion (my translator referred to the experience as the “shooting range,” which didn’t help me feel better). After I adjusted to the new scene, I realized that the Haitians were just living out their Pentecostalism in the classroom. Since our movement eschews experts, truth must emerge ftom dialogue. I was a preacher to them, not a professor, so interruption was the ultimate compliment. The Pentecostal preacher testifies like a witness to the jury. There is an unction to it that involves movement and sound, flesh and bones. No one can remain, no one must remain still and silent. ־־Well!” “Preach it, preacher!” Alright now!” ־־We cannot help speaking about what we have seen and heard,” Peter and lohn protest in Acts 4:20. The sermon is not really a sermon, in the sense of a presentation people listen to. Instead, it is a dialogue that all participate in. It is a contact sport, a ־־Ianguage event” not a PowerPoint, with the requisite calling back and forth, the energy transferring ftom one side of the room to the other until no one and everyone is the preacher.’ len it is done, the physicality doesn’t stop. Pentecostal preachers have this phrase: ־־Shake it out.” You do that when you are alone afterthe service, wringing out the last drops of passion ftom your bones. If “the med، :؛ijS thg message,” asMcLuhan famous{:، remarked, I have beeg
toanypreacher’sunderstandingandappropriationofthe Easter story. Modernism gave to us the medium of intellectual cognition with its natural message of rationalism as the primary method of discerning truth. Doesn’t this modernistic medium and message diminish the way that we read and proclaim Easter texts? lat might it mean, ftom top to bottom, with every sinew of ourselves, to join the Pentecostals of Acts 2 and ־־flesh out” Easter?
Fleshing Out Our Stories One of my favorite seminary classiOom tools is a rare gem in historical Jesus studies: the so-called Bar Ma’jan Parable. Found in the Palestinian Talmud, the folk story of Bar Maj’an apparently antedates Jesus, allowing us a small window into Jewish storytelling in and aiound his time.2 In this simple tale, a young Torah student and a rich tax collectoi ־named Ma’jan
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meet their fate in the afteilife. The Torah student was so socially insignihcant that his death goes unnoticed, while Ma’jan, the wealthy tax gatherer, is given a heiO’s funeral. This strange dissonance is caused by the fact that before his death, Ma’jan threw a great banquet and invited all of the poor, so that the people forgot all about his shameful lifestyle. In hazy dreams of paradise, however, the student is enjoying gardens and fountains, while Ma’jan is unable to CIOSS over. I love to watch the eyes of my classiOom students when they are intiOduced to this story for the hrst time. There is typically a pregnant silence while they piOcess the elements of the story that they already know from several parables of Jesus. Bar Ma’jan becomes a pathway into glimpses of Jesus that are often brand new. It begins to dawn on them that Jesus didn’tjust float aiound Galilee, a semi-conscious oracle of divine speech. Jesus had a brain. Jesus had a context. Jesus reworked new stories out of old ones in order to share his theological opinions. In shoit, Jesus was a real, flesh and blood human being who lived, really lived, among other real human beings. But the flesh of Jesus is not only apparent in his engagement with other rabbinic voices; the stories of Jesus themselves have an inherently fleshly quality. Bar Ma’jan is simply not alive enough for Jesus, so in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, he takes the elements of the story and vivifies them. Jesus turns their grainy analogue signals into roaring high definition. This vivification is intensely physical. In fact, the intiOduction in Jesus’ reworked parable is not only about the rich man’s fashionable outerwear, but includes a depiction of his fancy underwear, made of “fine linen. “This image of fine linen caressing the clean body of the rich man is contrasted with the hunger pangs and skin sores of Lazarus. As if this vivid physical suffering were not enough to behold, Jesus paints in some stray dogs that lick Lazarus’s sores for sustenance . Taking in such a description of Lazarus in an oral culture must be something like watching the recent film 12 Years a Slave today. Youjust want to look away, such is the brutal imagery. The remainder of the parable doubles down on the physicality of the characters. Lazarus comes to rest in the very breast of Abraham, while the rich man suffers in toituiOus fire and focuses on a paiticulaily painful speck on the tip of his tongue. There is a spatial chasm that separates them. This fixed space, like a raging river, simply cannot be ciOssed. And perhaps most creatively, Jesus does not conclude the story with moral platitudes or ethical principles. While the Ma’jan parable leaves the listener hanging, Jesus fills in the blanks. The point of the story is the set of scioIIs that are a pait of the rhythms of life for Jesus’ audience: the pen-and-ink Bibles. “They have the Pentateuch and the PiOphets,” Jesus concludes. “The scrolls are right down the street at the synagogue. Go and handle them.” Jesus’ focus on the fleshliness of the rich man, and Lazarus is the vehicle toward a more visceral reflection on an object that Jesus’ audience could see, touch, hear, venerate. It’s always weird to me when people call Jesus a great philosopher. In my reading, he seems so ardently literal about things: “Go and do likewise.” What does this have to do with Easter’? Easter puts preachers in the shoes of Jesus in that each year we must retell, rework an older story. This story has been with us for many centuries; what do we say about it now’? Could it be that the pulse of contemporary Western culture challenges US to reinvest these narratives with a profound physicality’? Perhaps we can render the Church a great service by taking some preaching cues from Jesus’ parables and fleshing out our resurrection sermons.
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Fleshing Oui Spirituality On September 18, 2012, the world of early Christian scholarship was jolted by Dr. Karen King’s announcement of the discovery of a groundbreaking papyrus. Presented in the shadow of the Vatican, the Coptic fragment was received with much media fanfare, including interviews with major news networks. The lines of the relic are broken, but one cleaily reads, “Jesus said to them, ‘ My wife.King claimed that the fouith century papyrus was copied from a second century Greek text, so although it held no relevance to the historical Jesus, it did supply “a new voice within the diverse chorus of eaily Christian traditions about Jesus that documents that some Christians depicted Jesus as married. ”3 Turns out that the scholarly consensus now considers the papyrus a medieval forgery, and not even a very good one at that. 1 am not seeking to throw Dr. King under the bus. Her paper is quite nuanced, but 1 do contend that our newfound fascination with Gnostic understandings of Jesus that has birthed a cottage industry reflects contemporary leanings of spirituality as much as it does a unique niche of historical inquiry. *־For ־those who would seek to endow early Christian Gnosticism with the status of an authentic expression of our ־faith, albeit a different denomination, perhaps we should look not only to the past, but also to the present. Our ־culture’s spirituality is Gnostic, and it is failing. Barth Ehrman describes early Christian Gnosticism broadly:
According to Gnostics, the world is a place of imprisonment for ־sparks of the divine that originated in the divine realm but have come to be entrapped her־e. These sparks want and need to escape their ־material entrapment. They can do so by learning the secrets of who they really are, where they came from, how they got here, and how they can reton. 5
Just like some Nazi scholars somehow separate Jesus from his Jewish lineage, the Gnostics divested Jesus of his “material entr־apment,” his physicalityj What resulted was not necessarily some liberation of the soul, but rather the denial of the significance of the body. The Corinthian church took some baby steps toward what would later ־become Gnosticism with their ־libertine cat call: “All things are permissible !” Such a posture led them to downplay bodily ethics (see 1 Corinthians 5-6). The Gnostics were “spiritual brrt not religious” long before the question made it onto census reports. Where do we see the substance of Gnostic Christianity today’? Look no ftrrlher ־ than Facebook, where the ethereality of opinion and affiliation take the place of lifestyle , of embodied action. We may not keep our ־knowledge secret anymore like the Gnostics of old, but we encamp around it, imbuing it with the secret powers of hatred, ;enophobia, and pride. Listento t؛e current pofitical rhetoric (if y(()١u c،an،slomach it)
need, offering whimsical notions of distant moral support instead. Even the financial support we will send to them isn’t physical, but rather another ־clever ־maneuver ־on the public debt sheet. And the people that we preach to, what Gnostic messages constitute their ־diet’? On a more popular ־level, look no ftrrlher ־than the “spiritual leaders” of blathering Hollywood, those who substitute an external God with a concrete history for a voice inside our heads. Martin Buber, the famed Jewish philosopher described this descent
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into spirituality:
But if it is the castle of separation where man conducts a dialogue with himself, not in order to test himself and master himself for what awaits him but in his enjoyment of the conhguration of his own soul—that is the spirit’s lapse into mere spirituality. And this becomes truly abysmal when self-deception reaches the point where one thinks that one has God within and speaks to him. But as surely as God embraces US and dwells in US, we never have him w ithin.۶
All of it seems Gnostic to me: religion devoid of concrete history, belief devoid of an external ethic, boundaried community subveited by individual inferiority. Enter the Bible, which revels in the physical world so much so that no Hebrew term even correlates with the great modern divide of the “spiritual” (vs. the secular). From the beginning of Genesis, God revels in physicality, declaring the eaithy ereation to be “good” at every turn. Man and woman do not emerge from some divine spiritual realm. They are hued out in the dilt. Jacob’s body slams God, and God hghts back with bone-wrenching vengeance. Moses hits a lock with a stick with the result that he isn’t allowed to set his old feet upon the Promised Giound. Levitical priests mediate what can be eaten, touched, and tithed. Likewise, the Temple is constructed with marked specihcity: measurements, metallurgy, and the pots and pans all matter. In the Bible, holiness is not holiness unless it occupies a space. As Barbara Brown Taylor writes, “Matter matters to God.”8 Are there not over two hundred muscles in the head of an ordinary caterpillar to tell US such a thing’? و
Fleshing out Easter When I was in graduate school, I took a seminar on ancient Greek texts that might help to illuminate features of the New Testament due to their piOximity or contents. One of the texts that we translated was the Life ofNuma by Plutarch, who wrote just after the Apostle Paul. In Plutarch’s story, Numa was a king in the distant past of Greece’s glory, known for prudence and wisdom. I must admit that I kept wondering what Numa had to do with the New Testament even as we chiOnicled his kingly exploits. Finally, during the last session of the semester, we translated Numa’s grand hnale. In the end of Plutarch’s tale, 500 years after the death of Numa, a flood sweeps thiOugh town and opens his tomb. Surprisingly, no body is found there. In the corpse’s place are piles of books. No resurrection is heralded and no appearance occurs, just books in place of the bones. With five minutes left in the class, it seemed clear that everyone agreed: “The resurrection of Jesus is not unique in ancient literature . We need to forget that confessional nonsense. Have a great Christmas break!” I understand that these matters are complex, but it still felt like the professor cursed my momma. For Christians, the apex of the biblical story arch that begins in Genesis is the resurrection of Jesus. Jesus’ resurrection is the great surprise of the metanarrative, the ace up God’s sleeve that no one saw coming. Easter is the joker in the pack when the chips have all been lost. At the empty tomb, God takes the conductor’s wand and brings the symphony to its point of tilumph. On Easter Sunday, we realize first and foremost that we regular humans have been simple newborns for millennia, glimpsing
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shades and colors of reality, but not distinct shapes; hearing echoes and cadences that we have barely begun to translate into anything discernable. Easter is our disorienting bilth where we have to navigate a brand new outside world. Unsurprisingly, the physicality of the resurrection event prevails in the gospel narratives. In John’s account, the grave clothes have been laundered. In Matthew’s telling, the guards tremble, are stupehed, then run. In Luke’s story, there is a piOnounced emphasis on food and eating. In Paul’s account, over a thousand healthy eyeballs see the resurrected Lord at one time. In all the accounts, the stone has been rolled away and Jesus seems hxated on walking the same old dilt roads with his old friends. “Reach out your hand and put it into my side,” Jesus says in John 20:27. But this time he is not refortifying a withered hand; he is challenging the disciple to touch. “Touch me and see; a ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have” (Luke 2Τ:39). And ultimately, in the ascension, Jesus enters the firmament as a body, uniting the heavens and the eaith. In the words ol fine aitist Makoto Fujimura,
Some say that such “resurrection” is one’s memory ol the disciples’ desire to speak ol Christ, to continue to remember him. To me, the Resurrection is a physical imposition, not merely a psychological recognition. Christ’s sacred reality invaded ours, embedded in the abundant physical reality. The Resurrection is a new generative paradigm. Lull ol the aroma ol Christ, that replaces the old limited-resource reality. Our limited minds and perceptions cannot see yet the Lullness ol that reality. ) ٥
The resurrection ol the gospels is not some Gnostic secret, but a physical triumph. Without slipping into unnecessary Lundamentalism, maybe it is this physicality that can save God’s people thiOugh our Easter preaching. For heaven’s sakes, is not all preaching sanctified conjecture’? So was it the same heait that was broken for the sins ol the world that revivified with new lile inside the locky enclave that Easter morning’? Was it the same Leet that were pierced by the nails that laid claim to the grave floor and shook off the linen garments’? Was it the same lungs pierced by the spear that inhaled the damp air ol resurrection lile with a stait’? Was it the same hands that were driven to the CIOSS by real Roman hands that dislodged the stone from the tomb’s entrance with a shove’? Was it the same head bloodied by the thorns ol scorn that disappeared into the eaily morning Log, the unlikely herald ol the new creation’? In the Pentecostal tradition, we recognize we weren’t there to know exactly how Easter happened or what it looked like, but we have a phrase for such rhetoric: “That’ 11 preach!” In our cultural moment, we know that our ahistorical spirituality is neither anemic nor on lile suppoit. It is already dead. Let’s invite the resurrected Jesus to the memorial service, even as he smells ol sweat and spices, fresh and unsightly scabs upon his brow. Let’s wrestle with him as Jacob did and dodge his dislocating jabs. Let’s allow the holy temple ol his body to sanctify our space. Let’s watch him play in the dilt. This Easter, may we not stand before a phantom, a parable, or an idea. May we stand before a resurrected person, shocked and awed, yet not stnick dumb. May we have the bravery to look deep into his wounds, then to shout with Thomas, “My Lord and my God!”
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If we think there is even a chance of such a miracle among US, we might run the aisles like Pentecostal evangelists, just as sure as Peter and John ran for Christ’s tomb. Karl Baith said that every Christian worshipper, saint and skeptic alike, is stricken by one question in her heait of heaits: “Is it true’?””
Notes t I borrow this phrase from Eta Linnemann, cited by Peter Rhea Jones, Studying the Parables ofJesus (Macon, GA: Smyth and Helwys, 1999), 6. 2 ؟>ﻫﻪ ko’oli.e.veà., The Talmud of the Land of Israel, Vol. 20 : Hagigah and Vloed Qatan ICWcagp■. University of Chicago Press, 1986), 57. On the origins of the Bar Ma’jan story, see Joachim Jeremias, The Parables ofJesus (2nd ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1954), 183. 3 Karen L. King, “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife… A New Coptic Papyrus Fragment,” n.p. (2012). Online: http://www.gospel-thomas.net/KingJesusSaidToThem_draft_0917.pdf.Forthelaterpublished article see Harvard Theological Review 107, no. 2 (2014): 131-159. 4 For perhaps the most famously sympathetic reading of early Gnostic traditions, see Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (New York: Vintage, 1989). ةBálüa, Ηο١ν Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preaclier from Galilee York: Harper One, 2014), 304. 6 On the former, see Walter Grundmann, Were Ist Jesus von Nazareth? (Weimar: Verlag Deutsche Christen, 19^). 7 Martin Buber, land Thou (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970), 152. 8 Barbara Brown Taylor, Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith (New York: Harper Collins), 228. 9 See Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (New York: Harper, 2013), 19. 10 Makoto Fujimara, “Friends, Haven’t You Any Fish?” in What Did Jesus Ask?: Christian Leaders Reflect on His Questions of Faith, ed. Elizabeth Dias (New York: Time Inc. Books, 2015), 274. 11 Karl Barth, The Word of God and the Word of Matt (NewT’ork: Harper, 1957), 97-135.
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