Easter Sunday 1998

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How dangerous that freedom is

Easter Sunday - - Resurrection of the Lord, April 12th, 1998

Readings: Acts 10.34a, 36-43; Col. 3.1-4 or Cor. 5.6b-8; Jn. 20.1-18

All during Holy Week, the liturgy of Thursday, Good Friday, last night, and today, I've been guided by a line from Paul's letter to the church at Galatia which, I think, is one of the multiple ways of trying to make sense of what we're doing here today. The line is, "For freedom, Christ has made us free". What was Paul talking about? Well, Paul, as you know, had been a Pharisaic Jew, faithful to God and knowing full well what a faithful person should do in regard to that: You do these things and don't do these things. You eat with these people, you don't eat with these people! You select this thing in your life and reject that, and that's the way you create a life faithful to God. And then he came to believe that God had raised this other Jew from the dead - this Jew Jesus. And what was different about this Jew, Jesus? He certainly was a Jew. He certainly was a pious Jew, but contrary to the Pharisees, he made no distinctions between people. He ate with sinners, he spoke freely to women, and in public. He showed inordinate concern about handicapped people who were ritually unpure and could not be touched - - they were as ignored in their society as they are in ours. The social outcasts, the misfits, the poor above all. Jesus showed this extraordinary openness to all these people as a Jew. And Paul, when he came to believe that God had raised this Jew from the dead, came to see that this is the way to be faithful to God. That is the way of being Jewish, that is real, that is paradigmatic for us. That kind of freedom. That kind of freedom which is manifest in that stunning gesture of Holy Thursday night where Jesus washed the feet of his friends, and that action serves as a metaphor for His whole approach to the world as the servant of all, available to all. And that freedom was costly and that's exactly what Good Friday is about. Society cannot run with that. It is politically inexpedient to behave in that way. The wheels of commerce, the wheels of government, the wheels of normal communication break down. Jesus is a great spanner in those wheels. And Jesus chose not to run away from His own life but to stand within his own life and to take responsibility for His life. And that cost Him His life. For this is the great genius of the Jew's understanding of freedom: to be free for the Jews, at their best, is precisely to be free as Jesus was. To be free for everyone. To choose to be there for everyone. And only in that context can we make sense of the Resurrection.

Who is God? Who is this weird Jewish God? He is not the God of the winners; He is above all, the God of the losers and by inclusion, the God of everybody. God is absolutely free to everything that She has made - this God. And so out of the freedom of that God, and the responsiveness of that God in acknowledging the freedom and responsiveness of Jesus to the whole world that God had made, God raised this man Jesus. And that is what the Resurrection is all about. God being responsible to this world and above all to this man who was supereminently responsive to that same world.

This all sounds so safe, on Sunday morning when the sun is shining and we don't have to worry about what kind of implications this may have for our lives. But think about it for just a minute. How dangerous that freedom is. Where are we free? Where are we free? Where are the institutions and the powers that constrain us or that we use to constrain others? My class, my color, my language, my economic status, my academic position. We live in a world where the government is not seen benignly but as the enemy. And the government is itself seconded to the powers of the large corporations who are currently running the world. And so who is free today? What are the implications of acting against those constraining and constricting forces? To put it very simply, who are the stake holders in the world? Who are the stake holders in the world? From my perspective, it's everybody who is like me, who thinks like me, who wants what I want, who has what I want. No, No. From God's perspective everybody's a stake holder in this world. God is responsive to everybody. Everybody. And above all to the people who seem to have no stake in this world at all. To come to believe that God has raised this man from the dead out of the millions of dead Jews, says what? That this deep, deep hope that I talked about at the very beginning of Lent, that we all keep very hidden, underneath multiple layers of fear and guilt and anger and cynicism and vindictiveness, this deep hope that we have, that we all really do belong with each other is realizable for all of us. There are no exclusions. But that is what is vindicated at this Feast of Easter. In other words there is joy at this Feast. The only thing that can bring us real hope: that the world is truly made for all of us. That we are all upheld by God. And under the image and power of that Man, Jesus the world will be for all of us, and we will be for each other, as Paul says again in another place, "members of each other, we really will put the interests of the other before our own".

And finally, besides Paul, there is another writer, a modern German theologian named John Baptist Metz who has done something very helpful for me this Lent. He has given me a criterion whereby I can assess my notions of freedom, my notions of responsibility. He made this proposal: "It is only when I can somehow encompass the sufferings of the world that I can be really free". Not just the sufferings of my family, not just my own interior anguish, but the suffering of the world and the suffering of all history of the world. Only when I become partner to all of that misery in this misery-filled world can I really begin to understand what freedom is. Otherwise I'm bracketing; otherwise I'm excerpting; otherwise I'm denying this God who raised Jesus from the dead, who is the God of everybody and above all, who is the God of all the sufferers. But if we do, as Metz suggests, come to believe that God is the God of all of us, then we come to believe above all, that God is the God of all the sufferers in the world. And that belief is sustainable in turn only because we believe that God upholds us. Because alone I cannot endure the suffering of the world, I cannot bear the sufferings of the world, if I am not, in turn, sustained by that God who upholds us all. If I can come to that point then all this wonderful talk about hallelujahs, and joy and glory really does begin to make sense and we can talk about legitimately celebrating Easter, an Easter which is not some kind of Disney-fied wish- fulfillment.

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