THE GOD OF NON-VIOLENCE - Easter Sunday A

27th March 2005 : EASTER SUNDAY : Year A
9:30am
Acts 10:34-43 : Colossians 3:1-4 : Matthew 28:1-10

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

I am indebted to the following source for insights into Acts 10:34-43 in particular:
Girardian Reflections on the Lectionary
http://girardianlectionary.net/index.html
Rev. Paul John Nuechterlein

Especially:
EASTER DAY -- YEAR A
Last revised: March 25, 2005
http://girardianlectionary.net/year_a/easter-a.htm

One of the ironies of the Easter story is that the accounts of the reactions of the disciples are so thoroughly human …

Hang on a mo, I hear you say. Of course they’re human! What else could they be?

I’m glad you asked because resurrection, which is what this Easter business is about, also involves the Living God – intensely so! And the “Godness” of Easter is what challenges us humans and offers the way forward into something that is truly new and truly new life.

We may find it something of an embarrassing and awkward truism to say that God looks at this world and its people differently from humankind. We say it easily enough because it’s an easy-enough thing to say. But what are the implications of such a statement? And how do those implications impact on matters like the resurrection of Jesus and human behaviour – especially the kind of violence which killed Jesus, has plagued our world for all of recorded history and continues right now with little sign of stopping?

We see the human side of the matter clearly enough in Peter’s speech to Cornelius’ household. Peter, still a torah-abiding Jew as well as follower of Jesus, had required a little persuading by God to share the good news with these Gentiles. God had to remind him who was the boss and that the boss had the right to explain what the rules really meant.

But Peter, in addressing the Cornelian gathering, cannot move past the confrontational, antagonist language of Us versus Them:

They put him to death by hanging him on a tree; but God raised him on the third
day and allowed him to appear, not to all the people but to us who were chosen
by God as witnesses, and who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead.
He commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that he is the one
ordained by God as judge of the living and the dead.

It’s the same line as Pete’s Pentecost preamble, which is even more aggressive and blaming:

"You that are Israelites, listen to what I have to say: Jesus of Nazareth, a man
attested to you by God with deeds of power, wonders, and signs that God did
through him among you, as you yourselves know-- this man, handed over to you
according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and
killed by the hands of those outside the law. But God raised him up, having
freed him from death, because it was impossible for him to be held in its power.

These are early days for Peter and the Church. They still have a human mindset which seeks to apportion blame and implicitly demand revenge, though they would no doubt have used the euphemism “justice”. Peter’s words, though somewhat restrained by eschewing an explicit demand for satisfaction, nevertheless bristle with the violence which led to and caused Jesus’ execution, which saw Judas handing Jesus over to the religious hierarchy and occupying forces acting out Operation Israelite Liberation, er, Freedom, and which gave rise to the desertion and denial of the male disciples.

Peter – and, we presume, the Church – have not yet grasped what the Living God has done in the resurrection – taken a situation played out on a human stage and recreated the entire aftermath in Godly terms – but still well within the human arena.

In other words, the Father, surely the One most hurt and grievously maltreated in the torturous death of the Son, responds, not with the kind of violence that wiped out Jesus, but with a negation of that violence. By refusing to be violent, God destroys violence as a legitimate answer to violence. So instead of death, God brings life. Instead of retribution acted out in rage and bitter fury, God raises Jesus from the dead on the third day and sends him into men and women’s hearts saying, Peace, and Do not be afraid.

Jesus for his part has to reassure the terrified first witnesses of the resurrection. … Partly because it jolly-well IS terrifying. I don’t know about you but the last time I was walking through the local cemetery and an angel of the Lord screeched down like a meteorite and plonked himself all blazing-white and sizzling on a tombstone, I was pretty alarmed … I can well understand the guards playing dead …

Matthew spares us little of the cosmological terror of the resurrection: Temple curtain mysteriously ripped in two; solar eclipses; the dead walking the streets of downtown Jerusalem. And then this just-about-kamikaze angel. Stephen King, eat your heart out!

And it’s terrifying because somehow the women who go to the tomb realise that the Living God is with them once again – but this time in a way which they have never before experienced, in a way which defies belief and shames the disciples’ betrayal of hope. God’s presence always strikes fear and awe.

But perhaps a later terror will come with the realisation that the resurrection means change. The God who steadfastly and faithfully refuses to allow humankind to cast the divine in a human image, changes the whole ball-game in the resurrection.

We have already considered God’s refusal to repay violence with violence. Death – the ultimate violent act - becomes life. If we want the prophetic foreshadowing and understanding we need look no further than the words of those prophets who remind us that God desires, not burnt offerings, sacrifices and ceremonies, but mercy. In the words of Isaiah:

learn to do right!
Seek justice,
encourage the oppressed.
Defend the
cause of the fatherless,
plead the case of the widow.

In Jesus, these things happened.

But the irony of it is that the change the resurrection demands is not a complete recasting so that something physically different comes into being. Rather, it’s a change of heart, mind and soul; a willingness to reflect on and absorb a newness that is internal but reflected externally.

So, when Judas hands Jesus over in Gethsemane he uses the standard Greek greeting, Cairete! It’s exactly the same word Jesus uses when he appears suddenly to the Mary’s on their way to tell the disciples about the empty tomb. Cairete! sez Jesus. …But now it is a word of hope and life, not a prelude to a death.

Similarly, both the angel and then Jesus tell the Mary’s to tell the disciples to go to Galilee: “there they will see him”. Galilee, the place of Jesus’ early ministry. The northern, marginalised, low-socio-economic hicksville peopled by dodgy characters who dressed funny and spoke funnier. Exactly the kind of people it’s easy to pick on and ridicule – or crucify – when we want to feel better about ourselves. Like today’s gays or disabled or Middle Eastern or different religion or denomination.

So we see Jesus working God’s business on the edges of polite and proper society, among the oppressed and the fatherless and the widow, putting in the “hard yards”, the way many professionals do when they’re on their way to the top.

So what happens when God raises Jesus from the dead? What a climactic victory, eh? That’s one mighty finger in the satan’s face. God rules, OK. So does Jesus get the keys to the Executive Loo? A promotion? A better class of parish where he doesn’t have to spend his time worrying about whether his people will rake up enough cash for his next stipend?

That’s way we humans might think.

But Jesus goes back to the edge. He returns to Galilee. The place where he began God’s work and the same place where he gathers the faithful to send them out to continue God’s work.

So, what’s new? What’s changed? What has resurrection effected? Certainly not a change in the external landscape. But maybe that’s the point – a point we miss when we go hunting for the empirical evidence of a literal resurrection, the eye-witness reportage, the plausible arguments, the minutiae that “prove” what we are supposed to wrestle with and come to as an act of unprovable, undemonstrable faith.

We humans demand evidence of the change and the Living God gives us the same and sez, I’ve been here all the time. Yes, God DOES do something new in raising Jesus from the dead. But it’s not quite the New Thing our human minds initially think it is.

What’s new is that WE begin to realise that God is NOT made in our image, God does NOT think like a human being, God responds to human violence with the non-violence of unrestrained, unremitting love, and God sends us out, Jesus being our example, to every Galilee within our reach to show in our lives and words and deeds the same grace towards others that Jesus showed in his own life and words and deeds.

By raising Jesus from the dead, God shows us definitively that love and peace are God’s ways, not violence and retribution. And this is why we are sent to Galilee, to meet the Jesus who continues to work in the unloved and the victims of violence, that he might send US out again and again to bring, in love and peace, resurrection to those who know no other reality.

See you in Galilee!