Dame Julian of Norwich expands upon this theme in her book, Revelations of Divine Love, the first book written in English by a female author. She writes:
The love of God most High for our soul
is so wonderful that it surpasses all
knowledge. No created being can fully know
the greatness, the sweetness, the
tenderness, of the love that our Maker has
for us. By God’s Grace and help therefore let
us in spirit stand in awe and gaze, eternally
marvelling at the supreme, surpassing,
single-minded, incalculable love that God,
Who is all goodness, has for us.
Meditations on God’s mercy, and God’s intense love for us both as part of creation and as individuals are particularly important, as our Psalm today also reminds us, when we have been cast into shock or turmoil by events that swirl around us.
This Sunday’s readings have contained many words of comfort and strength for me in the last few days. We have had two of our beloved parishioners pass into glory this week, and my mother, my sister and I have been dealing with the sudden death of my younger brother. Meditating upon verses such as Psalm 4:6-8 speaks directly to the trouble and doubts that plague us when we experience trauma and loss. I commend these words to you for comfort and assurance in times such as these:
Many are saying, "Oh, that we might see better times!"
Lift up the light of your countenance upon us, O LORD.
You have put gladness in my heart,
more than when grain and wine and oil increase.
I lie down in peace; at once I fall asleep;
for only you, LORD, make me dwell in safety.
All four of our readings this weekend speak to a lack of belief in response to being involved in pain and loss. Our gospel passage, from Luke 24, comes from the final chapter in the gospel of Luke, and, lain alongside the gospel from John we heard last week, give us Luke’s version of the events we heard last week: Jesus suddenly appears to all the apostles gathered together.
Jesus’s first words, just as we saw in the gospel of John, are to bless his disciples and friends with peace (v. 36). As in the portion of John’s gospel that we heard last week, this is in response to his friends’ fear, their swirling emotions, and their doubt that erupts as a result. Their response is natural and human—there is a reason why “I can’t believe it” is often our first response to shocking news like the loss of loved ones.
Jesus KNOWS that the apostles, having been through the trauma of his horrific, shameful death, can’t dare to believe that he is alive and risen. That is why Jesus then commands those present to look at him- to truly see him, and to know that he is real. Of course, their first tendency is to think that they are looking at a ghost. Yet Jesus eating and drinking is meant to underscore that this is a living, breathing Christ that they encounter—ghosts have no need for food or drink.
Luke’s recounting of Jesus’s actions directly addresses the doubts of those had insisted that Jesus was never fully human—disagreements of which have continued in Christianity to this present day. Passages such as these underscore the humanity of Jesus, risen and fully alive, hungry and thirsty, bearing scars in his crucified, yet living body-- signs of his bodily survival and triumph over the grave.
We see this argument continuing today. Some quadrants of Christianity play down Jesus’s humanity in favor of his divinity. This sadly all too often leads to a belief that one cannot imitate Jesus in our earthly lives, since he really was God masquerading as a human. No need to try to reconcile or love your enemies, much less forgive them even from the cross. Saying you believe in Jesus then becomes nothing about living a Resurrection shaped life, but a transaction where saying a magic formula will put you in line for heaven after you die—a heaven that is made all the more desirable by anticipating all the people you don’t approve of roasting in hell.
Other quadrants of Christianity downplay Jesus’s divinity in search of the “historical Jesus”—the first century Jewish peasant who formed a little band of followers to challenge the Roman Empire. This approach, sadly can lead to Jesus merely being a sage—or the subject of books by Dan Brown that people forget are FICTION. This Jesus never arose, never ascended. This belief is the product of Enlightenment thinking, that holds that there are no such things as miracles, and wonder is a mere product of naivete.
The Episcopal way welcomes those from both these tendencies. However, our theology creates a generous embrace of paradox—We fully embrace a High Christology that emphasizes Jesus’s divinity, AND a “Low Christology” that emphasizes Jesus’s humanity. At the same time. Without our heads exploding. We do that by embracing the wonders of mystery as not a threat or sign of ignorance, but as a sign of reverence toward the God whose self-revelation to mere mortals throughout history is always generous and imaginatively rich, but is a God who nonetheless is known to us only in part. We humbly acknowledge that what we know of God can never mean that we know all of God, or can limit God according to the limits of our imaginations.
But experiences like losing loved ones, friend or family, especially during Eastertide, call us to consider anew the wonder of Christ’s Resurrection. Jesus’s bodily resurrection has important implications for all of us experiencing loss. For if Jesus had a bodily resurrection, then we can anticipate the same thing for ourselves. If, as some claimed, Jesus was only a spirit in the shape of a human body, then Jesus’s ability to understand the human condition and bring it into the experience of the divine would be greatly limited.
No, Jesus being both fully human and fully divine is a necessary precondition for our salvation throughout Christian theology to today. This is why you are encouraged to cross yourself at the words of the Creeds as we affirm our faith “in the resurrection of the dead and the life everlasting.”
The Resurrected Christ, we affirm, “ascended into heaven,” bringing with him his scars, the suffering he overcame his experiences of human existence—hunger, cold, the love of friends and family, marveling at the beauty of the grasses and the lilies of the fields, welcoming little children in their purity—and in doing so, he merged all those experiences into the reality of the Holy Trinity, who dances in a circle of love, and through Jesus invites all of us in, as well. This knowledge is particularly comforting to me, as my brother was taken from us all too young due to the power and sway of the disease of addiction, working its evils within him for the last 35 years.
Seeing the doubt of Jesus’s disciples and friends, and hearing Jesus’s words to be at peace and believing in his being with us in life as well as death helps us as we move from shock toward acceptance and faith in the face of death that, in the words of the preface for the Eucharist at a Burial service:
For to your faithful people, O Lord, life is changed, not ended…
That knowledge, and assurance, brings peace, for the disciples then and us as disciples now, indeed. Even as the resurrection of spring bursts forth all around us, we pray for that flourishing of new life to take root within our hearts and our souls, so that we can truly see and put our faith and hope in “seeing what love God has for us, that we should be called children of God…”.
Fastening onto that promise, the promise that envelops our lost loved ones, even now in the embrace of a God who NEVER gives up on us, who tells us we can’t earn or bargain away into eternal life but accept it as a wondrous gift freely given. In doing so, we can LIVE Resurrection, right now. As an act of faith, and an act of being. For the love of the world.
Readings:
Preached at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville, MO, on the weekend of April 13-14, 2024.
