A Persistent Mercy
Suggested reading: Luke 24:1-12
or the Resurrection stories in Matthew, Mark or John
I want to tell you my second favorite Easter story.
A small child, son of an undertaker, was in Sunday School on Easter morning.
He was amazed at the story of the Resurrection.
“Do you mean that Jesus really rose up from the dead?”
“Oh, yes,” the teacher assured him.
The boy shook his head.
“Then I know my daddy didn’t take care of him after he died.
His never get up again.”
In my first favorite Easter story, the women’s words, Luke tells us, seemed to the apostles like an idle tale. So it is, still, in our time when to our analytical, literal, scientific minds, the Resurrection of Jesus is surely an idle tale.
But the modern analytical mind is not the mind of Easter.* Such thinking will not enable you to understand this event, nor to be liberated by it.
I cannot tell you the meaning of Resurrection, nor the proof of it.
The most I can do is tell you what trusting it is like.
Life is Stronger than Death
Some years ago, in the church I served then, a man was dying, and I spent the whole night in the hospital with his wife and family. It was a hard death; the man had been suffering for a long time, and was still painfully alive long after the medical staff expected. Towards dawn, I said to his wife, “I think he is afraid to leave you alone. Perhaps you need to tell him that you will be ok, and that it is ok with you if he goes. Tell him you can trust his leaving, and he can trust your staying.” She did so, and he died gently within the hour. That is what trusting Resurrection is like.
Death ends something, sometimes shatteringly so. But the essential being of the person is not snuffed out. It continues to exist, and even to be available to us. When we are alive in our human form, the particles or bundles of energy that are our unique being arrange themselves in a specific way. When the human part of our journey ends, that energy, those particles, simply re-arrange themselves in a new way, but they still exist, and, the Christian understanding tells us, they still exist in their particular unique identity.
Science tells us that energy cannot be destroyed. Consciousness cannot be destroyed. People of faith knew that long before science figured it out. Our language for that truth is to say that life is eternal. As Christians, our particular language for that is to say that God, through the Risen Christ, has defeated death. Life, and even connectedness, do not end at death. Trusting Resurrection is living and dying with that awareness.
Belonging
For me, to trust Resurrection is to know Jesus as living and present in my life. The relationship that I share with that Christ presence has many facets, ever deepening and changing, but at the least it is one of profound companionship. The Holy One companions me. The Risen Christ interacts with me. The Risen One’s love pours out upon me without ceasing. It is a Presence that is love. It is belonging.
When one little girl was hurt or unhappy,
her mom would hold her and tell her once again:
“If I could choose any little girl anywhere in the world,
no matter how much I had to pay for her, do you know who I’d choose?”
The little girl knew very well the answer, but still she’d say each time, “No, who?”
“I’d choose you, honey, I’d pick you!”
There’d be quiet for a moment,
and then the child would look up at her mom and say,
“Tell me again, mommy, tell me again!”
Belonging. And love.
That’s what it is to trust Resurrection.
Spaciousness
Our Resurrection story has provided me with a kind of spaciousness in my life.
New understandings of the universe tell us many strange things:
All living systems possess consciousness.
Everything is in relationship.
Everything is affected by everything else.
The observer impacts what is observed.
Matter is energy.
There is motion, but no moving objects.
The essence of the universe is relatedness.
Parts of the universe separated (even by light years) are in fact
in touch with one another, communicating.
When I meet these new paradigms of reality, I have room for them. Haven’t I been born and bred on the most stunning shatterer of old paradigms: this Resurrection story?
A kind of spaciousness: that what trusting Resurrection is like. A capacity to consider new ways of seeing. An openness to the unpredictable. A view of life that is expansive. An openness to possibilities I haven’t thought of yet. We might call that hope. Hope is a kind of spaciousness, a making room.
A little girl looked forward so much to playing softball next season.
Her dad tried to save her from disappointment.
An illness and resulting surgery left her unlikely to be able to run fast, if at all.
But she had a more spacious view.
She had room for hope, room for another way of seeing.
“I won’t need to run fast,” she told him.
I’ll hit them out of the park. Then I’ll be able to walk.”
That’s what it’s like to trust Resurrection.
Surrender
Trusting Resurrection requires surrender. It is about surrendering our own ego. It is about surrendering our old identity so a new one can emerge. It is about surrendering control. It seems in my life to be about surrendering my own schemes and dreams in order to offer myself to each present moment to be used as I am needed.
I grow into such a trust slowly, and often with much resistance. But to my amazement, I find that I have come to prefer the unfolding of grace over the schemes and dreams that I was previously collecting. Life becomes a freefall into grace. That is what it is like to trust Resurrection.
Easter does not rise or fall with the evidence.* For many modern thinkers, Resurrection is something to dismiss, diminish, or dismantle. But Resurrection is not something to believe in, or to debate about. It is to experience. It is something other than fact, deeper than data.*
Easter tells us that life is not out of grace.*
Evils and sufferings and oppressions and hurts abound,
but Easter breaks into the midst of them bringing hope:
not hope as optimism,
but hope as utter dependence on God,*
trust in the sacred process called life that unfolds around and within us.
Trusting Resurrection is to know that life is stronger than death.
It is about belonging.
It is a surrender into grace.
It is an attitude in life of spaciousness, the capacity to make room.
In Resurrection, we discover that life houses a persistent mercy.*
The dictionary defines persistent as
refusing to relent
continuing even in the face of opposition
stubborn
This I experience.
Life has not been all I dreamed of.
I have not been all I dreamed of.
I have suffered more than I wanted to,
or, in my naiveté, more than I expected to.
I have not found happy endings to all my stories.
I think it is the same for you.
But still, I have found that life houses a persistent mercy.
In spite of the enormous challenge of being alive on this planet,
mercy refuses to relent.
In spite of the great forces of hate and greed and despair in the world and within myself, grace continues.
Resurrection, thank God, is stubborn.
A persistent mercy.
I cannot tell you what Resurrection means, nor prove it to you.
But that is what trusting it is like.
Christ is risen.
Christ is risen indeed. Alleluia!
@2010 Janice Jean Springer
* An asterisk indicates that this sentence or phrase is from a small book, “Sermons Through Time, 1966-1991” by Rev. Paul Davis, a preacher and poet in St. Louis who was in my early years of ministry and is still today a mentor and model for me. I use these lines with his permission.
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