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Easter Day
4/4/2021

Job 38:1-18
Psalm 118
Mark 16:1-8

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In a sentence
The resurrection is the surprising Jesus simply being consistent.

Preamble to the sermon

There is a textual-come-literary question as to whether Mark intended to end his gospel at 16.8. The textual question arises from the fact that the oldest manuscripts end at v.8, while other manuscripts have one or both of the two shorter endings included in our Bibles. The literary question is whether there is enough evidence internal to Mark to settle the textual question: could Mark conceivably have meant to end his gospel here, or has his ending been lost and replaced by the other two endings? Perhaps these questions matter less than might first seem. Indeed, the question of where Mark intended to end is important for assessing his literary stature – even genius. Yet, in the end, it is not Mark who is the subject of the gospel but Jesus. Even if there were originally a couple of concluding ‘pages’ now lost, we would still have to make sense of these few verses as they stand – the ‘terror’ and ‘fear’ in response to the report of the resurrection, in particular. This is the assumption of our treatment of the passage in what follows.

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Following chapter upon chapter of Job’s crying against God, God finally speaks: ‘Who is this who darkens counsel by words without wisdom?’

The stage is set, God has announced his intention: now comes the divine wisdom.

And what we get is Shock and Awe: no engagement, no argument, nothing that looks like the wisdom which Job and his friends have wrestled to uncover. Chapter upon chapter now of rhetorical questions from the divine whirlwind. And Job, filled with the fear of the Lord (cf. 28.28), will be crushed and will repent in dust and ash.

Today’s gospel reading is not different:

‘So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid’

Shock and Awe.

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When we pose a question about the reported resurrection of Jesus, we usually consider ‘resurrection’ before considering Jesus. For reasons which seem obvious to us, the possibility of resurrection is considered independently of anything else the gospel says about Jesus. We understand life and death as natural categories, apart from Jesus: we are alive, we have seen the death of others and fully expect to ‘be’ dead ourselves one day. A report of a resurrection is only a radical violation of our lived experience of the natural world, on these terms.

Yet, it is alien to the New Testament to separate life and death as natural phenomena from what is said about a person as a historical phenomenon. We might say that, instead of adding resurrection to Jesus, the New Testament adds Jesus to resurrection. Instead of saying something unnatural about Jesus, the New Testament says something historical about resurrection. And what is important to keep in mind here is that ‘historical’ here does not first mean ‘what actually happened’. It means human cultural, social and political existence. The New Testament adds the cultural, social and political existence and action of Jesus to ‘resurrection’.

This means that what the New Testament says about Jesus, it says about resurrection. Here Mark’s Gospel is particularly illuminating. The word ‘discombobulation’ comes to mind from a close reading of Mark. Mark’s Jesus is surprising, confusing, even shocking. We hear, throughout, of what we’ve come to call the ‘messianic secret’: the active suppression of premature attempts to understand – and so to ‘box’ – Jesus with prepared labels. Against this, the secret enables that Jesus be heard and observed before labels can be applied, so that the labels are ultimately changed in their application to him. Jesus warps the world and its expectations: ‘Christ’, ‘Lord’, ‘Son’ are twisted around him to become something quite new.

Of central importance here is that ‘risen’ is one of these labels. ‘Jesus is Lord’, ‘Jesus is the Son’, ‘Jesus is the Christ’ and ‘Jesus is risen’ are all the same kind of affirmation. ‘Resurrection’ is an idea bobbing around in the cultural soup alongside other religious and political ideas. To say that Jesus is risen, then, is not a statement about nature applied to what is otherwise a cultural, social and political identity. Jesus – and all that he has said and done – is now added to ‘resurrection’, so that resurrection becomes warped and twisted into something new. Jesus is the surface from which the expectations of ‘resurrection’ are echoed, and they come back to us re-accented, in the way that a foreigner accents words familiar to us but which we are now not sure that we’ve heard correctly.

What Jesus does and says, and what is done to and said about him, are then, not a collection of independent affirmations but are ‘of a piece’: a single, seamless garment. To tear that garment into teachings here, miracles there, is to do violence to the integrity and identity of Jesus as the New Testament presents him. Jesus has no parts.

So too, then, is the response of the women to the tomb of a piece with the responses of Jesus’ friends and enemies as a whole, throughout Mark’s account: surprise, disorientation, discombobulation everywhere. The resurrection is no more – or less – problematic than ‘sell all your possessions and follow me’ (10.21) or ‘whoever divorces and remarries commits adultery’ (10.11f) or ‘the Son of Man will be handed over to be crucified’ (10.33). Jesus the Discombulator: At. It. Again.

We are, of course, very tempted to pick and choose between this and that bit of the story, because the crosslight of Jesus illuminates dark places in all of us. And, more than tempted, we simply do pick and choose – whether it is this or that teaching from Jesus we don’t like or this or that element of the Creed. In this is manifest our own fears and terrors – not so much in response to the proclamation of the resurrection per se but to the claim that everything which matters has its substance here, in the seamless Jesus who asks – and is – too much, and so about whom too much is said: he is risen. Shock and Awe, terror and fear.

To return to the specific question of the resurrection: we only begin to comprehend the proclamation of the resurrection when we see that the gospel has no ‘parts’. The gospel and the Jesus it proclaims are of a piece.

Jesus has no parts. The Jesus who is the beloved Son is the one who rails against God’s abandonment, is the one who is said to be risen, is the one we will become around the Table.

Jesus has no parts, that we might have no parts – we who divide ourselves into body versus soul, male versus female, doubt versus faith, conservative versus progressive, today versus yesterday, Job versus God; we who are fractured within and without, and who tear and spill God into parts along the way.

So partitioned are we and what we do, that integrity astounds and confuses.

What is the meaning of the terror of the women as they run from the tomb after having heard the amazing, disorienting declaration that he is risen? ‘Bloody Jesus. He’s at it again. Discombobulating. Won’t. Even. Stay. Dead.’

The resurrection is just Jesus being consistent: his life and death and life are one.

But this consistency runs in two directions – or perhaps many directions. If the resurrection is just Jesus being consistent, then we need not consider it to be the last thing he does. It is possible – on the basis of consistency – that the resurrection is the first thing Jesus does, the defining thing which gives colour to all else said about him.

If Jesus is ‘of a piece’, we can go further: his story begins everywhere: in the resurrection, in the crucifixion, in the confrontations, in the teaching, in the desert temptations; in Job, in the exile, in David, in the Exodus, in grace after the way back into the Garden is barred, in the creation of order out of chaos. Jesus begins, even, today with us – in our gathering around a table which is not ours but his, which gathering brings together as one what is not consistent but lumpy and skewed and divided: us ourselves. A little more resurrection fear and trembling as a grateful people extends its hands to receive its Christ would not be out of order.

The resurrection is Jesus before us and against us in the same moment, as is the cross, as is the proclamation of the kingdom and the call to repentance.

This is what we need, and it is the gift of God.

Shock and Awe: God and us, of a piece.

Come, says God. All is prepared.

Christ is risen.

Jubilate Deo.

Alleluia.

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Good Friday
2/4/2021

Job 23:1-17
Psalm 22
Mark 15:25-39

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‘My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?’

Early in our reflections on Job, we saw that Jesus’ question from the cross is precisely Job’s complaint: why have you abandoned me? And, like Job’s question, the question from the cross longs, yearns, cries for resolution.

For neither Job nor Jesus is this a question about the power of God. It is instead a question about justice. We have heard from Job this morning,

² ‘Today…my complaint is bitter;
his hand is heavy despite my groaning.
³ O that I knew where I might find him,
that I might come even to his dwelling!
⁴ I would lay my case before him,
and fill my mouth with arguments.
⁵ I would learn what he would answer me,
and understand what he would say to me. (Job 23.2-5)

Job is relentless: Let God justify himself. He allows no dualistic release from the tension in this, as if he must await the outcome of a struggle between a good god and an evil god. He models no punch-pulling pietism. Job is simply honest. Job believes that God has the power to overcome evil, and so the justice of God’s actions must be questioned. Where are you, God? Why do you not come with power, to set right what is wrong?

What would the power to overcome evil look like?

The gospel holds that such power looks like Jesus. This is not because he is the heroic saviour who will spend himself as a saving currency in his death on the cross. Jesus is God’s power simply because everything that Jesus says and does is intended to be effective. His confrontations with the powers active in the world are no mere prelude to the ‘main event’ of the cross. These confrontations are the prophetic word, uttered as a call to repentance – uttered in expectation of repentance. Jesus’ word is God’s power to overcome evil. The ministry of Jesus seeks to bring righteousness.

From this perspective, the cross is quite simply a disaster: the failure of God’s righteousness to find a home in us. (This failure Job also knows.)

But now, a question towards deeper understanding: if Jesus has been the prophet of God’s righteousness to this point, is what he utters on the cross still a prophetic word?

This is difficult, but – for Christ’s sake – let us not be timid. The charge of the prophet against the world now becomes a charge against God. To this point, Jesus has asked us, Why have you abandoned God? Now the charge is, God, why have you abandoned me? This takes us by surprise in the Gospel itself, although it is not new in the Scriptures. Job’s double defence of himself against the injustice of his friends and the injustice of God is the same kind of thing, as is the psalmist’s crying out against enemies and the delay of God.

The surprise of this charge against God ought to give us pause. It is not enough that we resonate with the sentiment, as we might with Job’s version of the question. ‘Where are you, God?’ is something we ask, of course, but do we expect it of Jesus? The messianic secret is now open: Jesus is ‘the Son’. He has just acknowledged the coming ‘cup’ of suffering, and committed to it (14.36). We don’t resolve the question by recognising that there’s a difference between knowing that this is going to hurt – that the cup is there – and it actually hurting – tasting the cup. The cry from the cross is on the lips of the Christ. What we see here, then, is not merely that physical pain shapes theology. Pain does inform theology, which is why we have Job and the Psalms in the Scriptures.

But, as it tells what Jesus does and what happens to him, the gospel is always concerned with who he is. It is not merely that he cries out which matters here; it is as the Son, as God’s prophet, that Jesus cries out.

Whom does God’s prophetic word address from the cross? This word is directed to God. The prophet speaks to God a word continuous with that he has spoken to his disciples and to the religious authorities and to those in the streets and byways of Palestine.

How does the prophet prophesy to God?

Christian confession knows that to speak to Jesus is to speak to God, but we only half know this. We know it in the way that delivers Jesus as a ‘human face’ for God, that makes God more ‘accessible’ to us: Jesus is ‘easier’ than God. This is how the children’s talk goes, and not a few sermons.

But this confession is much more profound. If our speaking to Jesus is our speaking to God, it is because for Jesus to speak to us is also for him to address God. When Jesus addresses us, he addresses God. This is not because we are divine but because when the Son speaks, he always ultimately addresses the Father. Only something like a trinitarian logic will make sense of Mark’s portrayal of Jesus here. More precisely, only a trinitarian account of creation – of ourselves in relation to God – will make sense of Mark’s Jesus, with his cry from the cross. What such an account would reveal is that there is no ‘parents’ retreat’ to which the Father and the Son can withdraw to get us – the ‘kids’ – out of their hair for a few minutes (oh, for such a thing!). There is no direct Father-Son conversation across the dinner table without interruption and discord darting back and forth across the other way (oh, oh, oh, for such a thing!). We are ever in God’s midst. God does nothing which does not involve us. There is no divine action in which we are not the cause or the means or the purpose of what God does. The prophetic word – at its harshest and at its most poignant – is directed both to us and to God, just as Job’s harsh case against his friends is his poignant case against God.

God is the end – the goal – of all things,s including God’s own word. Jesus’ cry from the cross, then, does not contradict who Jesus is and what he has done to this point. Rather, his cry intensifies his ministry. He addresses God now not ‘through’ us but as us – as one of us.

Jesus cries out as Job, who asks our suffering questions. And he cries out as Job’s friends who, having mocked him at the foot of the cross, finally discover that they have misunderstood God, for they have been so caught up in their knowledge of righteousness and sinfulness that they had nothing more to hear from God.

Jesus – God’s word to us – speaks our word to God. The sad song of God’s searching after us one evening in the Garden – Adam, Eve, where are you? – finds its harmony in our responding word in Job and Jesus one afternoon outside Jerusalem: God, where are you?

The answer to both these questions is, On the cross: in Jesus-as-Job, in Jesus the Son.

In this double word – Jesus: God’s word to us as our word to God – all things are reconciled in the only way they can be, in a world like ours, with a people like us, who reject the gift of God and ask for it again.

In this, the rule of God finally draws near: the reign of God among a people who would crucify God for God’s sake, and their own.

There is no resolution such as Job’s cry or the cry of Jesus on the cross would seem to seek, considered apart from who God is and who we are, together on the cross.

The cross is where it ends, but also where it begins again.

Repent, then, O Job – re-imagine yourselves and God – and believe the good news: the kingdom of the God we would crucify is come near, in that crucifixion.

In this way, God is finally ours, and we are God’s.