Disciple: Good News in a Bad News Cycle
A resurrection reflection
By The Right Reverend Michael Curry
Let me start with the bad news and then, the good news — the real good news.
Organized religion in North America of virtually all types is in trouble: mega and mainline, traditional and contemporary, church, synagogue and temple. If misery loves company, then there is plenty of company for this misery.
While interest in things spiritual is high, religionless living is increasingly the norm for more and more people. It’s harder to be church in this climate. Many old ways of doing things simply don’t work any longer. People don’t pledge like they used to. They don’t attend like they used to. They don’t give like they used to. Sunday School is losing the match with soccer. But all is not bleak. Actually, this could be, if I may borrow from Winston Churchill, “our finest hour.” But let’s not kid ourselves. The challenges are real, complex and deeply cultural, and they are not going away.
That’s the bad news. But that’s not all the news.
THE GOOD NEWS
There really is a God. And God is not finished with us yet. Jesus of Nazareth has been raised from the dead — for real. Jesus lives! And if that is true, as I believe it is, then the resurrection of Jesus may portend a pattern of creative possibility that seems to be the way of God, a way not even death can defeat or destroy. And that really is good news.
In the ancient world, the dead were often buried in caves on the sides of hills, and a large stone or boulder was rolled before the entrance of the cave, mainly to keep wild animals from desecrating the grave. This was done with the body of Jesus. The Bible says that a wealthy man named Joseph of Arimathea provided the tomb. He, Nicodemus and a few others buried Jesus in the tomb on the side of a hill and rolled a huge stone in front of the opening. All of that was quite normal and according to custom.
Matthew’s Gospel adds a provocative side note, however. After Jesus had been buried, the chief priests and the Pharisees got together with Pontius Pilate. This was the same gang that conspired to kill Jesus in the first place. You would have thought Friday was enough. They knew he was dead. It wasn’t that they even remotely expected Jesus to be raised from the dead. Rather, they wanted to eclipse even the possibility his disciples might claim that he had been raised. They meant not only to keep wild animals out but also to keep wild hopes in. It was Dante who in his depiction of the gates of hell had inscribed the words,
“Abandon hope all ye who enter here.”
The intent was to impose the limitations of the possible and to eclipse any hope of new possibility. But by early that Sunday morning, the guards who had been posted were out of the picture, the great stone had been rolled away by what appeared to have been an earthquake, and Jesus was alive.
While it is a part of W.H. Auden’s Christmas Oratorio in For the Time Being, these words speak the truth of the Resurrection.
We who must die demand a miracle!
Nothing can save us that is possible.
How could the infinite become a finite fact,
the Eternal become a temporal act.
Nothing can save us that is possible.
We who must die demand a miracle!
THE GATEWAY TO HOPE
The possible is frequently the problem, because possibility is frequently the gateway to hope. The resurrection of Jesus is a sign that with God, there is always another possibility. Theologian Paul Tillich once said that the providence of God means “there is a creative and saving possibility in every situation.”
With God there is always another possibility.
You can see this in the Bible. The poem in the first chapter of Genesis suggests that before creation, before there was a world at all, there was nothing, only God. The language of the earth being “a formless void” with “darkness” covering the deep is a poetic way of speaking of what theologian Karl Barth once called das Nichtige, nothingness.
“Then God said, ‘Let there be light’, and there was light.” (Genesis 1:3) The act of creation on God’s part was calling forth something when there was nothing, summoning up possibility from the limitations of the possible. For with God, there’s always another possibility.
The Book of Exodus tells the story of Moses and the freedom struggle of the Hebrew slaves in Egypt. Slavery is by definition life without God-given freedom, life without hope. All exits to hope have been blocked. That’s what any kind of slavery is: the eclipse of hope. But with God there is always another possibility. Exodus tells the story of how God, after a long and protracted struggle, after negotiations and plagues, created a new possibility by parting the Red Sea and setting the Hebrew captives free. With God there is always another possibility.
I don’t think it’s an accident that the creation story from Genesis and the Exodus story are both assigned readings for the Great Vigil of Easter. In the creation of the world and the liberation of Hebrew slaves we see the way of God in the world. And that way is what neutralized the guards, rolled away the stone and created a new possibility: the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. So how does that apply to us as disciples in the community called church in 21st-century Galilee?
CREATIVE POSSIBILITY
In Mark’s Gospel, Mary Magdalene and several of the women disciples went to the place where Jesus was buried. Mark reports that as they went, they said to one another, “Who will roll away the stone for us?” They knew the stone was there. They knew, presumably, that the stone had been sealed. They knew, therefore, they had no way to roll the stone away. And yet, they went anyway.
Whether they were fully aware of it or not, just going to the tomb of their loved one, just doing what love does, just living the liturgy of their faith led them beyond what was possible into the realm of divine possibility. Living deeply into the tradition of their ancient faith led them into the new creative possibility of God.
I suspect that may well be a definition of faith. Faith is not about living by what the world declares possible but by God’s new possibility. A disciple is one who goes anyway. It has nothing to do with being a wide-eyed optimist or a closed-minded pessimist. It’s about being a Gospel realist. The resurrection is God’s victorious declaration that there’s always another possibility.
That is a truth by which we, who are the church of Jesus in this 21st-century Galilee, can live. A complex time like ours is a challenge not to become trendy and to find short cuts to get more members, but, like those women that resurrection morning, to go deeper into the rich soil of the faith. Following the Risen Lord Jesus is about living into not simply what is possible, but living in God, and, therefore, living into the creative possibilities of God.
And that means following our Risen Lord may mean seeking out, discerning, working to find and being open to the creative possibilities that take what was old and transform it, reimagine it and reinvent it until new creation emerges out of the old. That’s in part what it means to “practice resurrection,” as the poet Wendell Berry teaches us. The resurrection of Jesus holds the key to following faithfully and effectively being the Church of Jesus in this complex and challenging Galilee of the 21st century.
And as the old spiritual says: Ain’t that good news!
Keep the faith,
+Michael
The Rt. Rev. Michael B. Curry was elected the 11th Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of North Carolina in 2000. Contact him.
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