April 8, 2012

Glynn Cardy

Easter Day     Mark 16:1-8

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Jesus was killed because he was out of control. He was outside the control of the political and religious institutions. He’d lived and taught and showed a disregard of borders. Whether those borders were around whom you should dine with, or touch, or put as heroes in your stories, or how you picture God… he deliberately flouted them. His was a spirituality without borders, and the border police didn’t like it.

Around Jesus was gathered the morally and theologically poor, those not able to afford the slick, tidy packages on offer in the confident religious brands. Around him gathered the nuisances, nobodies and skeptics. Jesus welcomed, broke boundaries and bread, and loved. In the doing, in the being there, was hope. 

It wasn’t that Jesus was ignorant of the borders, or just wanted to be kind to outsiders, or promote tolerance. Rather he set his sights on the nexus of ideological control, the Jerusalem establishment, and challenged its reason for existence. 

He wanted to break the control system. He hoped that breaking would catch on. He hoped that what horrified the thought police would spread. He hoped that like wild windblown mustard spiritual anarchy would grow, bloom, and seed like a weed in every and any place, beyond the power of the elites.

It was a vision that would get him killed, as it had killed other rebels before him. It was a bad Friday on the Golgotha hill.

In the years following his death his followers caught the wind of his spirit and the weeds of anarchy spread. On the edges of society men and women, slave and free, all races, shared in leadership and resources. There wasn’t a lot of control. One never knew quite what would happen. There were lots of good Sundays. 

Yet within three centuries a new Christian religious institution with its bevy of rules and rulers had arisen who not only took upon themselves to beat back the spread, but also to redefine Jesus. They sought to bring the movement Jesus seeded under control.

So a number of shifts in and manipulations of the collective memory of Jesus took place. The spirituality akin to a wild weed, mustard, was genetically modified into a tree with branches able to provide shelter and food to birds. [i] An institution is like a tree – dependable, predictable, and rooted. Jesus’ spiritual vision was now akin to trees not weeds, to stability not dynamic change.

The institutional controllers also split Jesus from the spirituality he’d taught and practiced. What became the mark of a Christian was not someone who lived that borderless inclusive faith but someone who believed that the former out-of-control Jesus was now elevated to the heavens, sitting at the right hand of the in-control God. The prodigal had been reined in, the rebel Jesus domesticated.

The controllers also concocted a system whereby people’s fears could be played upon. Everyone was defined as a ‘sinner’. Only by correct belief could people be forgiven. Jesus’ death had not been the result of the thought police maintaining the borders; rather it had been everyone’s fault, everyone’s ‘sin’, which had required him to sacrifice his all. Only by repenting, believing in humanity’s inherent unworthiness and Jesus’ sacrifice, could people be forgiven.

And thus institutional Christianity took root and grew into a tree where purity of belief and obedient behaviour were prized, and the ideology of sin and the guilt it produced were its fruit. It was quite different from the wild weed.

It is a mistake though to just blame others for what happened to the memory of Jesus. For in our fears and our failings we often seek that certainty, those demarcations between pure and impure, and the forgiveness that a divine super parent can offer. We want to believe that in a doubting, dirty and messy world there is absolution for us… and so we create a parental God to fit.

In most churches, at most services, there is a ritual reenactment of this Easter sin-redemption bargain. Called ‘confession’ and ‘absolution’ it requires the congregation to admit their failings, and then the priest on God’s behalf to pronounce that through Jesus’ sacrifice we are forgiven.

Many of us don’t participate in this bargain ritual. We don’t like what it makes God into. We don’t do ‘parent God’. We don’t like what it makes of Jesus’ life and death. We don’t do ‘Jesus died for us’. And we don’t like how it defines us as failures in need of forgiveness, when we are ‘made in the image of God’.

Yet there is at the heart of this confession/absolution ritual ancient truth that speaks still. We do fail, regularly. We are frail. We do doubt. We are afraid. The good news, that bargain theology doesn’t quite get, is that these parts of our humanity are not to be shunned or confessed or disguised. Rather they are to be embraced, held, and valued. 

For our wounds can be the source of our empathy, our doubts can be the engine in our quest for truth, and our fears can be the wellspring of our pity. Though usually, of course, they aren’t. Usually they are just part of the hand fate has dealt us to play.

The spirit of the borderless Jesus informs us of a God different from the super parent. This different God holds, embraces, and values our doubts, dirt, and mess. In the windblown community of this God’s followers no matter what one does or doesn’t, no matter how bound one is to addictions, no matter what one believes, if anything… all belong. The love called God makes room for all.

Hope therefore is not what some cosmic being has bargained for us by having his favourite son killed. Hope is, to quote Richard Holloway, when “the unacceptable are accepted by a community who knows itself to be unacceptable.” [ii] Weeds welcome weeds.

At Easter remnants of that windblown community gather to celebrate that the spiritual path of Jesus did not end at the cross. Neither did it end when they elevated him to heaven and crowned him there. Instead the spiritual path of Jesus, his life, lives on amongst all who reach beyond borders in the name of justice, compassion, and love. 

When freedom is celebrated, when bread is shared, when the constraints of certitude and dogmatism and fear are broken… then we know that Jesus lives on. In the doing, in the being there, is hope. It is the hope of mustard weeds, spiritual anarchists, splashing the world in hot, vivid colours. 

[i] Mark 4:30-32 (KJV)

30And he said, Whereunto shall we liken the kingdom of God? or with what comparison shall we compare it? 31It is like a grain of mustard seed, which, when it is sown in the earth, is less than all the seeds that be in the earth: 32But when it is sown, it groweth up, and becometh greater than all herbs, and shooteth out great branches; so that the fowls of the air may lodge under the shadow of it.

[ii] Richard Holloway Leaving Alexandria: a memoir of faith and doubt, p.301.