The Hope of In-Between

Jesus cried with a loud voice, "Lazarus come out!" “Lazarus come out!”

Now that’s a pretty good cliff-hanger for a story if I’ve every heard one: “Lazarus come out!”

And even though we’re pretty sure of the outcome, we’re waiting on the edge of our seats just to make sure. It’s the waiting and the hoping that gets us in, keeps us going, demands our attention. When you’re on a good cliff-hanger, you just have to wait until the next phrase drops. And the waiting can be excruciating even when we’re pretty sure of the outcome—what’s going to happen; will everything be all right; will everything fall into place as it’s supposed too?

And we wait…

The whole Christian story is a bit of a waiting game.

We have these ideas about “eternal life”, “everlasting life”, “the life of the world to come”, “resurrection of the dead”, “resurrection of the body”, “the final consummation of all things”, “the promised goal”, “the final reconciliation of humanity with God, and the renewal of all creation”, “the kingdom of heaven”, “the kingdom of God”, the eschaton. Whatever it is we’re waiting for, it certainly has a lot of names and even more descriptive phrases. It’s whatever we believe that God has promised, whatever we understand to be God’s will and God’s purpose, whatever we picture as the ultimate goal of God’s salvation, God’s liberation, God’s plan for the reconciliation of all creation.

And we wait…

Many of you know that I lost my Dad this year. We had in fact been expecting Dad’s death for a while… and that’s another kind of waiting, although similar in its own way. And in the course of that waiting, there’d been a range of conversations about the direction and destination of the journey. In the early days of his illness, the questions were like: “What would heaven be like?” Later the conversation took a different turn which seemed to centre more on acceptance of the present, and the promise of hope which it already holds.

It was Dad who first put John Williamson’s song “Cootamundra Wattle” together with the idea of resurrection hope for me—the story of Jesus’ resurrection and the hope of the new life we believe in because of Jesus.

It’s one of the gems he’s offered to me over the years: the fruit of long hours of silent reflection over the activity of pulling engines apart and re-building them; or developing the replacement part for some old engine for which you could no longer buy the bits he needed. Generally, his gems were offered after I’d spent a couple of hours in the shed with him, feeling completely useless—“Pass us the 10mm spanner would you… No, that’s not 10mm, that’s 3/8”; don’t you know the difference?”). I knew I wasn’t there for my mechanical skill, but to hear the gems when he chose to deliver them.

This gem was offered for my unpacking, and sometimes it takes me a while to do that, but I figure that’s okay because it took a while for the insight to be generated, and any good invention is worth due consideration.

In the resurrection stories of the Gospels, we see some of the unpacking by the early Christian community in relation to the hope they’d found in Jesus, the loss of Jesus’ physical presence, the loss of significant members of the emerging Christian community and the hope that they came to believe endured beyond Jesus’ death into resurrection, and beyond the death of others before the fulfilment of God’s promised reign.

The people saw Jesus as the kingdom of God in person, as the promised messiah who would not only heal their sicknesses and purify them from their sins, but would also liberate them from the foreign rule of the Romans... And then came the catastrophe… Jesus dies on the Roman cross in the profoundest God forsakenness: “My God, why have you forsaken me?” That was the end of Jesus the Messiah, the end of his message about the nearness of the kingdom of God, the end of the God whom he had addressed so intimately as “Abba”, the end of his divine sonship, the end of every trust that had been placed in him… (Moltmann 2004, pp. 45-46)

Or was it?

At the end of the Gospel of Mark, we begin to read of “appearances” and of the early Christian struggle with faith and doubt in the face of these epiphanies, in the face of those revelations. The various attempts at ending the Gospel of Mark indicate some of that struggle. In the early verses of the last chapter of Mark, Jesus appears to the women who flee the tomb and say nothing. Next, Jesus appears to Mary Magdalene who tells about her discovery but is not believed by the other disciples; similarly, another story follows about two disciples who had been on the receiving end of an “appearance” while walking in the country. They also are not believed by those whom they tell. It is not until after these 3 stories of aborted attempts to get the message of resurrection out, that we finally get a success story with the appearance of Jesus to the eleven, complete with an upbraiding “for their unbelief and hardness of heart”. Then, by the time we reach the Gospel of John, later in the first century, the profound experience of Mary Magdalene in the garden has become a powerful expression of the hope of the Christian tradition, and Mary has become the “first witness to the resurrection”. In order to make sense of:

the two experiences—the terrible experience of Jesus’ helpless, God-forsaken death on the cross and the reviving and the quickening experience of his presence in the divine glory—and in order to understand what had happened to him, they took up the ancient Israelite symbol of hope, “the resurrection of the dead”, and talked about Christ’s “resurrection from the dead”: he was the One ahead of all others as “the first fruits of them that sleep” and “the leader of life”, as Paul put it. For the disciples this was not a reanimation of someone who has died, nor was it a ghostly “return” of the dead. Jesus was not seemingly dead. He had really died and really been buried. Nor was it his spirit that appeared to them; it was Jesus himself in the transfigured form of the resurrection world. Consequently this event was for them not a past event, something in history finished and done with; it was an event in the past which still has its future ahead of it. That is to say, it was what theological language describes as an eschatological event, in which God’s future has acquired potency over the past (Moltmann, p. 47).

My Dad didn’t have a particularly easy life. He worked very hard to live, to survive, to provide for his children. He was in comfortable circumstances at the end of his life, but along the way, he’d had a few setbacks: mates who turned out not to be mates who pulled the rug out from him at various points. When Dad began talking about heaven with me, he began with a picture of a place where he might be able to get back what he’d lost. I guess he was angry: angry at his illness; angry at his helplessness; angry at the lot that had been dealt to him in life; and angry at facing the possibility of life’s end without just satisfaction. I know he was angry because, at the time, he was in a mood to have an argument. Eventually, he ended up at the story of Mary Magdalene meeting the risen Jesus in the garden and John Williamson’s song “Cootamundra Wattle”. His favourite version of this story was from The Aussie Bible.

If our life ends in nothing but our dying, and in eternal death, then in our experience of life too farewells will take precedence over all the new beginnings, since everything we experience is, in the end, transitory, and passes away. But if Christ’s farewell in his death has become the new, eternal beginning in his resurrection, then in our end we too shall find our new, eternal beginning (Moltmann 2004, p. 100).

Where men and women perceive Christ’s resurrection and begin to live within its horizon, they themselves will be born again to a living hope which reaches beyond death, and in living love will begin to experience eternal life in the fulfilled moment. They experience themselves in God, and God in themselves, and that is eternal life (Moltmann, p. 164).

Here in this moment, in the waiting, in the hoping, in the living, in the loving, we catch a glimpse of what it is that we are promised. So, "Lazarus come out!"

For Richer, For Poorer

The Gospel reading for today, like the one around the laws on divorce from last week, is one of which I think that we are more than little afraid. We’re afraid it, I think, because we’re afraid that it’s about judgement; and it is. This text is unashamedly about judgement; the judgement of God about the things that get in the road of us following the ways of God. Last week, it was about following the letter of the Law without understanding its Spirit, its undergirding its principles, the nature of the God who gave the Law as gift to human who needed it. But when the text was first read, I bet more than one of us cringed a little at the possibility that from such a text would come a sermon about the “evils of divorce”. And there’s no doubt that that text was concerned about the right response to the breakdown of very ordinary human relationships in marriage; but as we explored it, it wasn’t just about the right human response to the breakdown of human relationships, it was far more concerned with the right human response to the gifts of God in creation. Yes, there was judgement, and yes we know that God judges, but if that was all we heard in last week’s text, then we missed something of the very nature of the God who has gifted us with the scriptures. So, we come to this week’s Gospel reading… about the so-called “rich young ruler”… and we’re ready to cringe again.

We’re ready to cringe because we know we’re rich. And we know that it’s not about whether we’re on fixed or limited incomes or not, we know that it’s about relative wealth in a world where there are vast differences between the haves and the have-nots. We know that we our lifestyles, our lives and our life expectancies would be very different if we were living in Zimbabwe or remote Papua or even a remote indigenous community in Australia. We know that, by comparison, with people who live hand to mouth, or worse, we are rich. We know that, even with all our complaints about the Australian health system, we are rich in comparison to those people who still battle illnesses whose eradication we take for granted. We know that we are rich because our community has a reasonably coherent welfare system for those who do struggle and who do battle to survive even in this nation. We know that we are rich and we cringe as we hear the story of the rich young ruler, because we are afraid. We afraid that the text is about judgement, and it is. The text is about the judgement of God on the things that get in the road of us following the ways of God. And we wonder, “Is this the judgement that God brings down on us?” “Is this the judgement that God brings down on us?” Does God look at us and say, "How hard it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!" And we’d be kidding ourselves if we didn’t take that gut reaction to hearing the text seriously. Because the text if about judgement—the judgement of God on the things that get in the road of us following the ways of God.

And you know yourself that the judgement is true. How much time do we spend deciding what to do with our money? How much time do we spend taking the advantages we have for granted? How little time do we spend dwelling on the plight of those who, compared to us, even those of us on very modest incomes, compared to us are greatly impoverished in their access to resources, in their disposable income, in their life prospects? Of course, the judgment is true.

But if that’s the only thing we heard in this text, then we’d be making the same mistake as we might have made last week. Yes, there was judgement, and yes we know that God judges, but if that was all we heard in this week’s text, then we missed something very important about the very nature of the God who has gifted us with the story. We would miss the hope. We would miss the hope.

"How hard it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!" "Children, how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God! It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God." And again, I’d like to say that we could mitigate this text, that we could water down the judgement by talking about “eyes of needles” as small holes in city walls through which a camel (a possession) was unlikely to move, but which would allow the passage of a human being, but I fear that too might both let us of the hook of God’s judgement too easily and worse—it might mean that we entirely miss the marvellous message of hope that is offered in this passage, which is so hope-filled, only because the judgement is so fitting and so right.

"Children, how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God! It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God… For mortals it is impossible, but not for God; for God all things are possible.” “For mortals it is impossible, but not for God; for God all things are possible.”

And in this profound statement of hope, we are reminded that if we like the “rich young ruler” were to too quickly succumb to our shock and go away grieving in the face of our wealth, if we were to do what the “rich young ruler” did, we would not be hearing the hope that we are offered in God… despite our riches, not because of them… despite our apparent powerlessness to change the distribution of wealth across our globe, not because of it… despite our giving up of our wealth for the sake of others, not because of it… despite who we are, not matter how poor, no matter how lowly, no matter how rich, no matter how advantaged… despite all this, God has opened God’s realm to us in Christ and we are invited to enter it through the power of the Holy Spirit. None of it has anything to do with us, or with camels, or with eyes of needles—whatever they may be. And lest we boast, even when we think we have reason to lay claim to such a place, as Peter attempted to do so by drawing attention to what the disciples had given up, we are reminded: “But many who are first will be last, and the last will be first.” It is not then or now and never will be about us. It is all about God—God’s judgement and God’s hope. Thank God! Because of God’s gift to us in Jesus, it is not our worry where we are placed, rather it is our calling to honour the God who has given so much, by giving thanks, and by praying that our wills may be confirmed to God’s will and that the fullness of God’s reign of justice and peace will come to fruition in God’s time. And that more than anything will free us to be the people of God we are called to be.

Receive All As Gift

The story of Job is an extraordinary one. Job, “a blameless and upright man who fears God and turns away from evil”, is tested by the adversary of God, the Satan, literally the devil’s advocate. And God allows it! God allows it.

The Satan is given permission to afflict Job—with the death of his family, with the loss of his livelihood, with terrible disease, and with taunts to “Curse God, and die” in the face of such calamity—and God allows it. God allows it. At least in the story, God allows it.

But even more unexpectedly, Job accepts it. Job accepts it. It is precisely from the book of Job, that we get such aphorisms as: “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return there; the LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD.” (Job 1:21) and “Shall we receive the good at the hand of God, and not receive the bad?” (Job 2:10). And though nearly the whole book of Job is riddled with diatribes from Job’s friends attempting to get Job to “curse God”, blame God, give up on God, Job never does. Right to the very end of the book, Job remains faithful to God, and God “restores his fortunes”.

Now, I don’t know about you, but for me, the story of Job is very troublesome—how on earth can we human beings be expected to accept everything that happens to us? Did God intend that Samoa and Tonga would be devastated by a tsunami? Did God intend that a typhoon would hit the Philippines and earthquakes ravage Indonesia? Does God intend our loved ones to suffer and die, and for us to be afflicted by illness and disability? Does God really want to see children die of hunger, and crops fail due to drought? Did God engineer the global financial crisis? And does God enjoy seeing the rich third of the world getting its comeuppance? And even if God doesn’t want this, must we at least agree that God allows it? And if we did understand our God to be such a God, why would we want to trust in such a being?

And it’s precisely some of those sayings from Job that have been used so often and so glibly in the past to minimise the devastation wrought in people’s lives by death and disaster, damaging relationships and chronic and debilitating illness. Accept what you’re given and live with it. You made your bed, you have to lie in it. Even this will pass.

The book of Job is yet another one of those enigmatic books of the Bible like Esther which we looked at last week. If Esther never talked about God but was intent on God’s purposes, Job is always talking about God, but the book has almost nothing to do with God’s nature. Rather, it is all about the nature of human responses to the gift of relationship with God. It’s all about the way in which we, as humans, respond to God.

These first couple of weekends in October are big weekends for marriage services in Armidale—it must be Spring, or at least school holidays! Marriage services always confront the people involved with them with questions about human relationships, about the commitments we make to one another, about the hopes we have for ourselves and for each other. We know that if we enter relationship expecting that everything will be smooth sailing, we’re kidding ourselves. Life is not like that, or as one of our previous Prime Ministers said, “Life wasn’t meant to be easy.” Well, I don’t know about “meant to”, but it certainly isn’t easy. Being in relationship takes work. You can’t ever take relationship for granted, and yet equally truly, there are always moments when the delight of being in a loving, committed relationship is far more than we might ever have expected. So it is in relationship with God. If we think that committing ourselves to live a godly life, follow in the way of Christ, seek to respond to the wind of the Spirit, is taking the easy option, we’re going to be sadly disappointed. Being committed to God is not about getting rich, or being protected from bad things, or even living a quiet life. Being committed to God takes commitment. It does mean work.

But you know if that’s the only way that we understand relationship—as hard work—we’re going to get sick of it pretty quickly. Relationship is not simply about duty, about doing what you’re supposed to do, or at least not just because you’re supposed to do it. Relationship relies on us accepting the other in the relationship as gift, as something so precious and so providential that nothing can shake our desire to be in that relationship. In a very real way, it is only when we are able to welcome what comes to us as gift, that we are able to find the resilience to meet it, the generosity to share it, and the hope to live in and through it no matter what happens.

And that’s where we come to the Gospel reading and you’re probably all wondering what I’m going to do with it. It’s been such a problematic text for the church, for individuals, for society over the centuries.

If Esther never talks about God but is intent on God’s purposes, and Job is always talking about God but is basically about our response to God, then this text, which on the surface appears to be about divorce, has almost nothing to do with divorce per se and everything to do with the way that human beings can twist that which is given as gift from God.

It is, of course, a discussion about the nature of God’s law. The Pharisees are as usual in debate with Jesus, and Jesus acquits himself admirably as a good rabbi, arguing scripture for scripture and theological concept for theological concept.

“So on the matter of divorce, what is it that you think Jesus?” And Jesus cleverly puts the question back on them, “What does Moses say?”, i.e. “What is in the Torah, the Law, God’s Law? What is in the first five books of our Bible—Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy?” The Pharisees go to Deuteronomy: “Moses says it is lawful for a man to divorce his wife.” But Jesus is not stumped, “Ah yes, but what about Genesis? What about the gift of male and female in creation? We need rules because we do not live up to God’s dream for our world, because we do not receive the gift of relationship offered to us by God and through God. The Law is gift and the Law tells us of God’s gifts to us in creation. Look at the world around. Look at the gifts given to you. Better still: look at the way children look at the world. Everything is a big adventure; everything is to be explored. The very soil of the earth is stuff for testing out, in mouths and great building projects and simply in getting dirty because they can. The way in which children receive God’s world is the way in which we should receive God’s Law, God’s creation, God’s gifts to us—with wonder and delight, awe and astonishment. Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it. Whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.”

So we are invited to received God’s creation, God’s world as gift—all of it—and maybe, just maybe if we are able to do it, we will discover how to care for it; and maybe, just maybe if we are able to do it, we will not be so worried about hoarding the resources we have, for surely the best gifts are to be shared; and maybe, just maybe, if we are able to receive God’s world as gift, we will know how to respond to each other’s pain and grief, and the needs of our communities, and the needs of those who face such hterrible disasters as the Asia Pacific region has seen this past week.

The resources for Social Justice Sunday from the National Council of Churches this year remind us that “In times of crisis, we often turn first to consider our own interests.” Our fear drives us to fear for ourselves, to fear tat we will not have the resources for us let alone anybody else. “However, when most of us are asked, we say that we would prefer better healthcare, education, roads and public transport to a few extra dollars in our pay packets. This response reflects our understanding that taxation is what we use in our society to ensure the equitable distribution of wealth and the raising of public money, our “common wealth”, our common purse.” It reflects out understanding that everything we have comes from God; and that we are responsible to God’s Law, God’s way for what we do with the resources we have. “Christianity teaches us that we have a responsibility to care for each other and share what we have so that the most vulnerable are not left wanting.” And we can only do that if we are able to accept all that we have from God as pure gift. And perhaps that is only possible when we accept that God is on our side—God loves us, God cares for us and God wants the best for us. In the face of the generosity and graciousness of God, our only response can be gratitude and generosity in turn.

But most of us are not like Job, most of us need the rules, need to know something about what is required of us, because gratitude and generosity don’t come easily to us. Whether because we’re afraid or confused, or worried or in pain, our natural tendency is to think about ourselves, just us. God invites us to enter a world that is not about “just us”, but justice; to view what we have as children with delight and awe, wonder and astonishment—receiving all we have as pure gift and longing to share it with others.

(Some sections are sourced from Hope for the Common Good: Beyond the Global Financial Crisis, Resources for Social Justice Sunday 2009, NCCA.)