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!"