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THE HARROWING OF HELL

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A hymn for Holy Saturday

When Jesus died on Calv’ry’s cross,

all nature wept for shame.

But Death and Satan mocked our loss

and made a boastful claim:

“Today we triumph! We alone

shall rule from God’s imperial throne.”

Earth wept to hear their prophecy:

a broken world and gray,

air filled with grime, a poisoned sea,

the soil a barren clay.

The creatures there, bereft of light,

could only steal and quarrel and fight.

Yet, even as Death danced its dance,

Christ slipped out of the tomb

and, making of the cross a lance,

he swept into Hell’s room.

He drove the demons into flight

and broke down doors and let in light.

He seized our first-made parents’ hands

and shook them full-awake.

A thousand saints in cheering bands

all followed for his sake.

Sun shone again, and earth and sea

from shame and sorrow came out free.

Rejoice, you saints! Rejoice, O Earth!

The worst that Death could do

cannot destroy the hope of birth,

for God makes all things new.

God’s throne is love and joy and grace,

and Death will never claim that place. 

SONNETS FOR MARY (concluding)

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GOING TO THE TOMB

You and the other Marys, Joanna, Salome—

you went to the tomb, with fragrant offerings

to honor the dead and mourn the sufferings

that buried all joy the day before yesterday.

You went to the tomb, unsure of gaining entrance,

unsure you could complete this final gift,

unsure that any rite would ever lift

your sorrow or restore the swaying balance

of your life. And yet, you went—and found the stone

rolled back and the angel waiting for you there—

oh! known and proven perilous messenger—

to greet you and to tell you he was gone.

Uncertain still, you turned back slowly toward the world

till, meeting him on the path, your tight-clenched hope at last unfurled. 

AND THE JOKE IS ON . . . PRETTY MUCH ALL OF US!

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On Easter Sunday, Molly Haws told us how important jokes are to the Easter season. (If you missed that wonderful sermon, be sure to ask her about Frankenstein the next chance you get.) I think she was right on target. And this isn’t some new-fangled modern idea. It’s very ancient. You may not think of orthodoxy as funny, but it is. 

From earliest days, Christians have been telling the story of how Death and Satan thought they had won. They snared Jesus on the cross and swallowed him whole. But they hadn’t reckoned on God’s sense of humor, and they soon heard God chuckling. They had swallowed the hook along with the bait, and the process of coughing their ill-gotten prize back up was going to be very painful for them. 

Our Eastern Orthodox sisters and brothers—who, by the way, are celebrating Easter Sunday today, since they have a slightly different way of calculating it—know this story. One of their best-loved icons shows Christ at the moment when he has invaded and defeated Death and Hell. He’s taking Adam and Eve up by the hand and pulling them up out of their graves and starting a regular revolution in Satan’s own territory. Now, there’s an Easter joke for you. All of Satan’s best-laid plans thrown suddenly onto the scrap heap!

So the big joke is on Satan. But what about Thomas? Every year, on this Second Sunday of Easter, we read the story of Thomas’s uncertainty. He’s entered the English language as “doubting Thomas” with the implication that he was just stubborn, that he somehow failed a test that his fellow disciples all passed. So the joke was on him, too, wasn’t it? 

Now, let me say up front that I like Thomas a lot. He wasn’t given to flights of enthusiasm. He wouldn’t have been one of these renegade preachers who insist on their congregants all coming to church in the middle of a pandemic. If anything, he was a bit of a pessimist—or “realist,” as we pessimists like to put it. We get a lot of insight into him, a few chapters earlier in the story, when Jesus announces that he’s going to Bethany because his friend Lazarus has died. The disciples remind him that there are people down there who were trying to kill him not so long ago. But Jesus is going anyway. And it’s Thomas who says, “Well, let’s go along. We can at least die with him.” (11:16)

So Thomas isn’t one to leap up and do a jig over what might or might not be good news. He wants some evidence. Maybe he felt that some of his colleagues were (what shall we say?) a bit less hard-headed than they might have been. It’s a simple enough matter for him. We know Jesus died on the cross. We know who buried him and where. Whoever or whatever they saw, therefore, was not Jesus. 

But Jesus appears and gives Thomas what Thomas needed: the evidence not just of Thomas’s eyes, but of his hand, touching the wounds crucifixion had inflicted—still open, it seems, though no longer fatal. And Thomas is stunned into a complete reversal. The unthinkable was true. Joke on Thomas, right?

We often think so: “Well, Thomas, you little skeptic. You won’t believe without a special favor, so now you have it. Now, couldn’t you be more like the other disciples who believed without having to see it for themselves?” Thomas is the doubter, the questioner, the one weak in faith. Isn’t it much better just to believe?

But, then, where are all those good people who just believed? In all the Easter stories in the gospels, you’ll hardly find a single person who recognized the risen Jesus right off the bat. Mary Magdalene, on Easter morning, knew Jesus was dead. Therefore the man standing in front of her was not Jesus—until he said her name. And then she knew! Later that day, Jesus had visited the other disciples. He said “Peace be with you,” and showed them his wounds. And only then, John tells us (20:20) they recognized him. 

Even later on, in the next chapter of John, we find the disciples up in Galilee fishing from Peter’s old boat when Jesus appears on the shore and tells them to cast their net on the other side of the boat, where they promptly net an enormous catch. And only then does one of them recognize who it is that’s been standing there on the beach all this time and whispers to Peter, “It’s the Lord!”

Thomas isn’t an exception to the rule at all! He’s just like all his sisters and brothers. He knows the rules of the world, the rules of nature. It can’t be Jesus. Therefore it isn’t Jesus. His world has fallen apart; therefore nothing life-giving can happen now. If the joke is on Thomas and his skepticism, it hits everybody else in the story, too.

So the joke was on Satan and Death and Hell. And the joke was on all the disciples, Thomas included, who had such a hard time accepting what had happened. So who else gets caught? Who else gets taken by surprise? Is anybody exempt? 

In one way, I suppose we are the exempt ones. We know when Easter is coming. We know exactly what it’s all about. It’s about Jesus’ resurrection. We’re no more likely than Mary Magdalene and Thomas and the other disciples to believe such a story if it were happening in our own day. But this was a long time ago. It’s become simply a reality for us. I suspect that each of us understands the story in our own slightly distinct way. If we had to say what exactly we think happened on that Easter morning so long ago, we might be hard pressed to give an account. But we know the story. We celebrate it. We’re enlivened by it. It brings us joy. “Christ is Risen” is a familiar reassertion, not a radical break in our world. So, yes, we believe. But is it too easy? It it really the same challenge that faced Mary and Thomas and the rest?

Well, sooner or later, actually it is. What they had to discover was not just the risen Christ. They had to discover that their own lives and hopes had been given back to them, despite those days of disaster, of being scattered hither and yon, of losing their great love and their great hope, of finding themselves marooned in a hostile world. They hadn’t lost just Jesus, they’d lost their trust in God. Crucifixion turned their world, their lives, upside down. Now, the resurrection suddenly turned them right side up again. And that was what was so hard to imagine, so hard to accept

And the question for me now is whether it can make the same kind of difference in my world, here and now. As a pessimist I’ve been getting a lot of confirmation for my possibly jaundiced worldview lately—a lot of confirmation and from all directions. Sometimes it’s hard to imagine a different world ahead.

And yet, blessedly, there are signs of resurrection around me, too—signs of God interfering for good. I see them here at Good Shepherd in people who keep us connected, caring for one another and for our neighbors. I see them in the world around us with governors and mayors taking leadership on behalf of public health—sometimes at real political risk to themselves. I see them in people of all sorts tackling what needs doing—making masks and safety clothing for those on the front lines, forgiving rent for people who are thrown into desperate economic circumstances by loss of income, bringing some cheer to the isolated, caring about each other. 

I still find the pessimistic scenario easier to envisage than the hopeful one, but I am persuaded that Christ really isn’t dead, that the grace of resurrection is at work here and now. I’m convinced that God is at work among us, at work in our world. This won’t resolve all our problems. God doesn’t work that way. But it gives hope and hope gives power and perseverance and even a sense of joy dawning on the horizon. 

When Thomas saw the risen Christ, all he could do was exclaim “My Lord and my God.” God was at work before his very eyes. And I consider myself blessed that God is making God’s presence known to us, too, through one another and through other people in the world around us who are touched by the power of God’s love. And this love is the power that made the world and sustains it still and will never be defeated by gullible villains like Satan and Death and their many followers. 

Thomas and I don’t get any prizes for spiritual quickness. So maybe we rank as comic figures in the great story. But Satan and Death are the real butt of the joke, not us. And if we are still struggling, God loves us enough to provide the evidence we need. 

Preached by Bill Countryman at Good Shepherd Episcopal Church, Berkeley, CA

Second Sunday of Easter, April 29, 2020

Readings: Acts 2:14a; Psalm 16; 1 Peter 1:3-9; John 20:19-31

OUR VISION OF THE FUTURE IS WHAT SHAPES US HERE AND NOW

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A sermon preached by Bill Countryman at Good Shepherd Episcopal Church, Berkeley, California

22nd Sunday After Pentecost, November 10, 2019

Proper 27C: Haggai 1:15b-2:9; Psalm 98; 2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17; Luke 20:27-38.

I read recently that in the ancient language of the Assyrians and Babylonians, looking at the past was phrased as looking in front of you; looking at the future was looking behind you. It’s the reverse of our English usage, but it makes a certain sense. You can look at what’s already happened. The future is always something of a mystery to us until the day it turns into the past. 

That doesn’t keep us from imagining the future, of course. Maybe it will be just more of what we already know and experience. Maybe it will be a time of surprises, good or bad. Probably some of each! In any case, our interest in the future isn’t just a matter of idle speculation. What we expect of the future has a lot to say about how we live our lives in the present. A boring future is one thing. A foreboding one another. A future with an element of hope yet another. And a hopeful vision of the future is what all our readings this morning are about.

Sometimes the future vision is quite specific and immediate. Haggai kindly dated his prophecies for us to the year 520 BC. That was just eighteen years after a group of exiled Jews had returned to Jerusalem, with the encouragement of the Persian emperor, to rebuild the city. They’d built homes for themselves, but the centerpiece of that city was still missing: the temple still lay in ruins. It was Paris without Notre Dame, London without Big Ben, Washington D.C. without the Capitol.

But this group of settlers—relatively few in number—were daunted. They couldn’t see how to move ahead until Haggai gave them a picture of new and splendid future. He addressed his prophesy to all of them, particularly to their two leaders, Zerubbabel, a Davidic prince who was governor of what was now the Persian province of Judah, and Joshua the son of Jehozadak, who, as chief priest, was the religious authority for the community.

Haggai starts by admitting that the situation is discouraging: “Who is left among you that saw this house in its former glory? How does it look to you now? Is it not in your sight as nothing?” He tells the people to take courage. And holds up a promise for the future: 

For thus says the Lord of hosts: Once again, in a little while, I will shake the heavens and the earth . . . the treasure of all nations shall come, and I will fill this house with splendor. . . . 

It sounds extravagant, doesn’t it? But it wasn’t inconceivable. What he was predicting was that Jerusalem would once again become a great pilgrimage site. People would come from far and wide to worship there and they would bring their gifts and Jerusalem would become rich once again. And, indeed, with a few brief lapses, Haggai’s prophecy has proven true ever since. It’s still true today, when Jerusalem is a holy place for not one, but three religions.

None of this subsequent history would have been possible, had not those few returned refugees found the courage to embark on a seemingly hopeless task. Haggai’s vision of the future made the present different. It offered them hope. It helped them achieve things they hadn’t thought possible.

In our reading from Paul’s Second Letter to the Thessalonians, we get a different picture of how present and future may interconnect. According to Acts of the Apostles, the church at Thessalonica had experienced persecutions almost from the moment of its founding (Acts 17:1-10). Here were people who had embraced a vision of the future that would culminate in “the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered together to him.” But now, they’re growing uncertain. Life, for this community, has been difficult. And divergent speculations about the coming of Jesus leave people confused. 

Some people are even saying that “the Day of the Lord is already here.” That must have left people thinking, “Then, you mean this is all there is? This is as good—as holy, as joyous— as it’s going to get?” Would that mean that their faith and hope and endurance were all wasted? Some must have thought so, for Paul takes great pains to sketch out a more complex vision of the future. It doesn’t move in a straight line. The day of the Lord will indeed come, but not before the future first takes a turn in the opposite direction. Things will get worse before they get better. It will get very dark before it gets light. 

For the Thessalonian Christians, then, the immediate future isn’t about some great project, like rebuilding the temple. They don’t have the power to change the world around them. But they do still have a hope and therefore they have the power to maintain the beloved community, the community of trust and hope and love. That’s no small achievement in any era, including our own. It’s about hanging on through thick and thin, maintaining the primacy of love in a society that thinks things like power and wealth are more important. Paul urges them, “So then, brothers and sisters, stand firm. . .”

So, we’ve heard Haggai offering a vision of the future that helped people to build in the present. And we’ve had Paul offering up a very steely-eyed vision of a future that still holds hope, but only after an intermediate period of trials and tribulations, and he offers that vision to help people to hold firm by what is good and true. And, finally, our reading from the Gospel of Luke opens up the biggest question of all about the future. What kind of future comes after death?

Now, the Scriptures have no single, simple answer to that question. The scriptures of the Old Testament don’t even have much interest in it. And the scriptures of the New Testament use a variety of images in speaking of it. 

And if I look around the world today, I find no unanimity about it either inside or outside the church. For myself, I’ve never had much trouble with the idea of the resurrection. My whole life seems to have been full of resurrections, small and great, and there’s no obvious reason why that pattern should cease with the death of the body. But I’ve also known devout Christians who don’t believe in the resurrection at all, who feel that one life is quite enough for anyone. And just to complicate matters a bit further, I read this week a short blurb in The Christian Century (11/26/2019) about a long-term British study of atheists and agnostics which reported that “about three-fourths of the atheists and nine out of ten agnostics are open to supernatural phenomena, including astrology, the existence of supernatural beings, and life after death.” So human beings, Christian or not, are basically all over the map about this topic. 

The Sadducees, in our gospel this morning, objected to the idea of resurrection because it could create an anomaly, a situation that the Torah specifically forbids. A man was not allowed to marry his brother’s wife except under the specific condition of the brother’s having died without an heir, in which case, the next brother in line is obliged to do so. In the resurrection, however, the woman could not be the wife of one of the younger brothers, because that would violate the prohibition on marrying the wife of a living brother. But she couldn’t return to being the wife of the eldest brother, because the Torah specifically forbids a man to remarry a former wife who has been married to another man in the interim. 

But Jesus objects that they are imagining the future as simply a continuation of the present. But the future is inevitably different. Jesus doesn’t try to map it out in detail. He simply says that in the age to come people will not die and there is therefore no occasion to produce heirs and no need for marriage. In the age to come, we are no longer described as son of this person or daughter of that person. Each of us is there in our own right. Every person is equally present to God. Every person! God is the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and they are alive to God. And we, too, will be alive to God in the age to come—this remote future hidden from us in this world.

And if we will be alive to God in the age to come, what does that say about who and what we are here and now? It makes each and every one of us a person of extraordinary importance here and now, a person beloved and strengthened by that love. It places each and every one of us in friendship with God, here, now, and always. 

Paul put it this way in his Epistle to Romans:

We do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves. If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s. (Rom. 14:7-8)

And if our future is a life of communion with God, so is our present. It is a life of trust and hope and love. Our vision of the age to come is what makes us who are now as Christians, as saints, as people who live in the here and now with generosity and courage and joy. Perhaps we may have the opportunity to do great tings, like the returned exiles of Haggai’s day. Perhaps we may encounter times when we can only hunker down and hold firm against the corruptions and temptations of the world around us, like the Thessalonian Christians of Paul’s time. But in every age, we can and will be shaped by this assurance from Jesus: “God is not God of the dead but of the living, for to him all are alive.” Yes, you and I. Yes, now and always.

READING MATTHEW, 3: SNEAKING A LOOK AT THE END OF THE STORY

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Sneaking a look! Really!? Isn’t that taboo for serious readers?
If you’re reading a whodunit, it will certainly spoil the surprise. But, face it, in all likelihood you already know the basic story of Matthew’s Gospel and how it ends. So there’s no need for a spoiler alert here. And taking a peek at the end can be useful, especially when we’re reading a book that, for so many of us, is almost too familiar. This way, we can focus not just on the broad outline of the story, but on some details of what Matthew is particularly interested in. So turn to Matthew 28, which starts at dawn on the first Easter Sunday with two women going to the tomb.
Back to the women, eh?
Yes, they were featured in the opening genealogy, and here they are again. This time, two women named Mary: Mary Magdalene who is mentioned in all four of the New Testament gospels as having gone to the tomb and “the other Mary.” It’s impossible to know who Matthew has in mind here. Mark mentions “James’s Mary” as being at the resurrection scene (16:1). Luke mentions “Clopas’s Mary” (24:10). It could be either of them or someone else, since it was a common name.
Matthew may give us a hint, though. At the death of Jesus on the cross, Mary Magdalene is accompanied by “Mary the mother of James and Joseph”—the names of two of Jesus’ brothers (27:56). After the closing of the tomb, it is Mary Magdalene and “the other Mary” who sit by it, keeping watch (27:61). The easiest identification here is that she is the same Mary named a few sentences before. And the same person is probably the “other Mary” of the final chapter, too.
But it seems important to him that there are women here, echoing the women who play such an important role at the beginning of Matthew. If Mary Magdalene is mentioned first that is because she was acknowledged by all early Christians as the discoverer of the empty tomb. The “other” Mary is not made the primary witness, perhaps precisely because she was Jesus’ mother and might have been thought less credible. In any case, an angel appears to them just as happened to Joseph and the Magi earlier on—but this time in broad daylight, not in a dream.
The seal of proof is placed on the angel’s message by the appearance of Jesus himself (28:9-10). And not a man in sight in that overwhelmingly patriarchal world except for Jesus himself! In his opening chapter Matthew was questioning the overwhelmingly male orientation of his culture. Here, the greatest treasure of the gospel is imparted to two women. The male disciples will hear of it only secondarily through them.
Wouldn’t this make the whole resurrection story less credible in that culture?
Undoubtedly. He and his readers lived in a world organized in terms of a kind of moral separation of duties between the sexes. Men carried the public face of the family, women guarded the private world. Men could testify in court, women couldn’t. But Matthew, as we’ll see again and again, has no interest in making things easy. He may or may not have been able to imagine radical change in the culture he knew. We are all bound by cultural norms in ways of which we’re often unaware, and perhaps he would find our modern world as hard to understand as we find his ancient one. But he did insist that women were as much a part of God’s work in the world as men.
Isn’t all this sounding awfully modern?
I understand the concern, and I don’t want to “modernize” Matthew’s Gospel. But keep this thought in mind anyway. The test of it will be to see whether it helps us understand more in Matthew’s Gospel than we could otherwise.
But in the meantime, there’s another part of the story here (28:11-15) that’s understandable in both ancient and modern contexts—the self-protective efforts of the authorities to suppress the truth. After the Resurrection, the authorities in charge of both civil and religious affairs paid the guards at the tomb to lie about what had happened. We will find Matthew attacking this kind of thing often: religion is a good and valuable thing, but the authorities, including the religious authorities, are not always to be trusted. When religion gets entangled with status, it betrays itself.
Christians have a long history of taking this passage and others like it attacks on Judaism. Some modern scholars also read them that way. I think this is a mistake. Matthew attacks the authorities not for their doctrines but for their failure to live up to them. It is a problem equally threatening, in Matthew’s thinking, to the emerging Christian leadership.
But doesn’t he go on to have Jesus commission an authoritative Christian leadership?
The closing passage of the Gospel (28:16-20) is often referred to as the “Great Commission.” Some read it as Jesus’ commissioning of the apostles to be the first bishops of the church. Others take it as Jesus’ authorization of world missions. All very upbeat, right?
Not exactly, the key verse here is, as often, the difficult one that gets ignored: “When they saw him, they worshipped him, but some doubted.” The women believed the angel even before they saw Jesus; some of the male disciples don’t altogether trust the risen Christ himself. There are two problems with religious leaders, it seems: one is that they will sacrifice principle to expedience, the other that they don’t really quite trust God at all.
Right up to the end, Matthew is still throwing his wrench into the works. What are we to do if we can’t trust the authorities of religion, whether Jewish or Christian? He does give us at least a hint here. The disciples are told to teach people to follow everything Jesus commanded them. It’s Jesus’ teaching that can save us from falling into either the self-interest of the priests and elders or the doubts of the disciples. In the meantime, we are to remember that, while both groups are pre-eminently religious, neither is perfect. Need I say that every religious person is potentially included in this indictment?
And, as to our continued reading of Matthew, it should be clear from this peek at the ending that Matthew’s tendency in chapter 1 to set tradition against tradition is not merely his starting point. We should be looking for how it may show up elsewhere.
Next up: EVENTS TURN A CORNER WITH JOHN THE BAPTIST