God Exceeds Through Excess

THE SENSE OF SMELL is intimately enmeshed with memory centers in our brains. Humanity’s experience of the evocative power of scent is not fanciful. The bereaved hang on to their loved one’s clothes, to inhale their unique scent, to flood themselves with recollection.

As we celebrate Holy Week, we can evoke the memories created by Mary of Bethany when she anointed Jesus with luxurious nard, six days before his final Passover. “The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume,” we will read in John 12. Her lavish gesture, wasting this fabulously expensive Indian cosmetic, was to be ever linked with the excessiveness, the far-too-muchness, of Jesus’ own willingness to throw his life away on the cross. The theme of excess is taken up in John’s pointed note about the vast quantity of spices—a hundred pounds!—lavished on Jesus’ corpse before burial. When the disciples entered the empty tomb at dawn, the gorgeous aroma must have been overpowering. Perhaps the reluctance of so many to accept the empty tomb and the implications of the apostles’ testimony is related to a reductionist instinct, a recoil from divine excess. Judas was disgusted by Mary’s excess—and there are those who think that the bodily resurrection is incredible because it is over the top. Surely, they say, the idea of the exaltation of Jesus’ spirit, the resurrection as strictly metaphorical, seems more than satisfactory without anything actually happening to his corpse! But God exceeds through excess.

[April 7]

Paul’s Pile of Poop

Isaiah 43:16-21; Psalm 126; Philippians 3:4b-14; John 12:1-8

“BY THE LITTLE which now satisfies Spirit, we can measure the extent of its loss,” writes German philosopher Georg Hegel. A sobering thought. We shake our heads over the dependence of so many on off-the-shelf, fabricated identities that society offers, the branded clothes and consumer goods, without which we are made to seem nobodies. Competing ideologies of left and right offer identities with ready-packaged prejudices and stances: Those who refuse to buy into one or the other must then be nonentities. Perhaps this issue of identity is the key to a fresh discovery of the meaning of metanoia, repentance.

Writing to the Philippians, Paul lists the unearned privileges and accumulated credentials that he once counted on to be a man who “has it all.” His being “crucified with Christ” (Galatians 2:20) and his encounter with Jesus as the Risen One compel him to cut loose from all this. What Paul once counted on for an identity, he now regards as so much ... well, he uses the common Greek word (skybalon) for dog poop. Repentance is a deliberate act of extrication from all conventional sources of identity, entering the condition of being a dissident nonentity. That alone opens enough space for the gift of a core identity that is nothing less than identity with Christ, union with Christ. We find ourselves again with a self that is in Christ—ultimately, the only self worth having.

Psalm 126 uses ancient imagery for a new purpose. “Those who go out weeping, bearing the seed for sowing, shall come home with shouts of joy, carrying their sheaves” (verse 6). We are hearing an echo from religious rituals dating back to the dawn of agriculture. Sowing seed was accompanied by ceremonies of death and burial, with dramatic wailing performed by women. Only then would the miracle of resurrection be ensured, with the joyful ingathering of the grain months later. The psalmist transmutes earth rituals into wisdom about life itself. Times of grieving and loss are often discounted, when they are actually seed-times, calling for trust and infused with the promise of new life.

[ April 14 ]

Love Letters

Isaiah 50:4-9a; Psalm 118:1-2, 19-29; Philippians 2:5-11; Luke 19:28-40

PERHAPS IT IS too much to expect the average Palm Sunday congregation to listen closely to the passage from Philippians that quotes at length a hymn extolling the self-emptying of the one who was equal to God yet took on the most degraded form of human identity, that of a slave. The pageantry of our commemoration of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem commands our whole attention. Yet we need to embrace this extraordinary song that Paul “sings back” to his Philippian friends in his letter from a Roman jail. It may have sounded very different to those who first heard and sang it. Research has now revealed that a lot of the language it uses matches expressions used in contemporary love letters! In these love letters, the lovers describe themselves as feeling “equal to God” because they are in love. They refer to the temptation to abduct their love interests, using the same “exploitation” word as our hymn (“did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited”). Lovers describe the experience of self-emptying (kenosis), meaning the gut-wrenching vulnerability to rejection that we are all familiar with when we fall for someone.

It could be that this hymn was poetically conveying the insight that the whole drama of divine vulnerability that we now call the Incarnation is rooted in God’s ecstatic desire for us. The hymn certainly gives lie to the persistent fable that it took until the Council of Nicaea in 325 C.E. to attribute divinity to Jesus. In this early Christian song, Jesus is acclaimed as the Ascended One who has been given “the name that is above every name” (verse 9). And there can be no doubt what that was—the awesome and unpronounceable divine name revealed in the burning bush!

[ April 21 ]

Alive in Christ!

Isaiah 65:17-25; Psalm 114; 1 Corinthians 15:19-26; John 20:1-18

THIS EASTER WE read from the oracles of Isaiah in which the exiles, recently returned from Babylon, are given a vision of Jerusalem as the hub of a new “peaceable kingdom.” The restoration bestowed by God on Israel is imagined to be rippling out from the rebuilt Holy City to accomplish undreamed of reconciliation throughout all of creation. This peace accord transmutes ancient enmities into friendship, so that even “the wolf and the lamb shall feed together” (65:25).

In Paul’s first letter to the church in Corinth, the ultimate restoration proclaimed by the prophets radiates out from the “ground zero” of Jerusalem where Jesus was executed, buried, and raised from the dead. The resurrection bestowed by God on the sacrificial son triggers the chain reaction that will ultimately leave nothing outside the embrace of new life. Notice is served that a new outpouring of life has begun, one more powerful than the death whose power to terminate and extinguish everything and everyone has appeared invincible until now. “For as in Adam all die, so all will be made alive in Christ” (1 Corinthians 15:22).

The fourth evangelist’s story of the discovery of the empty tomb takes us right into “ground zero” itself, creating an intimate and immediate impression. We see the crouching of the disciples at the low entrance to the rock tomb, the shroud and head cloth seemingly folded with the care that thoughtful guests take when they strip the bed in the spare bedroom before leaving! And then Mary of Magdala’s mysterious encounter with the stranger who must be the gardener, but turns out to be the Living One, already on the way to God, the beating heart of the universe, to prepare a place for us—for us all. The garden graveyard near the killing field is the garden paradise in which a new humanity is being created!

[ April 28 ]

Open, Breathing Spirit

Acts 5:27-32; Psalm 150; Revelation 1:4-8; John 20:19-31

JOHN'S GOSPEL COVERS two appearances of the risen Christ to the disciples in the upper room: first in the evening of Easter day and then a week later. We learn that John has a very different approach to the giving of the Holy Spirit from the one embraced by Luke. Luke’s version of a dramatic event that takes place on the Feast of Pentecost, 50 days after the Passover, has become universally adopted in the pattern of the church’s liturgical year. But John’s story of the Risen Christ breathing the Holy Spirit into the disciples at the close of the same day on which he was raised from the dead is perhaps more profound. The disciples cower behind locked doors, fearful of the Judean crowd who are still out for the blood of the Galilean hotheads who had entered Jerusalem with the failed pretender Jesus. They are struggling to make sense of the empty tomb and Mary of Magdala’s uncanny experience in the garden. What was to come next?

Into this scene of bafflement and the disciples’ overwhelming self-mistrust Jesus himself comes, displaying his open wounds, greeting the disciples with shalom. Never had this everyday word of greeting resonated from such infinite depths. Peace flowing out from the defeat of death! In the scene that John paints we experience the receiving of Christ’s Spirit and the experience of being trusted by God as inextricably interwoven. How untrustworthy the disciples must have felt! But here there is no question of rehabilitation or penance. The Risen One trusts them immediately with the same trust that the Abba God had placed in him. “As the father has sent me, so I send you” (John 20:21). Thomas may have been absent because he had sequestered himself that morning to regain purity after defiling contact with tombs and grave clothes. Something utterly revolutionary is afoot. Belated he may be as an eyewitness to the wounds of the Risen One, yet he is the first to recognize that Jesus is God’s Word in the flesh: “My Lord and my God!” (verse 28).

“Preaching the Word,” Sojourners’ online resource for sermon preparation and Bible study, is available at sojo.net/ptw.