The Resurrection of Humanity

Passover is quite a bit more fun than Easter. For Passover, we get to enjoy a Seder meal, as we did here Friday night for our church family, with feasting and singing Di-di-anu. It would have been enough.

But Easter is also part of our heritage, important to many of us. Yet for Easter, all we get to do is enjoy frosted or creamy confections while trying to figure out some way to ignore the rather gruesome message of the Christian holy day, the one that involves death and graves and what seems to be the resuscitation of a corpse.

We turn then quickly to sweet and creamy things and metaphors of spring bunnies and daffodils — not very nourishing, not very satisfying. Empty calories.

Surely we can do better.

Of course, both the Passover and the Easter stories are preposterous. At least as they fall on the modern ear. Yet, in each story is a powerful capsule of truth. Truth that can set us free.

At the Passover Seder we remember the old, old story of liberation, and remembering and repeating and internalizing that story, acting it out in a ritual meal each year, we come to a deep commitment to the liberation of everyone and everything that is enslaved.

What then is the gem of truth in the Easter story? The inspiration, the transformation?

It is, I think, simply this: Jesus taught us how to be human beings, and his example, his inspiration, will not die.

No matter how long we are sealed in the dark tomb of despair, mass consumption, addiction, greed, selfishness, false patriotism, violence, depression, callousness, or cruelty—no matter how long we are sealed in these tombs, The One Who is Human comes at least each Easter to show us the way to resurrection.

The One Who is Human — my own minor adaptation of a title for Jesus. As the gospels are usually translated from the original Greek, Jesus often refers to himself as “The Son of Man.”

What sort of title is that?

To some, something grand and supernatural.

But to other scholars, “Son of Man” is thought to be a self-effacing way Jesus had of referring to himself simply as a human being.

I’ll buy in right there, and go a bit further.

In a preposterous story—a very powerful and useful kind of story — Jesus becomes the ultimate and the essence of what it means to be a human being.

The National Council of Churches, striving to be inclusive, has taken to rendering “Son of Man” inclusively but not misleadingly as “The Human One.”

Hence, my somewhat more speakable title for him: The One Who is Human.

And how exactly does Jesus show us how to be truly and authentically human?

First, strip away all those supernatural stories. Despite what some have made of them, they simply reinforce in metaphor and myth the larger, earthly mission and message of Jesus.

The message was this: We are called as human beings to a concern for others that is not governed by how attractive someone is, nor by their capacity to reciprocate, nor by any need we may have.

We are called to express our love and concern most especially for the weak and the oppressed. This extends to the enemy and the persecutor.

To love in this sense is to think and act each moment in relation to the future of others, just as surely as we think and act in relation to our own future. (John Cobb, Christ in a Pluralistic Age)

To do that, it is enormously helpful to think of the resurrection as happening in this way (which I believe it did):
After the radical rabbi, Jesus of Nazareth, had been tortured and executed by the Romans as an insurrectionist, because he befriended the oppressed and embarrassed the oppressors, his body was probably thrown into a common grave, never to be found.

His students and friends had been profoundly moved by his life. In Jesus, they had seen new possibilities for freedom, for equality, for compassion, for humanity.

When he was killed, they were disconsolate. Then, some days later, they began to experience his presence. We do not know exactly how.

It seems that Jesus was primarily experienced as present when small groups of his friends were gathered together — especially when they shared a meal. Some could actually see the living Jesus sitting among them, eating and joking and talking with them.

So powerful was this experience that his followers sought to repeat it in a ceremonial way each Sunday, as they gathered for a ritual meal. At that meal, Easter was repeated, remembered. Resurrection happened. In story and song, they were given the strength to find their humanity.

For those of us who do not practice resurrection each Sunday, but at best once a year, how might we glimpse something of the risen One Who is Human? How might we find him present among us?

I remember a story by Tolstoy in which the narrator, alone in a simple country church, sees suddenly the face of Jesus in the face of a common peasant. What he sees is the archetypical, very human Jesus who comes from God to share human suffering.

And taken away from that country church by the narrator is a habit of seeing the divine spark in every human being, and especially in every human being who is oppressed, who suffers.

Tolstoy’s narrator had shared resurrection with the One who is Human.

I remember a night in a bar years ago, before seminary, when I was a businessman on the road, in a bar near some convention center in some city somewhere. And we were indeed a bunch of business-men, loosening our ties and tying one on.

The jukebox was playing and a few couples were dancing. In a dark corner of the room sat a young woman in a rumpled brown dress. She was not pretty. Not at all. She was not shapely or trim. Not at all.

As the jukebox played on, she got up and crossed the room to where we were sitting. To the tables of the brilliant young lions of the business world...handsome men, clever men, men full of themselves.

And the woman in the rumpled brown dress asked us, one by one, to dance. One by one, we turned her down, and turned our backs on her, and made jokes about her in loud whispers.

I don't really remember now how long it took me — days or months — to recognize the woman in the rumpled brown dress, just as Tolstoy recognized the peasant in the deserted church — as Jesus. As Jesus herself. As the One Who is Human, awakening in me a resurrection of compassion, of basic humanity.

Perhaps I was helped in my recognition by J.D. Salinger's very Jewish characters, Franny and Zooey. They were whiz kids on a radio quiz show. And before every program, their older brother Seymour, who could indeed see more, their Jewish-Buddhist brother Seymour instructed them to polish their shoes. To go on the radio.

They must do it, Seymour insisted, for a frumpy woman somewhere out there in the radio audience. The frumpy woman, Zooey later understood—that lonely woman who could not see their shined shoes, and who probably had cancer — was Jesus herself. Franny and Zooey had discovered the distilled essence of compassion. The One Who is Human.

Or try it this way:

Once there was a monastery that had once been quite grand, but had fallen on hard times. It had become hard to recruit new monks. The villagers who lived nearby no longer came to the monastery for special worship and to leave their alms behind.

The monastery gardens were neglected, the buildings badly in need of repair.

What could be done? The abbot worried and worried. He resolved to seek help. And so, one day, he ventured into the village, where he called on the rabbi.

"Rabbi," he said, "you are a wise man. I have come to seek help because my monastery is nearly in ruins, the villagers no longer support us, the monks fight among themselves, and almost no work gets done."

"Ah" said the rabbi, "things are a lot like that in my congregation, too." And so the abbot and the rabbi had a long, long conversation about all the ills they faced, commiserating with one another until the sun began to set.

"I must go," said the abbot. "We have had a wonderful conversation, but I must admit, I had hoped for some wisdom from you, and now I must leave without having learned anything that will help my monastery."

Wait, said the rabbi. Let me then tell you this. You wait for the one you call Christ, the Messiah to come again, do you not?'

Yes, said the abbot, we wait for Jesus to come again.

"Well," said the Rabbi, "we also wait for the Messiah, so I know something about this, and this I can tell you. One of you at your monastery is the Messiah."

The abbot returned excited and eager to share the news. The monks gathered round. They were stunned. One of us is Jesus?

Surely it is not brother John, he is too cranky.

And it can't be brother William, he is a bit of a drinker. It might be the abbot, but then again, it could be brother Michael, who forgives so easily.

Not knowing which of them was Jesus come again, each monk began treating all the other monks as if he were Jesus.

Soon, the monastery gardens flowered profusely, and bore abundant fruit. The villagers came more and more often for special services and blessings, and found the place rich in spiritual power. The buildings were soon repaired, and many from the village actually joined the monastery.

When he passed by the monastery, the Rabbi was said often to chuckle under his breath, smile, and sometimes break into song.

The monks had discovered the presence of the resurrected One Who is Human.

The poet T.S. Eliot, raised in a church of our order, rejected it as coldly rational, wandered, then at midlife, shocking those who knew him well, on a visit to Rome, dropped suddenly to his knees before Michelangelo's Pieta. The suffering and love depicted there—as a young mother held the broken, yet beautiful body of her crucified son—that juxtaposition of love and suffering, beauty and tragedy, drove T.S. Eliot to his knees, and drove his life and his art from that day forward.

He had shared in the resurrection of The One Who is Human.

Albert Schweitzer, who could have been the greatest theologian of his day, or the greatest church organist, Albert Schweitzer — you remember him as the vigorous old man in a pith helmet with flowing white mane and bushy moustache — Schweitzer who would come to be regarded as perhaps the greatest humanitarian of the 20th century, one day came upon a statue of a black African suffering in chains, and recognized in that figure the image of Jesus being crucified.

And so at midlife, Schweitzer gave up all he had achieved, went to medical school, and devoted his life to tropical medicine in Africa.

Schweitzer had lived out the resurrection of the One Who is Human.

Mahatma Gandhi, living toward the end of his life in a simple hut in India — unadorned, with only a single picture on his wall. A depiction of Jesus, and under it the caption: "He is our peace."

Gandhi was living out the resurrection of the One Who is Human.

Once that is done, once we experience the resurrection of our humanity, how can we ever be the same again?
How can we not see clearly the face of the One Who Is Human in all the faces that surround us, and even in the mirror, each morning, when we arise.