The Man Who Was God

 

www.fullofeyes.com

Propers: The Resurrection of Our Lord, AD 2021 B

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Hallelujah! Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Hallelujah!

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

There is only one reason to be Christian. And that’s Jesus. Jesus is the only reason why any of us are here this morning, and the only reason why any of us ought to be.

If you had to sum up Christianity in a nutshell, it wouldn’t be citing a preponderance of evidence from Scripture. It wouldn’t be repeating by rote the declarations of men in long robes wearing odd hats.

Christianity in a nutshell is the conviction of an apocalypse—and by “apocalypse” I mean a revealing, an unveiling, showing things for what they really are—that the Lamb of God, Christ on the Cross, is the ultimate reality behind and through the history of all Creation, and especially the history of Israel. In other words: if you want to know who God truly is, look to Jesus. If you want to know what humanity truly is, look to Jesus. If you want to know the deepest truths of all reality, the meaning behind all history, look to Jesus. And that’s scandalous, I get it.

The heart and soul of all Christianity—real Christianity, mind you, not the cheap knock-offs you see on TV or in the soundbites of self-serving politicians—subsists in the vision of God dealing with humanity in and through a murdered peasant, who, impossibly enough, is the center of all human history and the very form of God. That’s what we worship here. That’s what we believe. And if that’s too much for you, there’s the door.

It isn’t just that Jesus is like God, but that God is like Jesus. And that metaphor is so powerful and so true that it ceases to be a metaphor, and becomes an Incarnation, God-With-Us, God in the flesh, God made Man. It’s one thing to say that Jesus was a nice guy who had some radical but lovely ideas, and He followed them through to suffering and death, and maybe He had a point. That’s not controversial. Anyone could agree to that.

But it’s another thing entirely to say that Jesus is God. And everything He said, everything He did, everything He suffered, that was God’s love poured out for you. Poured out for the world, yes, for every wayward soul. But for you. I mean, let’s be clear. We aren’t saying that Jesus is a god, or an angel, or a demigod. We’re saying that the One God, the Creator, the infinite and eternal source and ground of everyone and everything in all existence, became a Middle Eastern Jew.

And He walked through cities and deserts, seasides and rivers, utterly without fear. He spoke in ways that nobody else ever spoke. He did things that nobody else ever did. And it wasn’t the miracles that made Him famous. Not really. It was who He used them for. Jesus didn’t call down lightning or fire or storm. He fed the hungry, healed the sick, told the poor that God blessed them, believe it or not, and that they would be first in His Kingdom.

And when scholars scolded Him, He wasn’t afraid of their brains. And when soldiers threatened Him, He wasn’t afraid of their swords. He wouldn’t do what they wanted Him to; He would neither fight nor flee. His weapon was truth, His armor compassion, and His only battleplan seems to have been to speak of justice and mercy as if they were somehow both one and the same.

How do you silence a Man without fear? How do you get Him to stop telling the masses that we’ve all got things upside-down? That God doesn’t care about wealth and power and military might. God doesn’t care about your résumé, your bank account, your home up in the Hamptons. Give me a break. God has come to liberate us, all of us, from the spirits which enslave us: spirits of violence, insecurity, hierarchy, bigotry; spirits of ego and of mammon and of sin.

And that terrifies us. For some reason that terrifies us. Because we’re all part of the system of this world. We’ve all bought into its lies, deep in our bones, deep in our veins. We think life is all about the survival of the fittest, and I’ve got to get mine. But it’s not. Life is a gift. And as fallen and as broken as this world has come to be, nevertheless it was made good and is remade good by the Spirit and the Word of God—the same God who loves His whole Creation, and has placed His Image in us.

You know the story by now, I should think. Jesus wouldn’t bow to the empire, so the empire lifted Him up, lifted Him high on a Cross for all the world to see, stripped and whipped and pierced and shredded, crowned with thorns, split by a spear. And this was to remind us, all of us, of what really reigns supreme in this world, right? Violence and power and death! These are our final arbiters. These are the unspoken assumptions that underlie all our systems of order and of wealth.

Step out of line, and the power will crush you. The power will hold you up naked, displayed to the world, then stuff you in a tomb and drop a rock on top. Case closed, end of story, back to business. No more Jesus Christ. Except this time—this one time—it didn’t work. I mean, we threw everything we had at this guy. We got His buddy to betray Him. We got His friends to abandon and deny Him. We tortured Him, nailed Him, ran a spear up through His heart. You don’t get deader than Jesus.

But then the damnedest thing happened. He got back up. And nothing, it seems, would ever be quite the same again.

This wasn’t the conquest we expected. We all thought that the Christ would come riding in on the clouds with legions of angels at His beck and call. Instead, He inaugurates His Kingdom by laying down His life, by speaking a word of forgiveness to us even as we murdered Him. And by appearing to women! Making them the heralds of Resurrection, whose testimony would not even be allowed in the courts of their own day.

This, then, is how death dies. This is how our world is remade. Not in fire and brimstone, sword and blood. But in forgiveness and mercy and hope and love. In a God who comes down to join us in our sufferings, all of our sufferings; who conquers the grave not by slaying the devil but by embracing death fully, entering death fully, and drowning it in the infinite oceans of His love; so that all the things we feared are done: judgment, death, damnation, done.

And we are free. Free to live like Christ. Free to love without reserve. Free to welcome without reservation. Free to give and not to count the cost. Free to see the face of God in every human being and to tell that truth before all the assembled powers and dominions of this world. And in the face of poverty and war and disaster and disease, we are free to love our neighbors as Christ has first loved us, because death has no dominion here. Hell has no dominion here. We worship the Christ, the Lamb who was slain, and no-one and nothing can take us from Him, ever.

They tried. They failed. Hallelujah.

You know, once upon a time, the Church was the communal center for socialization, education, entertainment, support, and news. Now all that’s on our phones. People, it seems, are having trouble coming up with reasons to be Christian, when there are so many other ways to be entertained, so many other ways to claim community, even if it’s just on a screen.

If folks have come here today out of tradition, obligation, because their parents made them, perhaps it’s best that they find something better to do on a sunny Sunday morn. Given Christianity’s popular image, it would be hard to blame them. But if you believe the impossible—that Jesus Christ is God, that we murdered Him and threw Him into hell, and even that couldn’t stop His love for us, it could barely slow Him down—then you indeed have come to the right place.

For Christ is here, as He has promised. Here, in Word and in water. Here, in bread and in wine. Here in the community of sainted sinners gathered to receive the means of grace as beggars holding bowls before the mercies of our Lord. We are beggars, we are sinners, and He loves us all the more. For if our God is Jesus, then everything will change. But if God is not Jesus, who really gives a damn?

Hallelujah! Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Hallelujah!

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.