Easter 2009

Here's my Easter sermon. I've been preaching through Revelation and thinking about martyrdom. I am mostly awed at the way in which martyrs invoked a new reality--the new creative work of God begun in the Resurrection--and opened the door to the possibility of life lived free from the constraints of death, even in the face of death. The death that the martyrs anticipated took the peculiar shape of Christ's death which, we learn at Easter, is transformed by resurrection.





We are known as a peace church. As Mennonites we are identified to a great extent by our opposition to war and violence, often calling ourselves pacifists and for evidence pointing to generations of conscientious objectors and activists working in the arenas of conflict resolution and peacemaking. We frequently quote verses such as “blessed are the peacemakers,” “love your enemies,” “turn the other cheek” and so on. In all of this there is a certain honesty: the world is a violent place, full of conflict, wars, and struggles over power. We would simply rather have a peaceable world than a violent one—who wouldn’t? And yet our lives are understood according to narratives of struggle.

To the extent that we are Americans, we are a people who, for the rule of law and a peculiar notion of freedom, fought a great empire and won. Our identity has been forged according to the myths of redemptive violence that the revolution and subsequent wars have been used to suggest. By myths of redemptive violence I mean stories that have been told of wars and conflicts, stories in which we learn the necessity of violence in the good task and calling that has been the formation of the American nation. What would America be without Valley Forge, Bunker Hill, Gettysburg, Iwo Jima, Pearl Harbor, and D-Day? Bearing the name Sam Adams, as I grew up I came to identify with these stories as somehow definitive of who I was. I was named after the great American patriot after all, the founder of the Sons of Liberty and the instigator of the Boston Tea Party. Even the beer was named after the patriot! What would a great American beer be without a nod to our revolutionary origins?

But aside from the nationalistic stories, our lives on a more personal and less political level are understood according to stories of conflict and struggle as well. If you have overcome some hardship in your life, whether poverty, abuse, neglect, addiction, dependency, or the like, you have learned that such conflicts ought to in some way define you. They are part of your story. It may be that you are going through such struggles and conflicts right now that demand so much energy and attention that you will forever be changed by the demands that are placed upon you as your character is forged in the fires of adversity.

This is simply the way the world is. A Darwinist might call this the survival of the fittest. Organisms compete with one another for scarce resources and the ones best adapted to the task survive, beating out the competition and assuring their place in the genetic future. At the core of our world, at the core of the universe it seems, is conflict, strife, competition, and violence.

So who are we to protest? Who are we to want peace? If we are realistic about conflict, we ought to be realistic about the solution: prepare and be strong, defeat your enemy, adjust, adapt, play the game and come out ahead. Enter the race, train, and win. Survive, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Etc.

It doesn’t, of course, have to be so selfish. If we want peace we have to fight for it, right? If we want to be free from terror we have to kill all the terrorists. If we want to be free to live as we do, to work as we like, to worship who we want, we must assert these things with strength or we will find them slipping from our grasp. There are plenty of bad people who would like to see us fail.

Conflict, war, struggle, adversity—these are the ways of the real world.

So, we write of Jesus rather easily. A spiritualist we think he is, or an idealist—wait until heaven, then there will be peace. Or perhaps all he is doing is simply showing us how to find inner peace. The peace that passes all understanding. Let’s psychologize Jesus, make him the stuff of motivational infomercials, so we can understand the right technique to arrive at and get this un-understandable peace.

But the world is all about struggle, conflict, and war.

Or is it?

On trial before the governor Pilate, Jesus is asked the question, “Are you the King of the Jews?”

Jesus answers, “Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about me?”

“Your own nation and the chief priests have handed you over to me. What have you done?”

“My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here.”

“So you are a king?”

“You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”

Pilate asked him, “What is truth?”

Jesus’ trial is remarkable. He never enters the game. He offers no defense. He is innocent and yet takes the abuse. He explains when it seems right but at other times remains silent. He is not competing with Pilate. He is not competing with the High Priest. He is not competing with the Emperor.

After being flogged, mocked with a purple robe, and given a crown of thorns, Jesus is presented to the crowd who wants him to be crucified. Pilate is baffled and distressed. He questions Jesus again.

“Where are you from?”

Jesus gives no answer.

“Do you refuse to speak to me? Do you not know that I have power to release you, and power to crucify you?”

Jesus answers this time, “You would have no power over me unless it had been given you from above; therefore the one who handed me over to you is guilty of a greater sin.”

From then on, we are told, Pilate tries to release him.

Jesus refuses to enter the game. Interestingly, he acknowledges the power of Pilate, the Roman governor, but he refuses to acknowledge the myth that made sense of Roman power. Paul does the same sort of thing in the 13th chapter of his letter to the Romans. Power is not, ultimately, won through struggle and conflict. Power is God’s. Pilate would have no power if it had not been given from above.

But the religious leaders try to pull Jesus into the game. They try to get him engaged according to the rules of religion and politics: “If you release this man,” they say, “you are no friend of the emperor. Everyone who claims to be a king sets himself against the emperor.”

And so Jesus is crucified.

It is not that Jesus was somehow a spiritual king, unrelated to the emperor. John, in his apocalyptic vision, prefaces his letter by affirming that Jesus Christ is “the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth” (Rev 1.5). Jesus is not set against the Emperor, rather he is set above the emperor. And it is this that gets him into trouble, leads to his death, and the death of many of his followers. Jesus’ death is certainly a political death in a political contest—but by his death Jesus denies the very rules that would govern the contest. His is not a Kingdom from this world. In John’s Gospel this is the last we hear of the Romans. Their part is over. The end of the conflict that defines our world; the end of the sort of power that rules nations and empires; the telos of the conflict that defines our lives is this: the death of the Son of God.

That’s as far as the story goes. Or so it seemed.
“Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the tomb.”

The scene has changed. The players are different. Now we have women, fishermen, friends.

The hot and bloody stone of Pilate’s politics has been replaced by the dark morning chill of a woman grieving in a graveyard. Then an empty tomb! Then there is running, and news, and more running. One disciple outruns the other and gets to the tomb first. They see the tomb empty—empty except for the grave-clothes—and there was a mixture of belief and confusion. Then the men leave and Mary is left, alone, with her grief. But she is not alone. Jesus is there. He is alive.

Religious and political power killed him. The conflicts that seem to determine this world killed him. The politically fit survived and killed the King of the Jews. Rome is stronger. The tension between the Jewish leaders and Pilate is eased for a moment. Diplomacy found a victim—but at least it was only one. It’s an old story, a very old story. But something new was happening, away from Pilate, away from the Temple elite, away from the crowds, away from the powerful and the proud. The politics of death continued, but life….life had won. And life did not play according to the rules. As it turns out, conflict is not the nature of the world, war and conflict are not the essence of the cosmos. Peace and life are. And their reign has begun. Jesus is alive, the firstborn of the dead and the ruler of the kings of the earth. The only way that Jesus could have stood there before Pilate, carried his cross to Golgotha, been crucified and died, is if the power behind the cosmos is more determinative than the power in the cosmos. Were his kingdom from this world he would have fought, he would have engaged the empire, but instead he simply bore witness in the face of the conflict of this world that life was stronger than death, that God was not in the same league as the emperor, that though all the power and shame of the empire could be hurled at the Son of God, the victory would remain God’s.

She mistakes him for the gardener. Mary mistakes the King of Kings for a gardener. The only way such a mistake could be made is if the nature of kingship and power had somehow been fundamentally shown to be different than the way we have learned to see it.

This is what we witness to when we call ourselves a peace church. Being a peace church is being an Easter church. On Easter, everything changes. Life is shown to be more powerful than death—not by degrees, but by its very nature: death is shown to be ultimately powerless in the face of the goodness of God. By bearing witness to this through the practices of non-violence, reconciliation, and peace-making, even to the point of death, we participate in the life that is at the heart of the cosmos.

Easter tells us that our lives are not to be determined by conflict, violence, and war. Instead our lives are to be determined by the life and the peace that comes to us on and through Easter. In our church, even here, we are invited to enter into the shalom that comes to us from God the giver of life. In our worship we join together with the power of life over death. In the face of death our ancestors in the faith were able to sing because they lived in a world where death was not final, not ultimate—but rather life was. This they learned from Easter. As we go from here this evening, may we begin to see that Kingdom that Jesus proclaimed as we learn to see the lies inherent in the conflicts that surround us. May we begin to live as if life was infinitely greater than death so that our lives too may be a witness to the kingdom that is not from this world, but is instead the kingdom of the King of Kings.