| Today we will continue on with Alison's next comments in "The Joy of Being Wrong". This (for God, death is as if it were not) marks a decisive change in the understanding of God, one which had been a long time in the making, since if God has nothing to do with death, if God is indifferent to death, then our representations of God, all of which are marked by a human culture in which death appears as, at the very least, inevitable, are wrong, as Jesus remarked to the Sadducees: "You are greatly mistaken." The resurrection of Jesus, at the same time as it showed the unimagined strength of divine love for a particular human being that therefore revealed the loving proximity of God, also marked a final and definitive sundering of God from any human representational capacity. Whereas before it could be understood than God did not die, nor change, nor have an end, this was always within a dialectical understanding of what does happen to humans. With the resurrection of Jesus from the dead there is suddenly no dialectical understanding of God available, because God has chosen his own terms on which to make himself known quite outside the possibility of human knowledge marked by death. The complete freedom and gratuity of God is learned only from the resurrection, not because it did not exist before, but because we could not know about or understand it while our understanding was shaped by the inevitability of death. I know it is a long piece. I also sense that it is quite important for us to see how the resurrection is the end of our way of controlling the story about God - a story that is so tied up to the power of death. We are about life because we are told in the Jesus story -right through the resurrection - that death has no power. Therefore, life can be shaped differently. Just within the last few days I heard someone joking about "not lying and not wanting to lie because God sees and hears all of our lies - and I don't want that around my neck when I die..." You may hear and say things like that all the time. It is stuff that simply spews from us because the culture is saturated with such impressions of God - that are not really the God we know through Jesus. For example, we do not lie because the life within God's Reign doesn't need it. We need not fear truthfulness - in fact truthfulness is the character of God's Reign. Jesus is truthful because he need not doubt the ever-present love of God that has no end. In our storytelling, the resurrection is a banner that reads "yes" - in the face of all our fears of death. Connection: Again, we go back to the simple storytelling of the life of Jesus. Even though it is not a action-by-action video and it is told through the eyes and times of members of the early church, there is a consistent word about the life that is Jesus. Lord of the Resurrection, pull us into the life you have ready for us. Help us to take the steps into your Reign of freedom and all hopefulness Amen. |
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