Bend Mennonite Church
Easter Sunday, April 12, 2020
by Sam Adams
I am an optimist by nature. Andrea will readily affirm that. When the recession hit a few years back, I was working as a carpenter, the lead of a crew of at least 24 carpenters. As we finished up this one job we’d been on for over a year, I comforted Andrea that even though the recession was pretty scary, there’s no way that I’d lose my job—after all there’s 20+ guys ahead of me that would be laid off before me. But, sure enough, my optimism—which comforted her for a time—proved to be as flimsy as sawdust. I lost my job. The whole company shut down for months. I had my license and so I was able to get a few good jobs, but they were just that, few and far between. Optimism helps the optimist, but if not grounded in reality, it is a liability and can cause people pain when events don’t work out.
As our current pandemic started, I was, again, an optimist: it’ll be like the flu. Maybe just a bad flu season, I thought, as did so many others. But here we are. We may have been optimists, but we had absolutely no power to do anything about it. We could also be spiritual optimists: God must be doing something that will turn out to make sense and be good, after all. God will use this for good, just wait and see.
Such optimism is fine in the abstract. Then, when it is your family member who succumbs, who gets sick, and who dies—where is such spiritual optimism then? And even then there can be the tendency—and I’ve seen it plenty of times—to somehow try and make the suffering and death part of God’s good plan.
Notice, I’m not calling this faith. There’s a fine line here between faith and optimism. Optimism sees, in the course of events, as bad as they might get, that there is a good at work in them. This is the best of all possible worlds. History is going in the right direction. Things seem bad but we’ll one day understand that they really were good all along and we’ll understand what God’s plan was. Optimism—and for that matter pessimism, too—trusts that there is a “ghost in the machine” of events that is leading them in one way or another. The way I see it, this is not compatible with Christianity—at least not a Christianity that sees the cross as central to what it means to be a Christian.
In fact, it might be that the cross is the pessimist’s greatest ally! You think things are going in the right direction? Just wait…it could get worse. Just imagine you’re there with Jesus as he makes his triumphal entry into Jerusalem. Optimism is high. Things seem to be working out. But then it goes from bad to worse. He enters the temple, causes a big stir with those selling various animals for sacrifices, and finally, by Thursday night he’s talking about his own death and is betrayed. He’s arrested, beaten, put on trial, and then by Friday is crucified—all supported by the crowd, the same crowd that was cheering him less than a week before.
But here’s the thing: neither optimism nor pessimism will do. Some things in life work out well, and some things don’t. The cross and resurrection have nothing to do with this. The narrative direction from cross to resurrection does not tell us that in life there is always some sort of redemption or positive resolution. We have been set free from both optimism and pessimism: the Christian faith replaces these with hope.
Now to be clear, we can use the language of hope the way we use the language of optimism. But Christian faith is about hope in a much different way. And this can only be seen in the movement from cross to resurrection because there is no movement from cross to resurrection.
The cross is utter failure. It is the shameful murder of the Son of God. It ends with death and the cry of dereliction, “My God, My God why have you forsaken me?” hammers this point home. There is no “deeper magic” as C.S. Lewis might say that is operative; no ghost in the machine that is working something here for the good. The disciples walk away from the cross—or flee and hide, rather—with no hope, no answers. Neither pessimism (“well, that’s how things turn out”) or optimism (“I suspect it was all for a good reason”) make sense of this. There is nothing but darkness, death, and the silence of the grave. If Christ was God, the Word made flesh, then this was not a pretend death, not the acting out of death by someone who surprises us in the end with a triumphant smile and smirk that says you can’t really kill me. No, if Christ is truly human, this is a real death. He enters the grave just as we all will. Truly dead. Full stop. Silence.
But, from the other side, from heaven, from the Father, comes the word of hope. The deeper magic that is there is only the freedom and love of the Father: this death that has now been an experience in the divine life of God, will be the end of death. By death will death be defeated. Into the grave does the Spirit move and life is breathed back into the dead and there is a transformation. Will these dry bones live? Ah, Lord God, only you know.
Indeed, only God knows. Hope trusts not in history, in progress, or in human power, but places our faith only in God. The God who, after the darkness has engulfed us, after the silence has taken over, steps in and breathes life back into these dry bones.
When on that first Easter the disciples experienced, through the testimony of the women who went to the tomb, the first stirrings of hope, it then started to be clear that the cross was not utter failure. From this side, from the side of resurrection, the cross was transformed into an astounding victory. By death has death been defeated. All the optimism or pessimism we might have, the trust or despair in history, has been nailed there on the cross: death is the end of it all. And when the Son of God, the Word made flesh like us, takes death into himself, he dies for us. We don’t see that it is a death for us until we see the resurrection and know that if that death is our death, then his life will be our life too. And here is that victory. The cross exposes the limits of what the world’s powers can do. All they have is death; but the cross is God’s—indeed, in Christ it is our, victory over death.
So, instead of saying that Good Friday is that day when we celebrate that in a couple of days it will be Easter; rather, Easter is that day when we celebrate that a couple of days ago it was Good Friday. From the perspective of the empty tomb the cross is victory.
But as victory, it is no less the cross. Christ has triumphed over the grave by taking the path of the servant and being obedient to the point of death. This is why we continue to proclaim the cross until he comes. We don’t live our lives in the optimism that all will work out, we live our lives with faith and a hope grounded in the God who raised Jesus from the grave.
I will close this Easter sermon with these words from David Bentley Hart. They come at the end of his wonderful little book addressing the question where God was during the Tsunami that ravaged the coastal towns of the Northeastern Indian ocean back in 2004, and, as we experience a similar wave passing over the globe with our current coronavirus pandemic, I think they are poignant.
As for comfort, when we seek it, I can imagine none greater than when I see the death of a child, I do not see the face of God but the face of his enemy. Such faith might never seem credible…for it is a faith that set us free from optimism long ago and taught us hope instead. Now we are able to rejoice that we are saved not through the immanent mechanisms of history and nature, but by grace; that God will not unite all of history’s many strands in one great synthesis, but will judge much of history damnable; that he will not simply reveal the sublime logic of fallen nature, but will strike off the fetters in which creation languishes; and that, rather than showing us how the tears of a small girl suffering in the dark were necessary for the building up of the Kingdom, he will instead raise her up and wipe away all the tears from her eyes—and there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying, nor any more pain, for the former things will have passed away, and he that sits upon the throne will say, “Behold, I make all things new.” (DBH, The Doors of the Sea, 103-104)