Preventing Grace
We had a fun thought experiment at lunch this week, brought about by one of the children reading The Great Divorce for the first time, which led to me badly trying to explain the plot of Jean Paul Satre’s L’enfer C’est Les Autres (Hell is Other People) in which three damned souls have to live in one room for eternity arguing with each other and never finding resolution. Think The Good Place only in French and really depressing and therefore not The Good Place.
“Can’t everyone in hell see everything going on in heaven?” mused one child, which caused another to speculate that what they’ll be seeing is actually the live feed.
There’ll they’ll be, forever and ever, leaning forward on uncomfortable couches, backs improperly supported, staring at an endlessly glitching screen, sound system scratching painfully as happened last week to Matt as he tried to teach his class. All the people in hell will be typing in comments about how they can’t hear properly. Some of them will have the screen randomly cut out with a loud pop, flicker, and then randomly come back on again. Forever—stressed and frustrated. “Maybe we’ve actually all died and already gone to hell,” posited another child. It was pretty fun to consider, especially after watching Easter advertisements like this one. Don’t feel like you shouldn’t make an effort just because you can’t go! Get dressed up anyway!
Mercifully for Christians, heaven is not going to be live-streamed. We will get to go in person, and if there is technology (gosh I hope not) it will have to work the way it’s intended. But we aren’t in heaven yet, as many people have noticed, and the interesting part about being a Christian caught in time and space is that God is able to speak through the scriptures no matter what is going on. Indeed, as humankind trundles down the highway of history, various circumstances collide with biblical texts and the sparks illuminate the sorry, sad, glitching, disappointed soul.
The resurrection accounts are doing that for me this year. If you wanted a picture of a fractured, beleaguered community—church if you will—reclining back on their couches in abject misery, look at all the people who love Jesus in Jerusalem both on the day of his resurrection and through the weeks until Pentecost. There they are in the upper room, on the day that Jesus rose from the grave. They’ve missed the crucifixion, and they are at that very moment missing the resurrection, which was pretty dumb because the women have gone back and forth to the tomb, seen the angels, and, get this, seen Jesus himself…but #believeallwomen was not a thing back then. And, as we all know, people don’t rise from the dead, even when those people who have never lied and who have already raised the dead (coughLazaruscough) say they’re going to. Logic and reason dictate otherwise, so… Finally, “two of them,” decide to get some air and start out to Emmaus, which isn’t that far of a walk.
I mean, if you’re stuck in your house, as everyone keeps telling me, it’s fine to go out for some exercise, as long as you keep social distance, and don’t go on the playground equipment. I myself, when it isn’t raining or snowing (so maybe like twice in the last month) have taken a walk instead of just sitting at my desk or on my couch feeling angry and sorry for myself.
And, of course, like now, these two talk about the only thing that anyone is allowed to talk about. For us that’s coronavirus, but for them it was the astonishing events of the week, Sunday to Sunday. There would have been so much to process, trying to get the timeline worked out in their own minds, each reminding the other of details, of the order of the trial, of the weird darkness falling, of how all the competing political forces actually came together in some sick peaceful unity for the first, and probably the last, time in human history. What on earth had Pilate been thinking? Where did the high priest get those witnesses who had accused Jesus? Why hadn’t any of them (the disciples and these two and others) had the courage to stay and see Jesus nailed to the cross? It’s not like they hadn’t seen a crucifixion before. But no matter which way they come at the subject, they always wind their way back to the bizarre and absolutely unbelievable testimony of the women that Jesus was actually not dead, but alive.
This is so key, because many of us, or maybe I shouldn’t generalize, do have an awfully hard time knowing in the depths of the soul, all the way to the ends of the fingertips, that Jesus is alive and real, that the whole Christian thing isn’t just a dream wish, a weird thing to do on Sunday morning. We—I mean I—“believe” in a range of ways, intellectually, sometimes emotionally, spiritually of course, even sometimes in the outpouring of my physical life. But often, if you came in and took my anxiety temperature, you would conclude that I am probably an unbeliever. Faith power—believing that God will do what he says he’s going to do and be who he says he is—is not really a thing. I hang around for reasons I don’t always understand, tethered to the Body in need and hope, but not in expectation. I constantly rehearse the events of my own life, doubling down on disappointment and failure over and over. But I hope you won’t take my ‘I’ as really only just ‘me.’ We are all together in our social and spiritual isolation, “watching church” on the couch, uncertain of where God even is this morning.
Well, he is puttering along down the road with the two, joining in their conversation, and asking them all about it. Heretofore I have always seen this as some kind of divine joke born out of the sheer joy of being alive. That Jesus goes along with them and they don’t even know who he is because he is so happy and he wants them to discover him, grounding the knowledge of his resurrected life back in the scriptures themselves, because that will be where we find him. And that is clearly the case. After he listened to them, they listen to him, and he “interpreted to them in all the scripture the things concerning himself.” “In all the scriptures” is pretty comprehensive, and I am sure they must have walked rather slowly.
But I just blew through The Soul of Shame yesterday, by Curt Thompson (so good) and if you go read his exposition of Genesis 3 (which you should totally do) the question, “What things?” sounds a lot like the “Where are you?” that God uses to pull Adam and Eve out of the shrubbery and—and this is the key—out of themselves. Jesus wants these two poor, disappointed, unbelieving, untrusting, fearful men to tell him what’s on their minds…personally.
And they do. At first they’re incredulous—“Are you the only visitor to Jerusalem who does not know the things that have happened there in these days?”—but when invited to say more they do. You can hear the pain, “we had hoped,” and the ongoing disappointment, “but him they did not see.”
That’s how it’s going to be for me this morning, watching the screen, and I’m going to be bitterly reminding myself that I can’t even get to the end of the story, to the “breaking of the bread,” because, cue more disappointment, couch church “communion” is the worst. I can’t even get up and go return to the disciples in time to hear about Jesus walking through their locked door to tell them to, for heaven’s sake, stop doubting and see that he is really alive.
It may feel a touch hellish this morning, is what I’m saying, but it isn’t actually hell. Wherever you’re sitting staring at a screen, trying to comment, lonely for all the people you love, the risen Jesus is there with you through the power of the Holy Spirit, even on the couch. The question, “what things” or “where are you” is not a trick, not an endless unresolvable loop of frustration. It is a real ask and Jesus really wants you to tell him. And when you do, he will open the scriptures inside your mind and heart, and you will see that he is who he says he is.
However, if you think I’m dressing up for any of this you are hideously mistaken.
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