All Things Seen and Unseen

The story so far … We started this series with the feeding of the five thousand and a crowd so impressed that Jesus has to run away so they won’t try and make him a rebel King on the spot. But the crowd find him the next day and Jesus challenges them that they aren’t interested in the sign he has given them but only in the chance to get fed. OK they say so what’s this sign going to be? It is a sign already given, says Jesus, bread that satisfies more than your bellies, living bread fresh from heaven, that will give life a new vitality which cannot be taken away — not even by death. The crowd replies in one voice — Give us some! Yes, give us some of that! And then Jesus ruins it all by claiming that he, himself, is the living bread. Uproar! He feeds the flames. You have to eat my flesh and drink my blood. At which point departs the crowd angry, disappointed, disillusioned, … hungry.
But his disciples remain disappointed, disillusioned, and—today—murmuring: “These are hard words … you’d have to be mad to swallow them.” To which Jesus asks, “Am I a scandal to you? Am I a stumbling block?” And says, John, because of this many of his disciples turned back and stopped walking with him. The crowd has thinned out … Jesus turns to the Twelve: “What about you? Are you also going to leave me?”
A story that started out with signs and wonders comes down to this: to him. Not miracles, not signs, not food, not even doctrine — but to a question … who are you going to walk your days with? Who are you going to choose as your God?
It’s the same question Joshua poses to the Israelites: “decide today whom you will serve.” Who will be your God?
The Israelites as Joshua describes them are gung-ho for God. Adonai is our God. And John writes that Peter speaks for the Twelve when he says “Lord, Adonai, where else could we go? We trust you.”
Is that the way the story ends? Imagine how the TV would do this scene with close-up and long shot. With Jesus a semi-tragic figure, abandoned by so many at the peak of his success, left by his most of his followers, so that just the faithful few cluster around him in the space emptied by so many departures. And the Twelve, some sort of heroes, staying with him, accepting their fate with him, because they alone trust him. Is that the way the story ends?
Not quite. John has his doubts. For a start there’s something fishy about the words Peter uses to express faith in Jesus. “You are the Holy One of God,” he says. That’s a phrase found no where else in John’s gospel and in the other gospels only ever in the mouths of demons. Recognition isn’t everything. Even the devil can declare his faith in Jesus. All the black and white is grey.
Look at the Twelve who remain with Jesus or at least say they will. Judas who will betray him, Peter who will deny him, and ten others who will run away. What do we make of that? Of their promise, of their trust?
Only this: for centuries, for millenia, the choice is offered to human beings freely: who will you choose to walk with? who will be your God? The choice is offered freely without compulsion. Just the offer of something unimaginable, better than belief, stronger than wine, firmer than flesh, deeper than life. “Do you want it?” is the question.
But if the question is freely offered the answer is freely received. The Yes is taken a face value, taken in good faith—even if we are betrayers, deniers or plain cowards. And that is our salvation. That we so often speak words which are better than our lives. We are constantly urged to choose well who to take after, who to walk with and our answers are sometimes better than we are. But God believes us when perhaps we don’t believe ourselves.
We say “Yes Lord we believe,” and we are believed. We say “Yes Lord we trust,” and we are trusted. “Yes Lord we have faith,” and God has faith in us. And God’s faith in us gives us the space to go beyond betrayal, denial and cowardice into the land of life and living. We might trust Jesus more with our lips than our hearts but he trusts us with his life and that trust opens up a world where we can become witnesses, faithful witnesses, beloved disciples, heroic friends.

To live forever! It seems it might even be possible. You can indeed die but live forever … or at least twenty years … if you’re Elvis Presley that is. The King is dead. Long live the King! The TV this week’s been full of Elvis reanimated on celluloid and reincarnated in corpulent and impersonated flesh. The papers have been outdoing each other with humorous or weighty articles on twenty years of a modern myth—a legendary life that captured his era, a mysterious and degrading death, and now a spirit that lives on — at least in the hearts of fans and the pocket books of an industry devoted to his memory and memorabilia. Did you know that $80 could get you a matched pair of Elvis and Barbie dolls — with real wiggling hips!?
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, it seems the Mediterranean Sea is being taken over by a mutated Pacific seaweed. Delicate in its natural habitat, this weed was used in a German aquarium for its refined beauty. So beautiful in fact that one aquarium shared with another, and another, until in Monaco the Oceanographic Museum when it went out of business emptied its tanks into the sea and this once tender plant, exposed to years of UV light and aquarium chemicals, has been taking over and poisoning the local sea-life. “Nothing can stop it,” went the headlines. It seems that even the trivial things we do, like prettying up our fish tanks, have real and global consequences.
Back in the US, an impact of more modest, but more grisly, proportions: check you freezer for any of the 5 million hamburger patties—that’s over 500 tons of not-so-prime beef—which have been recalled for being contaminated with e coli bacteria. Which is a nice way of saying they’re full of feces. Which is a nice way of saying … well you get my drift! So watch that next trip to the golden arches because you are what you eat. Fast food has its own flesh-and-blood consequences — from fast food-poisoning through slow clogging of the arteries to starving children in the horn of Africa.
“Wisdom has built her house … she has dressed her meat, mixed her wine, yes, she has spread her table.” From the Elvis who now lives in some pseudo-spiritual realm, via the flesh-and-blood realities of our activity in this world, we come here to the table. Our Host, Wisdom, is quite a character. A person in her own right. Sophia, as the Greek text of Proverbs calls her, was there at the right hand of God at the creation of the world when she danced and played in the very ecstasy of crafting something beautiful. And here she is today laying out a banquet for whoever needs her help. Setting out the meat and pouring the wine that leads to life. “Aha! Just like Jesus,” we think, breaking the bread and spilling the wine of eucharist. But there’s more to the comparison than that. When the first believers reflected on who Jesus, their dead but living friend, could be, when they tried to figure out how Jesus was related to Adonai, the God of their ancestors, they turned to the resources of their Jewish faith. And they found there Sophia, Wisdom, ready-made—present with God before the world began, intimately involved with all creation, and setting the table of life for all to share. So one of the very first Biblical ways of understanding Jesus was not as King, not as Master, but as a woman, as Lady Wisdom, come down from heaven in the flesh. It’s an image that quickly got dressed up in men’s clothing but it’s there just under the surface if you look for it. God as She as well as He. My mother says, “I don’t care what you say he’ll always be a he to me.” Surely God is beyond flesh, beyond gender, beyond sex. After all God is spirit isn’t he … she …it?
Well in the teeth of all our attempts to rob God of a body and keep the Divine “It” at a spiritual distance—in the teeth of all that—we have eucharist and we have gospel. “The bread I am going to give, for the life of the world, is my flesh.” “My flesh is real food and my blood real drink.” We try to go one way—from flesh to spirit—but God always goes the opposite direction. We talk of metaphors and symbols but God is distressingly literal, even naive. The eucharist we will shortly share is the very opposite of a symbol. The meal we eat is Jesus’ flesh and blood but not by magic. He made bread, flesh, and wine, blood, by putting his flesh and blood on the line. He spoke the words and made them true with his body, by having it snatched from him: broken, battered, bleeding, … dead.
The bread and wine we eat is only our sacrifice because flesh and blood were his.
Why do we come and eat and drink together like this? Why don’t we stay at home and meditate or do good deeds? Only because Jesus made flesh and blood out of wine and words. We come to eat our words … and his. We come to lay down our flesh and blood, here, for each other’s consumption and for the life of the world. After all a sacrifice of words is nothing. It’s the world that matters—to God and to us. Flesh and blood, seaweed and ground beef, the oceans, the air, people, bodies, breath and breathing. For these … for us … Jesus made a sacrifice of his body. Gave it like bread so that we might feed on him and have life—life enough to lay down, so that the whole world might live.

I have to admit that I was taken by surprise by today’s gospel. We’ve been following Mark’s story for so long that I, reading ahead, was all ready for the feeding of the five thousand. So homily in head, half-prepared, I opened the book and found not Mark but John. The church, in its wisdom, aware that there isn’t enough of Mark to share among the Sundays of Ordinary time, inserts at this point four weeks of John, John meditating on broken bread. You almost can’t see the join. Both gospels are telling the same story of a miraculous feeding but all the details are different. Gone are the sheep without a shepherd from Mark. Instead the crowd follows Jesus because they have seen the signs. Gone is the Jesus who, moved by what he sees, sets out to teach the people at some length. Instead an enigmatic, almost reserved, figure breaks bread in the desert. Gone is the challenge to the disciple to take what little she has and in its breaking and sharing discover an abundant blessing God. Instead a commanding Jesus tests the crowd and the disciples with a question and a sign. And, sad to say, gone is the homily I had prepared. Instead here I am rambling about the homily that I am still preparing. But ramble with me a little longer and let this be a preamble to the next three weeks in which John himself unpacks the meaning of this gospel. I hope you like bread because you’ll have it in abundance!
John puts the familiar picture of the feeding of the five thousand in a skillfully chosen frame. And I want to pull back the focus from the picture to look at the frame. The frame is a careful construction of signs and the seeing of signs. It is fashioned from the heart’s hunger and the quest for satisfaction.
The crowd comes after Jesus, John says, because they saw the signs he worked for the sick. But he means more than just that the crowd wanted healing. A deeper hunger drives them into the desert after this wonder worker, a hunger for deliverance, for freedom, for political change. They want done with these Romans who occupy their land, they want a leader, they want the Messiah, they want a sign that God has returned among the people, they want a second Exodus. God knows the histories of the time are thick with messianic candidates who took their crowd of followers into the desert to show them a sign of God’s promise and blessing on their cause. God knows the same histories tell of crushed rebellions and crowds cut down like grain by Roman blades.
So it’s a risky quest the crowd is on to follow Jesus to this place, and so close to Passover with its reenacted sign of freedom from slavery. Is he the one? Will there be a sign? And Jesus gives them a sign. Stepping into the sandals of Moses, Jesus provides food in the desert — the bread of the poor taken, blessed, broken, given — enough to satisfy any hunger, enough to convince any doubter. Simple food, in abundance, overflowing.
It is a sign—an obvious sign—but a sign of what? To the questing crowd it’s a clear sign that they have found their liberator, their leader, their king. But Jesus turns his back on this meaning by running from kingship back to the mountain. But there was a sign. In some ways the next three weeks ask— a sign of what? What is the hunger being satisfied by the bread from heaven?
It ought to be a sharp question for us, brought to this place once again to see the sign of bread taken, blessed, broken and shared. It ought to be a sharp question for us when slavery is once again in the news. When the bread of the poor is denied them. When strangers are unwelcome in the land. When the sick die alone and the living want to die.
For John the Eucharist is a sign thick with politics. It ought to be for us. To come to this table is to seek to understand a sign — more, it is to take part in a sign that we do not understand, that defies our expectations, that satisfies hungers we didn’t know we had but leaves others gnawing. What we do here goes beyond these walls or it goes nowhere. But where it goes is only to be found by going along. The invitation at this table is not simply to be fed. It is an invitation to be food. When we take the broken bread of God to ourselves we say Amen to being ourselves taken, blessed, broken—yes broken— and given to others. Think twice about that Amen. Think three times. But come and join the sign and be the bread of the poor.

Jefferson stands there, enormous in bronze, in his memorial in DC: caught in mid-stride, stepping boldly forward, eyes gazing into an horizon of promise. I gazed up at him with throngs of fellow tourists in his classical temple of Enlightenment virtues, chiselled round with words of hope and freedom — of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Near his feet, I watched him in the gathering dusk and let myself be moved by the spirit of the place, by his spirit, stirring, optimistic, eager for an unbroken future of promise, free from the bonds of past authorities, old allegiances, with a destiny to fashion — a bold experiment in political freedom, individual liberty, and the good life for all.
A mile down the Mall, in the fallen night, another giant — this one shaped from stone — waited to hold an altogether more ambiguous court. A mile or so, and fourscore and seven years, separate Lincoln from Jefferson. But the gulf of the spirit is broader by far. Lincoln sits like Jehovah of old on his seat of judgement, a face ambiguous as any gods’. Is that a frown? A smile? Is that massive head overlooking his nation benignly or to condemn? Are those eyes promising mercy or justice?
What is certain is the challenge they hold and the silence they bring to the masses who mill at his feet. Between Jefferson and Lincoln something beautiful has been born and has died. A grand experiment in liberty, borne on the backs of slaves. A new land of the imagination stolen from the dreams of it’s native peoples. Lincoln sits at one end of the American promise, bathed in the blood of brother against brother, kith against kin, judging a nation, challenging a people to acknowledge the death of a dream, and to begin it’s birth all over again.
A hundred-odd years later, Lincoln still sits there in ambiguity — sign of an end of dreams, sign of a new beginning. What of now? What of today? America was born in a battle against oppression, against colonialism, against pretensions to global power, against interfering across the seas, against the sway of the strong over the weak. America won that battle and with it the mantle of power and the capacity to become all that she was born not to be. How different is she now? How well does the dream live in American hearts? With welfare in ruins, the stranger unwelcome in the land, with the right to bear arms killing cruelly on every street corner, with international power wielded lightly with a heavy hand. Add your own tests. How well is America doing? What’s the judgement from Lincoln’s throne?
Amaziah, the king’s priest, wants none of those questions asked. Amos the unwilling peasant prophet is deported for speaking in the wrong place: “Don’t prophesy here — in the king’s sanctuary, in the royal temple.” But these are the very places he speaks to — to political power and religious piety in holy alliance against the ideals of a nation. Listen to the words of Adonai, from the lips of a greasy, uppity socialist from south of the border.
“You sell the righteous for silver, and the needy for the price of a pair of sandals — you trample the heads of the poor into the dust of the earth, and push the afflicted out of the way.” “I despise your festivals, your burnt offerings. Get away from me with the noise of your songs; I will not listen to the melody of your worship. But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”
Amaziah is right to throw Amos and his God out of Israel. Israel had never been more prosperous, more influential as a nation, more hopeful for the future, never been more able to do what it wanted. Israel was discovering its destiny, at last making its way in the world.
So Amos, don’t come here with your words of doom and gloom. You’re out of synch with the signs of the times. Why focus on the little difficulties we have, on the economic inequities that are inevitable in a growing nation. We are doing what we can. We want just what you want. Give us time and we’ll work things out. But right now other things are more important. We’ve got to safeguard jobs, we’ve got to attend to national security, we’ve got to pay our way, we’ve got to make our mark, fulfil our God-given destiny. And look! our liturgy’s never been better! Give us time, Amos, give us time.
Amos and his God gave them twenty five years. Twenty five years before the prosperity crumbled, the nation collapsed, and the rich and famous were taken away in chains to be strangers in a strange land.
Did Amos watch from his village south of the border? Did he smile as his borrowed words came to pass, or is that sadness on his lips?
And as Amos looks from across the border upon this nation, as Lincoln looks from this nation’s heart, is that a smile we see on their ambiguous faces or sadness? Are those eyes promising mercy or justice? Can we hear their silent challenge? Can we let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream?

Last Wednesday I made a pilgrimage. I climbed a hill called Revelation to visit the grave of Paul Monette, the author of “Borrowed Time,” a book I read last summer that moved me very deeply. Subtitled “An Aids Memoir,” it tells very honestly and with great feeling the story of the sickness and death of Monette’s lover, Roger, his “little friend” as the gravestone says. Paul Monette himself died from Aids a few years ago but not without first putting his passion, his anger, his gentleness and his bitterness into print and into speech to protest the public silence over so much suffering.
As I climbed the manicured pastures of Forest Lawns looking for his grave I knew I was looking nervously for an epiphany. Some sign, some word, some significance. But to tell the truth I was disappointed. Beside the simple elegance of Roger’s memorial Paul’s was, if anything, ornately bitter. Lying beside his lover in those sunny lawns, I had hoped that death would bring out his gentle spirit. Yet, as I sat there and gazed with them into the smoggy distance, my disappointment turned to its own bitterness at all that seems lost and broken in my own life. And I found myself accusing God from a stormy heart, “Don’t you care, don’t you care that we are suffering?”
Isn’t that something we’ve all asked when the whirlwind threatens to destroy us? Don’t we all sometimes align ourselves with Job, and with the waterlogged disciples, as we cry out “Don’t you care that we are drowning?”
And look at the answers we get: Job discovers a presence and a voice in the heart of the storm, but a voice that rebukes him to silence—”What do you know? How dare you ask?” And the disciples, themselves, are rebuked as Jesus rebukes the wind and the waves with words you’d use for a stray dog, words he uses to silence demons: “Shut up!”
As silence falls the disciples are terrified. But are they terrified of the storm and the danger to their lives, or are they terrified of him, of Jesus who stills the storm with a casual word?
Don’t we all know it? Sometimes the answer is more terrible than the question. At least until the next question—”Do you have no faith at all?”
Doesn’t he care that we are perishing? Who is this man?
The disciples are in awe. Amazed. And I don’t think it’s just because he stills the storm. I think it’s this: surrounded by storm and raging waters Jesus sleeps. He simply doesn’t notice. They are panicking, shaken, terrified but he rests on a cushion. Mark, in telling the story this way, has a message for his own panicked, persecuted community. When the trouble starts, and death seems just around the corner, and you can think of nothing else, … well … just watch Jesus sleep serenely. Jesus will not panic. Jesus will see it through calmly—and so should you. Treat it lightly. If he wants to still the storm he will. What’s a little martyrdom here or there?
This story is a call to the community—to us, I’m afraid—to make up in faith what Jesus’ first disciples lacked. To stay there in the storm no matter how strong the urge to run.
Back at the graveside, as I asked my sulky question of God, another voice slowly became insistent with it’s own bitter question. Paul Monette asking angrily, asking tenderly, “Don’t you care that we are perishing?” Not asking God … but asking me. Don’t I care?
Do I care enough to enter the storm? Do I care enough to stay there when all I want to do is quit? Do I care enough to be where Jesus is and see it through like him? Do I care enough to be his disciple?
Do you?

God? Are you there, God? Moses said to ask, so here I am asking. I want to ask you, God, about the dinosaurs. I guess it’s Steven Spielberg’s fault they’re on my mind, but they are. “Ask now about former ages, long before your own,” said Moses. Well, how about 65 million years ago? By the way is it all right to call you God, God? … I hope so!
What I want to know is why you made them, the dinosaurs. No, that’s not it … I want to know … why did you make them if you were going to let them die? God knows—oops sorry—they were around for a long time—longer by far than we mammals—let alone the speck of time my own species has been walking on our hind legs. They peopled this planet for thousands of millions of years. They ate, they fought, they frolicked, they made their music and made their children. They were tiny and they were enormous. They were drab and they were gaudy. They were ferocious and they were gentle—they were all the things that we are—in their own way. And now they’re gone. All of them. We haven’t been around for a hundredth of the time they were and yet we think we’ll be here for ever. Did they ever think that? Were any of them wise enough to wonder? And did any of them in their dino-way ever wonder about you?
OK what’s my point? Is that what you want to know, God? Well what I’m wondering is this: did you like them? You made them … but did you like them? And if you did … where’ve they gone?
Did the poor beasts bore you? Is that what happened? Were you just twiddling your celestial thumbs while they were your tenants? They were kind of showy but not much company? Is that it?
Now that I think of it the dinosaurs themselves were latecomers—only turning up on this blue planet in the last fraction of its history. What were you doing for the other millions upon millions of years before you had even dinosaurs to play with?
To a bipedal mammal like me, just down from the trees, it seems like this world must have been here for ever. But I guess that’s not true. Go back far enough and even the earth isn’t here, even the sun. Our star itself is a latecomer in the universe—one of the second generation born from the drifting ashes of other long dead suns. And even those first stars didn’t form until the universe was well into adulthood. My God! (Sorry!) But I can’t imagine that length of time! What were you doing? Didn’t you die of boredom?
If I were you—hey, we can all dream—if I were you I’d’ve found a quicker way. None of this coalescing and burning and drifting. None of this emerging and evolving and going extinct.
What’s it all been for? … For us? Don’t look at me like that! How can it all have been for us? For me? All of that. OK, forget about the stars, forget about the dinosaurs—hey—forget about the shark, the elk, the chimpanzee, the mosquito—forget about them all. Just tell, me this. Did you really wait all that time, waste all that space, for us? Dwindle all that infinity, all that eternity, for one insignificant species, from a minor planet, way out on the limb of a galaxy somewhere on the edge of nowhere. And not even for a species—for a trifling little tribe from the desert’s margin. And not even for a tribe—but for this woman and for that man—fleshy, fleeting, bags of water and guts. It’d be a miracle to even care for us a bit. And we’re not just small—we can be nasty with it. So what were you thinking to abandon everything and pitch your tent with ours—to come even closer and be one of us! It’s beyond belief. Are we that lovable? Are you that crazy?
Don’t look at me like that! … How can we deserve it? How can we respond? All we are is what you’ve made us. And yet you’ve made us part of your own self. You’ve opened your heart to us. You’ve adopted us into your own life. Of who you’ve always been. Have we been there since before it all began? Will we be there after it’s all ended?
“Ask,” said Moses, “ask has anything so great as this ever happened or has its like ever been heard?”

“To live,” said John Henry Cardinal Newman, “is to change and to be perfect is to have changed often.” Don’t you just hate him! Change, whether welcomed or dreaded, is always disturbing, always stirs us up, always sends us stepping over the edge into the unknown.
Here we are on the brink of great changes: something finished and something about to be begun; some things to celebrate and others to mourn … but all to remember. Here we are in a time between times, gathered around one table to eat the body of a broken bread and be sent, scattering, to the ends of the earth. We welcome that and we dread it.
A time between times. John, in his gospel, promises that the breaking of Jesus will gather the scattered children of God. But, in no time, as the Acts of Apostles relates, the gathering is broken up and the children scattered. Now for some the scattering was just geographical—their bodies moved but their hearts stood still—and they only took the word to their own. But others—no better—were moved by their movement to hand the word humbly to outsiders, to atheists, to enemies—to anyone who would listen. It’s in this scattering that they are called, for the first time, Christians. Christianity is born in this breaking and scattering of both body and soul.
But what lies between these two times? Between the promise of gathering and the reality of dispersal? The hinge turns freely on an axis of love hanging from a tree. Here is the pivot of an arc of renewal that will stretch to embrace the whole world. Here, at the focus of that movement of gathering and scattering, is the body of one human being—friend, lover, brother, … son—dying for life’s sake, dying for a change. And what lies at this burning point of focus? A moment of passion. A passionate end to a passionate life. A passionate prelude to a risen life of even greater passion—A time between times.
It’s the passion of Jesus—that openness to life and death in its fullness—to joy and sorrow in their depth—it’s his passion that brought everyone who knew him to discover their own. And, discovering, to change—one way or another—to reject and betray life, as some did, or to live life with intensity and care, ready to be moved by the passion of others to com-passion—ready—like a mother, like a lover—to share joy and even pain—to bear the life of Jesus into to the world.
We too—most of us—are in a time between times, poised to take new steps. Whatever this experience at Berkeley has been—a time of change, of renewal, of love, of learning, of unlearning—whether it has been a time of rest or a time of frenzy, whether it has been work or play—one thing we pray for. At this burning point of our lives may we have experienced here passion—depth, richness, energy. May we have learned a little better how to really live—vulnerable to suffering, unafraid of joy, and capable of care.
This is our call—as we scatter to the ends of the earth—the call to care with passionate intensity for all that is broken, to carry gently the healing burden of life, … to be the compassion of God for a wounded world.

Don’t you find Ascension to be a puzzle, a mystery? Just as Eastertime is ending it pulls us up short with a reminder of just how deep the mystery of Easter is and how shocked we ought to be by Resurrection.
This is still Eastertime, Christ is still risen, but the strangeness of that is rubbed in once more today. Christ is not dead, Easter proclaims, Christ is alive and is with us. Christ is here … among us. But how? Each of the gospel writers struggles to give a glimpse of how the risen Jesus is present to his people, to his friends, to us. All the resurrection stories are strange — the risen Jesus walks through walls but eats cooked fish; the risen Jesus is alive and happy but bears still the wounds of his cruel death; the Risen Jesus is known in the breaking of the bread but is hardly recognisable to the eye. Is he real or isn’t he? Is he here or isn’t he? The answer: a resounding yes and no. A yes and no that reflects the messy situation of the Christian communities these guys were writing to. They had clear memory and honoured witness that Jesus had not only risen from the dead but had shown himself to people they knew, had spoken perplexing certainties to the doubting, brought a disturbing peace to the troubled, unaccountable comfort to the grieving, a calm courage to the trembling. But they knew, as well, that things weren’t quite the same for them. The Risen Jesus once present in flesh was now only present in memory. Where had the risen Jesus gone? Why did God bother raising Jesus up from the gates of hell if only to take him away from us once more? What kind of consolation is it for us, to know that the one we love is alive but that we can never see him again, can never touch him, can never say all that remains to be said?
This is what Luke is wrangling with. And he deepens the mystery before he releases it. In the Ascension we see the final goodbye: Jesus lifted up and taken from human sight. Another loss. To have lost him once through treachery and death; to get him back only to have him leave of his own accord.
So there they stand, friends and family, on a hilltop outside the city, straining their eyes to see where he had gone, hanging on to the after-image. Are they left alone? Left to their own devices? Yes and no. As the after-image fades, they have the usual overbearing angels pointing their gaze in a different direction: down the hill, into the city toward the habitat of the human heart. And they also have a promise. “I am going,” says Jesus, “but my Spirit is coming—a spirit that will drench you like a downpour, a spirit of power who will make you my witnesses.” All the gospels explain the absent presence of Jesus in terms of the same exchange: we lose his body but we gain his spirit. Is it a fair exchange?
Well, that all depends. We have to answer that question for ourselves. Is the spirit among us? Is that spirit better than having Jesus present in the flesh? Or are we living for an after-image?
It’s not an easy question to answer. By Mark’s measure in the gospel today you might wonder if the spirit is even here this morning. No snakes being handled, no drinking of deadly poison, no speaking in tongues, no demons being driven out. Mark loves to exaggerate but what’s clear is that expects his community to see some real signs that the Spirit of Jesus is alive among them. And so do we. We need to see the unmistakable signs of Spirit among us. Is that Spirit here this morning? Where can we point to confirm our message, who will be our witnesses?
I want to leave that question open. We have a week. Pentecost is coming. We have our own angels asking us “Why do you stand here looking up to the skies?” Asking us to look for Jesus somewhere else, down the hill, where people live. And we have Jesus, himself, promising us that his own Spirit has soaked us and is waiting to drench us once again.
So do we want that? Are we going to beg for that this week? Has the exchange of body for spirit been worthwhile? What are we waiting for?

Join me for a moment in thinking about the people in your life who you love. Parents, children, husbands or wives, companions or partners, friends, lovers… Remember your first love … remember your latest. When I do that, when I remember the people I love, I see their faces and I imagine their hands. It might be different for you but that’s how it is for me. Somehow love is about eyes to look into, and hands to touch and be touched by. And not just any eyes and any hands but these eyes which look back so tenderly into my own, and those hands with their unique character and texture and weight. I don’t love just anyone — I love real, solid, individual people — in all their distinctive, odd, particularity. Some of are bound to me by bonds of blood. We are tied by kinship and resemblance and long years of familiarity. Some are drawn to me, and me to them, by leading strings of love freely given, freely exchanged, in the friendship of shared desires and humble attractions. But family or friend or lover or life-partner, these are the ones whose faces never leave me, whose features never leave me unmoved. I see them and I am touched, I feel, I hope, I fear, I doubt, … Something shifts in my stomach. They hold out their hand and I want to take it, to hold it, to keep it, to enfold it.
I do not know what love is but I know who these people I love are. And knowing them I catch a glimpse of what love is, of what it is to love. And knowing what it is to love I have the hint of the shape of the outline of what it is to be loved. Not in general, not in abstract, but as me — with these eyes, this flesh, these hands, this body. I know what it is to love someone else — the risk of it, the vulnerability, the fragility, the passion, the pain and the glory of it — and I learn what it is to be loved, to be the object of someone’s desire, their risk, their passion, their pain, their glory. And learning love I learn power and taste freedom and know wonder. Learn the power I have to hurt or to exalt. Taste the freedom to respond or to repel. Know the wonder of love’s innocence and love’s economy.
Can you see the faces of the ones you love? Can you hold their hands in yours? Can you feel that shifting in the pit of yourself that they evoke in you? And you in them?
If you can, then you can say with St. John: “Love consists in this; not that we have loved God but that God has loved us.” Like it or not—understand it or not—feel it or not—God loves us with all the risk, all the passion, all the pain, all the glory, all the delight of the love we cherish for those special to us. Strange to say, we have become special to God. God looks into our eyes and is moved. God reaches out in risk to touch our hands. God has befriended us — has tried to, has made the first move, taken the first risk, and stands like a lover, waiting nervously, fragilely, to see whether our response will bring hurt or delight. Not in general, not abstractly, but for me, for each one of you, in all our distinctiveness, with all our quirks. God is partial to each one of us.
How do we respond?
The readings today have a lot to say about this, offering a vision of a Christian community founded on friendship and built on mutual love. But alongside the warmth of all that particular care and love, those familiar relationships and bonds, alongside that stands a vision of Christian community that is not partial, not exclusive, not particular about who belongs and who matters. The challenge and the call is for us, for you and me, to cherish both visions. That we might a draw in all impartially and love all with great partiality. But can we do that? Don’t we love by accident, on account of particular likes and dislikes? Maybe we do. But at least we know this. God manages to have a passionate, daring, risky, heartfelt love for me, and for you and you and you and you. Not for all but for each. With all the power and passion of particular bonds. With all the impartial generosity of unbounded benevolence.

I could have sworn when I read the gospel this week that that last line wasn’t in there — “penance for the remission of sins” — penance? In Eastertide? — hardly! So I looked it up — well it’s there in the New American Bible as large as life. Some other translations have “repentance.” I even tried spelling out the Greek and the word is metanoia — a change of heart, of vision, of imagination — an about-face.
Which is kind of the experience I had with these readings — a little shocked, a little dismayed, a little resentful — at having my Easter joy ruffled by three readings harping on sin and preaching penance. But not just sin and penance: sin, penance, and resurrection. Surprising allies!
There’s a lot of surprise and about-faces in these readings. Peter, a little while ago, coward and traitor, stands confidently preaching to the crowd. The disciples, hearts burning within them after the news from Emmaus, are suddenly struck into panic and fright by a familiar stranger breathing disturbing words of peace. They reach and touch him, they feed him, and still they are agitated but now with what Luke calls sheer joy and wonder. Now the reading doesn’t say so but I imagine they sober up pretty quickly as Jesus reminds them of who he is, of what he’s always preached, and of who they … and are to be—disciples, witnesses, people sent. “Nothing has changed,” he seems to say, “but everything is different.” “Look here I am, flesh and bone, eating cold fish out of ruined hands.”
And he tells them a story, a story they already know, a story we still tell each other, of life and death … and life.
Look how Peter puts it. “This is sin,” he says, “you disown justice and you prefer murder—you put to death the one who brings all things to life.” A better definition of sin than we heard all Lent! Sin is the choice of death when life is offered. And for some reason it’s so easy to die and so hard to live. So easy to repeat the old and so hard to risk the new. We can always find a reason why one should die for the good of the many, a reason why, in my case, laughter is out of the question, a reason why, in the circumstances, darkness is brighter than light.
Jesus chose life—offered to share it—and still we killed him rather than live ourselves. A final confirmation of the wisdom of our reasons. As if to say, “There! Done! Once and for all, proof that life is on a loser!” But just when you think it’s safe to slumber, when you’re sure there’ll be no more interruptions, and God is finally polished off—why then God refutes our reasons, confounds our cases. God denies the world forever the certainty of death. Even death is no longer safe, even hell has been opened and delivered up life, even the grave has become a garden.
“Touch me,” says this new Jesus, “believe I’m alive, believe that death is dead. Touch me and remember.” … Remember! If we have touched his joy we have been made witnesses. If we’ve known him in the breaking of the bread what choice do we have but to testify for life. If we’ve experienced the about-face of Easter then we have to share this with the world wherever it still dwells in the dark, still prefers murder to justice, still puts death to life.
Easter joy has its own challenges. If the Greek word for the about-face is metanoia, the Greek for “witness” is martyr. There’s a challenge, full of irony, that’s guaranteed to send us swaying between sheer joy and sheer panic. “Touch me,” says Jesus, “let my wounds be witness that I am not dead—I am alive. Turn about-face, you are not dead—you are alive. And tell the world—be my witnesses, my martyrs—tell them life is alive.”