| God’s Joke |
|
A sermon preached by The Reverend Robert Atwell at St Mary’s, Primrose Hill, on Easter Sunday 2006 A woman was walking down a residential street and saw a frail, wizened old man rocking contentedly in a chair on his porch. She called out to him as she passed by, ‘Hello there! I couldn't help but noticing how happy you look. Tell me,’ she said, ‘what's your secret for a long happy life?’ ‘I smoke three packs of cigarettes a day,’ he replied. ‘I drink a case of whisky a week, eat nothing but fast food, and never, ever do any exercise.’ ‘Wow!’ said the woman, ‘that is amazing. That must make you really happy! And just how old are you?’ she asked. ‘Twenty-six,’ he replied. In Germany, as late as the middle of the eighteenth century, Lutheran pastors would begin their sermons on Easter Day with a joke. The custom even had a Latin title: it was called risus paschalis – ‘the paschal joke’. In a tradition of Protestantism not exactly given to hilarity, the thought of a Lutheran pastor climbing into his pulpit, fiddling nervously with his starched ruff, and saying to his assembled congregation, ‘Have you heard the one about…’ or, ‘A funny thing happened to me on the way to the Bundestag this morning…’ somewhat bizarre. Why a joke? Because in the Lutheran tradition, the empty tomb and resurrection is seen as God’s great joke on the world. We laugh and sing because that is what God is doing today in raising Jesus from the dead. Of course, death is no laughing matter. It has always cast its shadow over humanity. Alone of all the animal kingdom – at least as far as we know – we live in the knowledge that one day we will die, and this is something we have to try and make sense of. Our ancestors who invented agriculture discovered that planting and reaping brought them to the brink of solemn mysteries in this regard. If a dry seed could be buried in the ground and then shoot up as a living plant and bear fruit, what about the corpses of men and women buried in the earth? So they buried trinkets, flowers and even weapons with their dead in a desperate hope that the dying and rising of vegetation was a sign of life beyond the grave. The idea of resurrection found expression in all sorts of myths of gods who died and came to life, in rituals around funerals, and in dreams of paradise. By the time of Jesus the battle-lines were drawn, much as they are to this day, between those who ridiculed such talk as illusory, and those who pinned their hopes on it. In Jesus’ day the Jews were split into at least two camps. There were the Sadducees, the conservatives, who urged people to mistrust the prospect of resurrection as a fantasy conjured up to avoid the finality of death. And there were the Pharisees who insisted that resurrection was a certain, though remote prospect, occurring just before the last judgement. But on a particular Sunday morning, God did something absurd in the face of all this human debating about death. He took our symbol literally. It was if he said, ‘Oh, are you worried about death? Is the idea of resurrection bothering you? Well, here goes. I’ll start with Jesus. Now you see him, now you don’t. One grave empty, the rest to follow.’ The crucifixion and burial of Jesus which we have commemorated this week are about human power over God. We took this man Jesus, God’s expression of his very self, nailed him down, and finally buried him. And then suddenly, just when we thought we had him beat, secure in his tomb, he springs up like some jack-in-the-box. But it’s a very strange game that God is playing with us today. By losing this game, we win. That’s the joke. And that’s why the angels are laughing out loud in heaven. Lancelot Andrewes, one of the great Anglican preachers of the sixteenth century, whom I suspect was no more given to telling jokes from his pulpit than his Lutheran counterparts, when preaching to King James I in 1620 spoke about the strange encounter in the garden between Mary Magdalene and the risen Christ early in the morning on Easter Day. Imagine Mary Magdalene’s consternation when she discovered that not only had the stone blocking the entrance of the tomb been rolled away, but the body was gone as well. She alerts some of the other disciples, but they run away in panic. So much for the men. Only Mary stayed behind, and in a sense her weeping figure stands for all who are prepared to wait in dark places. Mary mistakes the risen Christ for the gardener. We need to note this. The resurrected body of Jesus is very different from his earthly body. This is not a resuscitated corpse. It is only as he speaks her name, ‘Mary’, that she recognises this figure to be her Lord. If you want evidence for the resurrection you need look no further than the incredulity of the disciples themselves: they simply did not expect it. Lancelot Andrewes, however, preaching to the king made a different point. He said that by virtue of the resurrection, Christ will (and I quote) ‘garden our bodies too, and turn all our graves into garden plots’. ‘This gardener,’ he said, ‘made Mary all green of a sudden’. It’s been a long cold winter, and it’s a relief to find the sun shining today, the air warmer, the daffodils in bloom and the trees on Primrose Hill at last greening. And that transformation can be a reality for us too. We are here to celebrate the resurrection of Christ, and in so doing by God’s grace we will find ourselves ‘greening’ as well. In the words of one of the hymns we often sing at Easter: When our hearts are wintry, grieving or in pain, The resurrection of Jesus is God’s great joke. So let’s sing out for all we are worth, because there is laughter at the heart of the universe today. © Robert Atwell, 2006 |
