Pisteo in Christus Resurrexit

I believe that my wife is a treasure to me.  But when I fail to act on that belief, what does it say about me as a husband?  And if I believe that Christ rose from the dead, but that belief doesn't impact my life choices, what does it say about me as a Christian?

As we leave church on Good Friday we stand like Lazarus, facing the exit from our tomb of doubt.  The possibility that faces us outside is the Easter Mysterium, the rising from the dead of Jesus of Nazareth.  In The Case for God Karen Armstrong makes a distinction that can serve us well as we confront the stone imprisoning us.  She names the stone Credo.

Credo, the Latin “I believe” gives us the word “creed”  a statement of belief that we can accept…or break into sects or religions over, or as in the Crusades, use as a reason to kill.  Credo entered the Latin Vulgate Bible in translation from the original Greek pisteo which means not claiming or holding a belief, but being impacted by it.

So as we encounter this week the real stretch that Easter is, perhaps we can spare ourselves the intellectual flagellation of doubt, and look instead at our lives lived in response to the possibility that this might be true, that death does not really matter.

Can we be pistons, the things inside our car engines that are propelled by the explosion of the gasoline in our cars that is ignited by the spark?  Can our lives be similarly energized by the spark of the Spirit that we feel in even considering the possibilities that we see laid before us this week? 

A song goes through my mind.  It’s not a church song, but one that makes me think of my wife when we were dating.  It’s Sam Cooke’s “You Send Me”.  Kathy was only 10 in 1957; I was just 11.  But ten years later, she’d become the spark of my life, and she’s sent me ever since.   Are we willing to let God who lives beyond death send us?   What a ride!

Where are You Bound?

Yesterday I was moved by the circumstance of Mary and Martha in John's Gospel story of the raising of Lazarus.  They had lost their brother.  It was memory of my niece, the heartbreak of my sister-in-law and brother-in-law fresher on the anniversary of her death that made me think of the grief of those left behind by death.

But I have been moved since then by the call to enter the story as Lazarus, and what is in my mind is how he was bound, bound, bound.  Two weeks ago, it was the Samaritan woman at the well whose attitude of stubborn self-determination that bound her.  It took repeated logical argument to draw her beyond her suspicion and hostility to trust and hope.  Last week it was the blind beggar who was given sight not instantaneously by magic mud, but also by going where he was sent and doing as he was told.  They were not zapped, healed in a moment by the touch of the healer like they do on some of those “faith healer” TV shows. 

Healing is not an event, but a process of letting go of what binds us. 

So I’m Lazarus.  Bound, bound, bound.  The stone is rolled away, and the voice calls, the voice of my friend Jesus is one I recognize even through these wrappings.   I’ve awakened from my acceptance of the Big Sleep, and decided to return to the life I left, with the complex love of my sisters for each other and for me.  I’ve decided to return to the world of mornings and their call to action, and nights and their call to rest.  I’ve agreed to accept hunger and thirst in exchange for savor and refreshment. 

But I emerge haltingly, my hands and feet tugging at the rags of my shroud, like a convict being let into court in shackles.  And I do not weep at the sight of blue sky or the faces of my sisters, or Jesus.  My sight is obscured by that same shroud, even as the coins had fallen from my eyelids when I’d sat up.  It strikes me that Lazarus is bound in his mobility by the shroud...and all of his senses too.  I see in myself that when I was given freedom to retire, to be released from the daily requirement of going to work, that I discovered that I was not able to move around freely, my mobility bound by another layer of binding.  I discovered that my senses were not open to my new surroundings, bound as I was to my past.

So here we are nearing Holy Week, called to drop our daily grind like the Samaritan Woman and accept our gift of sight like the beggar, and now to let go of our bindings, bindings, bindings that we have allowed ourselves to be imprisoned in, just as Lazarus.  We’ll not climb Calvary in our shroud.  We have a couple of weeks to get with the program, to not only emerge from our cave but to reclaim our mobility and respond to our senses as we try yet again to believe that we can take on death with Jesus, and emerge from it.