“Life is Longer than Death”
by David Ketchum
April 9, 2023
Watch the video HERE
I’d like to continue on from last week, when Dr. Ray reminded us that the Easter message is given -
“in the face of a broken heart … When your life has been broken and the shattered pieces are lying all around your feet, heaven is not the issue…. Tomorrow is the issue. … Jesus didn’t send the blind man or the leper to heaven, but according to the gospel narrative, he gave them back their whole selves… not in an imaginary world in the clouds but right here, right now, in the only life we know anything about.”
Some of the basic questions I carry with me whenever I go to read an ancient text are: why was this worth remembering to the people who remembered it? How did they tell this story, and how were they changed in the telling of it? Why is this story worth remembering now? In the case of the gospels, they particularly speak to the experience of those living amid what Walter Brueggemann describes as “the destructiveness of empire.” It’s a world that is devastatingly familiar to billions of human beings around the world, across geographies and cultures. These oppressive systems, and the injustices that they bring, are the usual topics of our Sundays together, as we refuse to stand idly by. So it is that we recognize ourselves and our loved ones in these stories. Brueggemann connects them together by inviting us to:
“Imagine a world of life come amid the destructiveness of empire. It is this life-carrier who said to his followers, ‘I give you the power to forgive sin.’ I recruit you for the forgiveness business. I charge you with healing, transformative reconciliation. It was then, and always is, a hard work for the church, because in the empire there is no free lunch, no open hand, no breaking of the vicious cycles of fear and violence and failure. So here is my pitch. Imagine that you and I, today, are a part of the Easter movement of civil disobedience that contradicts the empire. Let’s see what happens. Let’s see if life is longer than death.” (A Way other than Our Own)
Brueggemann’s description of the “contradiction between empire death and Easter life” is a pathway to reflect both on the everyday choices we make and the movements we build. Looking back over the Easter reflections I’ve shared the last few years, this stands out to me. There is a litany of suffering, mirroring the crucifixion, followed by the determination to keep going, insisting on creating just, joyful, equitable communities, mirroring the resurrection. As I said last Easter, “we live in the hope that the world can be different and that we can be part of the difference.” So we repeat these stories, to remember the choices we are making between “empire death and Easter life,” and to make those choices clearer and more compelling.
One of the moments when that choice became clearer came to me during the summer semesters of 1997 and 1998, when I was teaching English at Leningrad Oblast Pedagogical Institute in Pushkin, on the edge of St. Petersburg, Russia. It was a wonderful time, and I still have some favorite stories that make it to my personal greatest hits lists. (Chief among them is probably Vladislav telling Jim, “I only break the law for you!” A close second may be the time I found myself singing “Old MacDonald Has a Farm” in broken Russian on a public bus on the way to the airport.) It was also my first firsthand exposure to the liturgy and iconography of the Orthodox Church. I would wander those old cathedrals and chapels, many operating only as museums at the time, soaking up the images and architecture. One particular icon repeatedly stood out to me. The descriptions in English called it “The Descent into Hell” or “The Harrowing of Hell,” though a more straightforward translation would have simply named it “The Resurrection.”
That literal translation is the basis of an argument that “the harrowing of hell” is a poor substitute for “resurrection,” and I get that point. But I am also personally fond of the image of harrowing hell. There are multiple meanings when it comes to this harrowing. The one that is almost certainly meant here is from an Old English word meaning “to ravage, plunder; seize, capture.” In that sense, the resurrection was portrayed as a conquest, a military victory against the army of death. We also know from Shakespeare that you can harrow someone’s feelings, leaving them feeling distressed. Thankfully, I wasn’t aware of either of those meanings at all in 1997. So when I heard the name “The Harrowing of Hell,” my mind went immediately to agriculture. A harrow is a heavy rake, and to harrow the soil is to break it up, to prepare it for planting. And hadn’t Jesus said that, “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain, but if it dies it bears much fruit”?
The image of a seed in the earth is a dear one to me. I especially love how a seed settling into the soil transforms the common negative associations many cultures have about darkness. The soil holds the seed in safety, nurturing it. The darkness holds the seed while it awaits the right time to respond to the sun and the rain and stretch itself in a tender green shoot. But even then, it remains rooted in the soil. In Denise Levertov’s poem, “Eye Mask,” the poet rests in the dark, “unready for the light” -
“I need
more of the night before I open
eyes and heart
to illumination. I must still
grow in the dark like a root
not ready, not ready at all.”
Similarly, David Whyte describes the “Sweet Darkness” as a womb that nourishes us in wisdom, freedom, and joy –
“Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn
anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive
is too small for you.”
This is why that image of Jesus taking Adam and Eve by the hand resonates so strongly with me. From a psychosocial perspective, the work for social change also requires tending the wounds, going into the “darkness and the sweet/confinement of your aloneness.” This is something my own early religious and cultural traditions failed to equip me to do. We were not allowed to have struggles unless they were past tense. At church, I learned well that I shouldn’t talk about a problem until after the problem was solved. We were encouraged to “rededicate our lives” as an acknowledgement of those problems, but that rededication communicated that we weren’t going to cause any trouble to anyone else. I don’t even know if there was anyone who could acknowledge that I was in the darkness, let alone go into it with me. If there was that possibility, it was hidden from me.
The obscurity was intensified by the nearly constant messages about how unworthy and evil I was. In that version of faith, that made me especially dangerous, because evil and impurity were contagious. I learned that goodness was a limited good, something that could be exhausted or spoiled. But I caught a glimpse of another possibility in the stories about Jesus. These stories upended everything, including my own fear and self-loathing. In the everyday world, ritual impurity made people outsiders; they were feared because their impurity was contagious. Their very presence could pose a risk for others, because the impurity could spread and others would face rejection. But in the stories of Jesus, everything was new; it was wholeness that was contagious.
This is the heart of many of the miracle stories, with Jesus upending the expected outcomes. We recognize it most easily in stories where Jesus interacts with the ritually unclean, like lepers or the woman with an issue of blood, and the morally unclean, like Zacchaeus the tax collector. It’s not limited to cases of ritual impurity, though. For example, in the tale of the feeding of 5,000 people, when the disciples wanted to send the crowd away because there was not enough food, the scarcity was contagious. They were afraid of their own lack and couldn’t risk missing their own dinner on what was sure to be a failed attempt at a group picnic. But with Jesus, abundance was contagious, and they had leftovers. In the tales of sailing on a stormy sea, the storms were terrifying and dangerous. The disciples’ fear was both reasonable and contagious, and their panic spread to each other. Jesus was the exception, and his peace was so contagious that even the sea became calm.
The resurrection stories fit this pattern. Jesus’ goodness, wholeness, and abundance is contagious. So when the powers that be assumed that killing Jesus would also kill the community of Jesus’ followers, that was a practical assumption. They very reasonably thought that Jesus’s death would be contagious, signaling the death of the community and movement. But in the gospels, Jesus’ life was so contagious that even death got infected and came to life. Hell was harrowed, and Adam and Eve got up again.
Growing up, I had absorbed the idea that my needs came last, if they came at all. I also understood that any woundedness I experienced would be interpreted as a lack of faithfulness and a moral failure. This was part of the marginalization I experienced and an example of how empire greases the wheels for domination. It was important to hide my needs and to hide my woundedness, because woundedness was weakness. So it also became easy to confuse woundedness for some deficiency in me, a failure or a sin, reinforcing my own self-loathing. Contemplating the Orthodox icons of the resurrection, the harrowing of hell, was part of my own seeing-through those lies.
The Easter story became an invitation to enter into the healing work I needed to do, to harrow my own hells. I learned that, when you are wounded, faithfulness looks like healing. I learned to stop judging what I needed to do when I was wounded by what I was able to do when I was well. I learned that I couldn’t judge myself into wholeness. The role judgment had was to help me understand what needed to heal and how to heal it. It was not ever meant to leave me feeling guilty for needing healing. Punishing myself for having wounds wouldn’t speed up the process. If I wanted to demonstrate faithfulness in the face of empire, I would need to tend my wounds and harrow my hells. I would need to learn to love myself, heal, and come to life. I needed to go into the safety of the darkness, and let the earth become a womb. After all, “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain, but if it dies it bears much fruit.”
Returning to the question of why and how these kind of stories were remembered, John Dominic and Sarah Crossan remind us that there was a gap between “Israel’s faith … in a Creator God of distributive justice” and the people’s experience of being caught between “superpowers warring first on a north–south and then on an east–west axis.” To hold on to those convictions within a “world of imperial injustice and political oppression,” they envisioned a future where
“war’s violent injustice” would be transformed “into peace’s nonviolent justice—here below upon a transformed earth.” Importantly, this was also a universal resurrection; it was “not … about the earth’s destruction, but about its transformation.” (Resurrecting Easter)
Jesus’ life and ministry flowed out of and embodied that vision, but with the insistence that the transformation was meant to begin and blossom right now. John and Sarah write that
“Jesus’s kingdom of God … represents a paradigm shift, tradition swerve, or disruptive innovation within this contemporary matrix. For Jesus, the kingdom is already present, but only if, when, and as humans accept it, participate in it, collaborate with it, enter into it, and take it upon themselves.” (Resurrecting Easter)
The trouble is that this kind of transformation is disruptive to those oppressive systems of domination that rule our world and our lives. The crucifixion was meant to be a warning of that. As Brueggemann points out, Jesus
“collided with the will and purpose of the Roman Empire and with the Jews who colluded with the empire. He is not crucified because of some theory of the atonement. He is crucified because the empire cannot tolerate such a transformative, subversive force set loose in the world. Jesus’ uncompromising commitment to the purpose of God contradicted the empire that lives against the grain of God’s intention.” (A Way other than Our Own)
The crucifixion was meant to tidy up the loose ends of resistance to empire, to the normalization of oppression and domination. In such a world, there is not much choice. If empire kills us, we must come back to life. Resurrection is resistance. We turn the grave into a garden; we turn our suffering into seeds; we turn our hells into healing; we rise again. As immigration justice activists have powerfully spoken and embodied over the last several years, we remember: "They tried to bury us, they didn’t know we were seeds.”
Happy Easter!
