April 20, 2025 (Sunrise)

An Idle Tale?

One of my favorite stories (which I may have used before, but if so it bears repeating) comes from my seminary days at Colgate Rochester Divinity School in Rochester, New York.  It’s the apocryphal account of Jesus’ resurrection appearance to a group of seminary students.  He approaches them and asks, as he did of Simon Peter, “Who do you say that I am?”  And like good seminarians, they respond, “You are the eschatological manifestation of the ground of all being — the kerygma in conflict and decision in the humanizing process.”  And Jesus says, “What?”

The story is funny because it calls attention to a rather common, and somewhat pernicious tendency among those of us with degrees in theology.  We like to cloud the air with a little theological jabberwocky whenever we’re afraid of being on shaky ground.  It is a very comfortable thing for a minister in a pluralistic society and a theologically diverse congregation to allude to Jesus in abstract terms like ‘the kerygma in conflict and decision in the humanizing process.”  Such intellectualizations allow us to speak about Christ in ways that cover the wide range of theological perspectives and categories that make up just about any congregation.  We can maintain a modern world-view and a healthy skepticism while not offending anyone – and confusing everyone.

The only problem is: what are we to do with Easter?  What are we to do with this embarrassingly simple story of a man who rose from the dead, confounding our attempts to allegorize the gospel and relativize the Christ?  The story is simply this: Jesus was crucified, dead and buried, and rose from the dead.  The Bible doesn’t give us much wiggle room to dodge the shock of that account.

The disciples’ first response upon hearing the story was understandable.  They may not have been tremendously quick on the uptake, but they had been around long enough and been through enough to know the difference between reality and foolishness.  They heard the story of the resurrected Jesus and they decided not to bite.  Scripture says they dismissed the story as “an idle tale.”

We are less ready to dismiss the entire story than they, but, if the truth be known, neither are we particularly overcome by it.  It is good on Easter Sunday to repeat, “Christ is risen!”  It is heart-warming to recall the scriptures; it brings a smile of recognition and the warmth of fond memories.  But many of us tend to keep the transforming power of that story at arm’s length.  We are, after all, rational, twenty-first century, thinking people.  None of us have ever seen someone come back from the dead.  And it is a simple thing to value the teachings of Jesus without having to be knocked off our pins by a denial of the degeneration of the human body at death.  It’s not that we admit our skepticism out loud.  We simply keep it in the back of our minds as a hedge against getting too carried away with religion.  We are people of science, and we live in such a reasonable world.  The base-line of comfort that allows us to get through our days is the relative dependability of predictable events and the familiarity of the patterns and routines that become our norms.  If we lived in a world where the sun might rise or set at any moment, causes might as easily follow effects as the other way around, and people might come back to life as readily as they die, we’d all go out of our ever-loving minds.  We are like the people of the village Anatevka in the musical Fiddler on the Roof; we keep our balance through tradition!

But, would it disturb you to learn that our science has revealed the world to be a far less predictable and far more surprising place than we ever imagined? The litany of the bizarre, now embraced by scientific theory, is impressive: sub-atomic particles – the building blocks of existence – seem to be capable of instantaneous ‘communication’ over nearly infinite distances; the subjects of quantum experiments appear to have no objective characteristics at all until observed by the experimenter, as though the act of observation itself were ‘creating’ reality; and the events upon which we so consistently rely in our daily lives are based not upon the dependably precise and ordered actions of electrons, protons and neutrons, but upon the degree of probability that certain occurrences will arise in a virtual sea of sub-microscopic unpredictability.

In short, the brightest scientific minds of our age are telling us that there is far more to existence than you and I can begin to imagine.  And that, at its core, reality is not a comfortably known phenomenon; it is more unfamiliar and unsettling than the most far-fetched science fiction.  Put in the language of faith: there is something far more wonderful to life than we know.

The sad truth is most of the time we keep ourselves at a distance from that wonder because we are addicted to the familiar.  The unknown, let alone the unknowable, is just too uncomfortable a place to live.  We wrap ourselves in blankets of custom, and walk through our days holding tightly to tradition, while all around us, unseen, the world is recreating itself with new surprises every minute.  It is entirely understandable that we hold tightly to the familiar.  It’s not a cause for shame.  But it does create a tremendous amount of resistance to allowing ourselves to be surprised by reality, surprised by one another, surprised perhaps by the Lord of Life.

I think it’s our pride that often keeps us from being surprised.  We like to feel that we’re smart enough to see things the way they truly are.  It is the humble person, the humble heart, the humble church that is open to transformation, to the learning and growth that cannot come from our well-ordered routines and prideful assurances, but only sneaks up on us and startles us by tapping on our shoulders.  Karl Barth said that “Wherever graves are, there is resurrection. . . . Broken, the Church can bear its message with its head erect, for the Gospel belongs to the Church that is lost.”¹  Barth has put his finger on a profound truth: being a little lost is a prerequisite to being transformed.  And it is our pride that keeps us from being at all lost.

For example, men are often shocked, angered and disbelieving when we are told that we have said or done something hurtful to women.  We don’t believe that we have done anything wrong.  We rarely intend any harm.  So if our wives are hurt by something we said or some assumption we’ve made, or women in a group discussion point out that we’ve made a sexist remark, we tend to conclude that they are imagining it or that they are being over-sensitive.  How many of us men are willing to look at our own responses as prideful resistance?

What’s more, it’s not only men who take part in that comfortable system.  Women buy into it all the time.  This all goes on not because any of us are out of whack, malicious, or masochistic.  It’s simply that we don’t know any other place of comfort than the places that are familiar.

It’s not a coincidence that the disciples who heard the tale of Jesus rising from the dead were all men.  It’s not a coincidence that those who went to do the anointing at the tomb that morning and ran back with the news were women.  It’s not a coincidence that the men (who were busy with their important, manly stuff) dismissed what these women had to say.  Scripture says, “. . . it was Mary Magdalene and Joanna and Mary the mother of James and the other women with them who told this to the apostles; but these words seemed to them an idle tale [and we might add the implied phrase: told by foolish women].”

But, surprise, guys!  The women were right!

And, surprise, everyone!  The story of Jesus was not over after all!

There are things far more wondrous in this life than you can begin to imagine.  But we miss them so often because we’re too wrapped up in keeping life predictable.

If we’re ever going to get anywhere, we’ve got to get out of our “comfort zones.”  If we’re ever going to let the intrinsic value of each human being be known and embraced we are going to have to allow ourselves to be astonished by each other!  That means approaching one another with fresh eyes, expecting to see something of value where once we might have been dismissive.  That applies to men and women; it applies across cultures and races; and it applies to those who find themselves on opposites sides of an issue.  If we’re ever going to truly know the wonder of this amazing, Divine creation we live in, we’re going to have to be ready to see and recognize the astounding in the world around us!  That means paying attention to the ordinary and expecting to find the extraordinary.  If we’re ever going to take the truth of Jesus Christ to heart, and allow it transform our lives, we’re going to have to let ourselves be surprised.  And maybe the place to start is to be surprised by the story of a man once dead standing and removing the burial cloths, and the ground trembling and shaking open the tomb.  If we can allow our minds to get a little blown by that, then maybe we can begin to see that the power of Love can shake off the blinders of prejudice, pattern and pride, shake off even the scales of death, and make us new!

Our death-dealing patterns of living are not the final answer.  The barriers that separate races, genders, cultures, and perspectives are not the end of it.  And perhaps death is not a brick wall at the end of the line but a door.

This is the abiding note of hope, that is the consistent theme of all those who have stood before the darkened tombs of life’s desperate moments and been overtaken by grace.

Christ is risen!  And in that wondrous event is the clear and unmistakable declaration that there is no defeat from which victory cannot be won.  There is no ending which cannot turn into a beginning.  There is no death by stale routine that cannot be remade into something grand and noble.

Christ is risen indeed!

Have a glorious Easter.

¹ Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, Oxford University Press, 1968, p. 416.