Now it dawned on me that today’s Gospel reading gives us the Christian equivalent. Or rather it gives us the final episode in the Christian version. For the story we just heard Fr Warren chant is the last in a sequence of four events. Jesus calms a storm at sea; Jesus frees a man possessed by demons; Jesus heals a woman with a life-sapping hemorrhage; and finally, today’s story: Jesus raises a girl from the dead.
Just as in the story of the Buddha, these involve our deepest fears. We fear natural disasters, catastrophes. We fear evil, especially evil filtered through our fellow human beings. We fear sickness. And above all we fear death.
These–natural disasters, evil outright, wretched sickness, and death– are everyday realities for us. 1 We should be praying, starting now, that this summer will not bring another Tsunami and that this year’s Hurricane season will be a mild one. I can assure you that Caribbean peoples are already praying that prayer. 2 We live now in daily dread of the latest political evil: what will be the next rogue state, what will be the next act of vicious terrorism, who will be the next disgraced congressman? 3 Our prayer list is essentially a litany of illness. And 4 as everyone cannot help but know, two celebrities died this week, and even those such as I who did not pay much attention to them while they were alive, felt the sadness, felt that strange, human, personal sorrow.
These were the kinds of fears, and the sorts of pain, that the Buddha responded to by developing his way of detachment.
Now Christ responded to the same problems. But very differently.
The buddha, like so many, you see, wanted to escape this world and leave the Body behind.
But in the resurrection, the Body is absorbed, not consumed, by Spirit- said Gregory, greatest of all the great 4th-century teachers I have learned so much from.
Christianity is fundamentally not about detachment. It is about engagement. For Jesus in the Gospel of Mark does not withdraw from these fears. He confronts them, he vanquishes them. Storm, Satan, sickness. And today, the greatest fear of them all: Death.
I have mentioned before that the great psychoanalyst Carl Jung said that in his entire career he never met anyone over the age of thirty who did not experience this fear at some level.
Today we have the poignant story of Jairus, who we are told is a “leader of the Synagogue.” That was the highest status a Jewish man could enjoy in Jesus’ day. He would have had a comfortable home, good clothes, servants, plenty to eat–and access to the best medicines and doctors.
But we meet him in a desperate state. He is groveling on the ground, at Jesus’ feet, begging him to come help his daughter who is at the point of death. He calls her “my little girl.” That is part of the poignancy for we will learn near the end of the episode that she is actually 12, which meant in that culture almost fully grown and ready for marriage. This is the art of Mark’s Gospel: the humanity is in these little details. She is almost old enough to leave the house, but she will always be Daddy’s girl, that’s what this means. Mark wants us to feel for Jairus across the centuries, and it works. If you don’t feel for a man begging for the life of his twelve year old little girl–well, I know you do.
Then the messengers come, and tell him, pretty callously when you think about it, your daughter is dead. So stop bothering the Rabbi, the teacher.
And now the drama begins.
1. Jesus takes Peter, James, and John with him. This is a signal: this is a hinge moment in the Gospel. Notice first. The storm at sea involved the inner circle, the Twelve. Only they saw it happen. The exorcism and the cure, these happened in front of all the followers of Christ, of which there were by now hundreds. But the raising of the little girl was for Peter James and John only–the inner circle within the inner circle. Now notice this. At what other points does Jesus take those three men with him? He takes them with him to the Mount of the Transfiguration. And he takes them to the Mount of Olives, to witness his agony in the Garden. That means, these are the three to whom he shows first, what he really is; second, these are the three to whom he shows his soul’s torment, and third, today, he shows them what in the end he has come to do: vanquish Death.
2. And note how easily he does it. That ease is there in all four miracles. He simply stands up in the raging storm and “rebukes” the wind. Like you do with a five-year-old. We are terrified of demons; the demons are terrified of him–they surrender before he says a word. And the woman with the hemorrhage–he does not really do anything, she just touches the fringe of his tunic and the healing power drains out of him. So how does Jesus raise the Dead? When Elijah the Prophet resuscitates a boy in his story in Kings, he stretches himself out on the body, eyes to eyes, and breathes the spirit into him. But just as easily as he said be still to the winds, all Jesus does is take the girl’s hand and says, Girl, get up. Miracles for him are casual events, almost offhand. Effortless. This says so much about him.
3. And this says something about Death. “She’s only sleeping,” he tells them. They laugh at him. Well, you know the saying–he who laughs last.
For most people, death is definite. It has finality. Sleep does not. Sleep is followed by waking up. Jesus did not mean she isn’t really dead. That is clear. But Jesus says Death is sleep, and therefore resurrection is a wakening. It is exactly what John Donne expresses so powerfully in his poem Death be not Proud, the poem where Donne gets sarcastic with death: one short sleep past we wake eternally.
Physics now has had to borrow the word singularity to describe one of the weirdnesses it stumbled upon. Well, I believe Christian faith has several singularities, and its–our– view of Death is one of them.
The ordinary wisdom is that Death is simply part of nature, something natural. Ordinary wisdom says you might as well accept it, there is nothing anyone can do about it. Christianity says Death is not at all a natural thing. It was never God’s intent that we should die. We were designed immortal, just as we were designed for Paradise, not this dangerous world.
Usually we see Death as a punishment. It is that, in Christianity, but it is other things as well. Ignatius says that the “breaking of the Bread is the medicine of Immortality.” He is thinking of this story. What is medicine for? It is for sickness, for disease. Ignatius is calling Death a disease. Usually we think that death is something caused by disease. There is a mighty difference: Ignatius says it itself is a disease. And all diseases, potentially, sooner or later, are defeated by medicine. Christ is the cure for this illness the human race has caught. For the little girl, it was Christ’s hand and words. For us, most often, the Breaking of the Bread. I urge you, think of that today when you receive that gift in your hands: the Body of Christ, the medicine of Immortality. It does wonders for you. Literally.
This is the Christ of Mark, the first Gospel. There is no talk in Mark of the sacrificial lamb that takes away the sin of the world. This Gospel presents Christ the Victor. This, the First Gospel, gives us a Christ who can scold a hurricane, before whom Demons tremble, who is so brimful of healing that the edges of his clothes can heal vicious disease.
And Christus Victor as the theologians call him is the one person who really has the last laugh when it comes to Death. I am grateful for the sacrificial Lamb, of course. I admire Christ the New Adam and I honor Christ the Redeemer. But Christus Victor-he has my loyalty and my love. For one thing, when I have my own hurts, the kind that feel so big to me, I simply hand them to him. You really should try it.
Then there is this penultimate detail. The story ends with Jesus ordering them not to tell anyone. Because he is not going to raise all the dead. Not this way. This is just a sign and a sample. He will vanquish death altogether, but not quite yet. How will he do it? Well as Bishop Andrew showed as a few Saturdays ago, the answer is depicted throughout this Church. Most powerfully in our Icon: there he stands, Christ the Victor, in THE moment of victory. He is a redeemer and a sacrifice as well, but there he is the Victor. And there by the way he fulfills his name, which means “Yahweh saves.”
And what are the last (ten) words in the story? And he told them to give her something to eat. As I have said, these little, humanizing touches are part of the simple beauty of the First Gospel. It also makes it seem very true, I mean factual. But there is more. In the wake of the mighty act of power comes this coda: a simple act of compassion. Very small, but it shows: he is thinking of her, as everyone should have been. Resurrected persons seem to be hungry very often, and I will leave it to you to figure out that one. But that little final command–get her something to eat–is, in small, the whole of the Old Testament lesson and the reading from Paul. Ignatius says do not be imitators of Christ. Be imitators of God. And here we see how to do it: have a heart. You and I cannot raise the dead. But we can give all sorts of children something to eat.
Fr. David did me a great favor a couple of weeks ago by helping me conclude Adult Ed. I don’t think he realized what a favor this was. My head was spinning from semester’s end, and I feel the need to stop teaching and be taught. David gave us one of those sessions of Ad Ed where I wished this entire parish had decided to attend. For what stood out in his teaching that day was a very important principle in Christian faith. He showed us the familiar golden rule in three versions: Jewish, Muslim, and Christian. In both the Islamic and the Judaic versions it went something like this:
Do not do to other people what is hateful to you.
It is a great precept. It in fact sums up the Ten Commandments, for who wants to be lied to cheated on stolen from or murdered?
But the Christian version is this:
Do unto others what you want done to you.
You see the difference? Our sister faiths advise us about what we must not do. Our own faith instead tells us what to do: whatever we would want, do for each other. It is far more difficult and far more powerful.
What today’s glorious Good News shows us is the same thing writ large. You know, the great British historian Arnold Toynbee predicted with uncanny foresight that the great religions of the world would be experiencing a confluence in our era. Indeed and that’s why we now find Christina Zen and Jewish Buddhists and my priest friend in Rhode Island who says she’s a Christina Muslim. I welcome this because I believe the Holy Spirit has in fact touched them all.
But I also believe that we, in our singularity, have been entrusted with the deepest truth of them all. The Buddha, and in fact all the great faiths of the ancient world, from Hinduism to Stoicism, all advocated detachment from this world as the right way. For after all, there are certain realities we just have to learn to accept, sickness, age, death, natural catastrophes, and evil doing. After all, nobody can do anything about them.
Our faith says, on the contrary, there is someone who can do something about them. What can he do? He can handle sin, Satan, and sickness. Effortlessly. He can defeat the enemies you and I fear to the core. And to defeat the most pernicious one of all, all he has to do is say, get up, little girl.
