On the Resurrection

(My mom died in March of 2014 and my dad in April of 2007. Today I ran across this, which I used in a Sunday School class in the fall of 2007. It seems good to share it on Easter Monday.)

Generally, I teach and preach out of where God is prodding me to grow. The death of someone you love has a focusing effect on a topic that may have been more theoretically interesting before.  The question my parents' deaths has focused for me is what difference does it make that I believe in the resurrection of Jesus from death? 

It made a huge difference for St. Paul.

1 Corinthians 15: 3, 4. 14, 15, 17-19 (TNIV)

For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins…, that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day, and that he appeared to Cephas…the Twelve…more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time…James…all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born.

…

And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless, and so is your faith. More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that [God] raised Christ from the dead… And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost. If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.

I had two discussions with people about the resurrection, one with a Christian friend from OSU who does not feel any necessity to believe in it and the other with a Quaker friend who does; both of them said that their present lives were so worth living they did not insist on being personally resurrected.  They acknowledge that if life were more presently miserable, the hope of a blissful life after death would be more meaningful. And I have asked myself, if the human being is not eternal, does that make life here necessarily miserable?  I too have thought that the world is so lovely and the relationships so precious that it could be enough, and then I lose someone to death or tragedy strikes within my awareness, and I hope for some way beyond death and tragedy.

The eternality of the human soul was not taken for granted in the Old Testament—that’s why the psalmist often pleads with God to preserve life for God’s own sake, because the psalmist will not be able to praise God in the grave.  The best expression of this with a bit of hope is in Job 14: Mortals, born of woman, are of few days and full of trouble. They spring up like flowers and wither away; like fleeting shadows, they do not endure….At least there is hope for a tree…but a man dies and is laid low; he breathes his last and is no more…If someone dies, will they live again?...You will call and I will answer you; you will long for the creature your hands have made. The only hope is that God will want to continue relationship with the creature rather than lose that to death. The immortality of the soul and the possibility of resurrection were topics of debate in Jesus’s day between Pharisees and Sadducees. Jesus enters the debate decisively on the side of the eternal human soul, justifying the faint hope expressed by the writer of Job.

Scripture records five “returns from death” prior to Jesus’s own resurrection. None of them has the history-changing effect of Jesus rising from death. Two are in the Old Testament.  1 Kings 17 tells the story of Elijah, the widow at Zarephath, and her only son.  When the boy sickened and stopped breathing, the widow accused Elijah of bringing judgment for her sin on her.  Elijah took the boy and prayed, “O Lord my God, let this boy’s life return to him.” The boy revived, and the woman took the miracle as a sign that Elijah was a man of God who spoke God’s truth.

2 Kings 13 tells a very odd story about desperate Israelites throwing a dead man into Elisha’s tomb. When the body touched Elisha’s bones, the man came to life.

Moved by compassion, Jesus raises a widow’s only son from death, saying, “Don’t cry” (Luke 7:11-15). He also raises a little girl, saying, “Stop wailing, she is not dead but asleep” (Luke 8:40-56).  And most famously, Jesus raised Lazarus from his grave after 4 days entombment, saying, “Your brother will live again…did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?” For some, these miracles established Jesus’s credibility as a prophet and perhaps even the Messiah.

However, these miracles also had great potential for getting Jesus in trouble for sorcery, and they did not prevent the crowd from chanting “Crucify him!” As Jesus himself said in a parable, “They have Moses and the prophets, listen to them.  If they won’t listen to Moses and the prophets, they won’t listen just because someone rises from the dead”  (Luke 16:29, 31).

After the resurrection and ascension of Jesus into heaven. Peter raised a woman named Dorcas/Tabitha from death and Paul restored Eutychus to life after he fell out of a window. 

So the main point of these stories is that those God sends as Messiah, prophet or apostle can also return the dead to life on occasion, though of course, not always.  None of these stories requires belief in the immortality of the soul, only in the efficacy of God’s spirit working through God’s messenger.

The Bible teaches us that God is alive and eternal; God gives life and death; God’s spirit raises [some] dead people in the Bible; life and death are mysteries; and the return to physical life is not the same as the resurrection. In fact, Paul says that coming back to human life is not the very best outcome for the dead person (“to die is gain”). Paul says this because Jesus’s resurrection changes everything.  And it does so because it is unlike all these others and unlike the near-death experiences or even death-and-resuscitation experiences that occur each day. It is one of a kind, or, better put, the first of its kind.

Paul argues that if Christ didn’t rise from death we are not saved out of our sins and those who have died are simply dead. If Christ didn’t rise from death, we are more miserable than those who disbelieve in Christ and the resurrection.  Paul is not talking about simply regaining breath and a heartbeat, but entering an entirely new life through the doorway of death.

Romans 5: 10

For if while we were hate-filled, the death of God’s Son changed our hearts toward God, much more surely, having changed our hearts, his life will save and restore our lives.

Romans 6:3-4, 10-11

Do you not know that baptism signifies our participation in the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Baptism buries us with Christ in death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life¼ Jesus’s death severed all relationship with sin, all at once and one time for all; but the life Jesus lives, he lives in relationship with God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God through and with and in Christ Jesus.

Paul works to help his readers and us understand that Jesus’s death takes away any basis we thought we had for hating God, for turning our backs on God. Jesus’s death turns our faces toward God and makes loving God possible. Jesus’s death breaks our relationship of slavery to selfishness, contrariness, malice, moral laziness, despair, over-indulgence, and possessiveness. We die with Jesus. A slave who dies is free—out of the reach of the whip and chains of unresolved fear, shame, and guilt. But there’s more and even better news.  We are free to relate uncomplicatedly to God, like a child who trusts and loves a parent.  We can respond to God’s unconditional love with unconditional love of our own.  Pay attention to this truth, says Paul, so you don’t fool yourselves into living like slaves. Instead, live by the faithfulness of the Son of God, who loved us and gave himself for our sakes. 

Essential to Paul's understanding of the work of Christ is the GLORY of the resurrected Jesus.  Now we are holy through Jesus and the resurrection, rather than the law. Jesus’s resurrection shows that he has the power to make us good, something the law could not do. Now we serve God guided by God’s own Spirit, rather than by law; our lives are characterized by the central question, “What does God want from me in this moment?” This is the life Jesus lived—"I do not do my own works but only what my Father tells me to do." Now we know that God is the best of all possible parents, and we are God’s sons and daughters. God is more intimate and accessible than our real daddy or mommy. The resurrection of Jesus means to us that nothing can separate us from God’s love.

The life of Jesus shows us what a life of intimacy with God looks like. We can see in Jesus how the wind of the Spirit blows wherever the Spirit wants, how God’s own self responds to restrictions and rules, how God feels about children and women, how God’s own self loved this good life even while he KNEW he would be resurrected; how impossible it was (and how hard it is even now) for ordinary humans to grasp the whole picture, to get the difference he was living before them on a daily basis.  So let's be merciful, just as God is merciful.  Let's love God and love our neighbors.  

The final seal of our adoption is the redemption of the body—the resurrection we look forward to, when the mortality of our present bodies is swallowed up in the immortality of new bodies, bodies like the resurrected Christ. We live in hope that when we see Jesus we will be like him; and, for now, in our present weakness, the Spirit intercedes for us. Now God works for our good, God calls us, God justifies us, God glorifies us, and if God is for us, who can be against us?  If God is on our side, who will condemn us? It is not Christ’s death alone but Christ’s death AND RESURRECTION that sets us right, sets us free, and sets us on fire with love for God Almighty.

Tamar and Immortality

One of the signs that the Bible depicts continuing revelation is the institution of levirate marriage among the early Hebrews. The only kind of immortality these people believed in was found in having children who carried on their father’s patrimony. So the practice, which was written into the Law later, was that if a man died without fathering a child, a brother or the nearest male relative must father a child with the widow, and that child would be the dead man’s child. (Barren women were considered to be failures, and their failure to produce children legitimized polygamy.) We don't do this nowadays because we no longer believe it to be God's plan--thus, continuing revelation.

This is the context for the story of Tamar—a Canaanite woman, by the way—from from the book of Genesis, chapter 38. Tamar was married to Er, eldest son of the famous patriarch Judah (by his Canaanite wife Shuah). Er died without any children, so Judah gave Tamar to his second son, Onan. Onan was selfish and cared nothing for his duty to his brother, so when he had sex with Tamar, he interrupted coitus and spilled his semen on the ground. God struck him dead.

One misreading of this story is that birth control is wrong. Subsequent understanding of reproduction tells us that “pulling out” is not a sure method of birth control, so Tamar could have been impregnated by Onan despite his stinginess. Further, semen has millions of sperm in it, only one of which is not “wasted” if pregnancy results. Natural reproduction for humans is immensely wasteful of the potential for life contained in sperm and ova, particularly if we add in the number of spontaneous miscarriages, many of which occur before women have any idea they are pregnant.

Another misreading of this story is that masturbation is wrong. In fact, masturbation doesn’t appear in it at all. The only possible Biblical reference is in Leviticus where “nocturnal emissions” make a man unclean the following day. More about uncleanness laws another time. If anything, Onan’s selfish action is sexual fraud, and we can see how God feels about that.

Judah blamed Tamar. Something about her had killed two of his sons (his own hope for immortality, by the way). He sent her back to her own family. This was a huge disgrace for her, and it is obvious that she felt it as such. Her duty—a sacred duty—was to provide a child to carry on her husband’s patrimony. Before God she felt bound to do this work. She waited for Judah to carry out his promise to give her to his youngest son, but it became clear over the years that Judah did not intend to do so. She was stuck in childless widowhood with no way out.

Because Tamar’s duty to her dead husband is so embedded in and infected with patriarchal values, it is hard to see how she is an example of the inclusion of women in the love and plan of God. However, note that she represents a woman who put her own sense of right and wrong ahead of propriety or fear. If having a baby for her husband was her sacred calling, she was determined to fulfill it.

The rest of the story is a wonderful trickster tale. Tamar hears that Judah is coming into her part of the country. She dresses up like a Canaanite religious prostitute and waits for him by the road. He does not recognize her behind her veil, and he takes advantage of her availability to have sex with her. (No one takes him to task for sex with a supposed idolater, or for sex outside his marriages. This is another evidence of the profound stranglehold patriarchalism had on this culture.) He is short on cash, so he gives her his ring and walking stick in pledge. When he sends money to redeem these items, no one knows that religious prostitute, so he keeps his money and keeps his mouth shut.

Tamar goes home to her father. In a few months, someone tells Judah that his daughter-in-law has turned up pregnant. “Bring her out and burn her to death,” he rages. Now this is interesting; it is apparently the case that she was not free of her marriage despite being a widow, at least until she birthed a child who could be legally attributed to her dead husband. Judah is angry because she has not fulfilled her sacred duty to his household, but at the same time he has made it impossible for her to do so. What a double or triple bind she is in.

But Tamar speaks up on her own behalf: “The man who owns this ring and walking stick made me pregnant.” “Oops, those are mine,” says Judah. “Never mind that stuff I said about burning her. God has taught me a big lesson here; Tamar was doing what she could to fulfill what she thought God wanted of her.”

Some of this story is infuriating—the culture that required Tamar to make herself vulnerable to the opportunism of a sexual exploiter like Onan; the culture that allowed Judah to have sex with a prostitute and then to require his pregnant widowed daughter-in-law to be burned for adultery.

More of this story is inspiring—a Canaanite woman does what she believes is her religious duty, even though she risks death, and she lives to tell about it. Some of the story is empowering—God validates Tamar by including her and her children in the line of the Messiah, and the record is there for all time in both Old and New Testaments. Some of the story is simply deeply satisfying—the powerless person tricks the powerful person, and the outcome is comedy.

It is interesting to think ahead to Mary, whose baby could be attributed to no human male. Like Tamar, Mary chooses for herself. She chooses to accept God’s will for her, which involves scandal and humiliation and potential death by stoning. As it turns out, through Mary’s son, no single male became immortal, no one family or clan continued its existence, but instead all humanity is invited into eternal life, starting now and continuing through death.

The Bible, Inclusion, and Sarah and Hagar

Because the Bible came out of patriarchal culture, whenever women's stories are told it is unexpected. In fact, I've come to see these women as signs of inclusion at many points in the Bible. Inclusion often involves some sort of conflict or trouble, which may cause people to consider women as causes of trouble rather than signs that trouble is implicit in the cultural norms.

Recently I looked into various marriages in the Bible, starting with Abraham and Sarah, because St. Peter refers to Sarah as a model for all wives in her submission to her husband, calling him, “Lord.” So I went to read the story. There are two places where Sarah joins Abraham in lying about their relationship, acquiescing to being known as his sister (which is apparently half-true, showing again that this culture is not the same as ours). First, before they are known as Abraham and Sarah—before God renames them—they take refuge from famine in Egypt. Sarai is barren, so it is easy for them to mislead the Egyptians. Because Sarai is beautiful, Pharaoh takes her into his house and gives Abram gifts, perhaps even the slave-girl Hagar. God sends plagues, Pharaoh wises up, sends Sarai back to Abram, and complains about being deceived. Much later, Abraham asks Sarah again to join him in his half-truth in the land of King Abimelech; again, the king takes Sarah; this time, God warns him in a dream that Sarah is married. (As an aside, this shows God speaking directly to a Canaanite king and the king’s immediate obedience.) So two times, Sarah follows Abraham’s lead in misrepresenting their relationship.

In the rest of the story, her submission is less obvious. When she can’t conceive, she decides to help God fulfill God’s promise by offering Abram her Egyptian slave, Hagar, as a surrogate; Abram listens to Sarai and has sex with Hagar, who becomes pregnant. Sarai accuses Hagar of having contempt for Sarai and treats her so harshly Hagar runs away.

God meets the pregnant girl in the wilderness and speaks directly to her. Think about this: not only does God reveal God’s self to the chosen man Abram, he also speaks to a Canaanite king and to an Egyptian slave-girl. God tells her to go back to Sarai and be respectful, and God promises that her son will be the father of multitudes too numerous to count. She names her son Ishmael—“God hears”—and names God as “the God of seeing,” marveling that she really saw God and remained alive. Remember this—a runaway Egyptian slave-girl saw God, received a command which she obeyed, received a promise like the one given to Abram, and lived to tell about it.

In the past, some may have read this passage as defining the duty of slaves to be submissive and respectful to their owners. We wouldn’t do that nowadays, now that we know slavery is wrong. But we don’t hear the rest of the amazing truth in this passage. God meets Hagar face to face and reminds her that he is taking care of her and her unborn son. (I want to write it this way: God. Meets. Hagar. Face. To. Face.) He also confronts her with her contempt for Sarai. Hagar affirms her human dignity by choosing to obey God.

Fourteen years later, Isaac was born to Sarah. When Sarah saw Ishmael and Isaac together, she said to Abraham, “Cast out the slave woman and her son.” Really Sarah is saying, “Cast out your son who is not my son.” Abraham loves Ishmael; he doesn’t want to send him away. God says, “Don’t worry about Ishmael and Hagar; I will make a nation of his descendants also. Do whatever Sarah says because Isaac is the one I promised you and intend to work through.” God can say this because God is the one taking care of Hagar and Ishmael. So in the morning, Abraham sends Hagar and Ishmael off into the wilderness with a canteen of water and some bread.

When they run out of water, she places Ishmael under a bush and goes far enough away that she cannot see him. She does not want to watch him die, and she weeps aloud. God hears Ishmael, who must also be moaning, and God’s messenger says to Hagar, “What troubles you, Hagar? Do not be afraid; God has heard Ishmael’s moans. Go raise him up and hold his hand. Remember that I will make a great nation of him.” Then God shows her a well of water. They live in the wilderness, Ishmael learns to hunt, and eventually his Egyptian mother finds him a wife from Egypt.

Notice this: God again communicates supernaturally with Hagar. God cares for her again in the wilderness. God makes sure she and her son (and Abraham’s son) do not die. God does not berate her for forgetting his promise. God treats her tenderly and rescues them. God includes the father of the Arabs in his care, knowing full well that there will be enmity and war between the descendents of Abraham, just as there has been enmity between the mothers.

The lessons from this are so challenging: God is the God of Hebrew and Arab. Indeed, with all the attention paid to the supernatural nature of Isaac’s birth, it is easy to overlook the supernatural care given to Hagar and Ishmael. God includes them. This ought to challenge Christians who see Zionism as the will of God, and it ought to challenge Christians who see patriarchy and sexism as the will of God as well.

It has to be noted that Hagar’s worst enemy is not Abraham but Sarah; yet the grounds of their animosity is in the patriarchal system that values women because they give birth. Barrenness is shameful to a woman for the same reason a woman must have a child on behalf of a dead husband; the important achievement is to provide the man with immortality through descendants. Sarah wants a child for Abraham for reasons Tamar will understand. In a patriarchal system, women compete with women to be valuable to men. If what men want is a son to carry on the patrimony, women will value themselves as they are able to produce that son.

However, Sarah, who somewhere in her life called her brother/husband “Lord,” has intrinsic value before God. It isn’t enough that Ishmael was born on her knees, symbolically her child. She wants her own child. She cannot reconcile herself to the legal fiction that makes Ishmael her child. Sarah also wants to birth a child for her own sake, and her jealousy of Hagar has to do with Sarah’s own hunger for immortality. When she went through menopause, she must have despaired. No wonder she laughs bitterly when she overhears God’s messengers repeating the promise to Abraham that Sarah herself will bear a child. No wonder she laughs with joy when Isaac is born. The gift of Isaac, the gift of laughter, the gift of immortality comes courtesy of God only, not from the legal fictions of human beings. No wonder the child of Hagar is an intolerable intruder on this gift as Sarah sees it. Sarah behaves cruelly to Hagar; God does not punish this cruelty, perhaps because God knows that patriarchy has crippled Sarah’s understanding of what gives a woman value.

A few generations later, Jacob’s two wives, Leah and Rachel, compete to give Jacob sons. Leah is far more fertile, producing three sons; so to compete, Rachel gives Jacob her servant girl Bilhah as a surrogate; those two sons count for Rachel. When Leah quits having children, she gives Jacob another servant girl Zilpah as surrogate; those two sons count for Leah, who leads five to two. When Leah’s son brings her mandrakes, which supposedly help make women fertile, Rachel begs for the mandrakes. In exchange, she sends Jacob in to sleep with Leah. Leah had two more sons and a daughter.

When God opens Rachel’s womb, as the Bible puts it, she has a son. Significantly, she rejoices by saying, “God has taken away my reproach.” What is reproachful about being barren? In this culture, the wife has failed in her main duty to her husband—the duty to make sure his line does not die out. Much later, Rachel dies birthing her second son, whom she names “son of my sorrow.” Her sorrow is not just the hard labor, but the sorrow of being unable to measure up to others. Despite being genuinely loved by her husband, she values herself for her fertility, and Jacob’s willingness to go elsewhere sexually in order to have children shows that he too believes a wife’s barrenness requires the remedy of more sexual partners to ensure descendants.

Women are primarily property in these times. Adultery is a property crime in a culture that permits polygamy. It isn’t having sex with more than one woman that is a crime; it is having sex with someone else’s wife. If a wife has more than one sexual partner, who knows which man’s descendant the child is—who has gained immortality thereby? So the response, as seen in the story of Tamar (which will be for another day), is to kill the woman. This ostensibly will reinforce the faithfulness of women so that husbands can be sure the children are theirs. Comically, it is after her sojourn in the house of King Abimelech that Sarah gives birth to Isaac. This seems to me to be a small divine joke at the expense of patriarchal anxieties.

It makes me sad that because of the mistaken use of the Bible to perpetuate patriarchy, people who know in their hearts that God doesn't favor men over women and patriarchy is wrong have felt that they must stop respecting the Bible as an authority for faith and practice. They dismiss and devalue a text that is an enormous resource for understanding the relationship between God and humanity—that tells us over and over that even at our worst, God loves us and is committed to making us whole and holy. They don’t get to know the historical Jesus with his tender heart and tough mind, his focused obedience to his Father, his full humanity in such unimaginable tension with divinity. How sad to know little to nothing of how God has touched the lives of humans in one small tribal group, how God has insisted that other tribal groups matter to God also, how God has entered the circle God drew, as William Blake challenged him (William Blake: "To God/ If you have formed a Circle to go into/Go into it yourself & see how you would do."), and how God has made available to all a new way of living in this world and a hope for joy after death.