2018-03-28
Brooke Strong
Scripture: Mark 15:1-39
Over the top of one of the windows outside Mary’s and my house sits a bird’s nest. Each spring for the last several years, a mourning dove has laid her eggs there, and she has nurtured and protected those eggs as she has waited for them to hatch. We co-exist peacefully, human and avian species together.
Earlier this week, as I came out our front door for my morning walk, something about the mother bird’s behavior struck me as odd. Rather than sitting in the nest, she was hovering around our front path, flying quickly to and fro. There was a kind of nervousness about her that I hadn’t seen before. Several hours later, I spotted the problem. Beneath the nest, on our front landing, lay the bodies of two of her babies. Whether a predator had gotten them or they had simply fallen out of the nest I don’t know. All I know is they were dead.
Well, that’s not all I know. As I saw their bodies lying there, the life drained out of them, a wave of sadness came over me. And I noticed something else. Because I have usually seen those birds as I leave the house at dawn, I had assumed the bird’s name was a reference to the time of day—an “a.m.” dove, one associated with the day’s beginning. What I have since learned instead is that this is a bird named for its sorrowful call, a bird whose figurative watch is not the dawn, but the dead. That cooing of hers, that morning, was perhaps for her own children. I suspect she was mourning their deaths. “Mourning” dove, indeed.
Despite what we might guess, there clearly and strangely is not a whole lot of mourning going on as Jesus is put to death. Especially as Mark tells it, this is a story of desertion and desolation. Jesus is betrayed and denied. He’s tried in two entirely different courts, convicted by both civil and religious authorities, and abandoned by the crowds who ask for Barabbas to be released rather than the Prince of Peace. He’s led out to be slaughtered, all the while being jeered and taunted, first by the crowds then by the soldiers, and even by the scribes and chief priests. It’s a gruesome, lonely end to his life.
And there is virtually no one to mourn him. Oh, there are three faithful women there at a distance, women to be commended for their loyalty. And Joseph of Arimathea who asks for the body once Jesus is declared dead. But no one else. No one. It’s a grim scene, with little or no mourning.
And this is the centerpiece of our faith. “No,” we want to say, “the center of our faith is the living, breathing Jesus, the one who healed and taught and drove out various demons from people’s lives. The center of our faith is the living Christ who has been raised from the dead.” And we would be right. Jesus’ life was all about instilling wholeness and peace and justice. It was all about vindication from despair and death.
What we can’t avoid, though, as much as we might like it, is that today’s story is the pivotal linchpin of it all. The same Jesus who lived and was raised was also erased and wiped out—“crucified, dead, and buried,” as the Apostles’ Creed puts it. This pivot point is crucial to the story, and we dare not turn away too fast. The only way to new life is through death. And so disciples of every age and era mourn, because something dear and beautiful and fully alive is snuffed out.
We mourn Jesus. But we mourn, as well, all the ways our lives have not turned out the way we might have hoped they would. Some have seen their vocational hopes crushed. Others have lost a spouse or a child or a friend who meant everything to them. Still others have watched their health disintegrate.
We mourn Jesus at his death, yes. But that death embodies and represents the countless deaths that assault us day after day. And so we mourn the way our lives break and bend and fall apart. We grieve that things are not what we hoped they would be.
The story of Jesus bending and breaking and falling apart is an acknowledgement that life can be pretty awful. When so much of Mark’s story about Jesus is about that last week of Jesus’ life—actually, the last day or so—it has the benefit of conveying that life is full of rough edges and grim realities. The community to whom Mark was writing were writhing in pain. The temple in Jerusalem had been destroyed by the Roman occupiers. Everything they held dear seemed to be disintegrating. And undoubtedly the people were wondering where God was in it all. So fully one eighth of Mark’s gospel focuses on that last day of Jesus’ life, as if to say, ‘I get it. Life can be pretty awful.’
At the same time, though, the story is not meant in any way to concede defeat to the forces of evil and destruction. This isn’t Mark saying, ‘Yeah, life is pretty awful. Let’s just weep and give up.’ No, the story acknowledges these terrible things partly as a way, I suspect, of demystifying them, as a way of taking away their power. Just naming the evil has its own freeing power. Just to acknowledge it is a kind of gift.
On this season’s last episode of TV’s “This Is Us,” Randall and his wife Beth have a deep-seated and unexpressed anxiety about what might be brewing in another character, a teenage girl whom they’ve taken under their wing. So they decide to imagine out-loud worst-case scenarios, like “she kills [people] in their sleep,” “she kills them not in their sleep,” and so on. They do this to take away the power of their fears. Name them, and they don’t have the same grip on us. The gospel of Mark is, in a sense, naming the worst. It’s saying, ‘Look what awful things can happen. And yet, at the same time, we wouldn’t be talking about these things if there weren’t something good that came out of it, some blessing in the pain.’
Nor is it just about naming the pain. In naming it, we make room for something new. We make room for God to work. Last summer, Carolyn Hax, the insightful advice columnist, got a letter from a woman who said her mother had Stage 4 breast cancer. “My heart is broken,” said this woman, “and I don’t think I’ll ever recover. To put the cherry on the sundae, I’m in my late 30s and very single with no children or family to speak of. I thought I had another twenty years with my mom. This is breaking me. How do I go on?”
And Carolyn Hax responds, “It will make sense again, I swear. Or it’ll never make sense and you’ll look back and realize nothing ever made sense to begin with; it was all just expectations.
“But,” she says, “as someone who has lived [through something similar], I’m comfortable saying it’s better on the other side in every conceivable way besides my mom’s absence. Going through it made me less self-conscious, less competitive, stronger, kinder, . . . more aware of my faults, less inclined to wield those faults against others, better at using my time on things that matter to me, [and] more able to laugh . . . at myself.
“I don’t know why it takes having our guts ripped out for some of these things to make sense suddenly”—why the cross is necessary, in other words—“but that’s often how it happens—so we must find our way through the wreckage and to this other side. But I’m getting ahead of myself. You have important enough work in just spending all the time you can with your mom, and crying it out. It really is OK not to get more ambitious than that. You’re feeling broken now and you’re supposed to, but you will also mend when you’re ready to. Not into the person you used to be, but the person you’re meant to be, the one who can look at the same view as always but see twice what you saw there before” (Plain Dealer, June 19, 2017, p. P3). You will mend into the person you were meant to be.
In one of the Psalms, the psalmist says to God, “I called out to you, God; I laid my case before you: ‘Can you sell me for a profit when I’m dead? Auction me off at a cemetery yard sale? . . . So listen and be kind! Help me out of this.” And then comes the turn, the turn of grace: “You did it: you changed wild lament into whirling dance” (30:8-11, The Message)—“You have turned my mourning into dancing” (NRSV).
The mourning is still there, in other words; the grieving is still there. Because death and dying are an inevitable part of life. But, by the grace of God, the mourning and the grieving and the dying transform into something else. Or, as Hax says, “you will . . . mend when you’re ready to. Not into the person you used to be, but the person you’re meant to be.”
It is, as Hax says, partly a matter of seeing. In a 1975 commencement address at the University of California, Riverside, an address my mother shared with me years ago, the writer Joan Didion spoke about what moves her in even the darkest times. “I’m not telling you to make the world better,” she said to the graduates, “because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave’s a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that’s what there is to do and get it while you can” (New York Times Book Review, Oct. 9, 2005, p. 14). In the face of our own inevitable death, see life. Grasp it. Get it while you can.
An obscure little detail in Mark’s story has always intrigued me. After Jesus gives a loud cry and dies, the story tells us that “the curtain of the temple [is] torn in two, from top to bottom” (15:37-38). What an odd detail to report. The curtain, or the veil, is what separated the Holy of Holies from the rest of the temple. This is the section that only the High Priest entered, and only on one day a year. When the curtain is torn, it’s as if to say what’s most holy is available not just to one person any longer. Now everyone has access to this holy space. Now everyone is granted entrance to the place God dwells. Or, to put it another way, even as this searing death unfolds and reaches its nadir, a word of transforming grace is spoken, a word echoed later by the writer of Revelation: “See, the home of God is among mortals. God will dwell with them; they will be God’s peoples, and God will indeed be with them; God will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away” (21:3-4).
Even in death and destruction, in other words, the temple veil is torn, and God is available for all of us. The gospel conviction is that there is nothing that can “separate us from the love of God” (Romans 8:38-39)—not bankruptcy, not a shameful past, not a terrible parenting moment, not an apparently all-encompassing mental illness, not a grotesque mistake: nothing!
And if that is the case—if that is the case—then what are we to do to “get it while [we] can”? As awful as the death of Jesus is, it is also a death rooted finally in love. It expresses the love of God for the world, the love of Jesus for you and me. And if that is the case, and we’re to “get it while [we] can,” the only real option is to make such sacrificial love the byword for the fabric of our days. Love that sees need and responds. Love that sees hunger and feeds it. Love that sees loneliness and meets it. Love that sees gun violence and works, as yesterday, to reduce it. Love that opens itself to others in graceful care.
A Federated elder was at home one day this past winter. It was a particularly frigid night, the temperature down around zero. In the middle of the night, this woman woke up and realized that the house was freezing. Worried, she went downstairs, lamenting the recent death of her husband—who could fix anything—to see if she could see what was wrong, and maybe to fix it.
Having no luck figuring it out, she finally called her town’s police department and asked if they could tell her the phone number for her repair-person. The police nicely gave her the number, she called the repair people, and then she settled in to wait for their arrival the next morning. In the meantime, the police officer to whom she had spoken on the phone arrived at her house. This was at 3:00 o’clock on a bitterly cold morning. In came the officer. After checking her furnace, he realized that this woman was out of heating oil. So he sat in her living room with her, and started a fire in her fireplace, and made sure she was comfortable.
Above and beyond the call of duty. Yes, we name what’s broken, we mourn what’s lost. But with the tearing of the temple curtain, as does this unnamed police officer, we also claim the power of God. May we go and do likewise. Wherever life is fragile and difficult, may we share God’s holy love. In the name of the crucified, and risen, Christ.