The Last Enemy (1 Corinthians 15:19-26; Easter C; March 31, 2013)

The Last Enemy

1 Corinthians 15:19-26
Easter C
March 31, 2013

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA

He did what he said he was going to do.  Luke is a little vague about just where and when.  “Once when Jesus was praying along,” it says.  But it was clear back in chapter nine, some fifteen chapters ago.  Jesus had asked his disciples what the word on the street about him was.  They answered that some people thought he was John the Baptist, others Elijah, still others one of the various other prophets.  Jesus asked who they thought he was and Peter—it’s always Peter, isn’t it?—Peter answered, “God’s messiah, the Christ, the anointed one.”

Then Jesus told them what he was going to do: He was going to Jerusalem.  There he would suffer, be rejected by the leaders of their people, and be put to death.  And on the third day he would rise.  And that’s what he did.

He went to Jerusalem.  He went to confront the powers that be in Jerusalem.  The powers that be were what we would think that they were: the Romans, of course, who governed in Judea without much pretense at home rule, and their Jewish collaborators.  These came mostly from the upper classes.  They were the priestly families, the nobility, the landowning class, the one-percenters.  Rome had arranged things so that the local upper classes would keep their positions and enjoy their privileges as long as they kept the people quiet and made sure the taxes were paid in full and on time.  This was Rome’s scheme of empire that left them free to enjoy the fruits of empire while leaving most of the dirty work to the local elites.  It was a neat arrangement.

Jesus went to Jerusalem to mess up this neat arrangement.  Once there, he headed to the Temple, the center of religious and symbolic power in Roman Palestine.  The Temple wasn’t just a place of worship.  It was also a state-controlled medium.  Its symbols and rituals continually broadcast the message that the way things were was God’s will.  The emperor and his servants were to be obeyed.  Those who obeyed them would be rewarded.  Those who disobeyed them would be punished.  The rich and the poor were rich and poor by God’s will and, since God is just, the rich deserved their wealth and the poor deserved their poverty.

There had been a series of revolutionaries and would-be messiahs who had come to Jerusalem determined as Jesus was to beard the lion in its own den.  What made Jesus different is that he saw that the struggle against the Empire would not take place on a military level.  He knew that it would be a struggle in symbol and story and one that involved the spiritual and invisible powers as well as the visible and political ones.

So on the way to the Temple, he staged a bit of street drama in which he made fun of the symbols of the empire by putting on all the trappings of empire and parading into the city.  Then, when he got to the Temple, he un-tidied the arrangements by making a mess in the court of the Gentiles. He wrecked the booths and stalls of the money-changers and the vendors of sacrificial animals and drove the merchants and money-changers themselves from the Temple.  In doing that he stripped bare the false claims and pretenses of the priestly leaders.  God had in fact nothing to do with what was going on in the courts of the Temple complex.  God had not blessed the status quo.  Obedience to Judean collaborators or their Roman overlords was no virtue and disobedience was no vice.  The only allegiance that anyone owed was to that elusive, never-quite-present and never-quite-absent reality that Jesus called the reign of God.

Walter Brueggemann has written somewhere that what tyrants fear most is not armed revolutionaries—and I would add, not even if they are armed with AK-47s—but poets.  Tyrants are most afraid of poets, because poets can use language to lay bare the lies that tyrants need in order to govern.

In the streets of Jerusalem and in the Temple, Jesus, the poet, unmasked the false promises of the Empire.  The Empire had a way of dealing with annoying poets and it was simple, especially if they were not Roman citizens: they killed them.  So that’s what they did.  But of course along the way they used symbols and speech of their own to try to undo what Jesus had done.  With a thorn of crowns and with the inscription on the cross—“This is the King of the Jews”—they made a mockery of his mockery.  They crucified him in public—a dehumanizing and humiliating death penalty used to demonstrate how Rome dealt with rebels.  With characteristic efficiency and brutality they dealt with this annoying poet and master of street theater.

There were two things they had not counted on.

The first was that even a state-sponsored murder like the one that Jesus suffered can have more than one effect.  The intended effect was to subdue the people, to show what happens when subjects disobey.  But in Jesus’ case it backfired.  Roman claims to rule were based on the claim that Roman justice was just.  But here was Jesus, an innocent man, put to death for a capital crime.  This was a miscarriage of justice.  Romans claimed to be just, but they themselves had made clear that they were more interested in staying in power than in justice.  The Romans had not counted on Jesus’ ability to turn his crucifixion into an indictment. 

More than that, they had not counted on the resurrection.   Now, I’ll be the first to say that I don’t understand what happened in Jesus’ tomb.  Neither Luke nor any of the other gospels is of much help.  They tell us that Jesus died.  Then they tell us that he appeared alive to his disciples in various settings and circumstances.  They do not tell us what happened in between.  I not only say that I do not understand what happened, but also that we should be very cautious about trying to fill in a blank about which the gospels are not only silent, but not even curious.

Still, the resurrection is central to our story and we are here this morning for good reasons.  I have not labored over a sermon, the choir and the musicians have not planned and practiced for weeks, you yourselves have not made the effort to be here only for me to tell you, “Never mind.  There’s nothing to see here, folks.  Now move along!”

It’s just that we’re up against a mystery.  We don’t have much tolerance for mysteries.  But by saying that the resurrection is a mystery I’m not saying that it isn’t important.  The resurrection describes a simple reality: when the disciples gathered after Jesus’ death, they experienced him as present.  Sometimes, especially in the beginning, it was a presence you could see and touch and hear.  Later, and for us, it is a presence that is no less real, but less obvious, experienced mostly in our hearts and minds and that sense when we are together that there is more to us than the sum of our parts.

If you were here last week you remember that I talked about Monseñor Romero, the archbishop of San Salvador, who was killed thirty-three years ago last Sunday.  As an archbishop he spent his time and energy with the poor of El Salvador and was such an outspoken advocate for them that the government was frightened and enraged.  He knew that his life was in danger.  A couple of weeks before he was shot while celebrating mass, he told a newspaper report that if the government had him killed he would be resurrected in the Salvadoran people.  I know that what he promised came true, because I have felt Monseñor Romero alive in them as they processed with lit candles to commemorate his martyrdom, when they sang songs to celebrate his love of the poor and his demands for justice, when they spoke of Monseñor’s vision for a Church of the People in a country that worked for everyone, not just for the fourteen fortunate families that control most of the wealth.

As much as it is true for Monseñor Romero, how much more is it true for Jesus.  The Romans thought they had disposed of him, but he is very much alive, more alive now than he ever was when he walked the hills of Galilee and the long, stony road to Jerusalem.  I have witnessed his resurrection.  I have felt him in a hospital room while waiting with someone going to surgery.  I have felt him beside a death bed when a faithful follower has completed their life’s journey.  I have felt him in worship as his people gather to pray and sing and listen carefully to God.  I have felt him as people found the courage to stand up for love and justice and against fear and mistrust.  I have even felt him in committee meetings—yes, I know, it’s hard to believe, but it’s true—I’ve felt him in committee meetings as people wrestled with hard decisions, sought God’s wisdom and committed themselves to supporting each other.  I have witnessed the resurrection.

The Romans never counted on that. 

Their empire, of course, is long since gone.  Other empires have come and gone since.  But the Empire is still around.  Nowadays it’s harder to see.  It doesn’t fly a flag or have a single seat of power.  But its scope now is global and it has no boundaries. 

Its centers of power are in places like Bonn, Tokyo, London, Wall Street and K Street.  It operates differently now.  It no longer crucifies its enemies, at least not literally. 

But for all the differences, there are some things about the Empire that haven’t changed.  It still makes promises it can’t keep.  And in the end the only thing it has to offer is death.  It has turned everyone and everything into a commodity, something to be bought and sold.  It knows, to borrow a phrase from Oscar Wilde, the price of everything and the value of nothing.  It counts everything, but there is something that it has not counted on.

There is a power at loose in the universe.  There is a justice that oppression cannot overcome.  There is a compassion that fear cannot defeat.  There is a love that hatred cannot bring down.  There is a life that death cannot hold back.  There is a power at loose in the universe that stands with us when everything stands against us.  There is a power at loose in the universe that has drawn us together this morning. 

So we have come to hear the same story that we’ve heard over and over, to take up the task of being God’s people in the world once again, to be sent as Jesus was sent.

We are here because hope has been set free from despair.  We are here because love has outlasted hatred.  We are here because peace has proven stronger than violence.  We are here because life itself is risen from the dead. 

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.