Easter Thoughts on Saturday

The cross is empty.  The tomb is sealed.  It is Saturday.

Throughout the Gospels Jesus tells stories of the lost and found.  Most famous of these is the story of the man with two brothers or, the "Prodigal Son".  This parable is preceded by two shorter parables featuring a lost sheep and a lost coin.

"Two what shall we compare the Kingdom of God?" Jesus asks, rhetorically.

The Kingdom is like yeast hidden in the bread, treasure hidden in the field, a pearl of great price.

Parables of the lost, found, and hidden.

On that Saturday the disciples were surely lost and Jesus was surely hidden.  Where was the Kingdom?

The Kingdom rests between the lost of Friday and the found of Sunday.  The Kingdom is hidden in between.

The uniting theme of the lost, found, and hidden parables is joy.  When the shepherd finds the one lost sheep he celebrates.  When the woman finds the coin she joins in neighbors in joy.  Full of joy the finder buys the field and, although the joy is not explicit, we may safely assume that the one who sells everything to obtain the pearl of great price found joy in doing so.

In order to experience the joy of discovery we must first endure the pain of loss.  In the first set of parables (Luke 15) the pain is very real.  The shepherd is concerned for the sheep.  The woman is frantic over the coin.  And the father is grief stricken over his lost son.

In the second set of parables (Matthew 13) the loss is not as keenly felt, for the motive in selling flows from the joy of finding.  In this case, the one who obtained that of great value was willing to let go of something else of lesser value.  But in each case there is a transaction,  movement, from lost to found.  From letting go to acquiring.

As Jesus lay in a sealed tomb the disciples must have pondered all that they had lost.  Did others have the same thought?  Did anyone meditate upon the madness of allowing the crucifixion of the one who healed the sick, raised the dead, fed the multitude, taught with authority and, above all, simply loved like no other had loved?

Have you ever let someone, or something, go and then sit in despair wondering what on earth you were thinking?  Did you trade your favorite baseball card for a worthless trinket?  Did you trade in the car your loved for the car you thought you loved?

Or perhaps we just suffer a loss beyond our control and the remedy for which seems beyond our control as well?

In the story of the man with two sons, the younger son flees his family believing the joy lies in lascivious and carefree living.  He discovers he is wrong.  The crucial part of the story is the moment the younger brother "comes to himself" or, as the Common English Bible translates it, "comes to his senses", he hatches his plan for return.  Although willing to be a servant, the younger son is received as a son with joy by the father.  What seemed lost for good was suddenly restored with joy.  It was the younger son's Easter.

Madness crucified Jesus.  Pure and simple madness.  There is no other way to describe the death of a man who possessed so much good.  Jesus was not just a good preacher, a beatnik, an activist, or prophet.  He was love itself.  No one else did what he did.  No one else performed the miracles, brought the hope, shared the love like he did.  The Kingdom he brought was good news for everyone.  Even his enemies stood to benefit from the social order Jesus championed.  But, as the scripture so often indicates, they were blind.  The Pharisees were blind.  The disciples were blind.  Here was God incarnate in their midst, asking for nothing but permission to change their lives, and he was rejected.  Madness.

On Friday the sheep was never found.  The coin lost forever.  The treasure hidden eternally in the field.  The pearl of great price languished on the shelf.  The younger son never came to himself, but died in a gutter and decayed amongst the garbage and the flies.

Saturday is the day of regret.  The day of loss.  The day to ponder what could have been and never will be.  Saturday is the day of lost opportunity.


Early Sunday morning the stone is rolled away.  When the women arrive at the tomb they find that it is empty.  Some of the disciples go inside to see for themselves.  Messengers speak of resurrection.  Jesus has gone on ahead of everyone.  At first there is fear, speechlessness.  By Easter evening there is joy.

Sunday is the day of joy.  Not the joy of eternal life or the victory over death, although that joy is hovering.  The immediate joy of Sunday is the joy of the woman finding the lost coin, the shepherd finding the sheep.  Sunday is the joy of the one who buys the field and the pearl.  Sunday is the joy of discovery, the joy that flows from realizing that we are not going to live with the consequences of our bad decisions, our bad choices, our rejection of love and mercy.  Sunday is the joy of the second chance.  Sunday is the birth of a new and stronger motivation to cling to what we thought was gone for good.

Perhaps the stone was not rolled away so that Jesus could get out.  Perhaps the stone was rolled away so we could go in.  And come to our senses.  And enter into the joy of not only finding again what was lost, but of being found ourselves, fully and finally, in joy.

The Myth of the Weak Victim

The debate currently raging across America relating to guns is a sub-text of a larger phenomenon I call “The Myth of the Weak Victim”.

The Myth of the Weak Victim is a mindset that addresses all power imbalances by prioritizing strengthening the victim over the nullification of abusive power.  Although protecting victims and their rights remains an imperative, limiting our imagination to this empowerment is shortsighted and distorts the relationship between abuser and victim by focusing on the victim’s inability to cope rather than on the perpetrator’s insistence on victimizing.

The Myth of the Weak Victim is the lynchpin of the gun lobby’s argument for the unrestricted availability of dangerous firearms.  National Rifle Association Chairperson Wayne LaPierre’s argument that “the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun” is the perfect embodiment of the Myth of the Weak Victim.  Rather than a commitment to take a societal stand against violence and the abuse of power enabled by unrestricted access to guns, the answer is to arm the victim.  One can argue that it is naïve and unrealistic—even dangerous—to expect bad guys to not have guns.  But this argument is born of a prior, unspoken assumption that admits, “We cannot stop power abuse and violence.”  Accepting this premise blinds us to alternative ways of thinking.

Guns are but one segment of society where this myth plays out.  Throughout our country domestic abuse prevention shelters are full of victims of abuse while abusers remain comfortably at home.  Why is it hard to imagine a society wherein those who have suffered abuse are comfortably at home while abusers populate temporary housing for treatment and rehabilitation?  When abuse happens in churches, perpetuated by either clergy or powerful lay people, the research indicates that more often than not the matter is dealt with by advising the victim to “move on” to either another church or judicatory while the perpetrators remain in place and the behavior unchecked.  Although social awareness of bullying is increasing, it is still the most common approach to bullying either in school or in the workplace to advise the victim of “strategies” of dealing with the bullying, including avoidance.  The ongoing plight of the LBGT community serves as another example of culture’s acquiescence to abusive power.  In each of these instances, the abuse of power and violence is managed by focusing on the victim and the victim’s options rather than taking a powerful stand against the abuse of power and its accompanying physical and emotional violence. 

The Myth of the Weak Victim is particularly relevant as we approach Holy Week.  Holy Week celebrates the “weak victim” that is Christ as he is brutalized and crucified by those who justified violence with religious and political claims.  The historical Church interpretation of the events of Holy Week is God’s self-sacrifice for sin.  The notion that Jesus “died for my sins” glorifies the victimization of Jesus while minimizing the cruelty of his attackers.  If Jesus’ death is atonement for sin, than humanity benefits from promoting the violence that leads to the crucifixion.

But this insistence upon the efficacy of Jesus’ death obscures Jesus’ message of the presence and nature of the Kingdom of God.  The Kingdom of God is a reality rooted—not in the weak victim—but in the social inversion of power.  The first are last, the poor are invited to the feast, and power is expressed through compassion and not dominance.  The Myth of the Weak Victim grants as a given the ongoing presence of violence and abuse.  The Kingdom of God inverts and eradicates this distinction between power and victim.  In the Kingdom of God the weak need no encouragement but ascend to a place of perpetual safety. Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.

Popular theology often disconnects the crucifixion from the resurrection.  One is the atonement for sin, the other the gateway to eternal life.  But if the crucifixion is seen as the unjust act of brutality that it is, then the resurrection becomes the astonishing miracle of forgiveness and second chance.  Jesus’ resurrection gives us the opportunity to reexamine our willful acceptance of violence and reevaluate ways in which we can eliminate crucifixion in all of its forms.  Rather than a world of the weak victim, we strive for a world that has no victim at all.