View From The Pew
by Gerry Hunter
(Posted April 9th, 2001).
Bp. Ingham's Easter Message ...
http://newwestminster.anglican.org/
The Bishop's Easter Message
At the heart of Easter lies a deep simplicity. Christian faith is not first and
foremost a way of believing, but a way of living.
Long ago there was a famous rabbi named Hillel. A tradition says that one day
someone came to see him and asked him to explain the whole of Jewish faith
while standing on one foot. Hillel thought for a moment, and said: "Do
unto others as you would have them do unto you: the rest is commentary."
The rest is commentary - what a wonderful phrase. All the books, the sermons,
the dogmas and doctrines, the statements of faith, even the art and music are,
as Hillel understood it, subsidiary to one central truth: that religion is
about goodness, the living out of God's goodness towards others.
I've pondered the story often, wondering what I would say if someone asked the
question of me. How would I explain the whole of Christian faith while standing
on one foot? The challenge, of course, would be to cut right to the heart of
the matter, to separate the one central message of Christ from everything else
that has accumulated around him. The answer, for me, would be resurrection. In
a sentence: Jesus Christ brings life out of death, new kinds of life out of
many kinds of death.
From the beginning, Easter was the central belief of the Christian movement.
"If Christ is not raised, then our faith is in vain," wrote St. Paul
(1 Corinthians 15:14). In the New Testament, the gospels themselves are
extended commentaries built around "passion narratives" - those long
sections describing the arrest, death and resurrection of Jesus. This is the
core material of the gospels, and the rest (the infancy stories, the healing
miracles, the disputes with the religiously self-righteous) is either prologue
or appendix. The main point of the gospels is that Jesus was given over to
death but not vanquished by it.
Now, as we know, there are many forms of death. Every one of us has to cope
with them in one way or another as we go through life. The loss of loved ones,
betrayal by friends, debilitating sickness, helplessness in the face of evil,
despoliation of the planet, suffering of innocents, the ruin of our deeply
cherished dreams - all these elements of the human condition take away our
vitality at some point, our capacity to live the life we have been given. They
are aspects of the power of death that robs us of life even while we are
living.
One of the promises Jesus made was about restoring the ability to live: "I
have come that you may have life in all its fullness" (John 10:10). He was
speaking about a quality of living, a fullness that comes with a deeper
knowledge of God and a growing spiritual maturity. As we become more vulnerable
to God, we become more Christ-like. As we do so, a long process of spiritual
transformation begins in us and we develop a capacity to overcome the many
powers of death.
Indian mystical theologian Raimundo Pannikar says that what is important, in
the end, is not Christianity but Christianness. He means, I think, that it's
not the dogmas and the creeds that are significant so much as the power of
Christ himself to make us whole. The purpose of everything that is said and
written about him is simply to bring us to the Christ who makes us new.
Christian faith is not first and foremost a way of believing, but rather a way
of living. It's the art of practising the gospel way which flows from growing
into Christ-likeness. There is a deep simplicity to this which we sometimes
miss. Yet it is the heart of Easter.
Whatever happened in that grave in Jerusalem on the original Easter morning may
well be of importance to scholars and historians, and even at times to our own
intellectual curiosity. But it pales in comparison with the grace of the risen
Christ that reaches out to us here and now. God's incredible act of
resurrection is waiting for us even in the midst of our brokenness and sin.
Christ's grace is stronger than death. No power on earth can defeat us when we
live by faith in him.
"In Christ shall all be made alive" says St. Paul (1 Corinthians
15:22). This is God's promise, sealed by an empty tomb. The rest is commentary.
+ Bishop Michael
TheResurrection -
Accept No Substitutes
A Commentary on the Easter Message of Bishop
Michael Ingham
By Gerry Hunter
One of the nice things about a spot of leave is the chance to catch up on your
reading. Having whittled down the “to do” list, and filed my taxes, I set about
doing just that last week.
The Easter message by Bishop Michael Ingham had been posted on the diocesan web
site, and I’d printed a copy to read later. (That surprised me. With the fourth set of papers from the “dialogue”
process still missing, I thought the site was broken. Apparently not.) I saw
the title sticking out from a pile of pages, reached over, pulled out a
document, and read on the page:
It is therefore contrary to the Catholic faith not only to posit a separation between the Word and Jesus, or between the Word's salvific activity and that of Jesus, but also to maintain that there is a salvific activity of the Word as such in his divinity, independent of the humanity of the Incarnate Word.
I blinked. I read it again. Could it be that the Bishop of New Westminster had come to the place where the revealed identity of Jesus had first place for him, rather than the one the Bishop had seen fit to assign to him by dint of fallen intellect? I flipped back to the first page of the document, and realized I’d been the victim of finger/eye trouble. After a certain age, a man must first put on his glasses, and then reach for the paper. I hadn’t. What I’d picked up was a Vatican notification, written to set straight the ambiguities in a book by a Jesuit pluralist. It, too, had been in the “to read” pile. Glasses in place, I retrieved the Bishop’s Easter message.
True to form, the message began by quoting a non-Christian source: Rabbi Hillel. A curious choice. Hillel was what we would today call a liberal theologian. For instance, he utterly set aside Scripture, and held that a man could divorce his wife for any and every reason. With views like that, it becomes not only helpful but mandatory to set scripture aside.
Well, perhaps not so curious a choice.
Moving along, we encounter a peculiar raison d'être for the gospels – about convincing us that Jesus was given over to death, but not vanquished by it. A pity the Bishop hadn’t told St. John about that. The evangelist said “These (‘many other signs’, the prologue and appendix, I guess) are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in his name. (Jn 20:31)
Now Jesus (in the superfluous parts of the gospel, by the reckoning of the message) promised to send God the Holy Spirit so we may have that life. (Stay tuned for Pentecost.) But apparently, we’re talking about a different kind of life here, one that comes, “As we become more vulnerable to God,” and that purports to make us “more Christ-like” through that process, apparently without the action of the indwelling Third Person.
If one is now having trouble with what the Bishop is getting at, with vulnerability leading to Christ-likeness, he kindly gives us a hint. He next quotes Raimundo Pannikar, and Pannikar wrote “The Unknown Christ of Hinduism.” And there it is: a switch between Jesus and “the Christ,” the kind Christians mustn’t make.
To cap it off, what actually happened the first Easter is, according to the Bishop, pretty much as may be. It’s significant that the last paragraph speaks of “Christ” without “Jesus,” and “resurrection” without “the,” – much as the Prince of Wales wants to be defender “of faith.”
Since the Bishop closed his pluralistic musings with 1 Cor. 15, so will I:
But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep. For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive. But each in his own order: Christ the first fruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ. Then comes the end, when he delivers the kingdom to God the Father after destroying every rule and every authority and power. (20-24)
Let there be neither word games nor flights of religionist fancy. Christian faith is about believing. Jesus said so, and said it was about believing in him. It is based on history, not floating in the abstract. Easter is about the resurrection, not about a metaphor. And it is about the Lord Jesus, not about some lost or cosmic “christ.”
Jesus is risen. He is risen indeed! And He is alive. Alleluia!