BLOG: THE CHURCH, LIKE CHRIST’S DISCIPLES, TOO OFTEN MISSES THE POINT OF EASTER.
Andy Crouch, in his book Culture Making, makes the point that real creative people are able to suspend the horizons within which everyone else operates. They are able think and operate in radically new and different ways. The post-Easter accounts of the response of Christ’s disciples indicate that they had something of that problem—they were not able “to suspend the horizons” of their traditional Judaistic understanding of a triumphalist role for their expected Messiah.
Those disciples had no category for a Messiah who would necessarily be arrested, tried as a criminal, and executed by a pagan authority. They had no category, either, for a resurrection. They could only conceive of one who was awesome in power, and who would restore the glories of the Davidic throne. No matter that as late in the game as Christ’s Passover celebration on the night preceding his arrest, he told them quite plainly that he must be betrayed and executed. No matter that he had told them about this many times. On that last night they were still arguing about who was going to be great in his kingdom No matter that he had taught them that those who followed him must take up their cross and follow. No matter that he promised them suffering.
They evidently simply ran all of these quaint teachings of his through their preconceived grid and interpreted them in terms of that grand earthly kingdom and their role in it. So when he was arrested they all forsook him and fled, or denied that they knew him (except his women followers: note).
They had seen him perform all the signs to be accomplished by the Messiah, as foretold by the prophets: the lame walk, the demons exorcised, the sick healed, the dead raised, and the poor having good news preached to them—but they couldn’t suspend the horizons of their Messianic preconceptions.
So on that Easter day, the women brought the message that he was risen, and then the word that he had been seen by several—it still didn’t register. He actually met incognito with a couple of them and chided them for their unbelief, and gave them again a whole study of scriptures on how the Messiah should suffer.
The response of the disciples wasn’t anything like despair. It was, rather, sheer bewilderment, perplexity, dismay, or mystification. They were not able to “suspend the horizons” and to think and imagine, much less enter into a whole radically new reality in which the problem of sin had been dealt with, and in which a whole new creation had been inaugurated. Jesus came to make all things new, and to do it in ways that had been prophesied—but those closest to him didn’t get the point. It had nothing to do with any kind of earthly triumphalist dominion. It had nothing to do with Temple or priesthood. It did have to do with a whole new humanity, with hope, and love, and justice, and meaning, and the understanding of “the mystery hidden from the ages, but now made known in Christ.”
The church too often reverts to an understanding of itself in terms of merely human religion, or “religious Christianity” (Bonhoeffer). We rather consummate the church year with all the ecclesiastical pageantry of Easter, focus on the fact that death is no longer the enemy—but never suspending the horizons to see the awesome and very present mission of being a radically new creation/kingdom here and now that cannot be contained in church sanctuaries, or captive to “church professionals.”
Maybe my recent book: The Church and the Relentless Darkness might help in your understanding.
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