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The Episcopal Diocese of Lexington
Easter Message From Our Bishop 2008 |
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Resurrection to the Future
I draw a great deal of spiritual inspiration from a perhaps unlikely source, a cartoon series that is no longer being produced, although it is still fairly popular, called “The Far Side” by a cartoonist named Gary Larson. Many “Far Side” cartoons are explicitly theological. One of my favorites is of an idyllic garden with trees and flowers and a broken old mayonnaise jar, like the ones we used to catch lightning bugs with holes punched in the lid. Two naked humans are running off in the distance. From the clouds comes a simple, and profoundly appropriate, exclamation: “Uh-oh.” Truer words were never spoken. We do not know what would have become of the creation had human beings not been introduced into it. God, in what is perhaps the ultimate mystery, intended human beings as part of the picture from the beginning. Indeed, God intended the human beings as the pinnacle of the creation, the part of the creation to which God entrusted the rest of it. And, as the “Far Side” cartoon makes theologically clear, God had to know where that was going to lead. And still, God declared that it was not only good, but “very good” — which does not mean that it was perfect, just that the way it was pleased God. But not perfect. I know we like to think it was perfect. The popular understanding is that the Garden of Eden was a paradise until we humans messed it up. This may come as a shock to you, but the creation had its problems from the very beginning. The serpent, after all, was there from the beginning. That means deceit was there from the beginning. Temptation was there from the beginning. The suggestion is that evil was there from the beginning. Perhaps most dangerous of all, hubris was there from the beginning. Denial of responsibility was there from the beginning when the man blamed the woman and the woman blamed the serpent. And this is the part that may surprise you most. Death was there from the beginning, too. Sometimes we imagine incorrectly that death only entered the scene with the human disobedience as God’s punishment. But that is not what Genesis says at all. When God is considering what to do after the disobedience, it occurs to God that the only way this could get worse would be if the humans were to “take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever.” And it is for that reason, to prevent that from happening, that the man and the woman are expelled from the garden to keep them from gaining immortality, which is something they did not already have and at the beginning were not meant to have. The biblical picture is not at all that it was once perfect and then our disobedience broke it. The biblical picture is that it was broken from the beginning, or more accurately, that it was what it was from the beginning. When we understand the Garden of Eden as representing the ideal and pristine state of the creation, I think we misunderstand it. And what makes this a dangerous misunderstanding is that it encourages us to think that the spiritual task before us is to reach back and reclaim something that was good and pure and holy and that we have for some reason lost. It is a fruitless and meaningless exercise to reach back in search of something that never was. The God of the Bible, the God of the creation, and the God of the resurrection is the God of the future, the God of what will be and not what once was. If our orientation is backward, we will search and search on a meaningless journey to find what, in fact, never was. We will be condemned to wandering forever. If we concentrate on the present, that is well and good, and we might even succeed in making the world a little better before we leave it. But in Christ we are called to neither. In Christ, we are called to press forward to what lies ahead. In Christ, we are called to abandon every idol we have of a time that is now past in favor of a future that is not yet fully revealed. The resurrection is not a matter of re-creation. It is a matter of the completion of the creation once begun. The completion of what was incomplete. The perfection of what was imperfect from the beginning. The wholeness of what was, in truth, always broken, even from the beginning. The truth is that we cannot recreate the Golden Age because there is no Golden Age to recreate. It is for this reason that the Passion and Resurrection do not look backward. They look forward. The Passion and Resurrection are not commemorative. They are eschatological. May this Easter bless you richly and point you, however uncomfortably, toward what is yet to be in God. Ginger, Andy, and Mattie join me in wishing all of you the fullness of the joy of the resurrection. Agape,
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