The American anthropologist Richard Leakey has argued that our
remote hominid ancestors made four things portable, which in turn made
social life as we know it possible: food, fire, water and word. Fire for light
and warmth; food for strength; speech and song – that is to say our
experience embedded in language and embodied as story, song and
speech. Lest we think that this – or any other fire – is purely functional,
Richard Leakey reminds us that fire helped transform isolated human
individuals into human communities . “Not only did fire provide warmth,” he
writes, “it also stretched social intercourse into the hours of darkness, a
time when the hearth would be the focus of the social group. So, as the
flames were keeping potential predators at bay, they were also drawing
people together, giving an opportunity for telling stories and creating myths
and rituals.” 1
1 Richard E. Leakey, Origins , (New York: Dutton 1977) 151-152.
In the final scene of Shakespeare’s King Lear, the mad old monarch
says to his daughter Cordelia,
“so we’ll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news; and we’ll talk with them too,
Who loses and who wins, who’s in, who’s out,
And take upon’s the mystery of things,
As if we were God’s spies…” 2
And take upon us the mystery of things, as if we were God’s spies. That is
precisely what we Christians delight to do. We gather – a community of
King Lears – to pray and sing, to gossip and cackle, to take upon us the
mystery of things as if we were God’s spies.
We tell our stories, the stories of the Scriptures. Beautiful stories,
puzzling stories, amazing stories, maddening stories. In all these stories,
we become what we sing and say, our vision restored by hearing.
St. Augustine argues much the same thing in his commentary on the
multiplication of the loaves and fishes in the gospel of John. Augustine
maintains that God’s greatest miracles are not flashy, they are ordinary, the
stuff we never notice – scattered seed sprouting into wheat and a loaf; a
“hidden” God who makes the divine self visible – and homely – as five
barley loaves or two fishes. “Miracles have tongues,” Augustine wrote, “so
let’s ask them questions, and let’s listen for their response. Every deed of
the Word is a word to us.”
2 William Shakespeare, King Lear , Act 5, scene 3, lines 8-17.
St. Augustine and the services from Maundy Thursday to Easter
Sunday are telling us that we see by listening. These stories have the
power to open us to new vision, to bring insight to those who thought they
knew, to enable us to discern the hidden hand of God at work among us.
The reverse is true, as well. These words from God are not rehearsals of
the past. God’s word reveals the present. It pushes, pulls, prods, pricks,
calls, questions, kicks, converts, and quickens. We “hear” God’s Word only
by seeing the hungry fed, the thirsty refreshed, the naked clothed, the
homeless sheltered, the sick comforted, the prisoner visited. For Christians
there is no other way. Our celebrations over the last few days have not
been about mourning poor Jesus, dead and gone. We are here to learn
God’s new language.
One of the most gripping images in the Bible is that of prophets called
upon to eat their own words. It happened to Ezekiel, and it also happened
to John in the book of Revelation. Handing him a scroll, the angel tells John
to, “Take it and eat it; it will turn your stomach sour, but it will taste as sweet
as honey.” (Rev. 10:9-10). And in Ezekiel, God says, “Son of man, eat what
you see; eat this scroll, then go and speak to the House of Israel.” (Ezekiel
3:1)
Eating one’s words is just about as familiar as daily bread to most of
us. We have all done it, usually with a blush of shame or wounded pride.
But I want to suggest that “eating our words” is how we become Church
(and becoming Church is the point of our celebrations during these Great
Three Days.) We become Church by eating our words and so, becoming
God’s words, God’s new language in the world. Again, as St. Augustine so
memorably put it, we receive at the Eucharist what we have in fact become
– Christ’s body member for member, flesh of his flesh and bone of his
bones. So it is today that we tell the story and then we will go and eat the
story, so that it becomes part of us and we of it. So we become the very
story we tell; we “take upon us the mystery of things as if we were God’s
spies.”
As God’s “spies”, of course, we must tread carefully. The Eucharist is
not a gift that places Christ at our disposal. Rather it is a gift that puts us at
the disposal of Christ. The new song we sing, that we become today,
is God’s language, not ours. The Church, the whole enstoried people of
Christ, is God’s new language. As God’s new language, the Church is that
community which flows like blood and water from the side of Christ as he
sleeps in death upon the cross.
When Christ appears after the resurrection he characteristically
appears as a stranger, even to his closest friends. Mary Magdalene
mistakes him for a gardener working near the empty tomb; the disciples
walking to Emmaus meet him as a vagabond; the apostles see him as a
solitary fisherman along the sea of Galilee. “Christ seemed to be teaching
his friends that he will be with them always, as he promised, but in the
world at large and in the faces of strangers.” 3
Forever now, in the world at large, in the faces of strangers: that is where
our Easter celebration will drive us; that is where and how we see and hear
God’s language written. Perhaps the most important thing about our Easter
celebration is what happens when it is over.
Kevin+
3 Ron Hansen, “Faith and Fiction,” America 178 (4 April 1998), 14.
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