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“Reimagining the Human
One(s)”
Daniel 7:13, 12:1-3; Matthew
26:63-64;
Mark 13:22-26; Revelation
1:12-13,
A sermon preached by the
Rev. Douglas M. Donley
Hear also this contemporary text from Virginia
Woolf:
I am going to develop in your presence as fully and
freely as I can the train of thought which led me to think this. Perhaps if I lay bare the ideas, the
prejudices, that lie behind this statement you will find that they have some
bearing upon the women and some upon fiction.
At any rate, when a subject is highly controversial—and any question
about sex is that—one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold
whatever opinion one does hold. One can
only give one’s audience the chance of drawing their own conclusions as they
observe the limitations, the prejudices, the idiosyncrasies of the speaker. (Room 4; as quoted in Schaberg 2004:257-8)
It’s a tall order to try and follow
that challenging liturgical drama of the past month. Gayla Marty and company fleshed out many of
the questions surrounding Mary Magdalene, the church, its hierarchy, its
blindness, our complicity in such blindness, the central import of Mary
Magdalene in the Biblical record and perhaps even more importantly her impact
to many people throughout history and across the world who struggle for
meaning.
The task of theology is to be true to our experience
of God, to translate that into a sense of how God continues to operate in the
world and to figure out how we are to make sense of and operate in this
world. I believe that this whole process
of resurrecting Mary Magdalene is part and parcel to recapturing our role
alongside God in the creative and redemptive process of resurrecting this
sin-sick world.
Luckily we have companions along this journey. Like Jane Schaberg we have the scriptures, Virginia Woolf, the lost gospels, the traditions that surround Mary and glimpses within scripture that point us to something we have perhaps not even considered. Unlike Jane Schaberg, we have each other.
We know each other’s joys, our concerns, our longings our stuggles, our triumphs and our tragedies. Making sense of how the ancient stories intersect with our present realities is what the church is all about.
That’s what I want to focus briefly upon this
morning.
You see, the resurrection of Mary Magdalene requires
something to arise within each of us.
Something to break forth.
Something to brim over like the flooded ruins at
Migdal, revealing something new.
Something to break free of the chains that have
bound it up for too long.
Something emerging from the empty tombs of our faith
journeys.
Something that confounds everything and turns our
world upside down.
The resurrection of Mary Magdalene might really be
the resurrection of each of us AND
the resurrection of the Christian community.
The resurrection of an apocalyptic sense of commitment and life-giving hope in the midst of a world gone to hell.
We know full well that we live in apocalyptic
times. I am not saying that the end is
near or anything like that, but I am saying that we are dancing perilously
close to the edge.
One needs only look at our use and abuse of natural
resources;
our xenophobic fear of the wrong kind of foreigners (read
non-Caucasian foreigners);
our propensity to delude ourselves into thinking we
can solve our problems by starting war after endless war;
our willingness to sell our collective souls for a
dollar or a euro or a yen, no matter what the labor practices are of those with
whom we do business;
our propensity to demonize other religions saying
that my God is better than your god, which is never a good way to make friends
and influence people, and the list goes on.
It’s like a tomb. Our hope is
dashed and sealed away.
We enter into theology with this kind of
backdrop. We don’t shirk from these
realities. And yet we long for something
better. We yearn for something
better. We come to church because we see
in the message and in the gathered community a glimpse of a something
better. We are followers of Mary who was
the first to deliver the Good News that the tomb is empty. Hope is set free. The ultimate power of this world is no match
for the power of God embodies in God’s people.
That resurrected community, that community that
knows full well the problems with this world and yet takes on the suffering of
the world so that we might redeem the world and ourselves in the process. That is what Jesus was getting at. And it’s apocalyptic. It is taking down the structures that we know
and reshaping them and molding them into a new future. It is snubbing our collective noses at the
powers and principalities of this world by saying that we have a power greater
than ourselves which will restore us to sanity.
Jane Schaberg and Elizabeth Schussler-Fiorenza put it this way, “Jesus did not explicitly attack the power structures that create injustice and oppression, but implicitly subverted them “by envisioning a different future and different human relationships on the grounds that all persons in Israel are created and elected by the gracious goodness of Jesus’ Sophia-God.”” (Schaberg, 2004:261—quoting In Memory of Her by Elizabeth Schussler-Fiorenza, 1994:142)
So what is this subversive power?
What is its name?
What is this that can restore us to our true
humanity, our true likeness of God?
What is this that enfolds and inspires and
undergirds our movement?
We get a glimpse of it throughout the Gospels. It is the Human One who will bring this all
about. Very often, this is translated as
the Son of Man.
“You will see the Human One sitting at the right
hand of God” (Matthew 26:64);
“Amidst the lampstands one like the Human One
clothed in a long white robe with a golden girdle round the breast” (Rev. 1:13)
“You will see the Human One coming in clouds with
great power and glory” (Mark 13:26)
All of these seem to come from the apocalyptic
vision of Daniel when he wrote:
“I saw in the night visions, and behold, with the
clouds of heaven there came one like a Human One…”(Daniel 7:13)
In Daniel, the Human One is not simply a person, it
is also a group of people, a movement of people committed to God and having
been made new by God’s unique revelation.
The resurrection community can be the Human Ones we long for.
Daniel’s apocalypse, like Revelation’s relied on
people taking a sociopolitical and ethical stand in hope and faith in final
justice, if for no other reason than because that is how God works.
Most of Christian theology has said that the Human
One is Jesus himself. And it seems to
make some sense, all except for the fact that Jesus never really seemed to be
too interested in making such a big deal about who he was or who he wasn’t.
We get into problems as we try to identify with one
person and not a movement. Jesus was
always pointing out there toward the kingdom.
Jesus was pointing out there to the work that needs to be done. Too much of Christian theology has pointed to
the pointer, maybe as an attempt to soften or even diminish the political import
of what Jesus was up to. To equate Jesus
alone with the heavenly Human One is to let the rest of us off the hook and
absolve us of responsibility. This seems
antithetical to Jesus’ mission.
Mary Magdalene received a mystic message from
Jesus. In all four Gospels, she is there
at the cross, the empty tomb and is the first witness to the resurrection. In fact, she is the first to spread the
Gospel. She is the first to tell of the
resurrection. But oddly she disappears
after sharing the good news with the boys.
Her mystical insight may well have been threatening to the emerging
church, largely because it emphasized mutuality, equality and it continued the
challenge to patriarchy that Jesus began.
This may have been too radical for the emerging church. Schaberg posits that Christian theology
needed to disavow and marginalize Mary Magdalene because she might expose this
apocalyptic aspect of the Jesus movement.
“…the son of Man is “a powerful political symbol…of a specific way of being, living, and hoping embodied by Jesus and his followers. The Son of Man is an alternative to other symbols of authority, such as the Roman emperor and his agents, the heirs of Herod the Great, and the messianic pretenders who attempted to overthrow Roman rule by force.” It is a symbol used consistently by the author of Daniel, the Qumran community, the author of Revelation and other writers, teachers and prophets as well as Jesus, none of whom advocated violence, and none of whom was content with accommodation to the status quo. “All called for resistance to the current unjust order by creating an alternative symbolic universe which sustained an alternative way of life.” (Schaberg, 2004:291 quoting A.Y. Collins’ work Origin of the Designation, p. 158)
“The root of the resurrection faith is an apocalyptic vision of the present reality and future hope of a renewed world free of suffering and death. “Resurrection does not simply spell the survival of the soul but requires the transformation of the world as we know it.””(Schaberg, 2004:302 quoting from Elizabeth Schussler-Fiorenza’s Miriam’s Child, 128)
So if the Human One is not simply an individual in
the person of Jesus, but the greatest hope for all of us, the greatest vision
for our world, the greatest aspiration for our movement, then every time we
feed the hungry, we are doing the incarnational work of the Human One.
Every time we delve deeply into theology with the
intent of setting people free, we are doing the work of the Human One.
Every time we say no to a dysfunctional relationship
and say yes to honesty and integrity we are part of the communal experience of
the Human One.
Every time we give of our time, our talent and our
treasure so that the movement of the Human One can continue to thrive and set
more people free, then we are doing the work of the Human One.
Every time we say the subversive word, or take the
subversive action, every time we refuse collude with injustice, then we are
doing the work of the Human One.
Every time we ask the questions why there are some
insiders and some outsiders in the church or the school or even our own
families, then we are doing the inclusive ultimately egalitarian work of the
Human One.
My friends, we worship, we pray and we work so that
the Human One may thrive in the world.
I see Human Ones right here.
I see Human Ones who set people free.
I see Human Ones who will not sit back and let
someone walk over someone else.
I see Human Ones who are willing, able, and
audacious enough to start a little apocalypse here and there.
Thank God for you.
Thank God for this church.
Thank God that the reimagined movement of the Human
Ones is alive and well and willing to set the course for the next revelation of
God in the world.
References are from Jane Schaberg’s book The Resurrection of Mary Magdalene: Legends, Apocrypha, and the Christian Testament. 2004. Continuum Publishing, New York, London.