Tuesday: The Body of Christ

In 1883 British General Charles Gordon gazed over the walls of Jerusalem near the Damascus gate. The cliff-face opposite struck his imagination: Two craggy pits in its upper portion, a jutting vertical shelf of rock below and between, and a jagged, vertical slash below gave the distinct impression of a grinning skull. Thus began the debate about "Gordon's Calvary" as the sight of the crucifixion of Christ.

We visited the site on Tuesday. Our guide, Dr. Jim Denison, laid out the case for this as Where It Really Happened: The hill does indeed front the viewer like the warning label on a bottle of iodine or a pirate ship's Jolly Roger. (Jo 19.17 et. al.) It sits a short-hop grounder's distance outside the undisputed sight of the ancient walls (the rival Church of the Holy Sepulcher lies beyond the natural path of the old fortifications), on the intersection of major roads coming from several directions. (Jo 19.20) Excavations revealed a garden nearby as witnessed by an ancient cistern and olive-press. (Jo19.41)

Then there's the tomb: Someone went to the enormous expense of excavating a burial cave and roughed out niches for three bodies. . .but only completed one, a possible indication that something happened after the first go-round that made the place too sacred to reuse. The layout fits first-century Jewish tombs. Cut blocks of Jerusalem stone repair a gap near the door and a crack fissures the upper cliff: deduction - an earthquake jolted the joint sometime in the past. (Mt 28.2) Someone carved an arch in the external rock-face, cut several niches into its surface, and inscribed an anchor-cross: deduction - this was an ancient church with the tomb door behind its altar.

Is this Where It Really Happened? The traditional sight has the better pedigree: The Roman emperor Hadrian, whose party platform included desecrating as many sacred Christian sites as possible, built a pagan temple there in the early second century: deduction - he was trying to stamp out veneration of the spot as Calvary. The cistern, olive-press and tomb at Gordon's Calvary may date a few centuries before the time of Christ. Bottom line: You makes your donation (neither site charges admission) and you takes your chances.

Then we shared the Lord's Supper.

I sat with my fellow travelers, most of whom I had not known before the trip, some of whom do not even have the good fortune to be Baptists and none of whom belongs to my own local church. . .and each of whom is a living stone in the eternal Temple (1 Pt 2.5), a limb of the Body of Christ (Ro 12.5). As we shared the bread and the cup I pondered again the lines from G. K. Chesterton with which I began this series of blogs: "There is something of the same mystery or majesty in the mob as in the monument. . . .The sightseer might almost as well travel to see the sightseers as to see the sights." I thought of what one of my students, Joshua Fuentes, recently wrote about the Eucharist: "The Lord's Supper isn't so much a reminder of what Christ did on the cross as it is a reminder of what we should be doing through Christ." I recalled that Paul's discourse to the Corinthians on the Lord's Supper is less a doctrinal statement than a book of etiquette: We fire blanks at the sacred table when we fail to see the marvel of our living Lord in each other. (1 Cor 11)

As I munched and sipped I gazed across the garden to the gaping door of the tomb. I thought of Mary Magdalene's Very Strange First Easter Sunday. (Jo 20.15) Mary's mistake was that she looked at Jesus and saw a gardener. Our mistake is that we look at a gardener and fail to see Jesus! What matters is not where Jesus isn't (in this tomb or that one), but where Jesus is (in the assembly of faith before me). What proves the resurrection is not the absence of a body in history but the presence of a body in this world. What the world needs to see is not where He lay, but where He lives.

The existence of the Christian faith presents a historical riddle which has no good answer except the bodily resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. Sacred places can help us venerate this event (the Church of the Holy Sepulcher) and experience this event (Gordon's Calvary). But Where It Really Happened counts for far less than Where It Really Happens Sunday after Sunday, weekday after weekday - not in the sacralized stone of Jerusalem but in the living stones of the saints.

Monday: Yes We (Peli)Can!

"To his good friends thus wide I’ll ope my arms,
And like the kind life-rend’ring pelican,
Repast them with my blood."

That's Laertes in Act IV/Scene 5 of "Hamlet" explaining how he'll go about avenging his father's murder. The image has always struck me.

Natural philosophy in the Middle Ages held that when food grew scarce the mother pelican allowed her brood to peck open her breast and feast on the very flesh and blood of her heart. There's not much scientific evidence for this; the medievals had different ideas than we do about what constitutes sound ornithology. Due to this belief, the pelican became a Christ-symbol: Jesus, arms flung wide on the cross, inviting us to eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood and thus find life in the desert of our sin. Some medieval churches mount stained-glass windows that feature the pelican in this role.

I knew the image went back as far as "Hamlet." I did not know it went as far back as my faith.

Yesterday we visited the traditional sight of the Upper Room, the sight of the Last Supper. When you mount the stairs and enter the vaulted arches of the designated building you are not in the same physical space where Jesus and the apostles dined the night before the crucifixion. It is a crusader construction that dates to about the first millennium AD. But in explaining to us the provenance for this place, our guide Dr. Jim Denison pointed to the capital on a pillar to one side of the room. It depicts a pelican: A deep wound punctures her breast and two fledglings, one on either side, stab their bills into the gap. That stone, Dr. Denison explained, dates to the first century. As was the practice of the day, later builders, finding it amidst the rubble of the area, re-purposed it for their own project. The idea is that this spot must have had great significance for the early church in some capacity related to the symbolism of the Lord's Supper.

I am less interested in whether that is a good argument that this was The Real Place and more moved by the antiquity and power of the image itself. And for a couple of reasons: First, Laertes plans to kill anyone he finds culpable in his dad's death. It is only to Polonius' "good friends" that he offers himself in sacrifice. But Jesus flung back his wings to the very race who murdered him and thus showed our true intent toward his Father. Second, the image is feminine. The early church evidently felt the freedom to comprehend the actions of Our Lord in ways that a woman's love best reveals. Oh, and possibly another thing: The Upper Room was also the sight of the Spirit's first falling on the Church at Pentecost. Perhaps the pelican offers us the reminder that great outpourings of God's presence to us come linked with great outpourings of ourselves to others.

So today, as I prepare to leave the Holy Land, I would carve that image into the capital that tops the supporting post of my life, and offer my desire in the following prayer:

Today I bind unto myself the power of the Pelican Christ.
From his five wounds on Calvary's tree I draw the holy meat and drink
that save my starving soul.
I, at one moment deicide and fratricide and fledgling child,
ensconce myself in the saving embrace of a mother's welcoming wings
Who gladly gives her very life to save a wretch like me.

Today I bind unto myself the call of the Pelican Christ.
I claim the gift of the indwelling Spirit to fling apart every protection.
If by Christ I here give all, no one can take my goods.
If by Christ I eat and drink, no one can leave me poor.
If by Christ I die to self no one can take my life.

This I pray in the Upper Room of my heart,
By the power of the Pelican,
In the name of Jesus Christ my Lord,
Amen.

Sunday: Treasure in Earthen Vessels

I went to Qumran yesterday. South of Jerusalem along the western shore of the Dead Sea stands the rubbled remains of stone walls that mark out rooms and walkways. Disputed scholarly opinion holds that this complex formed the home of a group of Jewish ascetics who schlepped out to the desert to live their sectarian vision of Judaism.

Signs along the paths indicated the location of a pottery, a kitchen, store-rooms and other necessary features. These rooms showed how the occupants lived. But one room in particular speaks to why they lived: Scholars posit the presence of a large scriptorium, a room for copying documents, on the second floor of one building. Majority opinion holds it was here that these people copied out the most famous set of books in all of biblical scholarship: The Dead Sea Scrolls.

A short jog down the trail brings one to the edge of an arroyo. Looking across, the visitor can see a smattering of holes that punch into the cliff-faces on the opposite side. A famous story recounts how a trio of Bedouin shepherds, chasing stray goats, began chunking rocks into these perforations - perhaps to locate their missing animals, perhaps out of frustration, perhaps for kicks. One boy heard the the distinct clink of pottery as the stone shivered it. They investigated and found tall clay jars stuffed with scrolls. Excavations ultimately revealed documents in several of the caves including whole or fragment copies of every Old Testament text but Esther.

(By the way, nobody knows why Esther didn't make the cut. Named after a chick so this boys-only club passed on it? Perhaps, but Ruth got in. Maybe because it never mentions the name of God and is set on foreign soil.)

This find pushed Old Testament textual criticism back centuries toward the original documents. Contrary to what many scholars expected, these far-older texts revealed no major changes from the Bible as we already had it. This was an exciting fact for everyone except the King James Only crowd, who presumably thought the whole thing a waste of time.

As I stood and stared across the draw at Cave Four where most of the pots rested, I tried to get in touch with what had happened there. I thought of this group of mentally and spiritually tough individuals who trekked out here to seek God through communal life, prayer, and the study of Scripture. Finally (so the theory holds) they bugged out one step ahead of the Roman army as it marched south in 68 CE to punish the Jewish rebellion. Before they high-tailed it (maybe down to Masada to join the rebels there; nobody knows), they stuffed and sealed their first century Tupperware and packed it away in the nearby grottos. They took care to preserve the thing that mattered to them most.

Not surprisingly, I thought of that verse, so beloved of both Christians and Jews, from Psalm 119.11, "Thy word have I hid in my heart, that I might not sin against thee." "We have," so goes Paul's outrageous claim about the Gospel, "this treasure in earthen vessels." (1 Cor 4.7) I wonder if somewhere, deep inside me where neither marauding Romans nor meandering goats can get at it, lies the text of the Bible. Have I, in the high desert of my soul's solitude, inked the Word of the Lord onto the living leather of my being? Could it be, if the Lord stays His coming, that when nobody can remember or even decipher who I was or what I did or why I did it, they will find an unmistakable and unmarred witness to God's Word? And if someone had to recover the Bible based on the text of my life, would they find it a faithfully copied witness to the original?

I pray today for God's grace to fill the hollow places of my inner landscape, the gaps and wounds that experience and sorrow have stabbed into the rocky surface of my heart, with the faithful memory and living witness of the very words of God.  

Saturday: Of Pilgrimage, Civil War Re-Enactors, and Church Architecture

The "period rush" is the Holy Graal of Civil War re-enactors. It occurs when the simulated heat of pseudo-battle transports a participant to the real thing. For that blindingly brief moment, he finds himself truly "there" - Gettysburg, Marie's Heights, Chickamauga, Chancellorsville. Of course, as soon as you realize you have it you've stepped outside of it and thus lost it, but it was there.

The "period rush" of the Holy Land has avoided me so far. After five days in Israel and what seems like non-stop touring of sacred sights I remain disappointingly (perhaps disturbingly?) frisson-free. It isn't that hard to figure. "The Moving Finger writes," laments Omar Khayyam, "and, having writ/Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit/Shall lure it back." The Sea of Galilee lies much lower than in Jesus' day because more people now drink the water. You can stand on the Mount of Olives and gaze back toward the city but the wall you see was built by Suleiman the Magnificent, an Ottoman sheik, not Solomon the Wise, a Hebrew king. You can't walk the Via Dolorosa because it lies under twenty centuries of accumulated building.

But maybe that factual historicity isn't what matters.

For instance, yesterday we visited the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, built by Helen the Mother of Constantine over the traditional sight of Mount Calvary and Jesus' tomb. Now, the smart betting says this wasn't The Place. Gibbets sat outside the city walls for reasons of ritual purity and, given where archaeologists think the original barricades sat, the wall would have had to do some serious yoga to avoid this spot. Then, too, you can't do much in the way of a period rush when everything drips with ikons and reeks of incense and glitters with mosaic tile. Finally, I realize I will never preach in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher: First of all, Baptists are not among the eight Christian communions that have divvied up the joint, and even if someone dealt us in, I doubt the assignment would fall to me. Secondly, it isn't built for preaching: No pulpit, no pews, the constant murmur of pilgrim prayers and shouts and cries, and the lighting is so dim you couldn't see the red lettering on your King James Bible if you held it right in front of your eyes.

But maybe preaching isn't what matters here.

Pilgrims enter the church, climb a staircase (you're ascending Calvary), and arrive at an altar (Christ nailed to the cross). Then they move left and kneel at a rock beneath an altar surmounted by a life-sized gilt crucifix (Christ raised on the cross). Left again to another altar (Christ removed from the cross), then down a second set of stairs (descending the hill) to a slab of stone with eight thuribles swinging above it - eight communions share the church, remember? (Christ's body prepared for burial.) A short walk through the shadows reaches a building-within-the-building (the sight of the tomb itself).

Get it? You don't HEAR ABOUT the crucifixion; you ENTER it. You don't need blazing halogen wattage so you can see "your" Bible; you need shadows so that you can enter the mystery of "the" Bible. You don't go back in time to examine the "real" crucifixion and resurrection; you open present time to experience "true" crucifixion and resurrection.

I'm still very Baptist: I like sermons and I don't like incense. The Reformation was right to give us back our Bibles. Still, I think we should remember that, as G. K. Chesterton once said, while "progress" means leaving things behind us, "growth" means keeping things inside of us. Could it be that our drive to master information works only as it wraps itself around an older and deeper desire to be mastered by mystery?

I don't think it matters that, as I moved through the second-oldest church building in the faith (the Church of the Nativity predates it), my eyes remained un-misted, my flesh stubbornly un-goosed. I think what matters was the trip up, across, and down Calvary and straight into the tomb.

I look forward, in a day or so, to seeing Gordon's Calvary and the Garden Tomb because they have good historical and archaeological claims and because, at any rate, they will help me get a better idea of what it was all like. But (Chesterton again), to say that one thing is "like" another is to admit that it is not, in fact, that other. I would welcome a period rush; I want to know what it was like. But I'd rather know - in the mystery of unknowing - what it is.

Friday, Part 2: On Jordan's Cruddy Banks I Stand

Mark "Chopper" Read has achieved legendary outlaw status in a land of outlaws. He spent his criminal career operating out of Melbourne, Australia as a "headhunter," a robber who preyed on other robbers. His enemies knew him for tactics like torturing rivals with a blowtorch.  He went inside for a while and ruled Tasmania's Risdon Prison as a personal fief. But he denies the nineteen murders that myth attributes to him: He's killed around four people, maybe seven, tops.

Now he's dying of liver cancer. When New York Times reporter Matt Siegel asked Chopper how he felt about standing before God, he replied, "I think if anything, I'm owed an apology."

This is on my mind because yesterday I stood on the banks of the Jordan River somewhere very near the spot, give or take, where John baptized Jesus. John, oddly enough, didn't think God owed anyone an apology. In fact, he figured it was the other way around. According to Luke 3.3, the Baptizer "came into all the country about Jordan, preaching the baptism of repentance for the remission of sins." He called his congregation vipers, likened them to deadwood fit for nothing but a bonfire. He made them confess their sins and told them in very specific terms the positive behaviors they needed to begin.

There was no mention of God apologizing.

"Are not Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel? may I not wash in them, and be clean?" (2 K 5.12) I had a certain sympathy for Naaman the Syrian as I saw - and smelt - the turgid stream that cuts its winding channel between the Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea. The viscous brown color and oozy odor bore witness to a slow current and a muddy bottom. It made me glad I've already been baptized. "Roll Jordan, Roll!" Ernest Hemingway's hero, Robert Jordan, chuckles to himself while blowing a bridge in "For Whom the Bell Tolls. "They used to yell that at football when you lugged the ball. Do you know the damned Jordan is really not much bigger than that creek down there below." And it really is pretty small.

John didn't seem to care about anybody's preferences any more than Elisha cared about Naaman's. This was the place and this was the deal: Rebuke, confession, and a duck in a dirty creek.

I wonder, as I look back on that half-hour or so by the Jordan: How many times, if I'm honest about it, have I secretly thought God owed me an apology? I think of all the times I did all the right things, followed the dotted lines my Sunday school teachers laid out for me, obeyed every tenet of Baptist orthodoxy, sang my didn't and danced my did - only to have it all go wrong. Of course I'd never be as bold as Chopper; never say it outright.

God doesn't owe me any apologies. And God has no obligation to customize the path by which God takes me down into self-death and up into the Christ-life. If it means I lose all sight of the light as I sink into the murky circumstances that engulf me; if it means my nostrils recoil at the blunt stench of the decay of my carefully crafted self; if it means shedding my snake's skin and feeling the axe bite into the root of my soul; God owes me no apologies. I owe God an apology; the theological term is repentance.

Of course, the thing to remember is that Jesus doesn't send me into that baptism: He leads me into it. Thus it became him to fulfill all righteousness. And thus he did.

Friday: Two Ways to Avoid a Messiah

Yesterday we stopped at an overlook in Nazareth just long enough to look over at the Church of the Annunciation in the distance. This structure marks the traditional spot where Gabriel appeared to the virgin Mary and told her she would bear the Christ. We didn't stay long. Our real destination was the Cliffs of Precipitation where, again according to tradition, the people attempted to heave Jesus into the gorge when he preached a sermon on racial inclusiveness. (No one has built a church there, presumably because no one wanted to risk planting ideas in a congregation's heads.)

But I stared down into the valley and thought of the lovely sonnet "Annunciation" from Malcolm Guite's book "Sounding the Seasons":

We see so little, stayed on surfaces,

We calculate the outsides of all things,

Preoccupied with our own purposes

We miss the shimmer of the angels’ wings.

They coruscate around us in their joy

A swirl of wheels and eyes and wings unfurled,

They guard the good we purpose to destroy,

A hidden blaze of glory in God’s world.

But on this day a young girl stopped to see

With open eyes and heart. She heard the voice;

The promise of His glory yet to be,

As time stood still for her to make a choice;

Gabriel knelt and not a feather stirred,

The Word himself was waiting on her word.


"We see so little." Maybe the problem isn't a lack of angelic visitations but a lack of attention to angels. Maybe the difference is not that an angel came to Mary, but that Mary noticed the angel. Hebrews 13.2 speaks of encountering "angels unawares." The Scripture rings with tales of those who did or did not know an angel when they saw one, and of the various consequences that follow. The men of Sodom saw two men and not two angels and thus attempted the most unfortunate case of date-rape in history. Jacob the double-dealer noticed the angels who met him as he trudged toward high-noon with Esau. He called the spot, "Two Camps" to remind himself that he had better backup than his own trick of keeping two sets of books. Balaam missed the angel that any ass could see and nearly rode straight into his doom.

Nazareth wasn't exactly the kind of place to get one in the mood for angel-gazing. Unnamed in the lists of cities found in various Old Testament records, it was probably more of a tiny huddle of extended family, a bedroom community for construction workers in the Roman city of Sephoris about five miles over the hill. Cana regularly creamed them in football, leading to Nathaniel's standard sneer: "Nazareth? They can't even mount a decent passing attack, let alone produce a messiah."

But if you think about it, and peruse a few biblical descriptions of God's throne room in Heaven, no place on earth has much chance of impressing these ministering spirits. Why not Nazareth? Why not Corpus Christi? Why not Your Town's Name Here?

It is impossible, unless your Calvinism is absolutely too pointy to admit the possibility, not to be struck with the sonnet's  closing lines: "Gabriel knelt and not a feather stirred,/The Word himself was waiting on her word." As I trooped back to the bus and trundled off to see where a congregation once attempted deicide, I wondered: On what word from me does the Word wait today? In what way will Christ not come until I say, "Be it unto me according to thy word"? I don't think I'd ever fling Jesus off a mountain. It's much easier just to prevent his showing up in the first place.

Thursday: Messing About in Boats

"Believe me, my young friend, there is NOTHING--absolutely nothing--half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats."

Thus does the Water Rat begin Mole's initiation in chapter one of Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. It occurs to me today that Jesus spent a significant amount of time messing about in boats. The results indicate there was nothing half so much worth his doing. Jesus used boats as a pulpit and a pillow. They carried him to appointments with demoniacs and dead daughters. He filled them with fish and emptied them of fishermen. For much of his ministry He messed, as the Water Rat puts it, in and around boats.

This is on my mind because yesterday we boarded an old tub at the port of Tiberius and chugged across a sliver of the Sea of Galilee to Gennesaret in order to view the "Jesus Boat." A brace of amateur archaeologists unearthed the boat in 1986 when a drought left it exposed just beneath the mud. It dates to the first century and probably gives us a good idea of the craft that Peter piloted along with Jesus' other seafaring pals.

I formed a couple of quick impressions in the brief time I had to peruse the preserved craft. One: small. The whole contraption runs about the length of the outboard fishing skiff my grandfather used to own. Two: old. Oh, I don't mean "old" as in ancient. Of course the thing has a couple of millennia on the odometer. I mean "old" as in it was a heap even in its day. Archaeologists have identified twelve different kinds of wood in the hull. Our guide compared it to the practice of a shade tree mechanic: When his old beater breaks down he'd rather not sink a lot of cash into a new part. Instead, he hits the nearest junkyard or perhaps cannibalizes an even more decrepit wreck sitting on blocks in his shed. In the same way, the owner of this boat strip-mined lumber from whatever source he could. A working man living without financial margins, he kept his pirough sea-worthy for as long as was humanly possible. In the end, there was nothing to salvage: He sailed her into the muddy bank, tossed the keys and title on the deck and walked away.

And THAT was the sort of thing that provided Jesus with a platform for miracles and a pulpit for marvels.

I thought about my car, a quarter-century old Toyota Corolla of indeterminate color and inelegant pedigree. It isn't quite as long or wide as the Jesus Boat. Dog hair flecks the threadbare upholstery. A neighbor told me he always knows when I head for work or return home by the choked grumble of my engine. It is small. It is old. Is it also an opportunity for the mighty works of Christ?

And, of course, if this is true of that disreputable beater I drive, it is also true of the disreputable driver. A tiny life, a fool's motley of patchwork parts, unshrunk scraps that have pulled great gaps where unwashed wisdom met threadbare experience. Throughout my days I have tinkered with the finicky mental mechanism, duct-taped the physical dilapidation, rerouted the spiritual wiring and generally tried to get 'er to crank over for one more commute. One of these days the thing will flat refuse to run and the cankering rust won't hold up to bolts or solder. I'll just shove the whole concern into the high weeds and walk away.

And in that moment all that will matter is whether, in all my perfervid living, I ever let Jesus in. All that will last will be anything the Master might have done when I put my little, banged-up life at His disposal. When I gave a homeless friend a place to crash, I let Jesus sleep in my boat and ride out a violent storm. When I spoke kind words to one who had wronged me, I let Jesus preach from the pulpit of my days. When I gave a friend a ride, I helped Jesus get where He was going.

Jesus didn't need a boat. He proved that when, in one of his most memorable miracles, he skipped the ship and decided to walk. On that occasion it was he who saved the vessel, not the other way around. But Jesus used the boat, because (at least I'd like to think) he knew it would one day moulder in the muck, used up and then thrust out, and He wanted it to have done something that outlasted all that.

And Jesus doesn't need my life. After all, it was He who saved me, not the other way around. But Jesus is willing to use my life. And when this aging flesh has sprung too many leaks to keep death outside any longer, when I have to give up sailing even the little inland lake of my limited existence, when all I have left to expect is room enough to hide the wreckage, that will make all the difference.