Today, the Saturday before Easter, doesn’t have a name so far as I know. In the church Bette and I attend, there are special services for Maundy Thursday [1] and Good Friday [2] and of course, on Easter [3]. At my church, and at English-speaking churches around the world, we will perform this little antiphon. The presiding minister will say, “He is risen” and the congregation will respond, “He is risen indeed”
Every year, I wonder why we say it that way. This year, I have been thinking that we use that language because it is not very specific. Also, because it is archaic and archaic expressions lend themselves very nicely to occasions that have the gravity to bear them. I’d like to explore the lack of specificity just a little, then this essay will take me wherever it wants to go. [4]
Passing On
When we began saying “passed on” to refer to someone who had died, I understood it as a reference to another place. That’s what “on” properly means. [5] You were here on earth and now that you have died, you have gone to “the next place.” Since this was being said out loud about someone we all knew, that was presumed to be heaven, but it is “on” that assured us that it was somewhere.
An alternative form—I think of it as later because I began to hear it later—is “passed away.” Notice that “away” does not require another place. She was here and now she is not here. She is “away.” We could say that of dust on the porch furniture after a windstorm, although we probably wouldn’t because of the associations. The dust was here and now it is not; we would not imagine a “dust heaven” to which it had gone.
But now, the expression I hear most is “passed.” Why is that, I wonder. Why do we not specify the implications of either “on” or “away?” I think we use it because it is imprecise. We don’t have anything precise to say so we choose a form that accommodate all the current meanings.
Being Raised
I think that is why we say “He is risen.” But that’s not the way I say it when I have a chance to say it by myself. I say “He is risen” along with everyone else, but I mean, “He was raised.”
My choice of that formulation ought not be taken to mean that I know what happened at the event my church celebrates as “the Resurrection” with a capital R. It means that the form in which the church first began to preach about it is still the form that means the most to me. Here is Luke’s re-creation of the sermon Peter gave to the multitudes. Peter is speaking to the crowd at Pentecost and says this: “This man [Jesus]…you took and had crucified…but God raised him to life.” [6]
Notice what that says. The event that we celebrate at Easter is something God did. It is not something God did “through Jesus,” which is a way we often characterize his ministry, but something he did “to Jesus.”
Jesus was dead. That’s a very orthodox thing to say. And then he wasn’t. And it is God who accomplished that transition. That’s what Peter says. Later formulations [7] say that Jesus “rose” from the dead as if it is something that he did, rather than something that was done to him. You see now, I hope, why I began with “passing on” and “passing away.” Whatever the resurrectional appearances were like, as the disciples experienced them, they caused the disciples to focus on the implications, rather than on the mechanics of the process. The overwhelming hit for the disciples was, “So it was all true after all.”
In our period of history, so much more in love with knowledge than with trust, we would like to know what actually happened. We would like to have that account in our pockets and we think if we only had that, we could keep track of the expanding role of Christ that the church crafted on his behalf and we could do it with understanding and tolerance. We don’t have that account. We have the early stages of the traditions and the later stages.
What I am saying is the I find the early stages of that process—Peter, as Luke imagines him—more meaningful. On the other hand, I am part of a community here is Portland that really doesn’t care one way or the other whether the verb is active (rose) or passive (was raised) and I’m not saying they should. I am saying that I want to be a part of that community so when I am greeted by a dear old friend or by a relative stranger with “His is risen,” I will say, “He is risen indeed.” It is what I should say and it is what I will say. But some small and inaudible part of myself will say, “Jesus was raised. Thanks be to God.”
I think C. S. Lewis comes at this question best when he comes at it indirectly. In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, he includes a scenesin which Aslan, the lion, who is the Christ-figure, is humiliated, tortured, and killed on a stone Table. And then one in which he is alive again. The witch figured she had Aslan dead to rights because he gave up his life to save the life of a traitor. But, Aslan says, the next morning, “There was a deeper magic that the witch did not know. She did not know that when a willing victim was killed in a traitor’s stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backwards.”
Lewis, in the children’s stories, contents himself with the notion that there is “a deeper magic.” I really don’t think that we, as Christians, can do better than that. Something happened. That is solidly historical. The first tellers of the tale were driven by the r
eturn to life of the story they had thought, up until the death of Jesus, they were part of. When he died, they thought they must have been mistaken. Then when they experienced him again, they said first, “So it was all true!.” Then they said, “Look, these scriptures—as we now understand them—show that this was the plan all along.” Then they said, “OK then. Let’s get to work.”
For me, most of this is captured in a whimsical little cartoon that my dear niece, Lisa Hess, sent to me years ago. She and I have a sense of humor that strikes people as odd on occasion. She thought this card was funny and that I would think it was funny in the same way she did. I did think it was funny that way, but for some reason it also strikes me as true in a powerful and not funny way.
On the front of the card, as you see above, the stone rolls away from the opening to Jesus’s tomb. It rolls over what must be the slowest bunny in the world and kills him. “Easter,” it says on the front of the card. On the inside, it says, “It’s not about a bunny.” Even about the world’s slowest bunny. But then there is this wonderful transaction in the bottom right hand corner of the card.
Jesus, restored now to life (but life of a different sort) heals the bunny. It’s 
pretty simple, as you can see. “You’re healed,” Jesus says. “Thanks!” replies the bunny, “Welcome back!” This bunny knows from the beginning what the church struggled even to begin to grasp. It’s so easy for the bunny. It isn’t easy because he was healed although I think we could say that not being dead is an advantage. It is easy because it is easy. It is easy in the way it was easy for the girls in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.
There is, apparently, a place you can be where Easter is easy. I don’t know where that is. But I celebrate in anyway. A part of my celebration is that every Easter, I wear to church a pair of socks that once belonged to my dad. His name is written on a tape on the socks because in that part of his life, he didn’t know what his name was.
For all the years I knew him, Dad struggled with the Resurrection, as I do. He believed it as he was able, as I do. He believed with great courage and I would fill his shoes if I could. I can’t. But every Easter, I wear his socks.
[1] From the Latin noun mandatum, “commandment.” Jesus said to his disciples, “A new commandment I give to you. Love one another.” (John 13:34) It is easy to see the English mandate in that.
[2] There is more debate about this than I thought among language people. I always thought it was an extension of God—as it is is “good-bye,” i.e. God be with ye. Apparently not. It appears that a consensus was achieved while I wasn’t looking that it reflects an earlier meaning of good, i.e. “sacred.”
[3] Easter is the only non-Christian word of the bunch. It’s almost ironic. We get the word in English from Eastre, the dawn goddess. It was, my dictionary says, “almost coincident in date with [the] paschal festival of the church.” I’m fine with that. There was already a festival at our Christmas, too. It isn’t as if we are going to run out of significant dates.
[4] My brother, John, and I have a very healthy respect for personalization. John is a biologist and there are moments when is just seems to him the right thing to say about a Roseate Spoonbill (for instance) that it is just beginning to think about heading home. There is something about the expression on the face that evokes that impression from John and he has no qualms about saying it because everyone understands that he is not claiming to know what the Spoonbill is thinking. It is a way of saying what John’s experience of the Spoonbill is. I do the same thing. I know that this essay does not have somewhere is wants to go. “It” does not exist, because I have not created it yet. But it does feel like that. It is like feeling a current in the water and imagining that the stream “wants you to go that way.”
[5] The series of alternative terms for “died” in Monty Python’s skit about the Norwegian Blue Parrot, one of which is Hamlet’s “shuffled off this mortal coil,” comes inevitably to mind.
[6] Those are fragments of Acts 2: 23,24. This is an amazing passage for any number of reasons, one of which is that Luke is giving to Peter a Christology that he himself does not hold, but that he thinks Peter held.
[7] Or Pauline formulations, which are based on a mystical “life and death” of Jesus, not a “following him around Galilee” life.
Here’s how I get there. If you treat “orthodoxy” as “believing the right things,” then you have to be able to believe something in order to be orthodox. Not to get rigorously etymological or anything, but the -doxy part of orthodox comes from the Greek verb (dokein) meaning “to think” and the ortho- part from the Greek adjective (orthos) meaning “straight.” So “thinking the right things” is a pretty good indicator of orthodoxy, especially if we allow “straight” to be defined by the local community.
I think a much better measure of being Christian, of being, as Christians understand it, a part of God’s family, is saying Yes to God with every available resource. Here’s a handy checklist. (See Deuteronomy 6 and Mark 12) To know what the authors of Deuteronomy meant, you would have to have a better grasp than I do of the crucial terms. What did they mean by “heart” or by “soul,” for instance? When I run a checklist of that kind for myself, I use these four categories: what I think, what I intend, how I feel, and what I do. That is a series that is meaningful to me. [4]
The only question that verse asks of the person living in that house is, “Are you going to open the door?” It doesn’t ask if you know who is knocking. It doesn’t ask if you had intended to have a visitor. It doesn’t ask if you are anxious about who is knocking. It asks whether you are going to open the door.
“Where to Invade Next.” That’s not a headline. We don’t look good in any of the Michael Moore movies. It’s just a statement about what I want to think about today.
The Italian couple pictured here who are accustomed to eight weeks of vacation every year are astounded to learn that American workers get none at all—by law. Moore does admit that vacation hours are negotiated in contracts. She is in a mid-level business; he’s a cop. They both look very good in the vacation pictures that someone takes of them nearly everywhere in the world it is sunny and warm.
meal we see at the elementary school is charming. It is served by kitchen staff. On china. A four-course meal. For less per child than we spend. And they get an hour to eat it.
is as good a thing as she thinks it is.
Another difficulty that the notion of “uselessness” hands us is, “What do we mean when we say ‘useful’?” Society is a rough and ready kind of enterprise so far as meanings go. Society is possible because “close enough” is the standard for giving and receiving meaning. But every now that then, “good enough” really isn’t good enough and I think this is one. What if, for instance, our common definitions of “useful” are merely conventional? What is these common definitions are not “useful?” What if another notion of “useful,” on being presented, would be welcomed and would benefit us all?
member of the group who is willing to ask the “Why is grass green?” kind of question. No one knows the answer, but we all think we should so all of us pass the opportunity by and none of us asks it. But this one guy does. He would be very much surprised, I think, to learn that his contribution is “useful” to the group; it is, in fact, much more than useful. It is vital.
One night, all the residents (except the one holdout) are magically transformed into themselves as children. They run and play and laugh. But before the night is over, they have begun to remember also the wonderful relationships and events of which they were a part and which they will not have any access to unless they go back to their old selves. And Mr. Bloom gives them that. You can go back, he says, to “your old comfortable bodies,” but with “fresh young minds.” The next morning these old people nearly erupt from the senior center, bursting with things to do and places to go that were there all along, but which they had not been willing to contemplate.
Amending the soil, so that the kinds of plants you want in your yard really would help. If the moisture retention of clay is my problem, then amending it with organic matter to improve drainage is the solution.
Montana in August 1991. A professor from the University of Montana had just given a talk opposing President George H. W. Bush’s “Operation Desert Shield.” It was a pro-Bush crowd so there was a lot of conversation afterwards. During the conversation, an old German man came up to me and said, in broken English, something that chilled my blood at the time and that I have never forgotten. He said, “I haff heard all ziss before,” and he went away shaking his head sadly. It chilled my blood because I knew who he had heard it from. He had heard if from Hermann Goering.
Germany. For me, Mauthausen is the name of the camp, a place where Jews and other “enemies of the state” were to be sent to die. [5] The camp is now a tourist attraction, of course, complete with a very good bookstore. That was where I found The Logic of Evil: the Social Origins of the Nazi Party, by William Brustein of the University of Minnesota. These are “the stairs of death” at Mauthausen when the camp was in full operation. I walked these steps on a beautiful sunny day and could scarcely believe they were the same steps.
But as the fear and anger are jacked up, what was once the vital middle of the spectrum comes to seem “politics as usual,” or, even worse, as “the status quo.” You hear people ay they are “against the status quo” as if it were one thing and as if whatever broke it would be better. Clearly politics as usual is not giving us back the America that was stolen from us under the leadership of the moderates. (Ronald Reagan, by the way, was one of those “moderates.”) Politics as usual is not protecting us from the threat of—in the U. S. today, that means “the existence of”—extremist groups who will count no cost too high if they can inflict even a minor wound on the U. S. It’s time to elect a “strong man.” This is a real Trump rally picture. Let’s hope it isn’t really representative.
Then the question of what “empties himself” means, both in the case of Jesus and in the case of Ben Whittaker. Then, second, there is the question of what is actually emptied. I don’t know what that means for Jesus, but what it means for Ben is what the movie is about. Finally, there is the question of what is not–can not be?–emptied.
My problem is not with understanding it. I can’t. My problem is with not caring about it. I’m not really critical of myself for failing to care, but I think all Christians are poorer if they fail to care about this fundamentally important mystery. I think we need to live with it and care about it. I would really like to understand it; that’s the kind of person I am. But even failing to understand it, I am not prepared to stop caring. How to do that?
Sir Robin’s problem is the tiniest fragment of the dilemma Jesus faced in “giving up the form of God,” but since I have no idea what “the form of God” means, I don’t really feel anything about it. I really get the little frog’s problem. I can feel that one.
The second interviewer picks up at college and asks about work history. This is the first time we, as viewers, hear that Ben was V.P. for Sales and Advertising and later was in charge of the production of the physical phone book. For New York. The second interviewer wants to know why people don’t just google phone numbers. Ben is unflappable. “Well yes, but back then people needed phone books.”
He doesn’t “empty” those things. They were part of his old self and they are part of his current self. And they save him. They save the company, too. And Jules Ostin, the company’s founder, whose intern he is. It is not hard to track those traits in the story. [4] Ben goes into a conference room to perform a very simple task that Becky, Jules’ secretary, has summoned him to do. While there, he hears crisis discussed—a crisis for the company and also for the founder. When he reports back to the secretary, she says, “So…what were they talking about in there.” Ben replies, “I really couldn’t say.” Becky prompts, “You were in there a long time…” Ben comes back with, “I couldn’t hear a thing.” Not true, of course, because he did hear; but also not a lie because Becky knows exactly what he means.
Second, I will really miss living in a country that is respected in the community of nations. Apart from the damage a Trump administration would do, simply winning the Republican nomination and/or the general election would be a blow to our prestige. Bette is in Germany at the moment, communing with three of her grandchildren, and she reports that the question the Germans want most to ask her is, “What are you people DOING?” This is orders of magnitude worse that Reagan who was, after all, a governor and, before that, a long time political activist. [1]
want to argue that we are culpable. When you take a look at what would have had to happen to prevent it, it is really hard even to imagine it. We are, however, the cause. Culpable or not, we are the stewards under whose “care” this soil developed. If “sovereignty of the people” means anything at all, surely it means that.
There is a thoroughgoing tribalism that makes policymakers who cooperate with each other to support policies that would be good for all, into “traitors.” It is only a small step to an Inquisition that begins with “Are you now compromising, or have you ever compromised with [a member of the other party.]” If you hear the House Un-American Activities Committee language there then I wrote it properly. “They” are evil and consorting with “them” is evil and you deserve punishment.
In the first scene in which Geoff Mercer and his wife Kate appear together, Geoff gets a letter. The rest of the movie is about the ramifications of message the letter contains. I am not really certain what the ultimate effect of the news is on the Mercers. David Constantine, who wrote the short story on which the movie is based, has no interest in our knowing what it will be. Google [David Constantine, telegraph, interview] for the whole pitch by the author. Andrew Haigh, the director, doesn’t care either.
The marriage that director Haigh shows us is not bad, really. Geoff and Kate are still interested in each other. A little. They offer all the everyday courtesies that allow for domestic tranquility. [3] She is especially attentive to him, but it to his getting through the day and his taking his meds that she is attentive. If she knows there is more in there—and maybe there isn’t—it doesn’t show up. Getting through the day seems to take all the attention Geoff has to give.
Finally, they could have practiced the full restoration of relationship after the friction has stopped fricking. [6] You can look at the week of Geoff and Kate’s relationship that is treated in the movie and imagine that they have never so much as exchanged a heartfelt endearment. But it’s a lot more likely that they used to do that, back in the old days, and they one friction and another occurred, like so much tread wearing off a tire. A strong marriage has ways of restoring the lost tread; of repairing the wounds any marriage will suffer. And if you don’t do that, the tire will blow when you hit something unexpected on the road.
In this piece, I would like to contrast what Brooks likes about America [1] with what he is willing to “pay” to have it. “Pay” is in quotation marks because for the most part, it isn’t Brooks who will do the paying. So here is another way to say it. Brooks thinks you should like the things he likes about America so much that you will be willing to continue to pay the price of keeping them—and it really is you, not Brooks, who will be paying the price.
