Back to Business

Great sermon on Easter Sunday.  My pastor, capping off a truly worshipful week during which we gathered each night to focus on Our Lord’s sacrifice at Calvary, preached about the women making their Dawn Patrol trek to the tomb.  (Sidebar:  the Greek word “to run” is trecho, though it has no actual connection to our English verb.  Still, it appears about four times in the various accounts of the resurrection, two of them with reference to the women.  Easter Sunday looks more like a track meet than a formal worship service and these early-day Wilma Rudolphs burned up the cobblestone race course of ancient Jerusalem!) 

Pastor Grover pointed out that, to everyone else, this was a day for getting back to normal.  Sunday was the Jewish Monday; people got up, grumbled a little, and went back to work.  Moreover, this particular Sunday followed the close of Passover, so everyone had that post-holiday hangover.  The Law had slapped a prohibition on unleavened bread for the previous seven days so women began baking rich, yeasty loaves.  After a week of choking down saltines, people snuffed up the scent of rising dough.  The current incarnation of the Gibeonites gazed at the temple grounds, red with the gore of thousands of goats and sheep slain over the weekend.  They manned their mops and began swabbing up the mess.  Priests rubbed sore shoulders and complained about arthritis aggravated by slitting too many sacrificial throats.  The Roman soldiers breathed a little easier.  Passover was always a dicey time for the hired muscle in a police state, but things had gone off fairly peacefully; had to crucify three guys but it avoided the riot.  The terror alert sank from fuscia to teal and the big men eased off their full battle rattle for the first time in weeks.

Meanwhile, for a handful of outland peasants, the whole world somersaulted twice.

Their world had ended a few hours earlier when their Messiah died.  Then their ended world became their upended world at dawn when their Messiah refused to stay dead.  Before it was over the psychic shift reached critical mass sufficient to switch their day of worship forward by twenty-four hours, and if you think recalibrating three thousand years of religious tradition happens for no good reason, you’ve never tried to get a Baptist to sit in a different pew at church!  Something had ended besides one more Passover; something had begun besides another work week. 

I thought of this on Monday morning as I settled down for the six Sundays of Easter.  Holy Week had been an ordeal, though a blessed one.  Well, there’s always that kind of intensity around religious festivals.  Archaeologists now believe that downriver from Stonehenge was a big town built to handle the holy tourism drawn to that sacred shrine at the solstices and equinoxes each year.  Excavations have revealed vats of beer and the general remains of restaurants and souvenir shops.  Evidently Easter sales at the mall are nothing new, nor are money changers in the temple.  Once the crisis passes we sigh our relief and hunker down to plough the old familiar furroughs.  Thank God (or the gods, or whomever), now things can get back to normal.

Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises centers around the Festival of San Fermin in Pamplona.  Though the book deals mostly with the famous bullfights, the narrator admits that “San Fermin is also a religious festival.”  On the day before this holy observance, Jake Barnes, scanning the sidewalk cafes in the town square, notes that “the marble-toppped tables and white wicker chairs were gone.  They were replaced by cast-iron tables and severe folding chairs.  The cafe was like a battleship stripped for action.”  At the end of the week we read,

In the morning it was all over.  The fiesta was finished. . . .The square was empty and there were no people on the streets.  A few children were picking up rocket-sticks in the square.  The cafes were just opening and the waiters were carrying out the comfortable white wicker chairs and arranging them around the marble-topped tables in the shade of the arcade.  They were sweeping the streets and sprinkling them with a hose.

Back to normal.  But for the characters in the story, irrevocable change has come, irrevocable damage has been done, irrevocable injury sustained.  The village doesn’t know; the village goes back to its business.

The world didn’t know it on that first Easter “Sunday” (our psychological Monday), but they now rebuilt their routines on the rubble of an unmade world.  The besieged city stood down and returned to comfortable furniture and comfortable food and comfortable religion, but revolution sank delicate tendrils in the cracked hearts of some crackpot Galileans, tendrils that would eventually bust up the foundations of the social edifice and sink taproots into a rich new soil.

I recently watched, as part of my Lenten penance, a documentary on the Shroud of Turin.  The producers made the rather goofy claim that the purported relic contains evidence of an “event horizon,” the phenomenon theorized to occur at the mouth of a black hole where all the laws of physics break down and the rules no longer apply.  Now, as a Baptist I have far more regard for revelation than relics, for Scripture than scraps of cloth, but the concept itself intrigues me.  Whatever else went on in that tomb on that Sunday, the world did indeed experience an event horizon.  We received new rules and, more importantly, a new Ruler. 

I woke up at my usual hour on Monday.  My newspaper had gone from rotund to anorexic after a bulemic purge of all the fat advertising flyers.  No evening services on the weeknights.  But my world, unmade on Good Friday and remade on Easter Sunday, will never be the same again; indeed, it never was.

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