The Glad Surprise

There is ever something compelling and exhilarating about the glad surprise. The emphasis is upon glad. There are surprises that are shocking, startling, frightening and bewildering. But the glad surprise is something different from all of these. It carries with it the element of elation, of life, of something over and beyond the surprise itself. The experience itself comes at many levels: the simple joy that comes when one discovers that the balance in the bank is larger than the personal record indicated—and there is no error in accounting; the realization that one does not have his doorkey—the hour is late and everyone is asleep—but someone very thoughtfully left the latch off, “just in case”; the dreaded meeting in a conference to work out some problems of misunderstanding, and things are adjusted without the emotional lacerations anticipated; the report from the doctor’s examination that all is well, when one was sure that the physical picture was very serious indeed. All of these surprises are glad!

There is a deeper meaning in the concept of the glad surprise. This meaning has to do with the very ground and foundation of hope about the nature of life itself. The manifestation of this quality in the world about us can best be witnessed in the coming of spring. It is ever a new thing, a glad surprise, the stirring of life at the end of winter. One day there seems to be no sign of life and then almost overnight, swelling buds, delicate blooms, blades of grass, bugs, insects—an entire world of newness everywhere. It is the glad surprise at the end of winter. Often the same experience comes at the end of a long tunnel of tragedy and tribulation. It is as if a man stumbling in the darkness, having lost his way, finds that the spot at which he falls is the foot of a stairway that leads from darkness into light. This is what Easter means in the experience of the race. This is the resurrection! It is the announcement that life cannot ultimately be conquered by death, that there is no road that is at last swallowed up in an ultimate darkness, that there is strength added when the labors increase, that multiplied peace matches multiplied trials, that life is bottomed by the glad surprise. Take courage therefore:

When we have exhausted our store of endurance,
When our strength has failed ere the day is half done,
When we reach the end of our hoarded resources,
Our Father’s full giving is only begun.

(For the Inward Journey: the writings of Howard Thurman.
Selected by Anne Spencer Thurman. pages 266-267
Originally published in Meditations of the Heart)

When I tell the Easter story, it always begins with darkness; a heavy darkness, a layered darkness, a beautiful darkness. Always it emerges from the darkness of the betrayal of a teacher by a student, the weight of empire crushing a people who are finding their own way, the sadness of the mortal remains of a rabbi sealed in an anonymous tomb given by someone who appreciated the teaching but feared the political notoriety. Always, Easter emerges. Easter emerges.

The darkness is broken by a group of women, injured women, faithful women, women who overcome their fear to do “what must be done.” They will prepare the body in a way that honors the teacher, respects his faith. In their own bodies, their actions proclaim, “may his memory be for a blessing.”

We remember that these are Jewish women preparing to perform a Jewish ritual act of cleaning and anointing the mortal remains of a faithful man. These are Jewish women, a Jewish mother, as it were, with her Jewish sisters, and a Jewish teacher. What gets lost in so many years of Christian telling of the story is that almost everyone in the Greek new testament is Jewish! The teacher is Jewish, the students are Jewish, the stories they learn from are Jewish, the scriptures they cite are Jewish. The dearly-held friends are Jewish. The betrayers are Jewish.

The entire Jesus project, as it were, was about figuring out how to be Jewish in a time where the Jewish culture was being dominated by, controlled by, crushed by empire. How does one respond to the all-powerful empire, its expectations of subjugation and dominance. The Jesus movement was one of any number of answers to the question of how does one hold a Jewish community together under empire.

There are a number of ways reflected in the Jewish Jesus story. Some retreated, like the Essenes, who created utopian communities that withdrew from broader society. Some capitulated, like the Sadducees, who cooperated with empire as long as they were able to control what happened in the Temple. Some, like the Pharisees, reframed the whole meaning of what it meant to be Jewish by enacting a rich behavioral code that emphasized a kind of ritual purity—one that they felt the Jesus movement did not fully embody. And then there were some, called the Zealots, who carried on a sort of guerilla war against empire.

These were all ways that people were trying to figure out how it was to be Jewish.

Jesus argued that there was another way; that the rule of Rome was not the rule of the world of spirit; that spirit could reframe our existence and claim our loyalty. “A new commandment I give you,” he said as the Roman soldiers came to arrest him, “that you love one another.” Love, he said, was what must claim our hearts, our minds, our attention. “By your love,” he said, “they will know that you are my students.” By your love, he argued, you will show what it means to be Jewish.

In the generation after the death of Jesus, this Love ethic expanded the reach of the Jewish Jesus movement to include other people, including non-Jewish people attracted to the teaching as a response to the oppression of Rome. A generation later the alternatives to empire will be reduced as Rome destroys Jerusalem, destroys the Temple, destroys the organized culture; and in that darkness, that heavy, layered, beautiful darkness, the Jesus story emerges to be told in different ways by different authors, some of them in the midst of battle, some of them picking up the remains, some, a generation or two later, writing more philosophically of what it means to show, by their love, what it means to be followers of that man Jesus.

Brokenness, darkness, destruction, sorrow; all these are part of the Jesus story, of the Jewish story, of the larger human story. How we may find ourselves in the rule and realm of spirit, of light, of love? These are the questions we seek to answer in our story, our story of living under the American empire and its peculiarities and particularities of today; our story of being a people of tremendous privilege in a world that ought to have our care; our story of teaching and learning a liberal religion. In English, the word liberal has been used, for some seven centuries, to mean free, as in born free; as in being noble and thus having the capacity to be generous; as in magnanimous and admirable. We challenge each other, in this place, to be in respectful relationships with one another so that we might be in respectful relationship with the world.

Taoist philosopher Lao Tzu wrote “when I let go of what I am, I become what I might be.” There is some courage, you see, in the seed which loses its seed identity to become sprout, and bud, and blossom, and fruit, yielding new seed.

On Easter, we’re letting go, you see, emerging, becoming what we might be. The darkness which frightens us, obscures the way forward, seeks to hold us back; we are emerging from that darkness by the promise of children who sing that though hope be frail, there can be miracles. We are becoming when we share our dandelion seeds with a world waiting for a delicious salad and some dandelion wine. We are finding another way when we acknowledge that in the tomb of the soul, we may have taken refuge from the world and its heaviness; and, grateful for the darkness that has nourished us, we push away the stone and invite the light to awaken us to the possibilities within us and among us—possibilities for new life in ourselves and in the world.

We are the women, you and I, working our way through the darkness, seeking to live into our religious calling. We are the ones who discover that the brokenness we were preparing to receive is not there, but that there is another story, another outcome, another way which we are blessed to embody. That we may we have love among us, the love for the task and the teaching, and the love for the world which will allow us to let the light awaken us to new possibilities.

Happy Easter, my friends, blessed be. Ashe, ashe. May it ever be. Peace, salaam, shalom. I love you. Amen.