Whom Do You Seek?

Texts for Easter Sunday, March 27, 2005
Matthew 16: 21-25 & John 20: 1-18

Whom do you seek? Take care not to have an answer at the ready.  Your life depends on it. Throughout this past Lent, we have listened in half a dozen ways to how the life of a Christian is “becoming who you are.” Along the way, we have felt the false self, like a mask on our real face. Maybe you have come to hear the echo of the false self, who always has the answer to the question, Who are you? Surface self piles on: name, job, family (if normal), residence. We’ve seen this; we’re getting used to watching this part of us jump into action. Maybe we can even laugh about how shell-self never wants to be seen not knowing, never wants to feel the empty space of a question unanswered–and so memorizes the answers to all the main questions. Now it’s Easter. The preacher asks “Whom do you seek?” and the answer must be . . . Jesus.! (Two points.)

Religion with all the answers in place is like watching a film of reality and calling that reality. Do you remember The Truman Show? In that movie, the director of a popular TV series of the same name has erected a set that reproduces the effects of a world. A boy is literally raised from infancy to young adulthood on the set so that the viewing audience can see him all the time. His parents and his teachers and his friends are all actors. The center of town is busy with cars and roads and people–actors–who say they are going to other towns, but the roads go nowhere except to the edge of the set. The sky above is a huge high dome with lights by night to match the stars, and blue sky and sun every day. Is the hero upset by his small world, and the surface selves with memorized answers to all his questions? Absolutely not; he never asks. Religion can be like that. A set piece. A dried flower arrangement. A nice landscape print for the wall. No questions answered. All questions refused until Mary bends over into the tomb.

There, two angels in white are sitting where the body of Jesus had lain. What is this? A tomb with angels? Yet how familiar this seemed to some who first heard the story. For the angels are the two cherubim, seated just as they are seated in the temple, in the holy of holies, over the ark of God, in that most precious place, where God said to reside, powerful for those who have him, who know just where he is–who know the answer. It says so in First Kings:

   Then the priests brought the ark of the covenant of the Lord to its place, in the inner sanctuary of the house, in the most holy place, underneath the wings of the cherubim. For the cherubim spread out their wings over the place of the ark, so that the cherubim made a covering above the ark. (1 Kings 8:6-7)

We spent so many centuries with God in the box. And then we met Jesus. And we thought, No, not there–but here! Jesus is the answer! We have seen God in Jesus. Then they killed him, and laid him in an inner sanctuary, in a most holy place, and angels set up and spread their wings over the place. And we come back to worship him who is the answer. But he’s not there! And we are weeping, inconsolable. It is as if we have stumbled upon reality at the edge of a movie set. The set is not real, the religion we had was all in our head, God is not in the box, but only the angels and an empty ark. Everything we thought we could trust, even the miserableness of death, is out of whack! And the angels won’t even play the game. They ask, “Woman, why are you weeping?”

“They have taken away my lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.” They have moved my religion and I do not know where to worship. They have changed the liturgy and I do not know how to follow. They have moved the pews and I do not know where to sit. Religion as a set-piece with answers in place is idolatry. Whatever else the empty tomb is, if you will encounter it in its bare emptiness, you see that it is the destruction of human religion and its set of answers to who God is and who you are. God is out of the tomb, out of the church. God is on the move, turning you around from your misdirected gaze.

So Mary turned around. She saw Jesus, standing, but she did not know it was Jesus; she supposed it was the gardener. Jesus–but unrecognizable to the eye of flesh. Do you sense the significance? Whatever you can see and understand with your normal, every day self; whatever looks like what you’re used to; whatever presents itself to your eye, and you understand it, and you have the answers–God cannot show up there for you. In relationships where nothing is on the move, because you have settled the terms, God cannot show up; in the affairs of the nation, where you always know which side you’re on, because you will not let a new idea in, God cannot show up; in nature, where the beautiful and the ugly come stamped like postcards on your imagination, God cannot show up; in emotions, where you already know to avoid what hurts, how to sweetly change the subject to pleasant things–God cannot show up for you; and in religion, even Easter, if the past is the point, and you know the answer, how he rose and saved everybody, just like a hero in a Western, God cannot come. God has no part to play in such a play, for God is on the move, out of the box, out of the church, out of the tomb so that you might follow.

Now Jesus asks, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom do you seek?” Are you ready to not know the answer? Mary isn’t, not quite. She says, “My lord (!) if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.” Tell me where the ark has been stashed, and I will put it back. Tell me where the stones lie, and I will rebuild the temple. Tell me where the answers lie, and I will set them down.

Now Jesus says, “Mary!” Now Jesus calls you by name. Now it is not your eyes that see–your eyes for whom seeing is believing, but which never see anything new. No, but your ear hears, though you are blind. Your ear does not know the answers. Your ear knows the voice.

The gatekeeper opens the gate for this one, for the sheep hear his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has brought out all his own, he goes ahead of them, and the sheep follow him because they know his voice. (John 10:3-4)

This is the beginning of true religion, a real connection to the Eternal–the infinite, the open question–when you respond with your whole self because you have heard your name. Whom do you seek? Here is a mystery. Do you seek your Lord? Yes, but why? To bury him? To worship him? No. To live with him? Yes, but what does that mean? You’re not going to watch T.V. together or have walks among the leaves or dine at a favorite restaurant. What can that mean, to seek the Lord to live with him?

It means you desire to rise as high as rise can rise. To become who you are! Yes. Whom do you seek? Your own true self, no false self. That is why you come out to an Easter service, even to a stony tomb. Even if the church disappoints, still that is why you come. Deep down, that is why disciples go in search after their Lord, who is on the move. You are not seeking him exactly, but the way and the truth and the life–to find your life.

How can you find who you really are? The answer is there at the tomb. The answer is there in its openness and its emptiness. The answer is there in the path that led to this place, the path of the cross. The Lord was never unclear about this. “Those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.” Whom do you seek? Christ in you. How shall you seek? By bringing yourself to nothing. Fr. Thomas Keating writes:

To bring oneself to nothing–no thing–is to cease to identify with . . . our emotional programs for happiness and the limitations of our cultural conditioning . . . As long as we are identified with some role or persona, we are not free to manifest the purity of God’s presence. Part of life is a process of dropping whatever role . . . you identify with. It is not you. Your body is not you. If you are not those things, who are you? That is the big question of the second half of the spiritual journey.

The Human Condition, p. 42

Whom do you seek? Christ, who is Christ in you. He is on the move. He does not settle questions, he opens them. He opens you. Who are you, if you are not all those complaints, those hurts, those successes. Whom do you seek? Perhaps, with eyes wide open, you can see what God is doing– who you are becoming–even in a bird on the wing.

The Heron

So heavy
is the long-necked, long-bodied heron,
always it is a surprise
when her smoke-colored wings

open
and she turns
from the thick water,
from the black sticks

     of the summer pond,
     and slowly
     rises into the air
     and is gone.

Then, not for the first time or the last time,
I take a deep breath
of happiness, and I think
how unlikely it is

that death is a hole in the ground,
how improbable
that ascension is not possible,
though everything seems so inert, so nailed

back into itself-
the muskrat and his lumpy lodge,
the turtle,
the fallen gate.

And especially it is wonderful
that the summers are long
and the ponds so dark and so many,
and therefore it isn’t a miracle

but the common thing,
this decision,
this trailing of the long legs in the water,
this opening of the heavy body

into a new life: see how the sudden
gray blue sheets of her wings
strive toward the wind; see how the clasp of nothing
takes her in.

— Mary Oliver

©Stephen H. Phelps, April 2005