The Empty Closet

Jerusalem passageway, 1981 -crg

Approaching Easter, I found myself in a kind of Holy Saturday malaise—you know, that dreary interim when Jesus is in the tomb, and all is lost. I read again the narratives around the empty tomb, the resurrection stories, one Gospel each day. I wanted to encounter the risen Christ. Lord, I believe, help my unbelief!

Then it occurred to me that I was looking for a literal resurrection, like Thomas demanding to see the prints of the nails in Jesus' hands and feel the wound in his side. In truth, the stories that most appeal to me are the mystical ones, like the Emmaus disciples experiencing Jesus in the kerygma of “opening scriptures” and the sacrament of breaking bread.

The literal miracle I was overlooking was what came out of that empty tomb: a new faith and spiritual community that would attract much of humanity and change the world; a fresh understanding of God and, to take it personally, a fresh understanding of myself. “God brought us to life with Christ,” in the words of Ephesians 2:5 (NJB). I recognized the resurrection of Jesus in countless others, thanks to his passion and compassion.

Coming out of the closet helped me better grasp resurrection. I know how differently life and God and the world are experienced when free of confinement, restriction, and hiddenness. Everything is new and seen/felt/heard/smelled/tasted as if for the first time. It’s wonderful and terrifying, uplifting and burdensome. It calls for an entirely different way of being, acting, speaking, and loving.

It entails both freedom and responsibility. Its heights and depths make one soar and sink at the same time. It helps one focus and broaden all at once. Suddenly, when first coming out, I was in the “rapids” of my life excursion, exhilarating and frightening, both limiting and opening possibilities, tearing me away from safer shores and hurling me toward the unknown. “Thar be dragons thar,” I feared.

In my 1998 book Coming Out as Sacrament, I used “coming out” as a hermeneutic for biblical interpretation. One reviewer groused about my introducing yet another hermeneutic, or lens, through which to view scripture, but I believe “the more the merrier,” the greater the opportunity for diverse populations to understand and apply the spiritual wisdom of the Bible to their own lives and the lives of their communities.

I boldly asserted that the Bible was God’s coming out story.  After all, in Christian tradition, self-revelation is how we know God. From the burning bush to Jesus of Nazareth to the Holy Spirit, all awareness and knowledge of God comes at divine initiative. I suggested God came out of the closet of heaven to dwell with us and even dwell within us.

The empty tomb may be viewed as a kind of empty closet. “Do not hold on to me!” Jesus told the weeping Mary in another one of those mystical resurrection stories. “Do not hold onto me!” each of us says to peers and colleagues as Jesus calls us from confining beliefs, practices, prejudices, perspectives, and expectations.

Jesus goes before us into Galilee, or any region or culture or community or vocation or workplace or movement in which we live and move and have our being, if only we have eyes to see and hearts to feel. With his dearly beloved Lazarus, he challenges us, “Come out!”

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Copyright © 2019 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.  

Resurrecting Jesus

Many of us have demythologized Jesus. Others have deconstructed Jesus. Now it’s time to give some thought to resurrecting Jesus!

I don’t mean we can assume divine power to restore life or create the eternal. But just as God is revealed in the sacraments only with our willing suspension of disbelief, the resurrected Jesus is said by scripture only to have appeared to believers. Some of those believers hesitated or doubted, but they showed up anyway. Many of us showed up this past Sunday for Easter celebrations of resurrection. Woody Allen once quipped that 90% of life is just showing up!

This train of thought began for me on Good Friday, in an afternoon conversation about “the empty tomb” with a friend from seminary days, Kim White, visiting us briefly in Atlanta en route home to Nashville. I asked him what difference the story of Jesus’ resurrection makes to his faith in the 21^st century. Like me, he’s more interested in Jesus than the appellations attached to him, like “the Christ.” 

As for me, I have discovered the ongoing presence of those closest to me after their deaths, continuing to offer me their joy and wisdom and strength. It’s easy then to imagine that those closest to Jesus felt the same, and this intimacy manifested itself in the stories of resurrection we have in the Bible, including what some scholars consider to be a misplaced resurrection story we call the Transfiguration, in which Peter, James, and John were given a mystical experience of Jesus’ spiritual intimacy with Moses the lawgiver, Elijah the prophet, and Yahweh, who proudly booms again about Jesus as a chosen child, just as Jesus heard at his baptism.

Literalists would say we have to take these stories as literal truth, not as mystical visions or explanatory mythology. But why? Even the early followers of Jesus differed on these manifestations of a risen Christ. Some biblical stories suggest a spiritual resurrection that allows Jesus to pass through locked doors or out of his burial garment, still in place. Others suggest a physical resurrection that allows Jesus to eat with disciples and permit them to touch his wounds. Some stories mix the two. And Mary Magdalene’s encounter and that of the disciples traveling to Emmaus indicate he is not immediately recognizable, and may be known in a garden (nature) as well as in sacrament (the breaking of bread), in grief as well as in hospitality to strangers.

For me, all of this is to say that we actively participate in Jesus’ resurrection by our own desire to see him, to experience his joy and wisdom and strength, to manifest his presence to those around us through  compassion for “the least of these” as well as our neighbors and opponents and sisters and brothers in faith.

I have always been fond of the concluding paragraph of Albert Schweitzer’s Quest for the Historical Jesus:

He comes to us as One unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lakeside, he came to those who knew him not. He speaks to us the same word: “Follow thou me!” and sets us to the tasks which he has to fulfill for our time. He commands. And to those who obey him, whether they be wise or simple, he will reveal himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in his fellowship, and, as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience Who he is.

Copyright © 2013 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. Check out past posts in the right rail on the blogsite.

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