“There is no resurrection that is not the resurrection of love“ ~ Dan Miller

The Madness of March, the Audacity of April

In the culture, at least the American sporting culture, these past two or three weeks and this week especially are considered for basketball worshipers the high holy days, referred to as March Madness. People who are not afflicted with the basketball bug no doubt roll their eyes, shake their heads, and look dazed and confused at this breed of March mutants who seem to have invaded and taken over their families, cities, the nightly news, and regular television programming. But with Easter coming early this year, this week is one time when the calendar of contemporary culture and the liturgical calendar of the church share something in common: the madness of March becomes the audacity of April.

The madness of March for basketball junkies is that nothing else much matters. But what is the madness of March we participate in each spring, this spring, as followers not fans of Jesus to whom we recommit and reconnect ourselves this week like April Fools? And what is the audacious truth to which we re-member ourselves this week? Is it merely a Passion “Play” or a Television Special we can watch from the comfort of our couch, push “pause,” get up for chips and a Diet Coke and come back for the scourging at the pillar, or yet one more youth group’s version of a story we’ve heard so many times before that our main response afterward is how tall Billy Walsh has gotten and what a fabulous job he did playing Pontius Pilate?

Is not March Madness a fitting way to describe the season of Lent which marches Jesus toward Jerusalem, toward his “good Friday” and his “magnificent defeat,” in a week in which we must be bears of little brain to call Holy? In fact, is not the madness of March the same as the foolishness of April? Arrested, interrogated, tortured, and executed as a criminal, disturber of the peace, rabbi-rouser, blasphemer, mocked as being “King of the Jews”— later assigned titles like Christ and Son of God by adherents and gospel authors— Jesus is the April Fool par excellence and we’d have to be nuts, crazy, mad and holy fools ourselves to get up off the couch and follow such a one as this.1

And yet, this is the call, this is the madness and the audacity with which we align ourselves. This is what it will mean on Holy Thursday to break the bread that is the body of Christ and the poverty and richness of our lives and to feed one another as Jesus feeds us. This is what it will mean to walk humbly into the world that is our life as if with a towel and a bowl and some water and be willing to kneel and tenderly to participate in the sacred kinship that is the holy communion of feet. This is what it will mean on Friday to reverence and touch the cross so that we might find the courage to see and touch the places where and the people in whom Christ is crucified today in our midst. This is what it will mean at the Easter Vigil or on Easter Sunday to renew our baptismal vows. Why else were the ancient baptismal fonts shaped like a womb or a birth canal or a coffin? Madness indeed. I fear Christians have trivialized Jesus’ death, so co-opted it for our own selfish purposes by packaging it almost exclusively in terms of “dying for my sins” that we have failed to see the larger, deeper, more immediate, preeminent, and cosmic truth, namely, that Jesus died for life, for Life itself, for the life of Life, and the life of Love. During Triduum, it is this Life and this Love in whom we live and move and have our being that we recommit ourselves to incarnate. This is the madness,the mandate, and the mystery.

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You have heard me say before, that contrary to and with all due respect to the peddlers of the traditional teaching of creatio ex nihilo, that it is truer and theologically more essential to say that the original, divine creative act was creatio ex amore. That is, the universe came into being not “from or out of nothing,” but rather as a deliberate, generous divine act of extravagant love.

It is also important to emphasize that all the central Christian mysteries, and every lower-case joyful, sorrowful, glorious, and illuminating mystery in the sacred drama of everyday life is one and the same mystery. And that mystery is love. The motive force for creation, incarnation, salvation, ascension, everlasting life is the conscious, intentional, generous outpouring and sharing of divine love by Love for the sake of love. To awaken to the central Christian mystery which is that God is a community of love, the beloved community, the Holy Trinity, is to awaken to the gratuitous invitation and incomprehensible opportunity to participate in the interactive dance of divine being, to partake of the exchange of divine life and love. If you can find a better deal, take it.

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This week especially, we are confronted with the extravagance of divine love (literally extrā– extra- + vagārī to wander), for Christians, the extra wandering of God in Jesus, the movement beyond the boundaries of what is logical or expected or safe in order to proclaim that love is the greatest power in the world, death be hanged. This week especially we see both the bitter and the sweet truth and consequences of authentic love, mad as March and audacious as April. What is bitter about March is the dying required— NOT JUST OF JESUS but of us— before we taste the sweetness of April. What is sweet about April is that those who weather the madness of March will savor the fullness of life. The paradox of the paschal mystery is that the truth and consequences of life and love are death, but the truer truth and the more consequential consequence is that the christened daily dying is the doorway to Abundant Life and Big Love not just in the afterlife but before death.

What is more mad than to come preaching, teaching, embodying, and offering others life in the face of death and the purveyors of death? What is considered more idiotic (and yet what could be more revealing) than to stand silent as truth and as moving as life before the gesticulating justifications of the insecure powers and principalities of death who expose and mock themselves, not Jesus, by asking “What is truth?” What could be more life-affirming? What could possibly be a better testimony of love and liberation than to die with such dignity in the face of human callousness and the lie of the presiders of unjust suffering and death?

What is more audacious than resurrection, not as a doctrine to give intellectual assent to from our easy chairs, not merely as something that happened to Jesus FOR US but as a principle and practice of life, as a lived conviction that love is the authentic expression and the fullest use of power in and for the world, as the enactment of sacrificial love by us FOR LIFE and for the LIFE OF LIFE? Is there anything more daring, more foolish, more audacious and costly than to love, as seen in the truth of the events to which we re-member ourselves this week? What is more audacious and more enlivening than resurrection whose appearance only occurs in and through and after dying? There is no resurrection that is not the resurrection of love. This is the truth we join ourselves to when in humility and faith we call ourselves Christ-ones.

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The various reasons given to account for Jesus’ execution include charges of blasphemy, crimes against Rome, sedition, and fomenting political unrest to name some but not all. But let’s not fool ourselves. The reason Jesus was executed was because he dared to love madly, deeply, extravagantly. To be a follower, not a fan, of Jesus, is to have the audacity to be an apprentice of love, for the manifestation of love is the dream of God for the world. This is the paschal mystery of our lives. This is our vocation, our identity, our work, our destiny, our freedom, our home. This is our Holy Thursday, our Good Friday, Our Easter Dawn. This is the vivifying experience of the reign of God, now and forever. This is our God— the extravagance of love given, the lavishness of love known.

~ blessings good people,
Dan

[1] “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves, get up off the couch, take up their cross daily and follow me” (Lk. 9: 23; Mt. 16: 24; Mk. 8:34; Revised Miller Edition).”