I’d like to begin this morning by talking about miracles.
A few years ago, a community church that I passed every day on my way to my former parish of Trinity, Orange had a banner-type sign out front that read, “Expect a miracle.” I always had a positive response to that sign, and I took it as a personal reminder to keep my mind and my eyes open to the reality of God constantly at work in the world – and then I encountered another quote, from where I don’t remember; another quote suggesting that a miracle is God’s work in the world intentionally slowed down so that we humans can see it more easily. I happily embraced both of these thoughts – until I came upon another quote, this time from my own files of “Good Stuff,” quotes and snippets collected from anywhere and everywhere through the years.
In this particular snippet, its author said, “People aren’t looking for miracles, they’re looking for hope – and they only get that from people who have struggled, and make the choice to keep going.” (CtK B 18)
People aren’t looking for miracles, they’re looking for hope. Now this is interesting, because based on what I just said, it’s usually miracles that get all the attention; it’s miracles that get the big press. Understood as special interventions by God into our physical world or into the lives of individuals or peoples through the power of God’s Holy Spirit, I think we certainly pray for miracles; we pray for the power of God to be manifested in a unique and decisive way in a particular life or a particular situation that’s important to us; but then, as I mentally thumbed through the miracles that are recorded in Scripture, from the parting of the Red Sea and the deliverance of the children of Israel to the provision of manna in the wilderness to the miracles of Jesus’ own ministry: water into wine at Cana, the multiplication of loaves and fishes to feed the 5,000; all of Jesus’ healing miracles, and even the raising of both Jairus’ daughter and Lazarus from the dead – as I thought about all these, I realized that miracles do have their limitations.
Now, true – miracles change immediate circumstances and can certainly alter the course of an individual life, as every person healed by Jesus and restored to their family and their community would attest; but miracles don’t change either the ultimate reality, or the ultimate bottom line, of human life. With only one exception, every single person who was the recipient or the beneficiary of miraculous intervention from God in all of Scripture, sooner or later, they all still died – and Lazarus and Jairus’ daughter each had to die twice.
Miracles may change the conditions of our humanity, but they don’t change the fact of our humanity.
The only enduring, ongoing miracle in all of Scripture is the miracle of Jesus himself: his Incarnation by the Holy Spirit, his Passion and death on the Cross, and his Resurrection to new life -- the miracle that defeated all those other deaths once for all. The miracle of Jesus as Emmanuel, God-with-us, is the concrete and eternal expression of God’s love for us and for all creation; and it’s the miracle of Jesus that is the foundation for, and the basis of, all Christian hope.
As I’ve said before, and I think from this pulpit as well, Christian hope IS NOT wishful thinking pulled out of our hearts and our minds, as we imagine the future we’d like to have. Christian hope in the present is the confident expectation of our future relationship with God, because it’s an expectation that is based on, and rooted in, the actual events of our past relationship with God.
One author writes, “Hope, with strength for the future, consists in returning. [Hope] is retrospective. The returning is to the fact and foundation of redemption, the established achievement of Christ’s atonement, the ‘one full perfect and sufficient sacrifice, satisfaction and oblation for the sins of the whole world’ (Cranmer’s phrasing). Everything else in life that is positive or promised is based on that achievement.” (LP, Hope, 10)
This being said, however, confident expectation isn’t always easy for us to maintain. As I mentioned earlier, people get hope from other people; “people who have struggled, and make the choice to keep going.”
One of the boldest affirmations of ultimate hope in all of Scripture comes from the voice of someone whose trials, losses, and pain are legendary to this day. The voice is that of Job, which is surprising, given that when he makes this affirmation, his own situation couldn’t have been worse.
Through no fault of his own, Job has lost his children, his wealth, his physical health, and his friends; and although he has repeatedly demanded an explanation from God as to the reason for his radical misfortune, he has yet to receive a response.
Even so, from these depths Job makes a statement that is so powerful, so filled with confident expectation, that it’s included as one of the opening sentences in our Order for Burial in the Book of Common Prayer: “As for me,” Job says, “I know that my Redeemer lives and that at the last he will stand upon the earth. After my awaking, he will raise me up; and in my body I shall see God. I myself shall see, and my eyes behold him who is my friend and not a stranger.” (BCP p. 491)
Even in the midst of all his earthly pain, all his earthly struggles, Job has chosen to keep going, and he has chosen to keep going in relationship with God.
On this Feast of Christ the King, when we celebrate the culmination of the liturgical year and we look ahead to the time when all things in heaven and earth will be restored and brought together in Christ, on this day all of our readings are about hope, and about fulfillment. All of our readings support the confident expectation that God’s purposes do continue to be worked out through the events of human history, even when these purposes are opposed by the world’s powers, even when justice seems perverted and the faithful are suffering. The Book of Daniel, from which today’s first reading is taken, is particularly relevant because Daniel was written to people in pain; people whose lives had been turned upside down by conquest and domination – people who, like us, struggled with violence in their midst; people who struggled with housing insecurity, food insecurity, health issues, and fears for the day to day safety of those they loved.
A little background: after the death of Alexander the Great in the fourth century B.C., his very sizeable empire was divided between three of his generals. One of them, Seleucus, and the Seleucid Dynasty he founded, took control of that part of the Middle East that included Judea; and the Book of Daniel was written two hundred years later, in the second century B.C., at a time when the Jews, especially those in Jerusalem, were being actively persecuted by the ruling Greek Seleucids; persecuted for practicing their faith.
Daniel was written to give the people hope in God’s deliverance, but because it was too dangerous to write openly about the author’s understanding of God’s plans for the Seleucids, the book’s storyline was placed in Babylon three centuries earlier, during the time that the
Jewish people were in exile there. It was presented partly as an extended narrative about Daniel, a Jew who remains faithful to God while a member of the court in Babylon, and partly as an account of Daniel’s visions of God’s coming action. These visions, as we heard today, are described in the symbolic language of apocalyptic, which is a specific literary style that places the immediate situation of the visionary and of the people themselves who are under threat into the greater framework of world history, and of the world’s imminent transformation.
(Craddock, 478)
And while apocalyptic writing doesn’t bring any physical or material relief to its recipients, it does something else: it places the immediate suffering of its recipients into the greater context of God’s Big Picture; and in doing so, the apocalyptic writer gives the people’s suffering a cosmic dimension as well as cosmic meaning; and it graphically demonstrates to the faithful that in the world things are not always as they seem. (F, R, Th, 328)
As another author says concerning the apocalyptic promises in the Revelation to John, “…with the Lord God, there is always more: more transformation to come than the earth has yet seen, more power and authority than claimed by earthly rulers, more dignity for God’s people than earthly rulers recognize.” There is always more. (F, R, Th, 326)
A Benedictine abbot once wrote, “Our faith is the answer not so much to the question ‘What must I believe?’ but rather [it is the answer to the question] ‘What dare I hope?’” (LP, Hope, 14)
“What dare I hope?” “What is my confident expectation?” This is a question we not only ask ourselves, but also a question we can ask in faith about Jesus’ mindset, as he stands being interrogated by Pilate in John.
John’s Gospel, of course, is qualitatively different from the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. The last Biblical Gospel to be written, and dating from around the beginning of the second century A.D., the Gospel of John is a mature theological treatise, an extended reflection on the part of his community on the meaning of Jesus as the Christ.
Throughout John’s Gospel, Jesus is in complete control as the Risen Lord. All events take place according to whether or not “his hour” has come, and nothing happens, including both his crucifixion and his death, without his complete consent. Jesus has come from God, and when the hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified, he will return to God.
This being said, within the context of John, what does Jesus dare hope? – and again, this isn’t wishful thinking. Based on his past with the God from whom he has come, what does Jesus confidently expect for the future?
Hold on to that for a moment.
The traditional representation of Christ the King is Jesus on the cross, head up, arms out straight, body erect, vested in a priest’s chasuble and wearing a crown.
In 1951, the artist Salvadore Dali, in response to what he called a “cosmic dream”, produced a painting that he called “Christ of Saint John of the Cross” because he based its design “on a drawing by the 16th century Spanish friar [and mystic] John of the Cross.” And I give you one-time sermon permission: if you have access to your cell phone, go ahead and take it out, keeping it on silent, and go to your browser or search engine. Type in “Christ of Saint John of the Cross,” because I would love for you to see the actual painting as I continue.
As I hope you can see, the painting dramatically depicts Jesus on the cross as seen from above “in a darkened sky floating over a body of water complete with a boat and fishermen”. Jesus’ upper body is arched forward in an extreme angle as would be consistent with gravity pulling on a torso held back only by nails, but this same angle allows Jesus to look down upon the fishermen as well as upon the cloud-filled, but not necessarily dark, abyss that lies between the fishermen and the cross.
And although Dali paints Jesus on the cross, he omits the nails, he omits blood, he omits the crown of thorns; and because of the angle of Jesus’ head, he also omits any facial expression for Jesus – again, he says, because he was so directed in his dream. (Wikipedia).
The power of this painting is unmistakable, because somehow Dali manages to portray not only the mystery of the cross, both “life-giving” and of the abyss, but also the mystery of Christ enthroned upon this cross; the mystery of the crucified Christ as “the one in whom all things [in heaven and in earth] hold together”. (Christian Century, 10/24/18, Brad Roth, 23)
And this glorified but radically different Christ the King, this Christ without nails, is held on the throne of the cross only by his own love, his own obedience to God, his own will. The painting’s message and its effect are regal, compassionate, and profound.
To go back to my question about the hope of Jesus, about what Jesus confidently expects for his future, one scholar has said that “The hope of Jesus was based on his
understanding of the character of God.” (LP, Hope, Robin Scroggs, 13)
As the one who had come from God and was returning to God, Jesus knew God, knew the character of God, intimately. He knew that he had come from Love and Compassion, that he was returning to Love and Compassion, and that in the Love and Compassion of God as revealed in and through him, all things – us, our lives, our world, all the little pictures that make up the Big Picture – all things will be held together.
People aren’t looking for miracles, they’re looking for hope – and our hope, our Christian hope, is based on our understanding of God as God was, and is, and ever shall be revealed in Jesus Christ, the king voluntarily enthroned upon the cross of love, for us. We don’t need to expect the miracle. We already have the miracle. Amen.