EVERLASTING LOVE

March 27, 2005

Texts – Jeremiah 31: 1-6

Matthew 28: 1-10

“I have loved you with an everlasting love . . .” [Jeremiah 31: 3]  An everlasting love . . .  That is what today is about.

            It is counter intuitive, make no mistake about it.  You don’t get this by following the rules of Aristotlean logic.  “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:  there is a time to be born, and a time to die . . . a time for love, and a time for hate” – that’s where logic takes you.  And we all must go there.  It is vital and necessary and absolutely indispensable for making our way through this world.  But it is not all there is, and it is not by a long shot nearly enough if what we want is to catch a glimpse of what is real.

“I have loved you with an everlasting love . . .” God says through the voice of the prophet Jeremiah.  An everlasting love . . .  Some of us know what that is.  Adrianne recites it to us almost every Sunday – “God has loved you . . .  God loves you now . . .  God will always love you.  This is the good news that gives us new life.”

            I experience that as true.  I have from the first moment that it dawned on me so many years ago that all of my guilt and self-loathing and feelings of inadequacy not withstanding, there is a Power in this Universe that knowing me better than I know myself nonetheless still loves and embraces me and holds me gently through every moment of every day.  It is not because I am special.  It is because this Love is extraordinary. 

            An everlasting love . . .  Some of us have experienced this with another, haven’t we?  “What is a friend?” a poet once asked; “just one with whom you dare to be yourself.”  It is a special gift, such friendship . . . and when you find it, it never leaves you.  Never.

            Ah but again I say – it is counter intuitive.  It requires inspired imagination, a quality little valued and infrequently used for the good in our day (though it is used, God knows, for many other less salutatory purposes).  I say “inspired imagination.”

            We tend to belittle it as the source of any real knowledge.  Imagination is just wishful thinking, we say.  It has not always been so.  In George Bernard Shaw’s play “Saint Joan,” there’s a marvelous scene where Captain Robert is interrogating the young Joan of Arc.  He is particularly disdainful about the voices she claims to hear – the voices of St. Catherine and St. Margaret, who instruct her in the name of God to raise the siege of Orleans.  Contemptuously, Captain Robert dismisses the possibility that these voices come from God.  On the contrary, he insists, “they come from your imagination.”  Joan replies, “Of course.  That is how the messages of God come to us.”

            It reminds me of that old college dormitory joke.  “What do you call talking to God?” is the question.  The answer is: “Prayer.”  “And what do you call it when God talks to you?” The answer is: “Schizophrenia.”

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            And so with sophomoric wisdom too full of the little we know than we are aware of the vast ocean of knowledge we have yet to glimpse, we dismiss as fanciful and naive the story of this day.  The claims of resurrection, some intellectual elites suggest, were simply wish fulfillment on the part of Jesus’ friends.  They could not tolerate the thought that he had gone down in defeat and death.  So they willed him alive again. 

            Isn’t that the argument lurking around the edges of today?  But tell me – don’t you think the women and men who first told this story knew as well as we that things like that just don’t happen?  Here’s how one New Testament scholar (N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, Augsburg Press, 2003 ) puts it –

            “When people died they stayed dead in first-century Palestine just as much as they do in the technological twenty first century.  Jesus’ followers weren’t expecting him to die in the first place; when he did, they certainly weren’t expecting him to rise again.  Yet they say, loud and clear, that that was what had happened.  He had gone through death and out the other side, into a new mode of human existence.  That’s what they claimed.”

And when you read the stories of this day – in Matthew and Mark and Luke and John – they do not have the carefully consistent flavor of a group conspiracy.  Indeed, Nicholas Thomas Wright goes on to say, they suggest that

            “the early Christians were as puzzled by the events (of that first Easter morning) as we still are.  But they are all quite clear that it happened.  It wasn’t a corporate hallucination.  It wasn’t a grief-induced fantasy.  It wasn’t just a matter of Jesus living on in their memory.  It was for real.”

I particularly like that last sentence – “It was for real.”  Was it?  Could it have been? “And the women left the tomb quickly with fear and great joy,” Matthew writes,“and ran to tell the disciples.” [Matthew 28: 8] That certainly has for me the ring of truth to it, of reality – “with fear and great joy.”  What can this mean?

            I say again, we need “inspired imagination” to entertain such questions, let alone to answer them.  Let go of that too-constricting rationality with its cold indifference and allow yourself to play it out . . .  What if it was “for real”?  What if they did meet him, hold him, and hear him say, “Do not be afraid”?  How does that feel?  Could it be the everlasting love we’ve been sighing after from the moment of our births?  Might that be the whole truth, the complete picture, our oh so human nature has been hungering for from the beginning?

“I have loved you with an everlasting love,” the voice of hope whispers to old Jeremiah, “and therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you.”  [Jeremiah 31: 3] “There shall be a day,” it goes on to say, a day of gladness and reunion.  And it was so in Jerusalem two thousand years ago.  And it shall be so for each and every one of us.   Everlasting love is the universe’s greatest secret, and it’s almost unimaginable joy.  Almost.  Trust it.