Dear People of St. James’,
When Paul speaks of us as the “Body of Christ,” he always means “us” collectively. No one of us individually is Jesus—that would be blasphemy. Together, however, it’s a different story. So, when we reflect on Easter’s resurrection, we need to think of loving human relationships as the source of new life bursting in from beyond our world.
I feel love and experience that vibrant life when I see doctors and nurses going into hospitals full of Covid-19 day after day, lacking adequate protection, without hesitation, knowing that their chance of becoming sick is high and their chance of dying not incalculable. Yet they go, day after day, because life is sacred. They go because our society has raised medicine and saving life to the level of secular religion. I can feel the warmth of God smiling on their faith. In their relationships with one another and their patients, and in my long-distance relationship with them, Jesus is alive.
Similarly, I wait for a collective resurrection yet to come for our nation. I pray for a time when our current shared struggle with mortality will bring us together, rather than provide yet another platform to define and refine our differences. I recall a brief moment after 911 when Americans softened toward one another and our national atmosphere was fresh and full of life. It didn’t last, sadly, but I still hope for shared life to surge again in the face of a virus even more implacable than al Qaeda. That would be an impressive resurrection.
Resurrection is much more than resuscitation. Resurrection is the appearance of vibrant life where life is not supposed to be. Resurrection is life where the world is hostile, even antithetical to life. Life rising from the Cross. Life in the horror of our hospitals. Life in our toxic political division.
This sensation of life rising in darkness is no transient feeling, though often we treat it so. It is not a momentary high to be enjoyed and then forgotten as we get back into the “real” world, so hostile to life. No. Life experienced as resurrection is a window unexpectedly open to eternity, enabling us to breathe fresh air from a world beyond and above ours. Resurrection, when it graces us, is our permanent reality. All else is transient.
Last night, I saw clips from the video diary of a doctor in New Orleans. He was overweight, like me, looked ethnic, maybe Hispanic, not like me, and was a consummate skilled physician, really not like me. But as I saw his video clips progress, day after day, watched his face grow wearier but no less determined, saw in his eyes the effect of stories like a husband and wife separated in the hospital, dying alone despite heroic efforts, something broke open inside me. My weary old heart said, “Yes, this is what God gave us life to do and to be. This is real.”
The life that God and my mother and father gave me in the beginning—its value hidden away by so many complex conditions of daily living—suddenly revived in an unconditional burst of new life, fresh as the beginning, because I saw the sacredness in that doctor’s faith meet the tragic, unconditional value of the lives he struggled to save. The community that gives rise to the Body of Christ does not have to be the company of intimate friends gathered in a church. It can just as easily be people you’ve never met, so long as you engage the stories of distant others with openness to the Holy Spirit whenever and wherever she moves.
So, as I said last week, if we are Eucharist on Maundy Thursday, and we are crucified on Good Friday, on Easter Day, when we are one in Jesus Christ, we are risen. Alleluia!
Peace be with you,
The Rev. David Hoster
