It is one thing to hear or read a story for the first time. It is quite another to have heard it many times before and to trace it through again. In the first case the sense of an ending is in the anticipation; in the second the sense of an ending is simply our agreement or disagreement that the end is right and proper.
We cannot act as if we did not know the Easter story’s outcome. Try as we may to provide suspense, we cannot elicit surprise about the reversal from grim failure to sublime triumph. We can only recite the story in a way reminding us of what we all know: the road to Easter Sunday is by way of Good Friday, and Christians have always insisted that this is the sequence and the end, and that both sequence and end are fitting and right. But we must also remember that religious stories are not recited simply for their moral or artistic interest. As long as they have any hold on us at all, their recital represents a reenactment. The Jewish tradition knows this better than the Christian, and some other religions know it better yet. To tell it is to have it happen again. A bedside tale to a child gains rather than loses from being told over and over again. How much more so religious stories that are part of the effective ritual of a living community! Mircea Eliade (in many of his books) goes so far as to suggest that in archaic societies the function of certain common rituals, including certain stories, is to obliterate or annul time, that inflicter of unbearable pain and inward homelessness. Through ritual, communities return and stand at the beginning again, made regenerate by the touch or
recital of the things that happened -- as we say -- "once upon a time,"
and happen now by reenactment and retelling.
In one way this is true of this week’s story in the Christian calendar. In the sweep of this narrative we are bound together, able to identify with and recall afresh its sorrow, its sense of the innocent victim dying at the hands and in behalf of the guilty. We are even able to identify, to some extent at least, with the note of triumph at the end -- even though many people take literally the portrayal of the sorrow but only symbolically the note of triumphant hope.
Two things bear mention here: first, the sense of recall, reenactment and identification in the retelling of this story gains from its association with ritual performance. The passion story and the Lord’s Supper belong together. Together they render present the original; each is hobbled when it is separated from the other. Secondly, the relation between this story and its applications or illustrations is the reverse of many another Instance. Other stories we bring to life by filling them with meaning and significance drawn from illustrations. Other instances of the so-called mighty acts of God in Scripture gain power over our imagination only as we ourselves supply illustrative instances for them. It is as yet true that this story on the contrary tends to supply meaning to other stories like it.
Without it they would not make sense, or at least not the same sense.
There are multitudes of crosses in the world. But it is because of Jesus’
cross that we apply the term to all the others.
But I said that this is "as yet" the case. For the story’s sense of present and vivid meaning cannot be taken for granted -- and for good reason.
One of the extraordinary things about this story is that, in the words of Romans 6:9-10, Christ died to sin once for all. He is never to die again.
And therefore the event and the story, like all things in time, can and does recede -- unlike other religious stories which annul the temporal distance again and again. There is no automatic possibility that present recall can annul the temporal distance between this story and us. It moves farther and farther back, and gets more and more pallid to our common cultural imagination.
Currently, and curiously enough, I suspect, both these contrary things are true for many people. The Easter story is present in recall for them, and yet the distance from it is great. To the extent that it is distant, it likewise tends no longer to bestow meaning on other, similar events.
The reverse becomes a matter of necessity: Their vivid reality lends
strength to it. In that case the original story may serve as no more than a symbolic form for gathering all these stories under a common type. Or else it simply recedes before the larger, more recent instances, and they then render whatever vividness is left to the cross. (In this connection I need only remind you of all that we sorrowfully feel in connection with the mention, especially on Good Friday, of the word "Auschwitz.") Again, I suspect that many people are at both ends of this contradictory situation: The central Christian story in its recited and performed
reenactment is the bestower of meaning for other similar events, and yet these other events have to evoke the original and breathe life into it.
There is no single lesson to be drawn from these ambiguities or
contradictory tendencies. Yet I hope that reflection on them will be of some use. If you happen to have the sort of religious imagination to which this story speaks directly, as it were in the present tense, well and good -- and lucky are you. If not, it doesn’t matter in the last analysis, although it may make believing a bit more trying, troubled, and lonely in our time. But in that case the important thing to remember is precisely that this story by its very nature does recede, it does not annul time.
Ultimately therefore its capacity to be reenacted in your sensibility and your imagination cannot be the criterion of its significance for you. And surely, the followers of Jesus Christ have recognized this from the very beginning. For whomever it becomes the truth it does so not by
imaginative obliteration of time but by hammering out a shape of life patterned after its own shape. That does not mean that we repeat the original events literally in our lives, and certainly not completely, but it means that our lives reflect the story as in a glass darkly. The shape of the story being mirrored in the shape of our life is the condition of its being meaningful for us.
Many of you will recall Schweitzer’s perverse but great account of Jesus’ ministry and hope in The Quest of the Historical Jesus. Its enigmatic final paragraph remains a true account of the way the Easter story becomes a truth for us, even though it may have receded in time and may not have recall power:
He comes to us as One unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lake-side, He came to those men who knew him not. He speaks to us the same word: "Follow thou me!" and sets us to the tasks which He has to fulfil 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.(The Quest of the Historical Jesus [New York: Macmillan, 1956], p. 403)
"Follow thou me!" It would be frightening to preach on that text. I want simply to draw your attention to what this passage, and that text in particular, have in common with the passage from Romans to which I referred earlier. It does not say there "follow him," but in 6:4 Paul tells us that whereas being baptized means being buried with Christ, Christ’s being raised means that our feet are set on a new path of life. And again in verses 12-14 he suggests that the embodiment of the Easter story’s pattern in our lives means no mysterious archetypal consciousness of it, but a new way of governing our bodies. That is how we are in touch with the story. A little humdrum perhaps, considering the dramatic quality of what happened at Easter. But the point is clear in these as in Schweitzer’s words: To know this story is to adopt a way of life
consequent upon hearing it, and shaped by it. That is how we are to be disposed toward it.
But I think we may learn something more from its receding in time: not only about the way to dispose ourselves toward the story, but about the story itself. Schweitzer said that "He comes to us as One unknown, without a name." The Apostle Paul said that having died once Christ is never to die again, but that living -- having been raised -- he "lives to God." What I understand both men to be saying is this: The distance between Jesus Christ and us is not simply that of lengthening time. Even if we could annul the time and have the story present, a distance would still be there. He would still be One unknown to us. Only Christ’s dying, not his now living to God, is literally in the same time sequence in
which we live and die. Reenactment can no more make him present than the passage of time can bear him away. Indeed, even our life shaped by his story is no final clue to his identity and presence, but only a mirror of his story. The crosses of Christ’s many brothers and sisters are not identical with his cross, any more than the shape of our life is identical with the shape of the events of this week in the Gospels. Why not?
Because he lives to God -- not to time in which he recedes from us, nor to the obliteration or annulment of time, in which he would be present now in the representation of his story. He does not live in or by his distance from or his presence to us: He lives to God. That is his life, not ours, or rather ours only in him.