The Compassion of the Christ
Matthew 28:1-10
April 20, 2014
Easter Sunday
Barbara Ehrenreich is 72 years old now, a distinguished journalist and activist and
muckraker, probably best known for a book called Nickel and Dimed that shows how hard it is to
live on minimum wage. And it was more than five decades ago, when she was a teenager, that
she had an experience which has haunted and troubled and thrilled her all her life.
She was raised as an atheist, in a family of scientists who had no truck with the idea of a
powerful invisible sky-god. She was not primed for spiritual encounters; her mind just didn’t
work that way.
And yet when she was just 17, something happened, and she has been trying to figure it
out ever since. She was on a skiing trip, sleep-deprived and probably low on blood sugar, when
early one morning, she says, she “stepped out alone, walked into the streets of Lone Pine, Calif.,
and saw the world – the mountains, the sky, the low scattered buildings – suddenly flame into
life.”
“There were no visions, no prophetic voices or visits by totemic animals, just this blazing
everywhere,” Ehrenreich writes. “Something poured into me and I poured out into it. This was
… a furious encounter with a living substance that was coming at me through all things at once,
too vast and violent to hold on to, too heartbreakingly beautiful to let go of. It seemed to me that
whether you start as a twig or a gorgeous tapestry, you will be recruited into the flame and made
indistinguishable from the rest of the blaze. I felt ecstatic and somehow completed, but also
shattered.”
A lot of spiritually minded people spend their whole lives yearning for that kind of
experience, but it came unbidden to this wholly rational person, and it rocked her world. You can
see why it stayed with her.
Spiritual encounters like that are more common than you might think. It’s said that
astronauts, floating in space and seeing the blue disc of the Earth below, often have a similar
experience. And when they come, there’s one element that almost always shows up: this
perception that boundaries are dissolving, that the separation we think stands between us and
God melts away. The sudden insight is that it’s all one – God, the created order, all living things,
all of it one seamless whole. As the apostle Paul says in Acts, “In [God] we live and move and
have our being.”
And yet of course we live in a world with lots of boundaries. If you own a home, for
example, down at the bottom of your filing cabinet there’s probably a surveyor’s drawing of
exactly where your property ends and your neighbor’s begins. The fence around the playground
is a boundary; so are the unwritten rules of behavior that grease the wheels of society. Our notion
of personal space is a boundary; have you ever felt bullied by someone whose only offense was
to stand just a little too close for comfort?
Our own skin is a boundary; it’s how we keep our guts inside us, and it’s how we
experience the world. That’s why touch communicates so viscerally; the act of crossing that
boundary, in some small way dissolving it when you touch another person, can feel deeply
loving and caring. It can also feel threatening and scary. Crossing boundaries is powerful stuff.
On this bright Easter morning, I want to suggest that Christ’s life and death and
Resurrection have taken a magic eraser to the boundary between us and God. That changes
things for us. But it changes things for God, too.
Let me tell you what I mean. It starts with Christmas.
The big deal at Christmas is that God comes to us in human form, in the person of the
baby Jesus. The holy infant snuggled up there in the manger – that’s God having the beginnings
of a human experience. In a way, Jesus’ birth was God’s way of dissolving God’s own ego
boundaries. When God took on human form, God entered completely into the human experience.
No limits.
But of course that’s only the start of God’s human experience. The Gospels tell a human
story, of a Jesus who hung out with his friends and ate and drank and worshiped and asked
questions and told jokes. A Jesus who felt joy and surprise and hunger and achy muscles. A
Jesus who formed intimate relationships with men and women both, maybe even experienced
romantic love. A Jesus who did a lot of human stuff. God learned a lot, through Jesus, about
what it was like to be human.
But the learning still wasn’t done. And so Jesus went to Jerusalem and underwent the
terrors we now call Holy Week, and he died.
And in that experience, God entered the human story in the fullest possible way. On
Good Friday, God got it once and for all. Understood that to be human means sometimes to
experience deep, deep sorrow, and betrayal, and physical pain, and fear, and despair over the evil
that human beings can throw at one another like the gamma rays radiating from their own
sinfulness.
God gets all that. And in the image of Christ on the cross we can see that God gets it,
because God has experienced it all through Jesus.
But then comes that astonishing morning at the tomb, and the two Marys, and the angel,
and the risen Christ saying to them what heavenly beings are always saying: “Do not be afraid.”
And in this great good news, you and I enter God’s story more fully as well. Just as God
has experienced human life through Jesus, you and I, we who share Jesus’ humanity, finally get
it: We share Jesus’ divinity as well. We are part of God, and we know this because God has
taken a magic eraser to the absolute immutable boundary of human life, the fact that it will end.
In Christ’s Resurrection we come to understand that death is not a boundary at all – it’s more like
a gate. It’s an entry into the limitless life of God.
So just as God has a human experience in Jesus’ life and death, we have this holy
experience in Jesus’ Resurrection. We get a glimpse of that mystical reality that Barbara
Ehrenreich saw, the truth that all the world, you and I included, all of it, is alight with the
creative and sustaining fire of God’s Spirit. That boundary we imagined held us back from God
is wiped away. Us and God, we are one.
That changes things. If all living things are one with God, you can’t really see the world
as “us” and “them” anymore. We’ve still got our skin and our personal space and our front doors,
but we realize that the illusion of separateness is just that – an illusion.
And the only possible response, it seems to me, is compassion. Tricky word, compassion.
Com-passion. The root words mean “to suffer with.” To live in compassion means, day in and
day out, to search out and honor the divinity in each person, in all living things. It’s not just “live
and let live.” It’s not grudging tolerance of each other. It’s affirming that you and I, all of us are
are the flawed reflections of God’s perfect love.
This is difficult work, living in compassion, and it’s not just the province of saints. It’s
not just Mother Teresa holding the hands of AIDS sufferers in Calcutta. It’s the work of a
lifetime, to keep reminding ourselves of the seamlessness of life and of God’s presence in all
things.
But it’s also the most powerful and the most joyful work you will ever do. And so my
prayer today is that we go forth as Easter people, our eyes opened to God’s presence and God’s
promise everywhere and always. The world is on fire with the Spirit of God! Thanks be to God
for that surprising, surpassing gift. Amen.