CHAPTER TWO

TIME'S THIEF

Kurt Vonnegut said that most good stories occur when a character gets “unstuck in time.”¹ Lives become interesting only when, in tragedy or in comedy, the time of our lives is disrupted, becomes unstuck. Horror novelist Stephen King, out for a jog one morning, was hit by a speeding van. He spent weeks in the hospital, fighting for his life, in terrible pain. In an interview with NPR's Terry Gross, King admitted that the accident changed his life and afterward he had written some of his best novels.²

“Still, if someone had given me the choice of retiring peacefully to New England,” said King, “or getting hit by a van and writing two or three more good books, I would have chosen retirement in a heartbeat.” Listening to that interview, I muttered, “In my religion, that speeding, disrupting, homicidal van is sometimes named ‘God.’ ”

What is God like? Jesus replies: a homeowner sleeps, secure in his ownership (Luke 12:39). During the night, he awakes in horror; a thief has broken into his home and ripped off everything. He dearly wishes that he had known that the time of his dormancy would be the time of a robbery, but he didn't. Now he's the loser. Jesus warns that each of us should live as if we were about to get ripped off by God. Losers, wake up!

I'll grant that Jesus' parable is not the most flattering image of God. God's a thief who breaks in and rips you off?

Jesus, teller of this outrageous tale, incarnates the thief who shatters the illusion of time's normalcy. Jesus strides in and takes time.³ What's “new” in Jesus is the “now” of Jesus. Others had talked “kingdom of God.” (Luke, for instance, tirelessly reiterates that Jesus Christ is not new: Christ is the fulfillment of the ancient promises of God to Israel.) It took Jesus to preach that the “kingdom of God has come near” (Luke 10:9). What was new is that Jesus said that the day of the Lord is now. He met our apocalyptic expectation with his earth-shaking presence. Trouble is, once apocalyptic expectation became messianic reality—present—we ​discovered that this was not at all the presence we thought we were awaiting. We looked at Jesus and said, “Please, not so near, not so excruciatingly present, not in this place, not in this Jew. Not in any Jew, in fact.”

“The Kingdom of God has come near” is ambiguous news. Jesus discovered that in the congregational reaction to his first sermon in Nazareth (Luke 4). Things went OK as he read the poetic words of Isaiah. Then Jesus had the gall to announce, “Today these past words are now (fulfilled) in your hearing,” and church was out. It was the nearness, the “nowness” that caused crisis and demanded change, now. Salvation is always easier when it is delayed, future and therefore harmless. Here, now is a demanding gift. In a threatening tone of voice Paul preached, “Now is the day of salvation” (2 Cor 6:2).

Yet here's the paradox. It was not only that Jesus was God present, here, now. It was also that God was in Jesus Christ reconciling the world to himself (2 Cor 5:19). In Jesus, we met the God whom we had not known, did not want to know. God pro nobis, for us, tends always to be perceived as the God anti nobis, the God against us. God is hidden precisely in God's availability to the world. In Jesus “incarnation” was not only in flesh but also in time. And when our time is commandeered by that particular God, well, we get nervous and our defenses against God are activated.⁴ Some of us wanted to see God but were disappointed that God was in Jesus of Nazareth, now, here.

A favorite way of defending ourselves against the challenge of Jesus' immanence (“Today … fulfilled.”) is through history, the claim that our problem with God is historical and that the way to hear Scripture is through the help of historians.⁵ Trouble is, when we say “history” we demonstrate our attenuated historical imagination in which time is thought to be a more or less uniform, coherent sequence of events.

Even though modernity did not invent the notion of cause-effect—do this, you will almost always get that—modernity is based to a great degree on the notion that there is only one efficient cause for every effect and that efficient cause is not God. Hume noted that the great goal of modern thinking was sequential predictability, the ability to isolate cause so that one could predict effect. The invention and ubiquity of the clock in modernity gives the illusion of time's uniformity, measurability, and linear progression. The clock makes time fleeting, incessant, and ultimately irretrievable. In modernity, we're always losing time, killing time, and wasting time because we've lost the means to retrieve time past or live ​into the future. Time without God is denuded, impoverished time, time without meaning. Boredom plagues modern people because we've robbed time of any agency other than our own actions, producing lots of empty, boring time with few surprises.⁶

God, the maker of history, is driven out of time by the device of modern history. The historian explains the course of history, its causes and their effects, without reference to God, thus making history an exclusively human product.⁷

“Everything is a question of chronology,”⁸ says Proust, the greatest artistic neurasthenic of all time. The Greeks tried to overcome time through imagining divinity as that which lacks all temporal boundaries. Greek gods transcend death by their immunity to the ravages of time. Christians see things differently. The triune God transcends death by triumphing over it, by the Son's dying in time and by the Father's raising him up in the power of the Holy Spirit for all time. The Greeks saw divinities as serene, ideal, and only occasionally, capriciously descending from Parnassus to become briefly involved in the grubby vicissitudes of human history. The resurrection narratives depict a God who is constantly on the move, energetic, revealing here, now. The Greeks predicated a quiet serenity at the ultimate heart of all things. Easter stories depict a God who refuses to stop talking and cease walking. Here is a God who takes time, not to be immune from time's vicissitudes, but to be eternally faithful in time. “Your faithfulness endures to all generations …” (Ps 119:90). In every generation God keeps rising up and defeating time in order to keep God's commitments in time, in order to keep talking, keep relating. Thus Easter brings us to the heart of Christian preaching and life with a God in time who refuses to be silent. The Easter mandate is the vocative, “Go! Tell!”

Again, Bonhoeffer states:

The proclaimed word is the incarnate Christ himself … the thing itself. The preached Christ is both the Historical One and the Present One… . The proclaimed word is not a medium of expression for something else, something which lies behind it, but rather is the Christ himself walking through his congregation as the word.⁹

I'm saying that preachers “make it new” by “making it now,” if we are to preach like Jesus. Preaching like Jesus is preaching Jesus. All preaching is Easter preaching, dependent upon the truth of resurrection to make it work. To preach in any time is to expect immanence, to make an eschatological ​claim that time between us and God has been, is being, will be bridged by God in Christ.

True, the Kingdom is “near” but not fully “now.” Preaching works that space between redemption accomplished and redemption still being finished. Preaching Christ is always a proleptic endeavor—talk about something that has already occurred yet is still to occur, is now occurring. As Barth says, our salvation in Christ is an “intrinsically perfect work” (in cross and resurrection, redemption is accomplished; nothing else is needed) and yet that work “is still moving toward its consummation.”¹⁰ Our redemption is already accomplished in eternity, from the beginning of time, into all time. Thus when we experience redemption, realize our salvation, acknowledge who God is and what God has done for us, we are simply beholding variations of one and the same event. Barth even said that, as we regard time from the view of Scripture, “eternity comes first and then time, and therefore the future comes first and then the present.”¹¹ We literally don't know what time it is now until eternity is revealed to us, along with the future. Only then do we know what time it is. First eternity, then the present. Jesus Christ the same yesterday and tomorrow becomes the same Jesus Christ today.

The Holy Spirit contemporizes, reveals, and imparts our redemption here and now. Sadly for us preachers, the Holy Spirit seems to be the most neglected person of the Trinity in contemporary theology. We preachers need a robust conviction of the Holy Spirit's work because we, unlike most academic interpreters of the Christian faith or of Scripture, must stand up and speak a word to God's people, here, now. The Holy Spirit is the power of God, empowering humanity to know God. The Holy Spirit is God's agency in preaching, that which makes a sermon work.

The Holy Spirit is not some impersonal force, not some vague sense, but rather has a distinct personality, as portrayed in Scripture. I would characterize that personality as dynamic, difficult, destructive, life-giving, creative but disruptively creative (Genesis 1; Acts 2). In the power of the Holy Spirit Jesus told us to pray for the coming of God's reign and to not lose heart (Matt 6:10). But not because God was holding something back. It was now but not yet. It is not fully here, not only because a nonviolent God refuses to force or to coerce that reign upon us. (We may still turn away and reject, refuse, and decline.) Yet the Kingdom also seemed distant, even as Jesus stood beside us, because it was Jesus who stood beside us. The nearness of the Kingdom, in Jesus, gave us a close look into ​what God's kingdom was really like. Jesus made us pray, “Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” now, here as it will be then, there.

It was much easier for us to think about God's will being fulfilled somewhere else at a time other than now. Jesus violated the comfort of our historical postponement of God's time by his daring assertion that the reign of God is now. Yet he also violated the comfort of any smug sense of immanence by standing near us as the stranger whom we did not expect. The narratives of Jesus' resurrection teach us what we might reasonably expect from a living God. God is whoever raised Jesus Christ from the dead.¹²

Nineteenth-century historian Adolf von Harnack wrote, “No religion gains anything through time, it only loses.” This provided the mandate for the historian to recover as much as possible from the past in order to make Christianity relevant. All of this made perfect sense considered apart from the resurrection and the gift of the Holy Spirit. Death gets everything, except what the historian can retrieve.

Yet if we believe in the resurrection, time must be reconsidered. Because of resurrection, and the activity of the Holy Spirit, we have more time left with God in the future than in the past.¹³ Although the mighty acts of God in the past (Scripture) are impressive, some of God's most interesting work may yet be before us. Who knows what the Holy Spirit will be up to next? We believe that time's dominance (death) has been broken. So why would we turn to the historians for help with revelation of God after the resurrection?¹⁴

In 1908 Ernst Troeltsch, professor of systematic theology at Heidelberg, wrote an assessment of theology in Germany during the previous half century. Among Troeltsch's contentions was that theological work must be a cultural synthesis that meets the religious needs of an age. Historical study of Christianity that recovered the essence of the faith, its relevant content for our culture, is the only way for Christianity to survive in the brave new world of modern Germany. A young pastor in Switzerland, Karl Barth, heard Troeltsch's lecture in 1910. After hearing the lecture, Barth wrote that he had “the dark foreboding that it had become impossible to advance any farther in the Dead-end street where [theologians] were strolling in relative comfort.”¹⁵ Why this gloomy assessment of Troeltsch? Barth said that it was “impossible for a historian as such to do justice to Christianity”¹⁶ Human methods (like history) can never construct a living God, at best only producing, in Kierkegaard's contemptuous phrase, “disciples at second hand.”¹⁷

Barth was indebted to the great anti-theologian, Franz Overbeck (1837–1905) for his low regard of the helpfulness of historiography for Christianity. Overbeck said that the resurrected Christ is complete contradiction rather than continuity with the old world. (For example, Overbeck made much of the fact that the resurrection sounded the death knell for slavery in the Roman Empire. After Easter, it was a whole new world.) Most contemporary “theology”—in its degraded synthesis of ancient and modern, with modern culture calling the shots—was condemned by Overbeck as a complete contradiction of Christianity's most basic affirmation (the resurrection). If Jesus has been raised from the dead, then “Christian religion”—as a mix of the culture of the world as it was with bits and pieces of Christian insight that do not threaten the order of this age—is a travesty.¹⁸ “Time” as understood after the resurrection has little in common with “time” as historians continue to use the term.

Karl Barth was deeply influenced by Overbeck's unmasking of the fraud of contemporary, liberal German theology—in attempting to make Christianity “relevant” to the modern age, theologians had only succeeded in trimming down cosmic Christian claims to unthreatening moral platitudes. I also believe that Barth came to this realization through his own frustration with the task of preaching in his early attempts to preach at Safenwil. Barth discovered that no preacher can make God real to anybody, no matter how hard the preacher tries. Preaching is impossible. Our human analogies fail when speaking about God, including such analogies as eternal and historical. The church has the assigned task to signify the gospel, but the church has not the power to make the gospel significant.

If God is God, then only God can determine when God will speak through what we preachers say or do. We are unable, through our meager human means, to conjure up the Holy Spirit. Augustine asserted that preaching was to instruct, to move, and to delight, but Barth says that we can't do any of that. Theology is the description of “an embarrassment,” in that we are called to speak God's word and yet we are unable to speak God's word.¹⁹ Only God can speak of God. Only God can preach. Only God can make God's word relevant.

In Jesus Christ, the reign of God is present—not as a progressive, gradual result of astute thinking or hard work, not as the result of quiet, introspective centering and spiritual exercises—but rather as unexpected interruption, intervention, new beginning, new creation, the eschatological ​end of history, the gift of the Holy Spirit that we did not want. Now.²⁰ This is a major reason why the Christian faith cannot be subjected to time, can neither be reduced to history nor apprehended by the historical. It is also the major reason why the most traumatic thing that can happen to anybody is baptism.

This more-than-the-historical quality of the faith presents Christianity with a great challenge because modernity made history humanity's basic mode of existence. Karl Barth said that modernity had made time into “absolute time,” the one, irrevocable “absolute reality” in which we are trapped and from which there is no escape. People can think, plan, project, and create, but nobody can escape the ravages of time. All cheerful humanistic assessments of humanity wilt before omnivorous death, death that is the human experience of the passage of time. This is the chronological prison in which we live. We think that we are free, that our actions can somehow stay the constant march of time, yet we live enclosed within “these walls.”²¹

Barth said that this was thinking about “time without God”²² in which time itself takes on divine-like characteristics, in which time becomes absolute, omnipotent, and indefatigable. Most godless attempts to think about time make time into “a God called Chronos.”²³ Attempts to speak about “infinity,” or the divine as infinite, said Barth, are akin to the Greek (pagan) attempt to make time into a god. In the modern period, a variation of this pagan project is the “idea of endless progress.”²⁴ We haven't said the God of the Old and New Testaments when we say “Infinite One.” When God reveals God's self by entering time, God thereby defeats the idea of infinity. Barth said that by clinging to ideas of the possibility of infinity or progress we delude ourselves about the nature of time.

For Barth, “absolute time” is time separated from God, an attempt to fit God into the confines of our temporal domain. “History” has become the study of human actions and their results, the study of humanity without reference to humanity's relation to God. History has become the fantasy of those who attempt to live in the temporal as if that were God. Barth said that abstract, absolute thinking about time “apart from the will and Word and work of God is itself the product of the perverted and sinful thinking of man, one of the manifestations of human pride.”²⁵

We therefore attempt to make Jesus a historical datum. We do research and investigation on Jesus, using history as a method of retrieval of that which is not ours, not of our time, something distant and removed from ​us. This historicism is a denial of our time as the time claimed by God. Ensconced in imperial Rome, Caesar thought he was making history. Then Jesus of Nazareth stole it.

Failing at historical retrieval, unable to figure out the truth of the past, sometimes we flee the present into the future. Tomorrow will be better. We write science fiction. Eventually we find that we are unable to live backwards into the past or to project ourselves realistically into the future. In truth, we are lonely. Frantically hunting for a time that has meaning for us, the hunter becomes the hunted.²⁶ Barth says that we Westerners react to this situation with endless striving and “conscientious work” while Easterners react with “resignation,” both the result of making time “absolute time.”²⁷ A longing for infinity robs us of real time here and now. Infinity is a delusion. In attempting to make time our own, without God, we no longer have time.²⁸

Infinity is vacant, lonely, endless time, time without God. There will always be tomorrow is a lie. Eternity is time with God. God doesn't just give us time (time between the resurrection of Jesus and final consummation of Creation); God takes time.²⁹ If we believe that God reveals God's self to us, then we believe that God has taken time for us.³⁰ God has determined, in Jesus Christ, not to be eternal without us. God takes time pro nobis. The Old and New Testaments, in the form of their presentation of Christ—not in eternal concepts or principles but in a story that, like any story, moves through time with beginning, middle, and end—is the narration of a history, something that occurs in time. God is not made over time, but God makes time. We therefore do not know what time it is until it is revealed what God is doing in time.

To know that we are bounded, limited creatures, that we are finite not infinite, mortal not immortal, to know that, really to know that, that's news. We believe, with Genesis 3:19, that our lives are bounded by death. That this should come as news to us is sign of our sin.

And yet, with Acts 17:26, we believe that the limits of our lives—the boundedness of life as fixed by God—is also a gracious gift of God. Our time is restricted. This life is not fated to go on forever, one damned thing, or one blessed thing, after another. Our lives are bounded not just by death but by Providence, Presence.

How can such knowledge—our time is finite, bounded in death— be considered a gracious gift? This is an insight granted to those who know that our lives are bounded by God. Death is the great boundary of life and, in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, God is the great boundary of ​death. Death limits life, but on Easter God limited death. Only then death loses its quality as the great final fact, the dominator of every moment of life. In Easter, death stops seeming like judgment, a curse, the thief, the final enemy, and begins to appear as forgiveness, blessing, sometimes even friend. No stoic resignation, the stiff upper lip of the doomed, is now demanded. Rather, thanksgiving, rejoicing even, which is what Revelation says our future is like. The door that was shut to us in death swings open, not by our striving or our positive attitude but rather by God. That which heretofore was exclusively ending is—surprise— beginning. We are not just given more time (in my pastoral experience, few people who are near death want that). We are given more radiant time, more presence time, time more fully to be with God and God with us.

God takes time, our time, to be with us. There is nothing new in this world except the kingdom of God, the only true escape from the downward pull of history, the only real breakthrough from the facts of life (and death). Death now has no dominion. Easter is absolutely unexpected, inconceivable. It is something that comes down from heaven and breaks through everything that we think we have learned about life and the world. It is God's grand revolution in time but against time. Barth says that the kingdom of God, radiantly revealed in the Resurrection, makes all other revolutions that we think we've experienced in history and in time as “little revolutions.”³¹ As Barth said, in his work on Christian ethics, published posthumously, the kingdom of God is not just something new, it is the new, the only truly new thing we've seen since we are put together from dust, “it is the new thing of God.”³²

Barth's exegesis of Romans 4:23-25 (“Now it was not written for his sake alone, that he was reckoned unto [Abraham] but for our sake also, unto whom it shall be reckoned, who believe him that raised Jesus our Lord from the dead … and was raised for our justification,” ASV) is instructive. In Romans Barth asks what on earth Abraham's history is supposed to mean for us? How could words that were written to Abraham be God's word to us?³³

Barth answers that this is peculiar history in that it speaks to us. Throughout his Church Dogmatics Barth quite deliberately conflates the two German words for history Geschichte and Historie. Historie tends to be the more specialized term that originated in the nineteenth century for the academic discipline of historical study. For many, this means the uncovered “facts” of history, what “really happened” back then. This ​word is in contrast to Geschichte, which can mean everything from “report” to “tale” or “story.” Barth does not accept the distinction as a serious one when reading the Bible. Whatever history might be able to verify and establish was, for Barth, “trivial.” In Scripture, by work of the Holy Spirit, what the world regards as a long-dead Historie becomes our currently lived story.

The great sin of humanity (in regard to time) is to act as if we are in time without God, to act is if our past is our past by ourselves, as if our future and present is in our hands. People who live only for themselves, in time by themselves, are not fully human, for humanity (according to Barth) is relationship.³⁴ When, in listening to a sermon, the risen Christ comes to you, reaches out to you, stands with you, part of the thrill of that moment is the joy of being a human being fully alive to a relationship with God. Until Christ becomes alive to us, we are not alive. It is a similar dynamic whenever we are loved by another. We can't have the present except as a gift of the God who dares to be present with us in the present.

This present day of ours is also a day of the living Jesus Christ… . It may well be a day when no moment passes in which death does not make … an … end of some human life. It may well be a day of the devil… . This is true. But it is not decisive. The decisive thing is that it is also a day of Jesus Christ, a day of His presence, life, activity and speech … a day of His coming again in the full sense of the word… . We are contemporaries of Jesus Christ and direct witnesses of His action, whether with closed or open or blinking eyes, whether actively or passively. More closely and properly than any other man … He is the neighbor … , the Good Samaritan for all of us… . Wittingly or unwittingly we are alongside and with Him. His today is really ours and ours His.³⁵

Barth says that in the resurrection Jesus appeared breathtakingly “in the mode of God,” that is, the risen Christ was God in that he was more clearly present as past, present, and future so that “no longer” and “not yet” don’t apply to him.³⁶ He is simultaneously present in all three tenses. Even though Jesus was different in his past, he is the same Jesus Christ yesterday, today, and tomorrow. He is the one “who is and who was and who is to come” (Rev 1:8).³⁷

God not only takes time, but God gives us time. We genuinely do have time. We have a present and a future because God gives it to us. When I take time to give someone else an hour of my time, that is one of my ​greatest gifts. I am literally giving them time, transforming their time by my willingness to enter their time and to allow them to enter mine.

Christians believe that something like that has happened in Jesus Christ.

Easter: He’s Back

I recall a theologian who, though now mostly forgotten, had a big effect upon preaching in my misspent youth: Rudolf Bultmann. Time was a big issue for Bultmann, an agenda set by his teacher, Heidegger.³⁸ Bultmann, wonderfully adept in the literature of Israel, was fascinated that there is so little in Jesus’ preaching that could be called “new.” Bultmann correctly identified the imminence of the reign of God as that which Jesus preached. Yet Bultmann believed that Jesus’ preaching of the imminent reign of God was a grand mistake. “The proclamation of the irruption of God’s Reign was not fulfilled. Jesus’ expectation of the near end of the world turned out to be an illusion.”³⁹ Jesus died a frustrated prophet. Distinguishing between the “Jesus of history” (Jesus caught in time, an historical figure about which little can be retrieved) and the “Christ of faith” (Jesus raised into eternity, free of time, a metaphysical entity with little substance or content), Bultmann essentially denied the resurrection as having historical reality.

In order to retrieve some earthly relevance for the resurrected “Christ of faith,” Bultmann then lapsed into an existentialist interpretation of the “reign of God” that enabled him to rescue some significance for the “now” of Christ by removing the kingdom of God from history and positing it in our modern subjectivity. The resurrection is the way that the risen Christ is to us now and the main means of that presence is in preaching. Jesus Christ has been raised into the kerygma, into preaching. Jesus Christ is now personal address (Anrede), strong demand (Forderung) that requires not our intellectual understanding but rather our full obedience. Jesus Christ is not simply more information; he is address that calls for decision. Though Bultmann spoke of the importance of a “decision” (without specifying much content in that decision), a sense of “crisis” occasioned by the preaching of Jesus, his existentialism forced him to honor the sovereign self of modernity, leaving it undisturbed by Jesus’ eschatological disruption of history.⁴⁰ The self’s awareness of the risen Christ is that which validates and certifies the risen Christ.

The need for Christian eschatology to submit to the demands of modernity was identified by Bultmann as the problem of Christian preaching. Bultmann felt that this biblical talk of a promised resurrection of the dead at the end of the world and the end to human history as we know it needed thoroughgoing demythologizing. He called for the translation of eschatological (that is, primitive) Jewish-Christian ideas of time into the existentialist time of modernity, thus to make Christianity relevant:

Until we translate this gospel into a language that enlightened men today can understand, we are depriving ourselves of the very resources on which the continued success of our witness most certainly depends… . If the price of becoming a faithful follower of Jesus Christ is some form of self-destruction, whether of the body or of the mind—sacrificium corporis, sacrificium intellectus … [that] price must remain unpaid.⁴¹

Although Bultmann attempted to construe the Christian faith in a way that would not demand the “sacrifice of the intellect,” he not only endangered the truthfulness of the gospel but also imperiled the gospel’s time-fulness.⁴² The existential decision that is demanded by Christ becomes awfully thin and rather vague in Bultmann. The content of the “decision for Christ” is a “decision,” though the ethical demands or the shape of that decision remain unspecified. Christ becomes a sort of Christ-symbol, timeless, above the tug and pull of earthly existence, a means of achieving inward detachment from the strain and stress of the world.⁴³

The Gospels testify that Jesus was raised into time, our time. “He is risen!” the women first preached, running back from the tomb. He is risen. He not only is raised, but he also speaks for himself, now. He appears, shattering our normalcy. He identifies himself, quite specifically, as God, though not the God whom we expected. So the women preached not, “He is risen into his eternal self,” but rather, “He’s back.”

Time’s Invasion

In a sense, on Easter or any other high holy day, our challenge is the same as on any Sunday—belief not only that Jesus Christ is Lord, but that he is Lord now and all other lordlets are not. There is room for only one Lord on the throne. The reign of God has come near and that nearness, in space and time, has subversive implications, here, now. God takes up ​room among us as Lord, and thereby subverts, pushes aside competing rulers. When our preaching of the gospel is detached from visible, active obedience to the gospel here and now (that is, the church) and from the tense, expectant, disruptive power of God’s future (that is, eschatology), our preaching wilts into some sort of report on a past event rather than, as it ought to be, proclamation of a divinely disruptive present reign. It is not only that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself but that God was in Christ.

It is somewhat bemusing to note the plethora of modern sermons on marriage and family—in spite of the pervasive ambivalence, if not outright opposition, to marriage and family in Scripture. Where on earth do preachers like James Dobson find a good biblical text for a sermon entitled “Biblical Principles for a Happy Family”? Most of the families in the Bible are dysfunctional and unhappy. Jesus’ disruption of his own family and those of his disciples (to say nothing of Paul’s notorious antipathy toward marriage and family) is eschatological. Nothing better illustrates the practical consequences of Jesus’ claim that we are living in the time of ending. Commitments that made sense in the old world just don’t work the same way in the whole new world. Therefore, time-honored, time-bound practices like marriage and family must be reexamined in the light of “the end.” Our recent embrace of the family and marriage in our preaching is testimony to our relaxation of the eschatological tension that once drove the church into more creative thinking about the world and the church.

New Testament Christianity is restlessly, consistently eschatological, and therefore relentlessly political—a claim about who has ultimate power and, by implication, who does not. Our preaching can’t be biblical without being a claim about the end of time and a reorienting of present life on the basis of the end. The end will have differing significance for differing groups, depending on where they happen to be when they get news of the end. As Walter Brueggemann notes, for some (the dead and defeated) the eschaton means “new possibility,” for others (the powerful and privileged) “a departure,” and yet for others (the poor and oppressed) eschaton means “entitlement.” For all it will be a stoking, a rearrangement, a fueling of the imagination, reorienting everything now in light of the end.⁴⁴

The key biblical text for a truly Christian assessment of time is 2 Peter 3. To those who scoffed that we are actually living in the “last days” (2 Pet 3:3) the writer notes that their skepticism is based upon their false ​sense that the cyclic succession of nature is the truth about time. It’s been one season after another since the beginning of time; why should nature not continue without interruption (2 Pet 3:4)? The writer counters with remembrance of historical events that were truly decisive, comparing Christ’s return to those events (2 Pet 3:5-7). Then the writer vividly depicts the eschatological move from earthly time to eternity (2 Pet 3:7, 10-11). Our time is a paradoxical age in which we are to both wait for and to hasten the “coming of the day of God” (2 Pet 3:12).⁴⁵ We must beware of thinking that our sense of time, instilled in us by the chronological passage of natural time, is akin to God’s time: “with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day” (2 Pet 3:8). That’s why “the day of the Lord will come like a thief ” (2 Pet 3:10).

I agree with Tom Long that “vibrant Christian preaching depends upon the recovery of [an] eschatological voice.”⁴⁶ Eschatology is not only a claim about the future and who has it, but eschatology is also a claim about agency. The modern world removed God as agent from history. Eschatology says that’s a lie. God is yet God. The ingrained liberal resistance to eschatology—based upon liberalism’s privileging of the present status quo in modernity over God’s promised future—may be our greatest mainline Protestant homiletical challenge.⁴⁷ Eschatology keeps things tense, whereas most of us preachers think it our job to relax the tension and the anxiety caused by Jesus. I hope that is why I like to preach sermons that have no neat endings—it keeps things open. I hope that this tendency in my own preaching is due to the nature of the Trinity. Only a living God can move into the future. Only a living God surprises. Only God can properly end a sermon.⁴⁸

I am still haunted by a long conversation I had with a man who was a member of one of my early congregations. He told me that one evening, returning from a night of poker with pals, he had a stunning vision of the presence of the risen Christ. Christ appeared to him undeniably, vividly.

Yet though this event shook him and stirred him deeply, in ten years he had never told anyone about it before he told me, his pastor. I pressed him on his silence. Was he embarrassed? Was he fearful that others would mock him or fail to believe that this had happened to him?

“No,” he explained, “the reason why I told no one was I was too afraid that it was true. And if it’s true that Jesus was really real, that he had come personally to me, what then? I’d have to change my whole life. I’d have to become some kind of radical or something. And I love my wife ​and family and was scared I’d have to change, to be somebody else, and destroy my family, if the vision was real.”

That conversation reminded me that there are all sorts of reasons for disbelieving the resurrection of crucified Jesus, reasons that have nothing to do with our being modern, scientific, critical people.

The “new” we ought to relish is the eschatological newness that occurs in the repetition of a truth that is so cataclysmic that nobody wants to hear, a truth that the government doesn’t want you to know, truth that is so inconvenient that it sets our most elaborate defenses in motion.

What’s new? New is a people who are willing to keep telling a story that can never be extinguished by being told again because it is a story always out of season, odd, abnormal. The world has a way of restoring the freshness to the story because the story always sounds new to the world. The world lives by a story counter to the ones told in the Bible. The church must never tire of patiently reiterating this story in the face of a world that doesn’t get it. No layperson has ever come to church on Christmas or Easter saying, “Preacher, please give me a sermon that’s novel, cute, innovative, and breaks new ground.”

Perhaps this is because the laity know that a story that claims that Herod got bested by a baby, or that the soldiers were defeated by a crucified Jew are perennially odd. We preachers, who must work with these strange stories so often that they eventually appear to us as normal, must therefore discipline ourselves not to let our pastoral boredom lead us into the temptation to attempt something new in what we say about Good Friday.

“Survey courses are death to professors,” an older professor advised me when I began teaching at Duke. “Going over the same material semester after semester will kill you. To stay alive while teaching survey courses you must attempt to listen to the same material as if you are hearing it as a freshman.”

No. The challenge is to keep loving the same material so that one is continually refreshed by the material. That’s why it is so essential for professors, particularly ones who teach survey courses, to do research and writing so they’ll keep being surprised by the same material they must teach. Professors who must deliver the same material, year after year, really do publish or perish.

So Mark begins his Gospel, a story that already had some age on it by the time Mark preached it: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news” (Mark 1:14).

In Jesus “incarnation” was not only in the flesh but also in time. In Jesus Christ God penetrated the time of the Pharisee, the Emperor, the leper, the Scribe, and the prostitute and to all he reiterated the same promise, “Yours is the Kingdom of Heaven.” He taught his disciples to begin prayer with a series of eschatological petitions: “Your name now be made holy; your kingdom comes now; and your will done now” (Matt 6:9 paraphrased). He preached the kingdom into the present lives of his hearers, giving them no time for careful consideration or postponement. If you waited too long to respond, at least in Mark’s Gospel, Jesus had already moved on somewhere else.

He spoke of the future, but did so by dissolving the temporal distance between future and present. “Follow me,” he cried, “and let the dead bury their own dead” (Matt 8:22). He enacted the future at the table, so that you couldn’t tell whether the messianic banquet was tomorrow or tonight. He performed miracles for the suffering—enactments, signs, instances of the Kingdom’s drawing near, now. He thereby shrank the distance between his mission and the Kingdom. “But if it is by the Spirit of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come to you” (Matt 12:28). His preaching was of a coming Kingdom but, wherever that preaching was heard, the Kingdom was already. We couldn’t keep up with him; still can’t, nor are we able to predict where he will show up next, or when he will make himself known in a sermon. We preachers keep preaching in the faith that, despite us, he keeps showing up.⁴⁹ Again.

All of which is to say that I’m agreeing with Karl Barth that the newness in the kingdom of God is located in the nature of God: “God … will always be new to us. God’s kingdom is God … as God comes.”⁵⁰

The church and its preaching are Christ taking our time for himself.

Listen to most Easter hymns and many Easter sermons and you might think that the whole point of Easter is, “Jesus is raised … and now we too shall get to go to heaven,” with the emphasis decidedly on the second half of that affirmation. This is a strange take on Easter when one considers that the gospel resurrection narratives seem unconcerned about our future hope. Paul drew out a future hope for us as an implication of Jesus’ resurrection, but that does not appear to be a first-order interest in Paul and certainly is not an explicit concern of the synoptic Gospels. In a sense, the risen Christ is not so much the one who rescues us now from having one day forever to die but rather he rescues us today from having to live with no hope beyond America.

I’ve just finished teaching an undergraduate course on Jesus. As part of the course we viewed a number of films on Jesus (including Jesus of Montreal and The Last Temptation of Christ). The students noted that most of these films have a gritty, first-century, Near Eastern verisimilitude about them—you really believe that you are there. Until they get to the resurrection. At the resurrection the camera becomes unfocused, everything gets fuzzy, blurred, and pastel.

How different from the Gospel narratives of Easter. The Gospels give the story of Easter an utterly this-world, present-age significance. Jesus Christ—whom we crucified—is revealed in his resurrection to be the true Lord of the world, this world, not some future world. Jesus is raised to reign now, not later. Thus the Easter narratives are accounts of vocation. Witnesses of the resurrection have a job to do—to tell the whole world the truth that Jesus Christ is Lord and all other presumed lordlets are not. “Go … tell!”

It is as if the Gospel accounts of Easter try not to give encouragement to those who attempt to make Jesus’ resurrection an otherworldly, spiritual experience.⁵¹ The Gospels present the resurrection of Jesus as a political event, that which happens here, now in the Gospel mix of fear, misapprehension, evening meals, locked doors, breakfast on the beach, and the disciples’ sexist unwillingness to believe the testimony of women. God’s new age has broken into the present time, our time. And the first to get the news were not good, spiritually perceptive people; they were people like us. We do not live in a perpetual state of pious Eucharistic adoration; our world is the dreary world of breakfast, soggy cornflakes, doubt, and fear. We gather, in your church and mine, not with spiritually perceptive, fully believing, undoubting Christians; we gather with those who, when it comes to Jesus’ resurrection, are convinced that Caesar calls the shots. We are as clueless as Simon Peter, shocked and utterly unprepared that the risen Christ should appear to a loser like him.

This was made manifest for me a few Easters ago. The teenaged son of one of our pastors took his life just before Holy Week. Trying to offer comfort to the pastor and his family during their horrible tragedy, I asked, “Is there anything I can do to help?” The pastor replied, “Would you come to my church and preach the Easter sermon? I’ll be in no condition to preach it myself.”

My first reaction to his request was a huge sense of ineptitude—is it possible to speak a good word in the face of such horror and grief? Perhaps death really does reign. Upon further reflection it occurred to me that ​this is always the way it is with Easter preaching. Every Easter we must preach to a world that is always in danger of thinking that death has the last word. Every Easter sermon is preached to people in grief. Every Easter a pastor is forced to speak in behalf of those who are “in no condition to preach it myself.” On Easter we preach, throwing our voices up against the tragic, raging against the final enemy one more time. And it is the world’s fate to not know the truth about Easter unless some inept preacher like me tells the story. (The women at the tomb, first witnesses to the resurrection, were commanded to “Go … tell!” though none of them had sufficient homiletical training for the task. Perhaps sufficient homiletical training is not the key to effective Easter preaching?) In the power of the Holy Spirit, the Easter narratives stand up to death’s dominion, defeat, disbelief, the Devil, and time’s inexorable march toward oblivion and preach, “He is risen!” Thus my Easter sermon:

Mark says that on that first Easter, women went to the tomb to pay their last respects to poor, dead Jesus. To their alarm, the body of Jesus was not there. A “young man, dressed in a white robe,” told them, “You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified? Well, he isn’t here. He is raised. He is going ahead of you to Galilee.”

Here’s my Easter question for you: why Galilee?

Galilee? Galilee is a forlorn, out-of-the-way sort of place. It’s where Jesus came from (which in itself was a shock—“Can anything good come out of Galilee?”). Jesus is Galilee’s only claim to fame. Jesus spent most of his ministry out in Galilee, the bucolic outback of Judea. He expended most of his teaching trying to prepare his forlorn disciples for their trip up to Jerusalem where the real action was. All of Jesus’ disciples seem to have hailed from out in Galilee. Jesus’ ultimate goal seems not to focus on Galilee but rather on the capital city, Jerusalem. In Jerusalem he was crucified and in Jerusalem he rose. Pious believers in Jesus’ day expected a restoration of Jerusalem in which the Messiah would again make the Holy City the power-center that it deserved to be, the capital city of the world. Which makes it all the more odd that the moment he rose from the dead, says the Gospel scripture, Jesus left the big city and headed back to Galilee. Why?

One might have thought that the first day of his resurrected life the risen Christ might have made straight for the palace, the seat of Roman power, appear there and say, “Pilate, you made a big mistake. Now, it’s payback time!”

One might have thought that Jesus would do something effective. If you want to have maximum results, don’t waste your time talking to the first person whom you meet on the street, figure out a way to get to the movers and the shakers, the influential and the newsmakers, those who have some power and prestige. If you really want to promote change, go to the top.

I recall an official of the National Council of Churches who, when asked why the Council had fallen on hard times and appeared to have so little influence, replied, “The Bush Administration has refused to welcome us to the White House.” How on earth can we get anything done if the most powerful person on earth won’t receive us at the White House?

But Jesus? He didn’t go up to the palace, the White House, the Kremlin, or Downing Street. He went to Galilee.

Why Galilee? Nobody special lived in Galilee, nobody except the followers of Jesus. Us.

The resurrected Christ comes back to and appears before the very same ragtag group of failures who so disappointed him, misunderstood him, forsook him, and fled into the darkness. He returns to his betrayers. He returns to us.

It would have been news enough that Christ had died, but the good news was that he died for us. As Paul said elsewhere (Romans 5), one of ​us might be willing to die for a really good person, but Christ shows that he is not one of us by his willingness to die for sinners like us. His response to our sinful antics was not to punish or judge us. Rather, he came back to us, flooding our flat world not with the wrath that we deserved but with his vivid presence that we did not deserve.

It would have been news enough that Christ rose from the dead, but the good news was that he rose for us.

That first Easter, nobody actually saw Jesus rise from the dead. They saw him afterwards. They didn’t appear to him; he appeared to them. Us. In the Bible, the “proof ” of the resurrection is not the absence of Jesus’ body from the tomb; it’s the presence of Jesus to his followers. The gospel message of the resurrection is not first, “Though we die, we shall one day return to life,” it is, “Though we were dead, Jesus returned to us.” If it was difficult to believe that Jesus was raised from the dead, it must have been almost impossible to believe that he was raised and returned to us. The result of Easter, the product of the resurrection of Christ is the church—a community of people with nothing more to convene us than that the risen Christ came back to us. That’s our only claim, our only hope. He came back to Galilee. He came back to us.

I visit churches where they have a “Seeker Service” on Sunday mornings. Sometimes they have a “Seeker Service” on Saturday night. What’s a “Seeker Service”? It’s worship trimmed to the limitations of those who don’t know much about church, where the music is all singable, and all the ideas are understandable, and the preachers are adorable. It’s designed for people who are “seeking” something better in their lives.

Of course the church should reach out to people, including those who seek something better in their lives. Trouble is that’s not the way the Bible depicts us. Scripture is not a story about how we kept seeking God. As we demonstrated on Good Friday and Holy Saturday, we can adjust to death. We can get along just fine without Jesus. So back to work, back to what we were doing before Jesus called us, back to Galilee. Nobody expected, even less wanted a resurrection.

But on Easter we were encountered by a Christ who was unwilling to let the story of us and God end in death. Easter is the story about how God keeps—despite us—seeking us.

On Easter, and in the days afterward, the risen Christ showed up among us while we were back at work out in Galilee—when he “appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred ​brothers and sisters at one time, … Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, … he appeared also” to the great persecutor and murderer of the church named Paul. The risen Christ was only doing what the crucified Jesus always did: he came back to us.

“Show us God!” we demanded of Jesus. God? God is the shepherd who doesn’t just sit back and wait for the lost sheep to wander back home, God goes out, seeks, risks everything, beats the bushes night and day, and finds that lost sheep!

God is the father who does not simply fold his hands and sit back and wait for the wayward son to come home; God is the heavenly Father who leaves heaven and reaches down in the mire and pulls out the prodigal son that he may be at home with the Father forever.

We thought, what with the blood and the betrayal of Friday, this was the end. We thought it was over between us and God. At last, we had gone too far away, had stooped to the torturing to death of God’s own Son.

Then on Easter, he came back. He came back to the very ones who had forsaken, betrayed, and crucified him. He came back to us.

Christians are the people who don’t simply know something the world does not yet know, or believe something that nonchristians don’t yet believe. We are the people who have had something happen to us that the world appears not yet to have experienced. The risen Christ has come back to us. In one way or another, you are here because the risen Christ sought you, met you, caught you, and commandeered you for God’s purposes. We live not alone.

Implications? When we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, time and again we look up and realize that we’re not walking by ourselves. When we come to some dead end in life, we look over the brink, into the dark abyss, and, to our surprise and delight, there he is, awaiting us, a light in the darkness. We pick up the morning newspaper and delude ourselves that if we can just get some really good political leadership, some really effective defensive weapons all our problems will be solved. Then comes the risen Christ who confronts and overpowers those politicos who thought they were in charge. We give up, give in, despair only to be surprised to find him near to us.

A student, asked to summarize the gospel in a few words, responded: in the Bible, it gets dark, then it gets very, very dark, then Jesus shows up. I’d add to this affirmation, Jesus doesn’t just show up; he shows up for us.

As the psalmist declared:

​Where can I go from your spirit?

Or where can I flee from your presence?

If ascend to heaven, you are there;

If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there. (Ps 139:7-8)

I was visiting a man as he lay dying, his death only a couple of days away. I asked him there at the end what he was feeling. Was he fearful?

“Fear? No,” he responded, “I’m not fearful because of my faith in Jesus.”

“We all have hope that our future is in God’s hands,” I said, somewhat piously.

“Well, I’m not hopeful because of what I believe about the future,” he corrected me, “I’m hopeful because of what I’ve experienced in the past.”

I asked him to say more.

“I look back over my life, all the mistakes I’ve made, all the times I’ve turned away from Jesus, gone my own way, strayed, and got lost. And time and again, he found a way to get to me, showed up and got me, looked for me when I wasn’t looking for him. I don’t think he’ll let something like my dying defeat his love for me.”

There was a man who understood Easter.

To the poor, struggling Corinthians, failing at being the church, backsliding, wandering, split apart, faithless, scandalously immoral, Paul preaches Easter. He reminds them that they are here, ekklesia, gathered and summoned by the return of the risen Christ. Earlier, God declared, “I will be their God and they will be my people.” That’s the story that, by the sheer grace of God, continues. That’s what this risen Savior does. He comes back—again and again—to the very ones (I’m talking about us!) who so betray and disappoint him. He appears to us, seeks us, finds, grabs us, embraces, holds on to us, commissions us to do his work. In returning to his disciples, the risen Christ makes each of us agents of Easter. “As the Father has sent me,” Jesus says, “so I send you” (John 20:21).

What the young man in white tells the women is in effect, “Jesus is raised! You had better get yourselves back to Galilee, there you will see him.” This was a wonderful, frightening thing to hear: the risen Christ is at work, on the loose, and will appear where you live. By the way, Christians, from the first, seem to have worshiped on Sunday. Sunday for Jews was not a holy day of rest; it was the first day of the Jewish workweek. Isn’t it curious that Jesus wasn’t raised on a Saturday, a holy day, but was raised on the day when everybody went back to work? I think in so doing God demonstrated that faithfulness is the willingness to be confronted by Christ even at the office. Jesus is raised into our time and our ​place. Now every day is sanctified and the whole creation, even Alabama, is the holy land. From this perspective, tomorrow, Easter Monday may be more to the point than Easter itself.

In life, in death, in any life beyond death, this is our great hope and our great commission. Hallelujah! Go! Tell! The risen Christ came back to Birmingham—uh, I mean, Galilee.