Easter and Empire

 Let’s talk about Easter and Empire. More specifically, about the way the Easter story challenges the pretensions of Empire, exposing imperial power as ultimately empty, as so much sound and fury signifying nothing.

Of course, Easter is about much more than this. It is about the redemption of the world. It is about the defeat of death. It is about God’s love for humanity and the astonishing lengths God is prepared to go to for the sake of creatures like us, sinful and petty and limited as we are. But the path to redemption passes through the cross—which, before it became a Christian symbol, was the ultimate symbol of imperial domination and control. 

The cross was deployed to terrorize any who might question the authority of the Roman Empire: human beings, nailed to wooden posts and hoisted up for all to see. Still alive when initially crucified, the victims of this imperial terror were allowed to die slowly of exposure and deprivation, and any who might think to defy the might of Rome could see these victims in various stages of demise: suffering, dying, dead.

The cross represented a certain kind of power: the power to dominate and control through the infliction of suffering and death and the fear of death. This was taken to be the ultimate proof of the Emperor’s supremacy and the final argument for obedience.

Bow down or die in agony. If you choose not to bow, you are a fool or you’re crazy, and the price for your defiance will be a living hell. 

This is the message of Empire. The empty tomb is God’s answer, declaring the emptiness of this imperial message and the final impotence of imperial power. 

Don’t get me wrong. The power to kill is terrible, and even worse is the power to kill slowly and painfully, with deliberate attention to humiliation: the conscious effort to turn a living human being into a thing. 

We see the evil of it in the Passion story, in Jesus’ journey to the cross, in His anguish. And on the cross, Christ stands in for humanity and thus declares in the most unequivocal terms, “What you do to the least of these, you do to me.” On the cross, God announces that what Empire does to secure its control—every hammer blow, every word of mockery, every infliction of death—is done to the very Creator of the Universe. It is a monumental crime against God.

That is the first lesson of the Easter story: the magnitude of the evil that imperial power commits. The use of suffering and death and the threat of these things to dominate and control others is a crime against the Great I Am, Being Itself, the Creator and Sustainer of all that is.

But the Easter story has a second lesson. It is this: the power to kill is nothing in comparison to the power to give life. That power lies with God, and through that power God will undo Empire’s every pretention to supremacy. 

Not only is the coercive domination of human bodies evil, but it is, in the final analysis, impotent. Everything it accomplishes is eventually swallowed up by the very forces of death that it wields with such sinister glee. What remains, what endures, is the life God gives out of boundless love.

It is in this power of love and life that we must abide if we seek anything eternal. If we desire anything that will last, we will not find it in the power of Empire. We will find it, instead, in the quiet power of healing the sick and feeding the hungry and loving our neighbors as ourselves. 

When we do these things, we abide in God. And when we abide in God, the threat of death cannot force us to bow. For when we abide in God, there is an empty tomb at the far side of every dark moment, every threat, every misuse of terrestrial power to terrorize and kill.

It is said that life is fleeting, and death the final answer to it all. The Easter story inverts this. It is death that is fleeting, and life the final answer. And if that is so, our standards of wisdom and foolishness become inverted as well. When that refusal to bow before coercive power springs from an allegiance to life and love, then—foolish as that may seem to the disciples of Empire—that refusal is the greatest wisdom in the world.

Death's Persistent Sting: Meditation for an Easter Monday

"O death, where is thy sting?"

I woke up Easter morning to the news of terror in Sri Lanka: hundreds dead, many hundreds more injured, in a series of coordinated bombing attacks on hotels and Christian churches. I blinked back horror...and then I got up, dressed for Easter services, and went on with my day.

I felt the sting, but it was a small one: a remote horror, the death of people I do not know on the far side of the world. It felt insufficient, this little sting, as if my compassion were too weak to reach across the miles.

Where is your sting, death? It is here, here in the news of hundreds killed. But it is too small.

"O death, where is the sting?"

For Easter services I put on the cream-colored silk jacket that I inherited from him after his death. It is the jacket he's wearing in one of my favorite pictures of him, the picture that was the centerpiece at his memorial service and that depicts him as I most remember him.

It was his favorite jacket for special occasions. In the last decade or more of his life, if the occasion called for dressing up, this jacket was what he'd put on. And I'd joke: "That jacket is mine when you die."

I rarely wear it, because I want it to last. And when I do take it out I see my father and feel afresh his absence. Sometimes it feels like a kind of treason that it doesn't hurt more.

Where is your sting, death? It is here in this pale silk and the memories it evokes.

"O death, where is thy sting?"

I have friends who are staring down the inevitability of death in a way that most of us do not. Confronted with a terminal diagnosis, the truth of human mortality intrudes on their living and in dark moments threatens to paralyze them, to steal away what life they have left--a kind of death before death that they must continually fight against: "You will not take this, too, o death. This day is yet mine to live."

The rest of us know this struggle in a weakened form: the anxiety over strange symptoms or impending storms or trips where so much could go wrong. We hide from it as best we can, but sometimes the inevitability of death rears before us and for a few heartbeats we can't escape it, the sense of a consuming dark. The only question is when: today, tomorrow, thirty years from now?

Where is your sting, death? Here, here in the universal dread.

There are some for whom the dread has faded in the face of something worse: the monotony of lonely hours. Death has taken too many beloved companions, and it's creeping harbinger has stolen away the skills and powers that make living rich and vibrant. And so they sit, reduced to waiting and remembering. Life is something in the past, something gone with the beloved. The fear of death has been replaced by the lonely horror of feeling nothing worth living for.

Where is your sting, death? Here, here in this living death, where death has stung so deep that its victim has come to see death as a welcome escape rather than the architect of the intolerable.

All around us, death stings and stings. And in defiance we lift our voices and say with Paul, "O death, where is the sting?"

We treat it as a rhetorical question.

As if the answer were that it's sting is gone.

As if we didn't feel its sting every day in different ways.

As if the muting of the sting were born of our faith, our capacity to grasp the deeper truths that assure us that death is weaker than life, when in truth it is born of sin, of our failure to care enough.

And yet we lift our voices in defiance and triumph, an exercise in holy pretense. We cry it into existence, this self who has no fear of death--that has lost its fear not because of despair, not because of insufficient compassion, but because we have seized upon a joy more powerful than death.

The joy eludes us. Death keeps stinging us. And yet in heroic, sacred, audacious hope, we keep reaching for that world where death has lost its victory and joy will have no end.


"O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?" 1 Corinthians 15:55

The Holiest Night

Before the joy of Easter comes the cross.

My faith, shaped by the Lutheran tradition, teaches me that it is on the cross that we encounter God's most profound revelation of the divine essence.

It is not through rising in glory that God's loving nature finds its most perfect expression, but rather through suffering the most humiliating and agonizing of punishments despite His perfect innocence.

It is not through defeating death that Jesus' divine nature shines forth most profoundly, but through facing it.

It is not in seeing the empty tomb that we witness the deepest truth about God. It is, rather, in seeing the incarnate God accept the very worst that humanity can do, endure the most profound rejection, and love us still. Love us with a radical, unflagging love.

In the cross we see God step into the place of debasement, the place of despair, the place where human beings are treated like something worse than things--step into that place and say, "Here I stand."

And in that moment, every scapegoat ceases to be a a sacrifice to the gods and becomes instead what we do to God. "What you do to the least of these, you do to me." On the cross we see just what that means.

In that moment, our ultimate rejection of love discovers the meaning of a love that reaches across the gap of rejection and says, "Not even this can separate us."

In that moment, our worst afflictions become moments of solidarity with the very foundation of reality. When we feel most cut off from the good, when despair and loneliness and anguish seem to consume our souls, we discover that God is there--and not just there, but there at His most human, at the point at which the divine enters most fully into the world.

By an act of stunning audacity, God turns the universe on its head, and finds a way to be most fully present to us in that space where God is felt to be most fully absent.

The empty tomb is the effect, the consequence. The cross is the thing itself.

Today is Good Friday, Silent Friday, Black Friday. Today Christians turn their thoughts to this staggering thing.

May this holiest night rip through the veils of the ordinary and move you to wonder.    

Slumber Parties in the Shadow of Death: A Holy Week Meditation

In the spring after my father’s death, on the night before Easter, my then eight-year-old son announced that he wanted to invite his sister over for a slumber party. It would involve bringing her stuffed lion-bear across the hall. And her pillow. As far as slumber parties go it was a low-stress affair.

In fact he’d already invited her. The two were anxiously awaiting my blessing. My daughter—a twirly five-year-old—clung to my leg saying, “Can we, Daddy? Can we? Can we?” Her brother was perched on his toes, hands clasped over his belly and eyebrows raised. “It’s Easter Eve! It’s a special occasion!”

I found myself looking down at my children with an ache. They weren’t thinking about it, but it was hard for me to think of anything else. Hard not to see in this eager moment the shadow of October; hard not to hear that same request, born then from the need for comfort in the dark.

A Good Friday Reflection on Arthur Miller's ALL MY SONS

“A man can’t be a Jesus in this world!”


So says Joe Keller, the tragic figure at the center of Arthur Miller’s first successful play, All My Sons. It’s a play I’m thinking about these days because, well, both my son and I are in it. That is, we’re in a production of it that opens next week.

But this week, as I’ve been thinking about the play’s harrowing conclusion, I couldn’t help but think of it in relation to Holy Week, and to the passion narrative that Christians remember in a special way this week. In a sense, Joe Keller’s tragic tale is a narrative of crucifixion, of the burden of sin, and—in its final terrible moments—of the tragically distorted pursuit of redemption.

By the way, this post will contain spoilers. If you’ve never seen or read All My Sons but plan to and want to be surprised, you might want to stop reading now.

The play is set in a single day, in a back yard somewhere in Ohio, in the wake of World War II. The yard belongs to Joe Keller, a businessman who, during the war, made cylinder heads for P-40 fighter planes. One day, the cylinder heads were coming out of the production process with cracks. They were shipped out anyway, the cracks covered over…and planes started going down. Ultimately 21 men died.

Keller and his partner, Steve Deever, were arrested, but while both men were initially convicted, Keller was acquitted on appeal. He had plausible deniability: he hadn’t gone into work that day. He’d been sick, apparently, with the flu. And so—at least as Keller tells the story—he never knew what Deever had done.

And now, on a summer day after the war, Keller sits in his lovely yard, enjoying his freedom and his wealth; and the only visible shadow over his life is that one of his sons, Larry, never returned from the war.

But there are portents. A storm has knocked down the tree planted in Larry’s honor. More significantly, Larry’s “girl,” Annie Deever, has arrived in town at the invitation of Joe Keller’s surviving son, Chris. Chris is in love with Annie and wants to marry her—a desire that is complicated not only by the fact that she’s the daughter of the business partner who took the fall for the cracked cylinder heads, but by the fact that Kate Keller, Joe’s wife, has never relinquished the conviction, even after three and a half years, that Larry is still alive.

But as the day’s events unfold, the truth of Keller’s complicity in the crime comes to light, precipitated in part by an unexpected visit from George Deever, Annie’s brother, who has just listened to—and been convinced by—their father’s account of what happened, an account that clearly implicates Joe Keller in the crime. The truth staggers Chris, whose idealism and love for his father never allowed him to believe anything but Joe’s version of events.

And as Joe Keller rallies in his own defense—appealing to the endemic corruption and dog-eat-dog realities of a system that made him no worse than anyone else in the business world, appealing to the bonds of family and his desire to leave a legacy for his sons—as Joe Keller argues his case, Annie comes forward with a letter that reveals the truth about Larry’s death.

Joe Keller utters the fateful words—“A man can’t be a Jesus in this world!”—just as Chris begins to read aloud Larry’s final message, a message written just before he took off in his plane intent on ending his own life. Larry had heard about what his and Annie’s fathers had done. Larry, a pilot himself, identified with each of the men who had died. And he was the son of the man responsible. He couldn’t live with it. He couldn’t go on living, knowing that his comrades, boys who risked their lives fighting for their country and each other, were casualties of his father doing business.

The letter brings home to Joe the full weight of his culpability. His sons, the sons for whom he had built his business and his wealth, for whom he had risked prison (and the lives of pilots) rather than allow the business to go under—these two boys, each in his own way, stood in solidarity with the men who'd died. For Joe, faced with this truth, the message of Larry’s suicide becomes clear: They are all my sons.

Larry killed himself to express, in the only way he knew how, the enormity of his father’s crime. He voluntarily shared in the fate of his father’s victims, declaring in a final fiery act, This is what your sins really mean. But even as he identified with the victims of his father’s crime, he also identified with his father. He could not help but feel that kinship, that connection, to recognize and bear the burden of his father’s crime—a burden he could only cast off by going on one last mission, a mission from which he knew he would not return alive.

And Joe Keller—who has been shifting responsibility for his crime to the broader system of which he’s just a part—now finds his scope of responsibility expanding beyond his immediate family. They are all my sons. Once ready to make the world responsible for his actions, he suddenly finds himself responsible to the world.

And from this new perspective he knows that “being sorry” is not enough. As he goes into the house, on the pretext of getting his jacket so that Chris can take him to the police station, Chris shares with his mother what he sees as the alternative to merely being sorry: “You can be better.”

Maybe Joe doesn’t believe it. Maybe what’s happened has convinced him of a paradoxical truth: His duty to the world exceeds what the world’s realities make possible. Confronted with what he’s done, and with a vivid personal awareness of the human capacity to rationalize and evade responsibility, he doesn’t believe he can be good enough. To be good enough, you need to be a Jesus in this world. But a man can’t be a Jesus in this world.

And so, Joe Keller’s moment of moral awakening is also his final moment. In that very moment when he realizes and internalizing the scope of his moral responsibilities, when he casts away denial and deception, he finds himself faced with a chasm of sin he cannot possibly cross. What he’s done is too terrible, and what he must do to be better is too unattainable.

And so the final gunshot rings out. Joe’s solution to the agony of it, to his moral crucifixion, is to follow in the footsteps of his son.

The play comes to an end with Chris weeping, saying “I didn’t mean to,” while his mother, Kate, urges him not to take it on himself.

Those final words are telling: “Don’t take it on yourself.”

But what is the alternative? One son takes on himself the weight of his father’s sins, and it drives him to a fiery end. A father refuses to take on the weight of his guilt, and it festers. A partner sits in prison, bearing alone the penalty for the crime. And the truth pushes its way to the surface. The gravity of the offense will be felt—somehow, irresistibly felt even through the veneer of pretense and rationalization, in spite of our efforts to hide behind pleasant routines, in spite of our carefully constructed imitations of the gardens of innocence.

Are these the only alternatives? Moral crucifixion or denial?

It is this dilemma that sits at the very heart of Christian theology. It is this dilemma that Good Friday is about. In a sense, Christian theology begins with a question: How do we face the truth of the human predicament, both our responsibility to the world and our inadequacy, without needing to crucify ourselves?

I don’t believe that Jesus’ passion story—from betrayal to crucifixion, from death to an empty tomb—can be understood unless and until the weight of this question is fully experienced, and the passion is understood as offering a narrative answer. That doesn’t mean the answer is easy to articulate in theoretic terms, terms that abstract from the details of the story. But Christians are united in part by their conviction that here, in the symbols of the cross and the empty tomb, lies God’s solution.

“A man can’t be a Jesus in this world.”

“Don’t take it on yourself.”

Joe Keller is right. He can’t be Jesus. Neither can Chris, or Larry, or any of the others in the play. And because none of them can be a Jesus in this world, all of them are trapped by the same intolerable dilemma.

Unless. Unless something greater than we are makes it possible for us to follow Kate Keller’s advice without sacrificing truth or integrity. Unless we can stand in the truth without being crushed by it, because there is someone who is taking it on Himself, someone better than we can be who is lifting the impossible burden of it without requiring that any of us deny its reality.

We can't be a Jesus in this world. But the hope offered by the Christian narrative is that this grim reality, played out in such harrowing terms in Arthur Miller's play, isn't the end of the story. Because we don't need to be. Because there's someone who is.

Meanings of the Resurrection

In honor of Easter, I want to reflect a bit on the symbolism of the resurrection story. I don't mean to offer an apologetic for the resurrection. That is, I don't intend to defend the reasonableness of believing in it--which I think is something that, as I mentioned in a comment on an earlier post, can only be done as part of a much broader project of reflecting on the value of holistic interpretations of lived experience. What I offer here is simply a reflection on what, symbolically, the story of resurrection means for Christians.

Like the symbol of the cross, the symbol of the empty tomb is polysemic—that is, it is heavy with a diversity of meanings. In its simplest terms it announces, “Death is not the end!”

Paul was arguably the first to develop a theological elaboration of this meaning. In terms of Paul’s teachings, Jesus’ empty tomb declares that Jesus has forged a pathway through death—past the final end of mortal existence—and established on the far side of that end a new beginning, a new life which has no end. For Paul, Jesus is the “firstfruits” of a general resurrection. And by such a general resurrection he had in mind an awakening from the “sleep” of mortal death, one in which all of us are brought into a new existence freed from the specter of death (see I Corinthians 14-22).

In conceiving of this triumph over death as involving a bodily resurrection, the tradition has affirmed the value of embodied existence. The tomb is empty because Jesus' new life was not achieved by abandoning his body but by reclaiming it--but reclaiming it in a redeemed form, that it, redeemed from its limitations, its fragility and propensity for degeneration. The message is that, despite its finitude, despite the evils that assail our material reality, there is an essential goodness to the physical universe, to our bodies and our embodiment, that deserves respect. Disdain or disregard for the physical world is not appropriate.

Taken in relation to the cross, the empty tomb has further meanings. It declares that what is conceived from a terrestrial standpoint as ultimate and total defeat, as final humiliation, is none of these things from the divine standpoint (and hence from the most complete, enveloping, and hence truest standpoint). Crucifixion, after all, was not merely a means of killing that involved intense physical suffering before death. It was also a graphic means of intimidation and a tool of public degradation. Human beings were treated worse than things—not merely as something to be used, but as objects of contempt. The purpose of crucifixion was to express towards a human being the very antithesis of respect.

To have the power to crucify another human being was to have the power to take away their lives in a manner that first stripped them of everything that gives life any value. And it was, at the same time, an act of triumphantly crowing over one’s victim—displaying for all the world to see just how helpless, just how disgraced, one could make another human being (before ultimately turning them into a thing in truth, that is, a corpse).

The empty tomb symbolically represents what such efforts at mortification achieve from God’s ultimate standpoint. We might express it as follows: “Look into the tomb and you begin to see what you’ve accomplished by such exercises of power. The tomb is not merely empty. It has been emptied. In the place of a corpse there is new life, eternal and incorruptible.” The empty tomb erases the pretentions of coercive power to define human worth. It declares that the use of force to degrade and destroy is less than impotent. It has become the means whereby the intended victim has been exalted, whereby the target for destruction has been made indestructible.

Take another step back, looking at the empty tomb in relation to Jesus’ life and ministry, and we see a related message. In his ministry, Jesus faced human forces that wielded enormous terrestrial power: the power to crucify. As He began to teach—as He preached against the injustices of His age, as He lifted up the poor and rebuked those who profited at their expense—He gradually and cumulatively earned the enmity of the privileged.

And so the power to crucify was turned against Him. And in the face of that power--the power to kill in the most brutal and humiliating way--what did Jesus do? Did He flinch? Did the fear of death--the fear of death imposed by the wielders of secular power--silence Him? Did He stop "preaching truth to power"?

On the contrary, the gospel narrative is a narrative of unflinching and persistent insistence on doing the right thing, saying the right thing, following the path of truth and love, regardless of the costs. And in the face of such a commitment to the good, the threat of death is impotent. For it is the threat of violence that tyrants use to control others. Actual violence is done only to intimidate those who remain alive--or when efforts at intimidation fail. This is the key: killing in the face of unswerving allegiance to the good is an expression of failure. Tyrants kill those that cannot be controlled by the fear of death. Their killing is an expression of their impotence, like the tantrum of a child who is thwarted.

But the vividness of killing--especially for those who fear death--often masks this impotence, this failure. The empty tomb exposes it. It declares that when we live as Jesus did, with a commitment to the good that does not bow to the fear of death, then the good has triumphed over the forces of this world that rely on the threat of death. When people of good will act with unflinching love in the face of the power to crucify, when the power to crucify is utterly stripped of its capacity to change our allegiance to the good by even the tiniest fraction, then death has lost its hold on the living. The tomb is empty.