“’Safe?’ said Mr. Beaver. ‘Don’t you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe.
But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.’”
C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
Having finished my work on tomorrow’s Resurrection Sunday sermon, I attended to some deferred maintenance on my email inbox. While digging down through the accumulated layers of unread messages, I ran across this line: “Dave, this is your last chance to make Easter safe with up to 80% off these safety products.” What followed was a price list for foggers, the disinfectant solution that goes in them, hand sanitizing stations, refills for them, and face masks for the whole family. As I read, I wondered if I’d be getting a similar kind of message from this company before Pentecost advertising good prices on fire extinguishers and wind barriers.
In all fairness to this company, I hasten to point out that I realize what the advertisement was getting at. And we at Emmanuel have chosen our own path to safety tomorrow due to the circumstances imposed on us by Covid. Nevertheless, it brought a smile to my face and a roll of my eyes. Our cultural obsession with safety, which predates the pandemic, often seems like a fruitless endeavor to me. And even if our Spring Easter celebration is restricted to its contemporary secular meanings, which are based on its pre-Christian origins associated with a Germanic fertility goddess, it isn’t safe. Don’t let those pastel bunnies and eggs fool you. I guarantee you there is very little that feels safe about a pagan fertility rite. Think of images that we might pair with the pulsating and cacophonous passages of Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring.”
Talk of a “safe” Easter also brought to mind C.S. Lewis’ oft quoted lines from his first book in the “Chronicles of Narnia” series. The children have finished their dinner with the Beaver family and are discussing how Aslan is on the move. When Susan and Lucy hear that Aslan is a lion, they both take pause and wonder if he is safe. In response, Mr. Beaver lets them know that they have asked a question that really makes no sense; that when it comes to talking about Aslan, safety was not the primary value at the core of his mission.
Holy Week is filled with events that do little to illustrate a sense of being safe. It is a week of describing what happens when God is at work and almost no one feels safe as they live through these events. As Jesus enters Jerusalem the religious leaders feel threatened as they watch the crowds go wild. On the one hand they fear instability in their tenuous relationship with Rome, and on the other they fear the retribution from God at what sounds like blasphemy coming from the mouths of the people. In the Garden of Gethsemane Jesus is afraid and asks his Father for relief. Just as his disciples are afraid when the temple guards come to arrest Jesus and Peter cuts off the ear of one of the men who make up this arresting posse. In the courtyard outside the High Priest’s house, Peter is afraid and denies his relationship with Jesus three times. Inside the Roman Procurator’s headquarters, Pilate is afraid as he observes Jesus’ fearlessness. At the cross almost all of Jesus’ followers have fled because of fear. And on their way to the tomb the grief-stricken women who have come to anoint Jesus’ body ponder how they will accomplish the herculean task of rolling away the stone.
Nobody feels safe. And neither are we because Jesus is not safe. But he is good.
Several years ago I attended a continuing ed. class for pastors on preaching the Holy Week texts in the Gospel of Mark. It was taught by New Testament professor Donald Juel. When Dr. Juel discussed the text in Mark 15:38 about how upon the death of Jesus the temple curtain was “torn in two from top to bottom,” he told a story about a discussion he had been a part of while teaching this text to a group of High School students. He asked the students what they thought the image meant. He initially got the expected responses: “It means that we are no longer separated from God, that we have access to the holy of holies, that we can now approach God.” But then one kid after a short period of silence said, “No, it means more than that. It means that God is on the loose.”
Faith in God is rarely about feeling safely in control of our circumstances. Faith is not simply security in a set of assurances that everything will be in ok because “God is in control.” Faith is faithfulness to a relationship with God. A relationship that God has initiated with us and one which he promises to sustain. A relationship based on a love from which nothing can separate us, but also a relationship where we encounter some of those things that Paul mentions in Romans 8 that seem to have the power to break this relationship and thus make us feel unsafe.
God is on the loose. God is in our midst. But God is for us. And if God is for us who can be against us.
Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Romans 8:35,37-39
David Rohrer
Holy Saturday
04/03/2021