The Jesus Impression

 

Gettysburg 86 John 20:1-18

You may or may not have caught this, but April 12, just a couple of weeks ago, was the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the American Civil War. On April 12, 1861, Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, thus beginning four of the bloodiest years in American history. Commemorations are beginning and will continue throughout as we recall the battles and events that shaped our nation.

I watched some of the commemoration of the Ft. Sumter battle and saw all the reenactors out there firing guns back and forth and it made me a little nostalgic, because I used to be one of them.

When I was in high school, I was big into history (still am, actually) and big into the hobby of reenacting. In fact, on the night of my senior prom I was not in a tux at the dance, but in Virginia—sleeping in a half shelter canvas tent and hanging out with a bunch of other smelly reenactors at the Battle of New Market. That should tell you everything you need to know about my dating life!

I had a few other friends who were interested in this and would come with us on the weekends. We all had our own “impression” of a Civil War soldier (that’s the word reeanctors use to talk about their character).

At each reenactment we’d meticulously recreate a particular battle—sleeping in those open-ended canvas tents, eating hardtack, executing the drills, firing the weapons (black powder blanks, of course, unless some moron forgot to pull the ramrod out of his musket and then you’d hear this whooshing sound as the rammer flew past your head). In battle we even had set rules about who would die and when. There was one Confederate guy, for example, who got so into it that after he took a spectacular hit, he’d actually make himself bloat up after he laid on the battlefield awhile

What was most interesting to me, though, was the vast numbers of people who would come out to watch us. Thousands of spectators would wander through our camps asking questions and wanting to put their hands on some history. When the battle kicked off, they would line the field as we blasted away at each other. Being a Union soldier at reenactments south of the Mason-Dixon line meant that we got booed a lot. People would bring a picnic lunch and watch the battle, much like those people who came out from Washington and watched the first battle of the real war at Bull Run in 1861. Except in that case, the real blood and carnage of battle sent them scampering back across the Potomac, leaving the picnic behind.

Later, I would parlay that reenacting experience into a summer job at the Gettysburg battlefield, where I portrayed a Union cavalry sergeant and gave four hour and half tours on the battlefield every day for the many tourists who would come to the field. It was a real privilege to be able to bring them into that world, even when they asked touristy questions like, “Did they hide behind the monuments when they fought?” or “Why were all these battles fought on National Park Service Land?”

Reenactments of important events have long been part of human history and memory. And some of the earliest reenactments were the passion plays that commemorated the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus.

In Oberammergau, Germany, for example, citizens have been putting on a world-renowned passion play every ten years that draws hundreds of thousands of pilgrims from around the world. The story goes that in 1633 the citizens of the town, having survived the devastating effects of the plague and the Thirty Years War, swore an oath to God that they would stage a passion play every ten years as a way of giving thanks to God for preserving them. That’s a long history of reenactments!

Closer to home, you might have heard about a theme park in Orlando called “The Holy Land Experience” where six times a week a handsome actor with long, wavy hair and six pack abs named Les Cheveldayoff portrays Jesus. Every afternoon, Les carries a cross down a faux Via Dolorossa while tourists look on licking the “milk and honey” ice cream cones they bought from the snack bar. The procession winds up at a Disney-fied version of Golgotha, where Les/Jesus is “nailed” to a cross that is lifted up by hydraulics while he says his lines via a hidden wireless microphone. Later, he emerges from a fake tomb to the applause of the crowd.

Sound kind of cheesy? Yeah, it probably is.

At base, all reenactments are mere caricatures of the real thing. When a Civil War reenactment is over, the “dead” are resurrected en masse, getting up to walk off the field, get in their cars and head to the closest McDonalds for some 21st century grub. When a biblical reenactment is over, spectators jump in their rental cars and head back to the hotel for a dip in the pool. The blood, the death, the horror of battle; the brutality, pain, and injustice of the cross—are all easily sanitized in the world of memory.

The truth is that time and distance tend to dull our senses. Horrible, bloody, destructive events become sanitized tourist attractions the farther down the line of history we are away from them. You don’t see, for example, too many Vietnam War reenactors and certainly no Operation Iraqi Freedom or Afghanistan events. The bloody reality of those conflicts is still right in front of us.

After high school, I enlisted in the 20th century U.S. Army and it was there that I learned the difference between pretending to be a soldier and actually being one. One is a hobby, the other one is a way of life. One is a form of historical tourism, the other is a full-time commitment that takes every ounce of your energy and focus—a commitment may result in one day making the ultimate sacrifice of your life. Moving from reenacting to reality, from spectating to participating, is a conscious and costly choice.

The more I’ve thought about this, the more I have come to realize that Easter presents us with the same choice.

A lot of folks, even Christians, treat the resurrection of Jesus as a kind of tourist attraction—a pretty interesting event to revisit once a year. Churches are packed today as people come to share a memory, but then it’s off to brunch or back home to chew the head off a chocolate bunny in celebration. But what is there to celebrate? Ask a lot of Christians what the resurrection means and they’ll say things like, “Well, it proves that Jesus was divine,” or “It’s a metaphor for a new spiritual life,” or “Jesus rose from the dead and went to heaven, so that means that if we believe in him we’ll go to heaven when we die, too.” Those things may be true, in some sense, but they sound like standard answers to tourist questions—the kinds of answers repeated over and over again by bored tour guides in clergy garb. On Easter, the church reenacts an old, old story, people come to watch it, everyone maintains their cognitive and emotional distance, and then we go back to our normal lives.

What happens, though, when we make a different choice—to see Easter not as a reenactment of the past but as the launch of a world-changing movement? That’s really the point of the story as we read it in the Gospels. The truth is that Easter was never meant to be an annual historical event celebrated only by reenactors or spectators. It was and still is a call to enlist in the real and present battle that God is waging with evil and with the powers of this world—a battle that Christ has already won. Easter calls us to choose whether we’ll simply be theological tourists or whether we’ll follow the risen Christ into a new reality and lifestyle that requires a total commitment.

The real message of Easter is that it is an ongoing reality that continues beyond the historical event. The resurrection of Jesus marked the triumph of God over evil and death, but it also marked a fundamental change in the relationship between God and humanity.

The resurrection story in John 20 is a familiar one — Mary Magdalene discovering the empty tomb, Peter and John seeing the folded grave clothes, the visit of the angels, the risen Jesus calling Mary’s name. This is the story the crowd gathers to hear on Easter morning.

Mary moved to embrace the risen Jesus, but he said “Do not hold on to me” because he had “not yet ascended to the Father” (John 20:17). It’s not that Jesus had some kind of dangerous spiritual aura about him or that his resurrection body could not be touched by human hands. Mary wanted to hold on tight to her teacher and Lord, but Jesus reminds her of the bigger picture. The focus of Jesus was not on basking in the glow of the resurrection event, but on getting word to his disciples and getting them moving out on the mission of taking the message of the risen Christ into the world.

In other words, they were to no longer be mere spectators of what Jesus had done. They were now to give their whole lives in doing it themselves. They were moving from reenacting to reality, from spectating to participating. They weren’t simply getting ready to go to heaven, they were getting ready to go into the real world to battle the forces of sin, oppression, and death with a message of God’s good news, God’s Kingdom, God’s reign and rule made possible and made a reality by the resurrection of Jesus from the dead.

As if to signify this change in relationship, Jesus instructs Mary to bring the news to “my brothers.” The disciples, both male and female, were to be the new family of God and the representatives of Christ to the whole world. When Jesus appeared to his disciples for the first time, he confirmed that mission—“As the Father has sent me, so I send you” (John 20:21). The glory of Easter, the glory of Jesus, was to be acted out by disciples. They were to be Jesus’ hands, feet, and voice serving people everywhere.

For 21st century disciples, being Jesus isn’t about beards, robes, six-pack abs, but it is about dying, being raised, and being Jesus’ representatives in the world. We may not get crucified on a hydraulic cross six times a week, but we do “die” to an old life of sin, nailing it to the cross of Jesus. We may not come out of a replica tomb six times a week and smile for the cameras popping in the crowd, but Paul says we are indeed “raised with Christ” in whom our “life is revealed” even as we are “revealed with him in glory” (Colossians 3:1-4). Every day we are to take on the person of the crucified, resurrected, and glorified Christ within us. Do that and we change the world. That’s the real message of Easter.

This is why Easter is such an important day—perhaps even more so than Christmas.

Awhile back, I was browsing Slate came across an article by James Martin on the difference between Christmas and Easter (yes, both are religious holidays – a derivative of “holy days”). Martin says that while Christmas has been broadly commercialized and accepted by even non-Christian people, Easter stubbornly holds on to its status as a purely religious holiday (except for the bunny, of course).

Says Martin, “Even agnostics and atheists who don’t accept Christ’s divinity can accept the general outlines of the Christmas story with little danger to their worldview. But Easter demands a response. It’s hard for a non-Christian believer to say, ‘Yes, I believe that Jesus of Nazareth was crucified, died, was buried, and rose from the dead.’ That’s not something you can believe without some serious ramifications: If you believe that Jesus rose from the dead, this has profound implications for your spiritual and religious life—really, for your whole life. If you believe the story, then you believe that Jesus is God, or at least God’s son. What he says about the world and the way we live in that world then has a real claim on you.

“Easter is an event that demands a ‘yes’ or a ‘no.’ There is no ‘whatever.’”

When we say “yes” to the resurrection, we are giving up a seat on the sidelines and entering a whole new reality. When we truly say “yes” to the resurrection, we can no longer pretend to be followers of Christ—we have to become the real thing no matter what it costs. To say “yes” to the resurrection is to move ourselves from occasional theological tourism to a full-time lifestyle that reflects God’s will in our lives. When we say “yes” to the resurrection, we make a vow to make the Lord’s Prayer a reality in our world—God’s will being done “on earth as it is in heaven.”

Les Cheveldayoff, the Jesus reenactor, gets stopped in the mall by kids and gets double-takes on the street. How does looking so much like everybody’s idea of Jesus affect him? “It’s improved my driving,” he says with a smile.

Imagine what improvements a group of people who physically look nothing like Jesus, who aren’t merely reenacting the risen Jesus, could make if they simply chose to act like him—serving humbly, speaking passionately, living generously, doing justly, and experiencing the elevated life in Christ. We are to be transformed people, transforming the world and that begins by giving our lives to the risen Christ—answering the “yes” or “no” question.

What will your answer be?

Will you be a spectator, a reenactor, or a disciple?

Sources:

Kaylor, Bob, “Being Jesus,” Homiletics, March-April 2008

Martin, James, “Happy Crossmas,” Slate.com, March 20, 2008.

 

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