The joy of being wrong
Wonderings:
I wonder, when was the last time you said something really confidently that you later learned was wrong? (And how did that feel?)
I wonder if you’ve ever experienced the presence of a dead person?
Reflection based on these wonderings + [some of] the readings assigned for the Third Sunday of Easter in our Lectionary.
Let us speak, and listen, held in the presence of our loving, liberating, and life-giving God. Amen.
While journaling a few years ago, I jotted down a few notes about the kind of community I dreamed of. The kind of church community where I could be my full self; maybe the kind of community that would let me serve as their priest as my whole self.
This wasn’t a polished plan, these were half-baked hopes; wishes, really. I wrote
To take the gifts of this Christian tradition seriously, but not take ourselves seriously.
To take the stories and the practices seriously, but beyond the consolation of certainty.
A seriousness beyond certainty.
Together, willing to risk being broken open by love.
These readings today made me think of the consolations of certainty, and that desire for a “seriousness beyond certainty.”
What was I trying to get at, there, with those half-baked thoughts?
We have both certainty and something beyond certainty represented in our readings. From the book of Acts: “Peter, standing with the eleven, raised his voice and addressed the crowd, ‘Let the entire house of Israel know with certainty that God has made him both Lord and Messiah, this Jesus whom you crucified.’”
Peter is fired up. He is confident. He is self-assured enough to confront a big crowd of Judeans, saying right to their faces “The Jesus who YOU crucified? Guess what? He IS both Lord and Messiah. Not was: IS. Because even though you crucified him, he has conquered death and is risen. So y’all better repent and be baptized so your sins will be forgiven! God’s promise is for you, and for everyone—but you gotta get with the program, people!”
Now, when someone talks with this kind of confidence—the confidence that is expressed as certainty that someone else has to change—there’s a little alarm bell that starts ringing somewhere around my spleen.
…I don’t know if that’s the posture I want to take…
…I don’t think that’s what spiritual maturity looks like…
But let’s put that to the side for a second.
How do you imagine it felt for Peter to say all that with such confidence? So good, right? I’m feeling some endorphins flowing here, just performing this caricature of him. As the book of Acts tells the story, Peter knows that Jesus was raised from the dead, and knows Jesus as the Risen Lord. And he knows it “with certainty.” And damn it feels good to know for sure.
But here is a mystery: in most of the stories we have of the risen Jesus appearing to the disciples, they do not recognize him—at least not right away. There is something in the experience of resurrection that defies certainty. That actually…makes a fool of you.
In the sublime story we tell on Easter morning, Mary Magdalene finds the tomb empty and sees the risen Jesus—and she thinks he is…shout it out if you know it: the gardener. In John’s gospel the grieving disciples go fishing and catch nothing until a stranger on the shore calls out to cast their nets on the other side of the boat—and their nets are so full they can’t haul them in. But most of them don’t recognize the stranger as Jesus until they come back to shore and he serves them breakfast. And even then, they are not sure.
Today we hear that a disciple named Cleopas and another, unnamed disciple meet the Risen Jesus on the road to this town called Emmaus. As always, it can be useful to try to imagine ourselves inside the story—to see it unfold from the perspective of these two disciples.
They have been talking about the crucifixion of Jesus—their teacher and friend. The one they had pinned all their hopes on—that he was the Messiah. When this stranger asks what they are talking about, “they stood still, looking sad.” I imagine that they are grieving, shocked, disillusioned. AND they are wondering if what the women said that morning could be true—that the tomb was empty, and angels appeared saying that Jesus was risen. The story says that this is the first day of the week: this is all taking place on Easter Sunday, first time. They’ve heard that Jesus is risen—that day—and they’re…leaving town? “Looking sad”?
If you’ve been through grief, or on the flipside, if you’ve been graced by an epiphany or a revelation, you know that the process of integrating a new reality…that ain’t a linear process. It takes time. In the immediate aftermath, we’re all over the place.
And we can see the wheels turning within these disciples. If we’re living this with them, we haven’t had time to process the shock of Jesus’ execution, that bitter disappointment, that terrible scene we can’t wipe from our eyes. Do we really have it in us to risk hope…hope that he is risen? We want so bad for that to be true, but come on, that’s crazy talk.
These disciples are many things, and they feel many things. But certainty is not one of them.
We sense this heaviness in them, the awful weight of these days on their shoulders.
And—man, I love scripture so much—we feel this weight with Cleopas and the other disciple, and yet…you’ve got to admit this story is funny. There’s this delicious dramatic irony throughout: as readers, we know from the start what the disciples don’t. This stranger who asks them what has happened—it’s Jesus, and they can’t see what’s right in front of their faces. It’s hilarious! I almost feel like Jesus is getting a kick out of this—that he’s messing with these guys. Pretending not to know what happened in Jerusalem, but then explaining everything to them, eyes twinkling…because these two dopes still can’t connect the dots. These two beloved dopes.
And the comedy of this feels so close to the thing that moves me so much in this story. These two disciples are just completely flooded, completely overwhelmed, and when they hear that Jesus is risen they do exactly the wrong thing. They don’t go to the tomb to see if they can meet Jesus too—they run the other way.
And so Jesus meets them there, on the road, pointed entirely in the wrong direction, when they’re so wrapped up in their own stuff that they don’t even recognize him.
Here’s the other thing that moves me about this story. When they realize how blinkered and self-absorbed and foolish they have been, they are maybe embarrassed, but : they rejoice. Because they can now see that he had been with them the whole time. Were our hearts not burning within us? They not only recognize Jesus before them, they recognize that Jesus was with them in their foolishness. And even though in that moment of recognition Jesus vanishes—even though there’s nothing for them to hold onto, no evidence to present—all the weight and worry that they carried is made light.
There are so many Christians out there who treasure their certainties, for whom foolishness would feel like the opposite of faith. And all of us probably cling too tightly to different ideas or stories that make this overwhelming world feel tractable, that make us feel safe, or in control. It’s only human to want to be right. But James Alison, a gay catholic theologian I really admire, writes that close to the core of truly Christian life is “the joy of being wrong.”
I wonder if this story might be telling us that being a follower of the risen Jesus requires a tolerance for not-knowing-for-sure, an embrace of what is beyond certainty. The word “disciple” means learner: maybe to be a disciple requires what our Buddhist friends call “beginner’s mind.” The humility to eagerly, even joyfully acknowledge that reality is way bigger than the stories we tell about it, to acknowledge that we are constantly getting in our own way. Because that’s what learning is.
I wonder if the health of our faith depends on our willingness to feel bewildered, or even foolish—our willingness to rejoice when we discover that we failed again to see what was right in front of our faces: that the love and grace of God is richer and more surprising than we’d thought. That the deathless love of God does not depend on us knowing the right answers. That the presence of God in our lives will not be tamed.
I don’t know for sure, but I want to take that seriously. And I want to take it seriously with you.
Amen.
