The Pre- and Post-Easter Jesus
Sermon by Stephen D. Edington, April 8, 2001
It was the kind of conversation you would probably only find on a chat-line for UU ministers. Someone pointed out that there could not have been any palms waved when Jesus rode into Jerusalem for the Passover celebration. The reason, as this colleague went on to say, is that the climatic conditions in and around Jerusalem are such that palm trees cannot grow. This poster further pointed out that in the synoptic gospels-- Matthew, Mark, and Luke, which are all based on a common set of stories--there is no mention of palms. Instead each of these accounts, or stories, say that persons in the crowd threw their garments in front of Jesus as he rode into the city on a donkey. Only in the Gospel of John, written some 80-90 years after the events it purports to describe, does it say the crowd waved palm branches; which means that the author of that passage was clearly taking some literary license. It's all well and good to have that pointed out I guess, but I think a case for palms can still be made on aesthetic grounds if nothing else. In the churches where our more traditional Christian sisters and brothers are worshipping today, palm branches are being waved; and that, as I say, is far more aesthetically pleasing than waving articles of clothing--however more Biblically correct the latter may be. And "Palm Sunday" has a better ring to it somehow than "Garment Sunday."
I've developed my own Palm Sunday tradition during my years in the UU ministry; and I realized how ingrained that tradition has become at a Fund Raising Committee meeting several weeks ago. We were going over the things that were to be done to promote the Pledge Drive on the Sundays following the Kick-Off Sunday and when we got the April 8 (today) someone said, "Oh yeah, that's the Sunday for Steve's Jesus sermon." I thought, well if it's become so assumed or expected that I talk about Jesus on Palm Sunday I guess I'll just have to keep doing it. I'll just have to keep sharing some thoughts on how I as a UU and a religious humanist, relate to the person of Jesus as portrayed in the New Testament gospels; taking into account that my faith journey to my present stance began as an evangelical Baptist.
I'll be drawing this morning on some of what I learned in the course I took last summer by Dr. Marcus Borg at Berkeley's Graduate Theological Institute. But I'd like to start with a story that has a much more local flavor to it, and that draws on another of my well known interests, the life and writings of the author Jack Kerouac. The story is about a family living in the French-Canadian neighborhoods of Lowell, Massachusetts in the 1920s. The parents, who grew up and got married here in Nashua, are Leo and Gabrielle Kerouac. They have three children: Gerard, Caroline, and their youngest son, Jean Louis. At some point it becomes clear that something isn't right with Gerard. He has trouble breathing, his legs ache a lot, and he spends more and more time bedridden. He has a disease called rheumatic fever, for which at that time there is no cure. In June of 1926 at age 9, Gerard Kerouac dies after a long period of agonized suffering. His sister is 7; his youngest brother is four. The Kerouacs have a family plot here in Nashua at the St. Louis de Gonzague Cemetery, and after a funeral in Lowell little Gerard is brought to that cemetery for burial.
In the devoutly Catholic Kerouac household, Gerard may be gone but he's far from forgotten. His goodness, his kindly ways, his love of animals, his devotion to his parents are long recalled; and stories of the saintly Gerard are told and retold. These "Gerard Stories" become part of the family lore. The family member most affected by all this is the youngest brother, Jean Louis. His parents call him "Ti Jean." His friends come to call him Jack. Jack struggles throughout his boyhood, adolescence, and into his adulthood with the legacy of this absent, and yet powerfully present, older brother. He also pursues the life of the vagabond writer.
In January of 1956, nearly 30 years after the death of his older brother and about 18 months before the publication of his signature novel On the Road, Jack Kerouac writes a book, over an intense three week period, called Visions of Gerard. In the opening paragraph he says, "For the first four years of my life I was not Ti Jean, I was Gerard ... and (his) holiness and his teachings of tenderness to me, and my mother constantly remind me to pay attention to his goodness and advice..." As Jack writes Gerard becomes a saint, and Kerouac's own spirituality which in 1956 was a blend of the Catholicism in which he was raised and the Buddhism to which he had become strongly attracted, becomes all intertwined with the beatification of his older brother. This, indeed is what this beautiful little book really is: The beatification of Gerard Kerouac.
In doing some research for my own Kerouac book a few years ago I interviewed a couple of elderly gentlemen who knew Gerard when they were all youngsters. One of them was his first cousin, who has since passed away, and who lived just a block or so from here on Cross Street where his father ran a grocery store on Whitney Street. He told me about how he and Gerard and Caroline and little Jack played in our cemetery when the Kerouacs would come up from Lowell for a visit. (You heard it here folks--as a little tyke Jack Kerouac ran around in our cemetery.) What these gentlemen recalled of Gerard was that he was your basic neighborhood kid, a pleasant enough fellow, a good playmate; and a little guy who had the very tragic misfortune to come down with an illness that killed him. As for his being a saint, or a little god, well, as one of his one-time playmates put it, "I thought he was just a good kid."
The concluding chapter of Visions of Gerard describes his funeral procession from Lowell to Nashua: "We all get in cars and they slowly weave the parade and out we go on a long slow drive along the Merrimack River, by sodden trees in all their foliage looking sad, to the bridge at Tyngsboro, and across that, to Nashua, entering that little city (my parents come-from town) in bleak array, to the cemetery outside of town..." is the way Jack tells it as a 34 year old writer. I read this passage whenever I lead a tour of Nashua during the annual Kerouac festival in Lowell every October. We visit places in this city that Kerouac mentions in some of his novels, and then wrap it up at the St. Louis Cemetery. I've had Kerouac aficionados and scholars from all over the country, and various parts of the world, join me for this little excursion over the years. I've witnessed some emotional moments out there just off Exit 5. Some of my tour-takers want to re-live the concluding paragraphs of Visions of Gerard. People will sometimes place their hand on the marker that has Gerard's name, and say a little prayer, or just stand in silence for a moment. Occasionally a tear or two gets shed. All of this because of a book Jack Kerouac wrote some 30 years after his brother's tragic death. And I'll own up to my own stuff on this matter, when I first located the grave site myself--shortly after moving here--I instinctively took off my hat and stood there with a bowed head for a short time, replaying some of the lines from this book in my head. I guess I might as well own up to my own stuff on this too: Sometimes on a stormy or rainy or snowy night when I heading north on Rt. 3 and go by the St. Louis Cemetery, I'll say something like "OK Gerard, get me safely the rest of the way home." (It's a Kerouac thing; you probably wouldn't understand.)
This is supposed to be a sermon about Jesus, and I'm getting there. But first, think on this: A nine year old boy, who by all accounts was a pleasant and likable kid, dies a slow and painful death. Within his household his memory is revered and he becomes the ideal child, and ideal human being, for his brother and sister. He also becomes the moral and spiritual standard against which their lives are measured. Thirty years after his death his living brother writes an account of his deceased brother's life drawing on the Gerard stories he's heard all of his life. Gerard becomes mythologized. In this book the deceased brother has visions of heaven that he relates to the nuns at the Catholic school he attends. He displays extraordinary kindness to animals. One of the Gerard stories is of how he nurses a crippled mouse back to health and is then grief-stricken when the family cat eats it. He loves his mother so much, as another Gerard story goes, that even with his legs hurting he walks to a neighborhood drug store on a cold night to buy some aspirin for a crippling headache she has. The nuns and priests at his parochial school predict he'll be a priest himself someday. But that, of course, does not happen. As death nears, the Gerard stories are of how his family in Lowell and those from Nashua gather to await and mourn his agonized passing; and then he's carried to his grave.
Did these Gerard stories actually happen? In some form or other, they probably did. Did they happen in just the way Gerard's writer-brother wrote them down thirty years later? Well, Jack probably worked in his own version of palm branches here and there. Like the writers of the gospels, he took some literary license.
Even if you've never read Visions of Gerard I have a hunch a number of you have heard a version of this story, and you recognize a certain process in its formation and telling. It goes like this: An itinerant Jewish teacher from his society's peasant class travels the countryside of his day offering a rather simple message of love and justice based on his knowledge of Jewish scripture. He proclaims an approaching "Kingdom of God" as he calls it. He's not the only one doing this, by the way. This was a time when a number of itinerant teachers and self-proclaimed messiahs of one type or another were preaching some form of deliverance in a captive country to any who would listen to them. But this particular teacher and preacher, with the not uncommon name of Jesus, had the misfortune of running afoul of the religious and political authorities of his day, as they feared that he was going to lead a popular uprising as crowds flocked to Jerusalem for Passover. So they have him executed; and it's a slow, agonized and painful death.
End of story? Not exactly. Within his circle of followers-- his earthly family, as it were--Jesus becomes the Ideal or Perfect Human Being; so much so that he's even called the Son of God. Within this family, which begins to expand and spin off other families, or communities (churches, as they were later called), Jesus stories come to be told. There are stories of how he healed the sick, cured the blind, and on one occasion even raised the dead. He becomes the compassionate one, the friend of the poor and the downtrodden everywhere, as well as the one who was unafraid to speak truth to power even though it cost him his life. These Jesus stories become part of the lore of this slowly expanding community. Some 30 years after his death some of these stories come to be written down, in a mythologized way. The first written collection becomes known as the Gospel of Mark; then there's Matthew and Luke, and much later, the Gospel of John. These accounts contain the Jesus lore. Other versions of this lore were also told, by the way, but a couple of centuries later the Church decreed that these four accounts were the official version. (That's a topic for another sermon.)
I'm drawing an obvious analogy here, and any analogy can only be taken so far, of course. We know who Gerard Kerouac actually was. His birth, baptismal, and death certificates all exist. The house in Lowell in which he lived and died in is still standing. During the Kerouac festival, and at other times, groups of people will gather in front of it and someone will read passages from Visions of Gerard. (People still live in this house, incidentally; I don't know how they feel about all these gatherings.) I trust the St. Louis de Gonzague cemetery records when they say that those are Gerard's bones in the ground out there. With Jesus you're dealing with a much more shadowy figure. The human, earthly Jesus cannot be identified in the same way that the human, earthly Gerard Kerouac can. But the process by which an earthly figure becomes, in a very real way, deified is quite similar in both cases. And what we mostly know about both persons--Gerard and Jesus--is contained more in the lore, or in the stories that came to be told about them, than in their earthly lives as such.
So here's the question I'm shooting for in all this: We have, basically, two Gerards and two Jesuses here: We have the earthly beings, and the creatures of Visions of Gerard and the New Testament Gospels respectively. Which figure, with respect to both Gerard and Jesus, is more real? Which figure, with respect to both Gerard and Jesus, has affected and touched the lives of more people?
This is the same issue, in fact, that Dr. Marcus Borg (finally getting around to him) raises in the distinction he makes between what he calls the Pre-Easter Jesus and the Post-Easter Jesus. This is my third, and final, round with Dr. Borg for this year following the course I took from him last summer. Mr. Borg is a very learned and very liberal Christian theologian. His two best known books are The God We Never Knew and Meeting Jesus for the First Time. He was also a part of a project, some 6-8 years ago, known as the "Jesus Seminar," which was an attempt by New Testament scholars and theologians to determine which of the words and actions in the four gospels can most likely be attributed to an historical figure called Jesus, and which parts of are part of the lore, or mythologizing, done by the early church writers. Dr. Borg and his colleagues were hardly the first to attempt such a thing. Thomas Jefferson gave it a pretty good shot a couple hundred years ago.
I'm sure you can figure out this pre- and post- Easter distinction by now. It's analogous, as noted, to the pre- and post- Visions of Gerard Gerard Kerouac. While Kerouac's novel contains no resurrection accounts, the book itself is the resurrection of a beatified and holy Gerard. And this is the Gerard that draws people to the stories his also now deceased younger brother tells about him; and that bring them to his one-time home and to his grave. The Gerard of Visions of Gerard represents the idealism, the innocence, the goodness, the promises and the dreams that are universally associated with young children because he is the child forever frozen in time as a nine year old. He also represents the holiness and sacredness of life itself. The holiness Jack locates in his brother Gerard is reflective of Emerson's "spark of the divine" that I feel resides somewhere in all of us. This is the Post-Visions of Gerard Gerard that Kerouac readers relate to. The regular neighborhood kid and the Divine Child are both Gerard Kerouac.
I'm quite capable of keeping the two separated in my mind, but I also like to blend them together now and then. So if you ask me, as a rational person, if I think the corpse of a nine year old that's been in the ground for 75 years now has anything to do with my getting home safely as I drive along Route 3 on a perilous night my answer is "Of course not." But what if I can focus my mind on the preciousness of life that Jack Kerouac saw and wrote about in his older, and yet forever young, brother? Then maybe I'm going to be just a little more attuned to the value of my own life, and to the preciousness of the lives that touch mine, in such a way that I'll take a little extra care in getting myself safely home. It's a Kerouac thing; but maybe you do understand.
Well, that's how I manage the two Gerards. What about the two Jesuses; or the "Jesus of History" and the "Christ of Faith" to use the language of many New Testament scholars? As for the Jesus of History I agree with Borg when he calls him "a finite mortal human being born around the year 4 BCE. In his early thirties, after one to three years of public activity, he was executed by the Roman authority. That Jesus--the flesh and blood Galilean Jewish peasant of the first century--is no more."
So what about the post-Easter Jesus? I'll save my take on the New Testament resurrection accounts for next Sunday. For today I'll say that just as with the post-Visions of Gerard Gerard, the post-Easter Jesus is the more real figure, even though he represents a blend of earthiness and mythology. This blended figure, this post-Easter Jesus figure represents, or epitomizes, one who was so deeply in touch with his essential humanity that he was also in touch with his innate divinity or holiness, in a way that very few persons who have ever lived on this planet are. He represents the most positive reaches of human possibility when it comes to being a compassionate, healing, and justice-loving person. His message, as I've come to understand it for myself, was that my life is really about your life. For all this figure had to say about the Kingdom of God, his message, as I see it, came down to one essential point when he said, "The Kingdom of God is within you."
So whether or not such an individual "really" lived and really did and said all those things that are recorded in the Gospels--which, taking a cue from Kerouac, could be called Visions of Jesus--is not near as important as the image of someone who did. Because it is an image that serves the greatest and most worthy of human ends.
Does saying all this make me a Christian? Well again, not exactly. I don't ascribe the same kind of meaning to the death of Jesus that most Christians do; and while I find, as just noted, much value in the image of the post-Easter Jesus, it is not the only or even the central figure in my life when it comes to a religious and spiritual guide. I also agree with my now retired colleague in the UU ministry, Rev. Jack Mendelsohn, when he says in his book Being Liberal in an Illiberal Age: "To me the important thing is not that Jesus was just human, but that the human race is capable of producing (or imagining) him. And not him alone, but others like him. And not only in ancient times, but now." Rev. Mendelsohn's point is that it is to our credit as human beings that we can imagine such a person as Jesus "and not him alone, but others like him...not only in ancient times, but now."
Finally, I see in this Jesus image one expression of a larger voice. A voice that "sounds along the ages, soul answering to soul (and that)...echoes on the pages of every Bible scroll." Throughout the history of human race there have been voices that have called us to greater levels of humanity. The records of these many voices are each in their own way Scripture--whether they be a collection of writings called The Bible, or a novel by some guy from Lowell, Massachusetts. They are each and all part of a larger voice; a voice that calls us, each and all, to the best that is within us.
