Follow the Faithful Women

Follow the Faithul Women

Luke 24:1-12

Let’s begin here.  I think the point of Jesus whole ministry was to invite us to live a loving life.  He says that we should love God, love our neighbors, and love ourselves.  He says that we should recognize the needs of others and respond.  He points us not toward the “mansions” but toward the margins, toward the overlooked and the ignored, and tells us that they are our neighbors.  He insists that we should love our enemies and that if we make our lives about revenge—“an eye for an eye”—sooner or later everyone will be blind.  There is one question and only one question that matters in the end.  That question is, “What’s the next loving thing to do?”

“What’s the next loving thing to do?”  It seems like such a simple question, right?  There is a certain elegance to it, after all.  All I have to do is be a loving person who’s singular goal is to do the next loving thing.  Because we are loved unconditionally and forgiven readily, there’s even room to be trying to do the next loving thing and getting it wrong.  God’s a loving parent.  Like the best of the loving parents in this world, when we make a mess of things and get the “next loving thing” completely wrong, God is there, whispering to us, “That wasn’t exactly it, right.  But I’m so proud of you for trying!”

“What’s the next loving thing to do?” It is a simple question that we can carry with us.  Embodying the question can even become the foundation of our life.  And yet, to actually live and try to keep doing the next loving thing can be incredibly difficult.  Why is it so hard?  My answer is that doing the next loving thing is incredibly challenging because we live in a Good Friday world.

Now, I’m going to be honest here.  I grew up as the son of the pastor of the big Protestant church in an Irish Catholic town.  As such, I was acutely aware that, compared to my Catholic friends, we kind of skipped Good Friday, altogether.  While my friends were going through the “stations of the cross,” we were generally pretty much skipping from Palm Sunday, when everything seemed so happy, directly to the empty tomb.”  For the most part, the Jesus who I met was a really nice guy who was kind to everyone and just wanted us to be kind, too.  So, why were people so mean to him?  There were no crucifixes in my world.  The crosses and the tomb were empty and sometimes Easter could feel a little bit empty, too.  At most, the meaning seemed to rest in the question of what happens when this life is over rather than the more urgent question of what happens when this life gets incredibly hard.

Of course, that is the truth that we all have to struggle with sooner or later.  Sooner or later, mostly in moments you don’t see coming at all, life is going to get incredibly difficult.  You’re going to get sick or, perhaps even worse, someone you love is going to get sick.  You, or someone you love, are going to find yourselves the victims of injustice or of someone else’s terrible choices.  That driver coming your way has decided that it is okay to text while driving or that driving buzzed is alright after all.  The grill of their car may have your name on it.  Or, much less dramatically but equally painfully, you may be deeply immersed in loving another human and discover as we always do when we love someone dearly that our love, though life giving, may not, in the end, be enough to make that person whole.

Here’s the truth.  Life is full of wonderful, incredible, transforming beauty and joy.  It is also full of injustice and pain and suffering.  Life, in short, is “all of the above.”  We can devote our lives to trying to avoid the hard stuff.  We can commit ourselves to trying to maintain control.  We can choose to check out, to “sit this one out” when we see the hard things coming.  We can rage about life being unfairly bad, even though we know, deep down, that it has just as often been unfairly good.  (Really, if you haven’t had moments along the way of thinking, “How did I get this lucky,” then you might want to check yourself for a heartbeat!)

We are called to live a loving life in a Good Friday world.  We don’t get to edit the world.  We don’t get to just participate in the moments that we welcome or in the things that make sense to us.  Instead, we are cordially invited to roll up our sleeves and immerse ourselves in the moments of anguish as well as the moments of joy and just keep trying to do the next loving thing.

I have a friend who is a doctor who tells the story of the day when he became a better doctor.  He had a patient whom he had worked hard to heal but healing was not going to happen.  He was sad and worn out after all the effort.  Then, he did something most doctors don’t do.  He visited that patient again, even though he had no more medical tricks to offer.  When he walked into the room, he realized that the patient had soiled his hospital bed.  He didn’t call a nurse or an orderly.  Instead, he cleaned the bed and remade it and cleaned the man.  Everything was fresh and clean. Dignity was restored.  The man just sighed with gratitude.  My friend had discovered that the next loving thing to do was not a diagnostic decision but a concrete act of restoring another person’s dignity.

Lot’s of people read the Gospels and want to focus on Jesus.  I get that.  He is our example, our teacher, our preacher.  He is “the one.”  However, though I need to keep my eye on him and keep being guided and challenged by his example, what I really need is someone to show me how to be a loving person in a Good Friday world.  What I need is an altogether human example of what a regular, run-of-the-mill human being might look like when they’re doing the next loving thing.

Lot’s of people, if they’re looking for that human example of a loving life, look to the disciples.  However, if you really look closely at the disciples, what you will find are examples of the pitfalls that we can fall into when we’re trying to live a loving life in a Good Friday world.  Judas follows Jesus but what he is really committed to is a particular political outcome.  Jesus is a means to an end: the one who will lead the revolution against Rome.  Judas betrays Jesus out of rage.  Peter seems like a worthy example, right?  He was probably Jesus’ best friend.  However, what Peter believes in most is himself—his own passion, his own strength.  When his passion and his strength aren’t enough to hold things together, he denies ever having known Jesus, at all.  And the rest of the disciples? When push comes to shove and things get really terrifying and awful, they run for their lives and hide.

My point is not that we should reject the disciples.  If we are being honest with ourselves at all, we have to acknowledge that we’ve all been there and done similar things.  Life gets really hard and scary and all we want to do is hide.  Life gives us a chance to stand our ground and act on what we believe and we end up denying the things that matter most to us. Life disappoints us and we realize that our “agenda” is not going to be the agenda.  We realize that we are not going to get our way and we suddenly look for someone or something to betray.  

This is why I want to challenge you to see the example, not of the disciples, but of the faithful women.  The disciples struggled with thinking that because they were disciples, they were special.  They were the insiders.  Women in Jesus’s day knew that they were powerless from the moment that they became conscious.  They couldn’t own property.  They couldn’t testify in a court.  They weren’t allowed to talk to strangers or be in public places without escorts.  In short, women were second class citizens—people who were almost always flying under the radar, doing the worst jobs, pretty much always overlooked and ignored. Unlike the disciples, there was very little experience of “ego” or expectations of control.

These women, however, were treated as full-fledged human beings by Jesus.  He talked to them and healed them and connected with them.  They accompanied him, quietly and often in the background, every step of the way.  Because they weren’t distracted by delusions of power and control, these women were probably naturals at doing the next loving thing.  After all, if you’re not wasting your energy trying to edit your life you have a lot more energy to get on with living lovingly.

These women, as a group, accompany Jesus all the way to the cross.  They are there when he’s arrested.  They witness his torture and beatings.  They watch as the world throws the worst it can muster at Jesus and as Jesus forgives and loves even as he dies on a cross.  And with broken hearts and tear stained faces, they watched as his body is placed in a tomb.  And, on Sunday morning, they did the one other loving thing that they could think to do:  they went back to that tomb to care for Jesus’ dead body.  Not surprisingly, dealing with a dead body was considered “unclean” work.  This thankless task had always been assigned to women because the powers that be always considered women unclean.

Here’s what I want you to know.  When things get hard, these women remain who they’ve been all along—loving people.  If you base your life on gaining control or getting what you want or getting revenge, then the choices that define you will be other people’s choices.  If they hate me, I’ll be a hateful person.  If they’re angry at me, I’ll be the angry guy. If they don’t give me what I want, I will seek revenge.  The women, quiet as they may seem, are the very definition of integrity.  It doesn’t matter what anyone else does or what anyone else thinks, they are simply going to be loving people.

Because they have been loving people looking to do the next loving thing every step of the way, they enter the tomb and are transformed.  What did they expect to find?  A dead body.  However, what they find, instead, is an empty tomb.  They are perplexed by this but instead of demanding that things have to make sense on their terms, they just stand there and remain open.  Because they are not in charge of life but just open, when two dazzling strangers show up, they don’t declare, “This can’t be happening.”  Instead, they drop to their knees and begin worshiping because what’s happening feels full of the presence of God.  And when those men speak, because they are simply present in that moment, they hear the invitation to remember what Jesus had said to them long before and they begin to see things in a new light.

Understand…these women do not meet the risen Christ.  In fact, Luke is offering us an Easter account in which the risen Christ does not appear until much later.  Instead, we hear the story of a group of women who keep loving their way through the pain until they are led into a living faith.  They try to share this faith with the disciples but the men are not open.  The disciples think the women have lost their minds.  Peter goes to the tomb to see for himself but he’s still partially blinded by his own shame and bruised ego.  

If we want to be an Easter people in a Good Friday world, we have to let go of our desire for power and control and our hope for getting our way.  We need instead to follow the faithful women, loving our way through the best and the worst of life, looking for the chance to do the next loving thing, remaining open to the possibility that the worst things will never be the last things.