Nichole Torbitzky gives me new eyes for the empty tomb. She is an Associate Professor of Religion at Lindenwood University, and she explores this theme in her sermon "Go Back to Galilee," featured in a book she co-edited titled Preaching the Uncontrolling Love of God.
I do not know whether the "empty tomb" literally occurred in a physical way—for example, if Jesus' body was placed in the tomb in a manner that could have allowed for public viewing before mysteriously disappearing. For those who find it very important to believe in its physicality, I have no quarrel. Maybe it did! But for me, it's the image of the empty tomb that matters most, and that’s where she is so helpful.
As a Christian influenced by Buddhism, I’m attracted to the "emptiness" of it. The idea of an open space, an empty space that overlaps the world and somehow instills hope for new life - that's my beginning. Maybe God's emptiness (or self-emptying) is also God's fullness.
What she adds is that another name for this space is grace and, even more specifically, the grace of God "taking up" the sufferings of the world, including those of Jesus, and the sins of the world as well, transforming them into something beautiful and hopeful. The sufferings and even the sins return to the world in the form of fresh possibilities for healing and wholeness.
For her, and for me thanks to her insights, the empty tomb represents a space within the divine life where forgiveness and creative transformation occur, not just once, but repeatedly. Here are some passages from her sermon that will give you a feel for it:
I do not know whether the "empty tomb" literally occurred in a physical way—for example, if Jesus' body was placed in the tomb in a manner that could have allowed for public viewing before mysteriously disappearing. For those who find it very important to believe in its physicality, I have no quarrel. Maybe it did! But for me, it's the image of the empty tomb that matters most, and that’s where she is so helpful.
As a Christian influenced by Buddhism, I’m attracted to the "emptiness" of it. The idea of an open space, an empty space that overlaps the world and somehow instills hope for new life - that's my beginning. Maybe God's emptiness (or self-emptying) is also God's fullness.
What she adds is that another name for this space is grace and, even more specifically, the grace of God "taking up" the sufferings of the world, including those of Jesus, and the sins of the world as well, transforming them into something beautiful and hopeful. The sufferings and even the sins return to the world in the form of fresh possibilities for healing and wholeness.
For her, and for me thanks to her insights, the empty tomb represents a space within the divine life where forgiveness and creative transformation occur, not just once, but repeatedly. Here are some passages from her sermon that will give you a feel for it:
In Christ, God—that which is truly divine in this world—is made known to us in an empty tomb. We learn that God—what is truly divine, is divine not because of his power to coerce. God is divine because God has the power to forgive when forgiveness seems impossible. God is divine because God has the power to love when loving seems not just hopeless, but useless. God is divine because God has the power to take up our cycles of violence and oppression and injustice and anger and fear with grace that has the courage to say, “I am enough to take this horror and never pass it on, not flee from it, not give retribution; but take it, and keep it, and fix it in myself, and offer in response the totally unexpected grace of forgiveness, peace, and love.” It is so much more difficult to respond to evil with love. And yet, because it’s God we’re talking about here, that’s what we get. And that is how we know it’s God.
We need to hear Jesus’ parables afresh, see the miracles anew. We need to re-consider Jesus’ every word and act in the light of the empty tomb and God’s inexhaustible love for us. Because only then will we, by the Spirit, see and understand the nature of God’s kin-dom. And the nature of that kin-dom is grace, grace, grace.
As a Christian influenced by Buddhism, I grow weary of fellow Christians' preoccupations with the agency of God, when for so many of us it is the companionship of God that is most important. There is more to God than "luring" or "calling" creatures to the fullness of life. There is another kind of activity that involves not luring the world, but receiving what happens in it, absorbing even the terrible happenings, and responding in forgiveness. Her words are worth repeating:
God has the power to take up our cycles of violence and oppression and injustice and anger and fear with grace that has the courage to say, “I am enough to take this horror and never pass it on, not flee from it, not give retribution; but take it, and keep it, and fix it in myself, and offer in response the totally unexpected grace of forgiveness, peace, and love.”
What is this taking up? I think it resembles what we Christians influenced by Buddhism, and also what Christians in the more contemplative traditions, call listening with the ears of the heart. The phrase is used by Benedictines but represents the intuition of many other kinds of Christians, including evangelicals.
This is not listening for information or knowledge; it is listening to what another person is feeling and absorbing that person's feelings, "taking them up," into one's heart. This is not to say that the feelings are always praiseworthy: a person may feel love or tenderness or creativity or care, but a person may also feel hatred, jealousy, insecurity, and violence. The listener need not approve of what is felt, but the listener still receives the feelings, and is affected by them, as, to quote Whitehead, "a fellow sufferer who understands." Whitehead uses this phrase to describe what he calls the "consequent nature of God." That is, that side of God that feels the feelings of the world as they unfold: taking them into God's own life. According to Whitehead, God then transforms what is felt into whatever beauty is possible, and offers the energy of that transformation back into the world through fresh possibilities for healing and wholeness. When I read Nichole Torbitzky speak of God's "taking up," this is what I imagine.
It is tempting to imagine all of this in ways overly dependent on the subject-predicate mode of expression: that is, to conceive of God on the analogy of the subject of a sentence, to which the predicate of forgiveness is then added. A better option is to recognize that, in God, the predicates we might apply are part of the subject itself: or, to say the same thing, that God is the very act of forgiving. This activity is a kind of grace, and we are always swimming in it, like fish in an ocean, even if we don't know it. We are always inside the taking up, which is everywhere at once, all the time.
Nichole Torbitzky helps me appreciate this taking up, and gives me new eyes for the empty tomb. May I be empty, too, and thus a channel of grace for the world. May I extend the healing spirit of the empty tomb.
- Jay McDaniel
God has the power to take up our cycles of violence and oppression and injustice and anger and fear with grace that has the courage to say, “I am enough to take this horror and never pass it on, not flee from it, not give retribution; but take it, and keep it, and fix it in myself, and offer in response the totally unexpected grace of forgiveness, peace, and love.”
What is this taking up? I think it resembles what we Christians influenced by Buddhism, and also what Christians in the more contemplative traditions, call listening with the ears of the heart. The phrase is used by Benedictines but represents the intuition of many other kinds of Christians, including evangelicals.
This is not listening for information or knowledge; it is listening to what another person is feeling and absorbing that person's feelings, "taking them up," into one's heart. This is not to say that the feelings are always praiseworthy: a person may feel love or tenderness or creativity or care, but a person may also feel hatred, jealousy, insecurity, and violence. The listener need not approve of what is felt, but the listener still receives the feelings, and is affected by them, as, to quote Whitehead, "a fellow sufferer who understands." Whitehead uses this phrase to describe what he calls the "consequent nature of God." That is, that side of God that feels the feelings of the world as they unfold: taking them into God's own life. According to Whitehead, God then transforms what is felt into whatever beauty is possible, and offers the energy of that transformation back into the world through fresh possibilities for healing and wholeness. When I read Nichole Torbitzky speak of God's "taking up," this is what I imagine.
It is tempting to imagine all of this in ways overly dependent on the subject-predicate mode of expression: that is, to conceive of God on the analogy of the subject of a sentence, to which the predicate of forgiveness is then added. A better option is to recognize that, in God, the predicates we might apply are part of the subject itself: or, to say the same thing, that God is the very act of forgiving. This activity is a kind of grace, and we are always swimming in it, like fish in an ocean, even if we don't know it. We are always inside the taking up, which is everywhere at once, all the time.
Nichole Torbitzky helps me appreciate this taking up, and gives me new eyes for the empty tomb. May I be empty, too, and thus a channel of grace for the world. May I extend the healing spirit of the empty tomb.
- Jay McDaniel