He Has

True stories and feasting in the presence of our enemies

Welcome to The Just Beautiful Newsletter where I write about making space for beauty and justice to meet - lately, I’ve been noticing this in children’s literature. Due to my husband’s sudden death over a month ago, I can’t promise or predict what these essays will be! But I appreciate the chance to write and share with you all, and I’m fairly certain they will wander back in the direction of children’s literature fairly soon. :)

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Resistance is the protest of those who hope, and hope is the feast of the people who resist.”

-Theologian Jürgen Moltmann

I am not in a season of my life where God tells me things personally, and yet I did have a strong sense I should pay attention to Psalm 23 as I started Lent this season.

I didn’t know that the Ash Wednesday service my husband and I attended would be the last church service we sat in together, that when we received ashes smeared on our foreheads, within a few days my husband’s body would already be turned to ash and dust. I didn’t know that “walking through the shadow of death” was not just some spiritual metaphor for Lent, but that I’d literally be doing it.

But the part from Psalm 23 that stuck in my head, even after my husband died of sudden heart failure, was the idea that God prepares a table for us in the presence of our enemies. I wasn’t quite sure what it meant.

I wondered about “keeping the feast” this Easter. Would we still have cinnamon rolls and champagne for breakfast¹ as per our family tradition? Or were the ashes of Lent a more fitting posture this time around, and we’d catch the party next year? It feels like our Western culture likes to minimize other people’s grief so we don’t have to be uncomfortable, and Easter candy felt at first like rushing in with sugar and happy endings when I was not there yet. I wondered about the prudence of feasting in a time of mourning.

But in the end, when one has children, one is forced to party whether one feels like it or not. And maybe that’s a spiritual discipline, too. So we did the cinnamon rolls, the champagne, a wonderful egg hunt and delicious meal with friends, and looking back, yes, it was the right thing to do. Children are a grace that way. There is always laughter even in times of tears.

That morning at breakfast, after we popped the cork on the (non-alcoholic) champagne, I was reminded of this passage from The Chronicles of Narnia. Aslan is on the move, and one of the first signs that the witch’s power is waning is a feast:

Perhaps this is what it means when it says in Psalm 23 that God prepares a table for us in the presence of our enemies. Perhaps, as the Liturgy for Feasting with Friends says

“To gather joyfully is indeed a serious affair, for feasting and all enjoyments gratefully taken are, at their heart, acts of war.

In celebrating this feast we declare that evil and death, suffering and loss, sorrow and tears, will not have the final word.

But the joy of fellowship, and the welcome and comfort of friends new and old, and the celebration of these blessings of food and drink and conversation and laughter are the true evidences of things eternal, and are the first fruits of that great glad joy that is to come and that will be unending.

So let our feast this day be joined to those sure victories secured by Christ.

Last year this time I read Tish Harrison Warren’s “Prayers in the Night”, and I wrote about how she talks about the problem of a sovereign God and the suffering of the world, or, in her words, the “existential knife-fight between the reality of our own quaking vulnerability and our hope for a God who can be trusted.” She says:

“We cannot hold together human vulnerability and God’s trustworthiness at the same time unless there is some certain sign that God loves us, that he isn’t an absentee landlord or, worse, a monster. But we cannot divine such a sign from the circumstances of our lives or of the world. We have to decide what we believe about who God is and what he is like. We have to decide if anyone keeps watch with us. It is unavoidably—even irritatingly— a decision based on doctrine, the first principles we return to again and again, the story we define our lives by.”

If I stop and try to decipher from the circumstances of my life why my 35 year old husband is suddenly dead and not here with me and the boys and the baby daughter he had yet to meet, and how God could let that happen, it’s just an abyss of sadness and horror.

But when I think about the story by which my husband and I defined our lives, when I stare at our family values poster we made that is still hanging in our dining room, one of the phrases being “feast!” , when I think about a Christ who wept at Lazarus’s tomb and then descended to the dead himself, yet came back alive, when think about how there is still an enemy at large in the world, but that Death knows his days are numbered—

I think back to the little squirrel at the Christmas feast in Narnia, at the moment when everyone is interrupted by the White Witch. The joy and the celebration freezes, the animals quiver in fear.

“Speak, vermin!” she said again. “Or do you want my dwarf to find you a tongue with his whip? What is the meaning of all this gluttony, this waste, this self indulgence? Where did you get all these things?”

“Please, your Majesty,” said the Fox, “we were given them. And if I might make so bold as to drink your Majesty’s very good health – ”

“Who gave them to you?” said the Witch.

“F-F-F-Father Christmas,” stammered the Fox.

“What?” roared the Witch, springing from the sledge and taking a few strides nearer to the terrified animals. “He has not been here! He cannot have been here! How dare you – but no. Say you have been lying and you shall even now be forgiven.”

At that moment one of the young squirrels lost its head completely.

“He has – he has – he has!” it squeaked, beating its little spoon on the table.

It doesn’t end happily. The enraged witch turns them all to stone. No one said feasting in the presence of your enemies was a picnic.

But the story was true, no matter what the witch said or did.

Aslan is on the move. Father Christmas did give them this feast.

And since the story was true, Aslan eventually breathed the little merry band back to life, and the little squirrel was vindicated.

As Tish Harrison Warren writes, the Easter story is the one we shape our lives around: “Jesus’ resurrection is the sole evidence that love triumphs over death, that beauty outlives horror, that the meek will inherit the earth, that those who mourn will be comforted.”

I cannot say I am certain of many things right now. And I’m not sure I can say I really enjoyed Easter. But I want to be that little squirrel, holding onto my spoon in the presence of my enemy, banging the table and squeaking he has! he has! he has!

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Post-script: My Easter reading from Plough’s collection of Eastertide readings was by German Theologian Jürgen Moltmann on the feast of Easter was to pertinent not to include:

“The Easter faith recognizes that the raising of the crucified Christ from the dead provides the great alternative to this world of death. This faith sees the rising of Christ as God’s protest against death, and against all the people who work for death; for the Easter faith recognises God’s passion for the life of the person who is threatened by death and with death. And faith participates in this process of love by getting up out of the apathy of misery and out of the cynicism of propserity and fighting against death’s accomplices, here and now, in this life… Christ’s resurrection is the beginning of God’s rebellion. That rebellion is still going on in the Spirit of hope, and will be complete when, together with death, “every rule and every authority and power” is at last abolished (1 Cor. 15:24). The resurrection hope finds living expression in men and women when they protest against death and the slaves of death. But it lives from something different—from the superabundance of God’s future…it lives from joy in the coming victory of life…Easter is a feast, and it is as the feast of freedom that it is celebrated. For with Easter begins the laughter of the redeemed, the dance of the liberated…from time immemorial Easter hymns have celebrated the victory of life by laughing at death, mocking at hell, and ridiculing the mighty ones who spread fear and terror around them. Easter is the feast of freedom. It makes the life which it touches a festal life… Resistance is the protest of those who hope, and hope is the feast of the people who resist.”

May we all join the resistance this week, in whatever shadow of death we find ourselves.

— Steph

Easter is about the wild delight of God’s creative power–not very Anglican perhaps, but at least we ought to shout Alleluias instead of murmuring them; we should light every candle in the building instead of only some; we should give every man, woman, child, cat, dog, and mouse in the place a candle to hold; we should have a real bonfire; and we should splash water about as we renew our baptismal vows. Every step back from that is a step toward an ethereal or esoteric Easter experience, and the thing about Easter is that it is neither ethereal nor esoteric. It’s about the real Jesus coming out of the real tomb and getting God’s real new creation underway...[Easter week] ought to be an eight-day festival, with champagne served after morning prayer, or even before, with lots of alleluias and extra hymns and spectacular anthems. Is it any wonder people find it hard to believe in the resurrection of Jesus if we don’t throw our hats in the air? Is it any wonder we find it hard to live the resurrection if we don’t do it exuberantly in our liturgies? Is it any wonder the world doesn’t take much notice if Easter is celebrated as simply the one-day happy ending tacked on to forty days of fasting and gloom? …if Lent is a time to give things up, Easter ought to be a time to take things up. Champagne for breakfast again–well, of course.

- NT Wright, Surprised by Hope

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