Third Sunday of Easter, Year B
April 30, 2006
Christ Church, Covington
“’Touch me and see; for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that
I have’” (Lk. 24:39).
People in South Louisiana know that food can change the way you look at the
world. Bite into a soft-shell crab po-boy at Jazz Fest (or whatever else you
particularly like), and you know it’s not just the music, or the crowd, or the
good weather, that is changing your perspective on things. Though it seems like
a pretty simple affair, the po-boy is really a work of art: the crab may be
found in nature, but it is human invention and intervention that makes it
something more. Somewhere there’s an artist, and through the simple vehicle of
the po-boy, that person has changed the way you look at things, at least for one
Spring afternoon. A high calling for a po-boy, but after all, this is South
Louisiana. It’s hard to express, but you know what I mean.
Artistry comes in all sorts of forms. Words can move you, music can move you,
painting and sculpture can move you. A book or movie can change the way you look
at things. There are sophisticated and everyday forms: Bo Diddley and Mozart,
Hallmark and Tennyson, and of course our po-boy. Some works of art are better
than others, though this has nothing to do with being sophisticated or
commonplace. What distinguishes true artistry is precisely this: it moves us, it
changes our perspective, it reveals something we didn’t know, or confirms
something we’d forgotten, about ourselves and the universe. Bad art is above all
trite, stale, neither revealing or confirming anything, incapable of moving us
or of creating a new reality.
Here’s how poet and writer Andrei Codrescu puts it: “Artists are duty-bound by
their art to sabotage the familiar in order to express an unsurveyed and…
unsurveyable personal reality. Their very existence is predicated on the as-yet
unexpressed and… inexpressible.” (“The Unsurveyed Arts, The Unsurveyable
Artist”).
So now we may be on to the meaning of our Gospel story today, where Jesus
appears to the disciples after his death and resurrection. Whatever this is
about, it is certainly out of the ordinary human experience. Jesus invites the
disciples to look at and to touch him; he also asks for something to eat. The
story is told because the Church believes that Jesus is alive, and not a figment
of its collective imagination. The request for food is part of the human detail,
conveying the conviction that Jesus is alive, and not a ghost.
In fact, the resurrection of Jesus Christ is a work of art which sabotages our
familiar reality. The reality expressed undermines our belief that life ends
with death. The story of Jesus’ resurrection changes our perspective on the
world and on ourselves. Death is not the end; in fact, it is life, in the end,
that is victorious. This is a shock, to them and to us; it is also, like true
art, hard to express.
The resurrection communicates to us the insight of the Artist, the unique
perspective of the Maker of all things. Before this moment, it was unexpressed;
and the truth of the thing is even now inexpressible in many ways. The story of
resurrection goes beyond our usual expectations of order and proportion. But in
doing so, it creates its own new order and proportion. It’s a work of art, but
not one of human origin. It expresses the reality of the universe as God made
it, but which the human propensity for deadly triteness (“the same old same
old”) has obscured.
How does this story and this reality challenge your own? God knows we need a
fresh look. Triteness has a way of creeping into our own souls, because we
aren’t expecting much new from God or from ourselves. New life is surprising,
neither trite nor stale. It changes our perspective. There is new life for us.
I’ll bet if we look closely, we’ll even see the disciples giving Jesus a
soft-shell crab po-boy when he asks for something to eat. At least that’s how
the Gospel goes in South Louisiana. God the Artist is offering us new
perspectives all the time, so that we can embrace the fullness of new life.
John Bauerschmidt is Rector of Christ Church, Covington.
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