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Something’s missing in the current culture war over the Ten Commandments. I knew about Judge Roy Moore, the now-removed chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court who waged and lost a stubborn fight to keep a Ten Commandments monument in his courthouse. What slipped past me is just how much this monument of his weighs: 5,280 pounds, or just over 500 pounds per commandment.

Judge Moore has been lugging this hefty monster around from one public appearance to another on the back of a flatbed truck. Joshua Green, writing in the Atlantic Monthly, notes that whenever the truck returns to Alabama, "a 57-foot yellow I-beam crane that spans the ceiling of the Clark Memorials warehouse drops down to retrieve the Rock from its chariot, and even this one -- a five-ton crane/ -- buckles visibly under the weight." I know that Jesus once scolded the Pharisees for neglecting the weightier matters of the law, but somehow this I-beam-bending version of the Decalogue seems way out of proportion.

I mean to make a serious point, of course. In the popular religious consciousness, the Ten Commandments have somehow become burdens, weights and heavy obligations. For many, the commandments are encumbrances placed on personal behavior. Most people cannot name all ten, but they are persuaded that at the center of each one is a finger-wagging "thou shalt not." For others, the commandments are heavy yokes to be publicly placed on the necks of a rebellious society. For such an understanding of the Decalogue, a two-and-a-half-ton rock sitting on the bed of a truck is a perfect symbol. We’ve forgotten that the Babylonians’ gods were heavy idols that had to be trucked around, "These things you carry," Isaiah jabbed, "are loaded as burdens on weary animals" (Isa. 46:1).

Understanding the Decalogue as a set of burdens overlooks something essential, namely that they are prefaced not by an order – "Here are ten rules. Obey them!" -- but instead by a breathtaking announcement of freedom: "I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery" (Ex. 20:2). We will probably always refer to the declarations that follow as the "Ten Commandments," but we can also think of them as descriptions of the life that prevails in the zone of God’s liberation. "Because the Lord is your God," the Decalogue affirms, "you are free not to need any other gods. You are free to rest on the seventh day; free from the tyranny of lifeless idols; free from murder, stealing and covetousness as ways to establish yourself in the land."

The Decalogue begins with the good news of what the liberating God has done and then describes the shape of the freedom that results. If we want to symbolize the presence of the Ten Commandments among us, we would do well to hold a dance. The good news of the God who set people free is the music; the commandments are the dance steps of those who hear it playing. The commandments are not weights, but wings that enable our hearts to catch the wind of God’s Spirit and to soar. As Luther wisely advised, "With practice one can take the Ten Commandments on one day, a psalm or chapter of Holy Scripture the next day, and use them as flint and steel to kindle a flame in the heart,"

Robert Wuthnow talks about how we transmit our ethical ideals to future generations by telling stories. "Stories do more than keep memories alive," says Wuthnow. "Sometimes these stories become so implanted in our minds that they act back upon us, directly and powerfully."

Wuthnow tells the story of Jack Casey, a volunteer fireman and ambulance attendant who, as a child, had to have some of his teeth extracted under general anesthesia. Jack was terrified, but a nurse standing nearby said to him, "Don’t worry, I’ll be here right beside you no matter what happens." When he woke up from the surgery, she had kept her word and was still standing beside him.

This experience of being cared for by the nurse stayed with him, and nearly 20 years later his ambulance crew was called to the scene of an accident. The driver was pinned upside down in his pickup truck, and Jack crawled inside to try to get him out of the wreckage. Gasoline was dripping onto both Jack and the driver, and there was a serious danger of fire because power tools were being used to free the driver, The whole time, the driver was crying out about how scared of dying he was, and Jack kept saying to him, recalling what the nurse had said so many years before, "Look, don’t worry, I’m right here with you, I’m not going anywhere." Later, after the truck driver had been safely rescued, he was incredulous. "You were an idiot "he said to Jack. "You know that the thing could have exploded and we’d have both been burned up1" In reply, Jack simply said he felt he just couldn’t leave him,

That’s the way the commandments work. First comes the experience of being cared for, the experience of being set free, preserved in the form of a narrative. Then there follows the life shaped ethically around that profound story. A nurse saying "I’ll be right here beside you" becomes the action of a man risking his life for a stranger because he knows in his bones that he just can’t leave him, "I am the Lord your God, who brought you . . . out of the house of slavery" prompts us to live lives shaped by the freedom created by that God.

To see the Ten Commandments as declarations of freedom is far more satisfying than hauling around tons of dreary obligation and worrying about whether the springs and shocks are going to hold up on the flatbed truck.

As Jesus was about to descend the Mount of Olives to enter Jerusalem, Mark reports, he dispatched two of his disciples to fetch a colt. A seemingly minor matter of transportation it would seem, but surprisingly, over half of Mark’s story of Jesus’ entry into the city is occupied with mundane details about acquiring this animal -- where to go to find it, what kind of colt to seek, what to do, what to say.

Though no one knows what these two disciples were thinking, I am fairly confident that they had imagined for themselves a grander and nobler role on this day than being on donkey detail. Mark does not name these disciples, but maybe they were James and John, who only hours before had proposed to Jesus, "Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory." But it hardly matters which two they were. All of the disciples had been jockeying for advantage, angling for glory, arguing about who was the greatest. So it is deliciously ironic that on this very public and glorious day of Jesus’ ministry, a day when he will be welcomed into Jerusalem with joyous hosannas, they find themselves engaged in a most unromantic form of ministry, mucking around a stable, looking suspiciously like horse thieves, and trying to wrestle an untamed and no doubt balky animal toward the olive groves. For this they left their fishing nets?

Why does Mark allow this donkey-seeking scene to come across as a trivial matter of advance planning? In the Gospel of John, by contrast, Jesus begins his entry into Jerusalem on foot. The donkey enters the picture only afterward, when the crowd gets caught up in a palm-waving, nationalistic, king-admiring zeal. At that point Jesus finds the donkey on his own and sits on it, as if to say, "I’m not that kind of king." In John, then, acquiring the donkey is something that Jesus himself does as a dramatic gesture, and it is a beautiful symbol of his humility in the face of triumphalist misunderstanding. But in Mark, finding the donkey seems more like a delegated chore -- somewhat akin to the worship committee meeting to plan the Palm Sunday service, one of those thousands of routine and inglorious details of church work that are necessary but not the real action.

In the ordination service of my tradition, candidates for the ministry are asked, "Will you in your own life seek to follow the Lord Jesus Christ, love your neighbors and work for the reconciliation of the world? . . . Will you seek to serve the people with energy, intelligence, imagination and love?" These are bracing words, and the wind ruffles through your hair when you hear them. Such language implies that ministry is a brave white-water romp over the cultural rapids toward global transformation in the name of Christ. Never once is it mentioned that serving people with energy, imagination and love often boils down to stuff like ordering bulletin covers, changing light bulbs in the restrooms, visiting people in nursing homes who aren’t quite sure who you are, getting the brakes relined on the church van, making a breathless Saturday afternoon run to the florist because someone forgot to order the palm branches and, as two of Jesus’ disciples found out, finding a suitable donkey at the last minute.

It is right at this place, though, that Mark imparts some of his best theological wisdom. He begins his Gospel with the exhilarating trumpet call to "prepare the way of the Lord," but he makes it clear, by his description of the disciples’ activity in the rest of his Gospel, that the way to do so is not by becoming a member of the Knights Templar and gallantly defending Christendom, but rather by performing humble and routine tasks. The disciples in Mark get a boat ready for Jesus, find out how much food is on hand for the multitude, secure the room and prepare the table for the Last Supper and, of course, chase down a donkey that the Lord needs to enter Jerusalem.

Whatever they may have heard when Jesus beckoned, "Follow me," it has led them into a ministry of handling the gritty details of everyday life. Mark understands, as Markan scholar Joel Marcus notes, "the preparation of the Lord’s way in a rather prosaic manner as the arrangements people make for the ministry of Jesus."

The "arrangements people make for the ministry of Jesus" -- one could hardly find a more apt description of what we, as disciples, are called to do. This cuts two ways. On the one hand, we are called to prepare the way for Jesus’ ministry, and it is his ministry, not ours, that ultimately counts. We are but donkey fetchers. On the other hand, because we are -- in ways often hidden from our eyes – "preparing the way of the Lord," the routine, often exhausting, seemingly mundane donkey-fetching details of our service are gathered into the great arc of Jesus’ redemptive work in the world.

In Mark, .the Twelve are sent out to proclaim the gospel, cast out demons, heal the sick and exercise authority. But Mark wants us to know that what this looks like is often a matter of speaking a quiet word in a committee meeting, spending time with someone who is incoherent and coming apart at the seams, emptying a bedpan at the hospital and scratching a few desperate, halting words on a legal pad when getting ready for Sunday’s sermon. In Mark’s world, "preparing the way of the Lord" usually looks like standing hip-deep in the mire of some stable trying to corral a donkey for Jesus.

Most new testament scholars say that the Gospel of Mark originally ended with the story of the women who go to the cemetery, only to encounter a mysterious young man pointing to Jesus’ empty tomb and announcing the resurrection. One of the challenges of this view is that if Mark truly ended his narrative here, he seems to have concluded by deliberately not concluding, by dangling something incomplete and unsatisfying before the reader in the final verse: "So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid." Not only does this verse fail to provide proper narrative closure, it also lurches to an awkward grammatical stop. A more literal translation would read, "To no one anything they said; afraid they were for..." It is almost as if the author of Mark had suddenly been dragged from his writing desk in midsentence.

In his commentary on the Gospel of Mark, the late Donald H. Juel tells the story of one of his students who had memorized the whole of Mark in order to do a dramatic, Broadway-style reading before a live audience. After careful study, the student had decided to go with the scholarly consensus regarding the ending. At his first performance, however, after he spoke that ambiguous last verse, he stood there awkwardly, shifting from one foot to the other, the audience waiting for more, waiting for closure, waiting for a proper ending. Finally, after several anxious seconds, he said, "Amen!" and made his exit. The relieved audience applauded loudly and appreciatively. Upon reflection, though, the student realized that by providing the audience a satisfying conclusion, his "Amen!" had actually betrayed the dramatic intention of the text. So at the next performance, when he reached the final verse he simply paused for a half beat and left the stage in silence. "The discomfort and uncertainty within the audience were obvious," said Juel, "and as people exited the buzz of conversation was dominated by the experience of the nonending."

If Mark’s ending creates discomfort and uncertainty, it is partly due to our knowledge of how the Easter story is told in the other Gospels. Easter is supposed to have postresurrection appearances, joyful seaside meals, scenes of reconciliation and forgiveness, garden embraces of the risen Lord, and the disciples’ excited shout, "He is risen!" But Mark offers us none of these, choosing instead to end his story with frightened women fleeing from a cemetery in silence: That’s no way to run a resurrection.

But Mark was trying to impart a different kind of Easter joy, trying to reveal another dimension of the Easter faith. As you come to the last verse and contemplate the unfinished ending, fretting that the Jesus story ends in mute fear and wondering where to go from here, suddenly an insight shatters the silence. "Go tell his disciples," the young man at the empty tomb said. "He is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him." Who are his disciples? Peter, James, John and Andrew. .. yes, but also you. You are a disciple too. Where is Galilee? North of Jerusalem... yes, but also located in the opening chapter of Mark: "Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God." In other words, reader, the story isn’t over. Leave the empty tomb now and go back and read it again. Like the disciples, you did not understand this story the first time. Now that you have been to the cross and to the cemetery read it again.

What do we see when we read the Gospel of Mark again, this time with postresurrection eyes? We see Jesus healing and teaching and casting out demons, but always being misunderstood, even by those closest to him. In other words, Mark is telling us that the saving action of God in the world is always hidden, ambiguous, sealed off from the obvious explanation. Reading Mark a second time, we see Jesus breaking through into human life as one who is powerful, but also as one who will suffer and die. In other words, we see a God whose power is a strange, suffering power. We go back to Galilee, and the second time around every story in the Gospel of Mark is a postresurrection appearance. What we see is a God who surprises us at every turn in the road, a God whose power is expressed finally in weakness.

One biblical scholar has suggested that if we really understand Mark’s muted resurrection story, we cannot easily sing Handel’s "Hallelujah Chorus" on Easter. Perhaps. But recently the Viennese chorus Concentus Musicus recorded an unusual version of Handel’s Messiah. Instead of giving a thundering, triumphant, cymbal-crashing rendition, it offers a modest, tentative version. When the chorus sings "The glory of the Lord is upon thee," the word thee is hardly sounded, as if the human creature can scarcely bear the weight of God’s glory. And when the singers come to the climax of the Oratorio, the grand "Hallelujah Chorus," the hesitant style conveys the truth that human beings can only dimly see and longingly hope that God is even now wresting victory from suffering, chaos and captivity. As music critic Porter Anderson put it, it is almost as if the singers "were in a dream, sometimes sitting bolt upright with the memory of a fine thought -- King of Kings -- then drifting again . .. back to a pianissimo of heartbreaking faith. . . . Something here aches, longs, needs."

Mark would approve. Go back to Galilee and read again. There you will see him, the risen but still hidden Christ, his saving hand extended to all human aching, longing and need.

Last year, just in time for Easter, Mel Gibson released an edited version of his controversial film The Passion of the Christ. A few brutal scenes had been cut and camera angles had been changed, all in an attempt to soften the graphic violence of the original. Gibson said that the new edition of the film would appeal to people who "want to take your Aunt Martha or Uncle Harry" to see it but who would find the first version too intense.

I suspect that what prompted this tamer version of the movie was not merely the squeamishness of Aunt Martha and Uncle Harry but the fact that the original film had stirred up a surprising and unintended reaction: it caused some people to question the very goodness of God. One woman who saw the film said, "I left the theater feeling sick. What sort of God would let that kind of violence happen to his own son? I guess I was supposed to be moved by the sacrifice of Jesus; instead I was repulsed by the idea of a God who would will such a thing."

This is not a new response to Jesus’ death, of course. The cord running through Western theology, from Ambrose to Anselm and beyond, that only the violent sacrifice of a perfect and sinless Jesus could appease a God whose honor has been affronted and whose anger has been aroused is, as Michael Welker says, "nothing less than destructive of faith." It has, Welker continues, "propagated a latent image of God that is deeply unchristian, indeed demonic: This God is always seeking compensation."

Gibson’s movie, however, exposed the pastoral side of this problem. The idea of a God who always seeks compensation, a God who always wants a pound of flesh, is not simply a tactical problem in a chess game among professional theologians; it provokes a crisis of trust among the ordinary faithful too. We may say in sermon and liturgy that the death of Jesus squared the debt once and for all, but we are still left with the troubling picture of a God who balanced the checkbook by inflicting pain. Who would love or wish to draw nigh to such a God? We suspect that a God who requires compensation just might encrypt a cancer cell into our tissue in order to teach us an ethical lesson or send a surging tsunami to pummel a coastline for the sake of some cosmic moral equation.

The pastor who preached the sermon we call the Letter to the Hebrews felt the same tremor of terror in his own congregation. Worship had become for them "a blazing fire and darkness and gloom" (Heb. 12:18). People were staying away from services. They had drooping hands and weak knees from the heavy burdens of their religion. The problem? At the center of their faith was a God always seeking compensation, a God seemingly incapable of satisfaction. Like ancient priests, these Christians trudged dutifully into the sanctuary bearing offerings. Week after week, year after year, they brought what they could, but without refreshment. "God, what do you want? A cereal offering, a bull, a ram? Do you want a tithe, a testimony, a guilty conscience? Do you want me to serve on four committees and run the night shelter? Do you want prayer without ceasing or a thousand signed petitions for peace and justice?"

No, God wants only one thing, said the preacher of Hebrews. Not an unblemished goat or a fat pledge card, not a gift to the building fund or a promise to walk across burning coals. God desires this: a fully human life, a life well lived. "The glory of God," said Irenaeus, "is humanity full alive." But, of course, a life truly well lived is the one thing we cannot, on our own, bring to God. So it was our brother Jesus who walked the same paths as we, experienced the same temptations as we, endured the same afflictions common to our humanity, but who never lost his bearings, never compromised his humanity. It was he who walked, as the high priest, into the great sanctuary and, on behalf of us all, placed himself into the offering plate, the one thing God truly desires: a human being fully alive.

It was not pain and violence that God desired. It was human life as God created it to be, summoned it to be. The pain and the violence were already out there on the path; they had been there since the blood of Abel soaked the earth and cried out for vengeance. No one can walk this human path in faith and obedience without encountering suffering. In the midst of that suffering Jesus cried out with tears, not for revenge and not in hate, but "with prayers and supplications ... to the one who was able to save." The human being each of us fails to be, he was, and he is "not ashamed" to call us his brothers and sisters (Heb. 2:11).

At the end of The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker says, "The most that any one of us can seem to do is to fashion something -- an object or ourselves -- and drop it into the confusion, make an offering of it . . . to the life force." In Christian language, to be truly human is to shape our lives into an offering to God. But we are lost children who have wandered away from home, forgotten what a truly human life might be. When Jesus, our older brother, presented himself in the sanctuary of God, his humanity fully intact, he did not cower as though he were in a place of "blazing fire and darkness and gloom." Instead he called out, "I’m home, and I have the children with me" (Heb. 2:13).

On Larry King live the other night, a well-known Christian musician was telling his life story, and it was exactly the kind of story I prefer not to hear from the pulpit. As King peered at him through his owlish glasses, the musician told of being raised in a warm and loving Christian family and of discovering in high school that he was blessed both with a vibrant faith and with a rare musical gift. Eventually shaking off the dust of his little town, he took his faith and his keyboard and headed off toward the bright lights of Nashville, aiming at a career in gospel music.

In Music City, he found some success, but, unfortunately, he also found drugs -- lots of them. A life once young and hopeful soon spiraled out of control; a faith once alive soured into despair. One desperate night, he came completely apart emotionally and found himself lying face down on the linoleum floor of his kitchen, sobbing uncontrollably, crying out to God for salvation. "I woke up the next day," he said, "and I haven’t been the same since. That was 28 years ago.

"I just give credit to the Lord," he said, reflecting on three decades of sobriety and productivity. "I think God just rescued me."

I can provide a number of good reasons why I don’t want to hear this kind of story from the pulpit. It seems simplistic, for one thing, theologically naive; it belongs in the Christian tabloids. What is more, as a southern Protestant, I am trying to leave these "Just as I am, without one plea" stories behind. I was steeped in a sweaty revivalist culture, the South that Flannery O’Connor called "hardly Christ-centered . . . most certainly Christ-haunted." There personal testimonies, all of them bearing identical "I was sinking deep in sin" plots, were standard evangelistic fare. Nowadays, liturgically I much prefer the aroma of incense to the smell of sawdust, and I know I am not alone in this.

Frankly, though, the real reason why such stories of sin and salvation cause us discomfort may well be that they bring us too close to the molten core of the Christian faith. We prefer to leave the control rods safely in the reactor, but as much as we might like to domesticate the gospel, to make the faith about spiritual enlightenment or ethical ideals or the broad love of God that inspires tolerance, the fact of the matter is that the gospel is at root a rescue story. Even Jesus’ name, as theologian William Placher reminds us, means "the Lord saves."

"You were dead through trespasses and sins in which you once lived, following the course of this world," says Ephesians, but now "by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing." To see this statement as applicable to us, to swallow even one ounce of this claim, we must admit a cluster of truths about ourselves we would rather not face -- that we are captive to cultural and spiritual forces over which we have no control, that they have drained the life out of us, that we are unable to think or feel or crawl our way free, and that we are in urgent need of a God who comes to rescue. In short, we need saving. We can accommodate this, perhaps, in a 12-step program, but to encounter it as a description of our true and basic selves sends us scrambling for safer ground.

A pastor friend told me about the day a very disturbing telephone call came into the church office. A part-time staff member, who had been out in his neighborhood walking his dog, had been mugged, stabbed in the heart and rushed to the hospital, and was now in intensive care with virtually no prospect for survival. When the word spread among the church staff, they gathered spontaneously to pray. Standing around the communion table, each person prayed. My friend told me that he and the others offered sincere prayers, but mostly polite and mild petitions, prayers that spoke of comfort and hope and changed hearts, but prayers that had already faced the hard facts of almost certain death.

Then the custodian prayed. My friend reported that it was the most athletic prayer he had ever witnessed. The custodian wrestled with God, shouted at God, anguished with God. His finger jabbed the air and his body shook. "You’ve got to save him! You just can’t let him die!" he practically screamed at God. "You’ve done it many times, Lord! You’ve done it for others, you’ve done it for me, now I am begging you to do it again! Do it for him! Save him, Lord!"

"It was as if he grabbed God by the lapels and refused to turn God loose until God came with healing wings," my friend said. "When we heard that prayer, we just knew that God would indeed come to heal. In the face of that desperate cry for help, God would have been ashamed not to save the man’s life." And so it happened.

Recently a popular theologian declared, "The Jesus who ‘died for our sins’ has simply got to go. . . . Christianity must move beyond a rescuing Jesus." Part of me wants to purr like a kitten in relieved agreement. Yes, let’s sweep away the cobwebs clinging to Jesus the rescuer. But then I realize that I am face down on a linoleum floor somewhere in my life, powerless, praying like mad, "You’ve done it for others, God. I am begging you, do it for me." And when I find myself lifted up into new life and hope, I am more grateful than I can say that "by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing."

Maybe it’s just my imagination, but has the parable of the prodigal son become something of a bore lately? I know, I know, this is one of the most beautiful stories of grace in the Bible. And yes, I know this is a powerful archetype of human redemption. And yes, this parable presents a picture of divine acceptance so radical and sweeping that it has sometimes generated astonishment and provoked sputtering outrage.

But the shock value has worn off. Just say the opening line, "There was a man who had two sons," and we know where this one is going. The story has all the bland predictability of a biblical theme park. The awful, relationship-shattering words, "Give me my share of the inheritance," leave us unruffled because we can already hear the musicians tuning up for the joyful dance jig at the end. We are untroubled by the son’s anguished lament, "I am no longer worthy to be called your son," because the aroma of fatted calf roasting on the spit wafts over the narrative, and covers up the fetid stench of the pigsty. Fear not; the boy is coming home. He always does. The road back from the far country is paved and well lit, and we have traveled it many times.

But the power brownout in the prodigal son story is not just the result of over familiarity. Countless repetitions have transformed what was once a parable with trap doors and mysterious and unexpected depths into an Aesop’s fable, an anecdote with a prosaic moral tag. Instead of knocking our socks off with the surprise of the father improbably hiking up his skirts and dashing down the road shouting for joy and calling for "A robe! A ring! And sandals!," the story coos a little cultural wisdom in our ear: "Hey, no matter how badly you have messed up life, pick yourself up. A ready supply of forgiveness is waiting, and you can start over where you left off." The prodigal son becomes the "Comeback Player of the Year," and, as Hartford Courant columnist Jeff Rivers notes, "Everybody comes back. Mary Albert came back. Hugh Grant came back. Mike Tyson came back, Marion Barry came back. . . . It’s a forgiving culture."

Taken this way, though, the story becomes a predictable piece of self-help advice. Once the boy lifts himself up out of the muck and heads home, the rest of the plot locks into place. The father is obliged, like a cuckoo in a clock, to show up at the right time with the party hats. There is no other choice. The boy, after all, is really, really sincere, and he is making a comeback. He "is due" his celebration.

Luke, however, will have none of this. In fact, to preserve the shock of this parable, he wires up an electric fence just a little way back. The story of the rich fool (Luke 12:13-21) is a mirror image of the prodigal son. Here, too, a brother demands his share of the inheritance, but this time the answer is no. Here, too, there is an economic emergency, but this time the crisis is not famine but abundance. Again there is a festive party of eating and drinking, but this time the guest of honor is not a bankrupt son being embraced by a generous and joyful father but a rich fool who thinks he can throw a party for his own soul. Luke so badly wants us to see the pictures of undeserved grace and unexpected joy in the prodigal son that he leaves the negatives lying around as clues. In God’s economy, he practically shouts, you cannot throw your own party.

When we treat the prodigal son as a comeback story, we miss the point. When we say, "Head home, God’s feast is waiting!" we misunderstand. It is not our remorse that forces God to set the banquet table; it is not our deep desire to start over again that leads God to roast the fatted calf. We cannot throw our own party. By all rights, this story ought to end with the younger son sweating in the furrows, eating in the slave quarters and spending his days serving his older brother. So if we prodigals see the father running in our direction with open arms, we should know in our souls that this as an event so unexpected, so undeserved, so out of joint with all that life should bring us, that we fall down in awe before this joyful mystery.

A student of mine went jogging with his father in their urban neighborhood. As they ran, the son shared what he was learning in seminary about urban ministry, and the father, an inner city pastor, related experiences of his own. At the halfway point in their jog, they decided to phone ahead for a home-delivered pizza. As they headed for the phone, however, a homeless man approached them, asking for spare change. The father reached into the pockets of his sweat pants and pulled out two handfuls of coins. "Here," he said to the homeless man. "Take what you need."

The homeless man, hardly believing his good fortune, said, "I’ll take it all," scooped the coins into his own hands, and went on his way.

It only took a second for the father to realize that he now had no change for the phone. "Pardon me," he beckoned to the homeless man. "I need to make a call. Can you spare some change?"

The homeless man turned and held out the two handfuls of coins. "Here," he said. "Take what you need."

We are all homeless prodigals and beggars. So head home, but expect nothing. Be astonished beyond all measure when the dancing begins, the banquet table is set and the voice of God says, "Here. Take what you need."

One Saturday afternoon, my wife and I escaped to the movies. We had barely slipped into our seats and positioned the bucket of popcorn between us when a gaggle of teenagers jostled into the row behind us. They were having a great time together, noisily talking and teasing and laughing. During the previews, the conversation became even more animated as each kid weighed in on the merits of a coming attraction. Every so often I would turn around to dart a glance in their direction, a look I hoped would come across as a serious but not-too-parental appeal for theater courtesy. I was relieved when the opening credits of the feature finally started to roll and the group quieted down.

But not for long. One of the teenagers had evidently already seen the movie, and was eager to serve as plot guide for the others. "Omigosh," she croaked in a stage whisper, as the male protagonist made his first appearance, "he is going to like fall for her so-o-o hard." Now my wife and I had guessed that there might be a romantic spark between the male and female leads, this being the movies and all, but it would have been nice to watch it unfold ourselves. "Look, look," our cinematic herald shrieked a few moments later, "he forgot to put the key back under the mat. Did’ja see that? That’s how the cops are gonna catch him!" With one huge "whoosh," all dramatic suspense rushed out of the room.

Look carefully at this story in the Gospel of John. Mary is anointing Jesus, and at first the narrator seems like the teenager in the theater who was providing play-by-play commentary. Notice the whispered asides. "Look," John confides, turning around with his box of popcorn, "there’s Lazarus! He was raised from the dead in the prequel." Or he hisses, "Hey, keep your eye on that guy Judas! He’s about to betray Jesus!" And, "Don’t believe a word of that caring-for-the-poor stuff. Judas is really a thief!"

What is going on here? Can’t John just allow the story to unfold on its own? Do we really need this voice behind us constantly spilling the beans on the plot?

In the case of John, this tendency to give whispered asides is not a narrational quirk, but rather a profound mark of John’s theology. John is convinced that life is double-plotted, that ordinary events unfold around us but that hidden among all the mundane props are signs of the eternal. The wine is in the water, the light in the darkness, the Word in the flesh. For John, belief is the capacity to see not only life’s surfaces but also its holy depths, to be able to look at events unfolding around us but also to look through them, above them and beneath them to perceive what is truly happening.

We need, then, two sound tracks -- one to tell the story and the other to tell God’s deepest truth about the story. John wants us to go to this ordinary dinner party in Bethany, but not to miss the hint of resurrection we can see in Lazarus. He wants us to hear Judas’s pious speech about caring for the poor but also to discern in those words the treachery that lies in the human heart. He wants us to see Mary not just as hostess but as prophet. He wants us to see her anointing of Jesus not as a mere impulse of indulgence, but as a costly act of worship. Jesus is not merely eating and drinking with friends -- he is the lamb at the Passover feast, and John wants us to smell the fragrance of the perfume that fills the house as the aroma of holy death. John whispers between the lines of the story because he wants us to see what is truly happening, and to believe.

Some time ago, I returned as the guest preacher to a church where years before I had served as a student pastor. After the service, I struck up a conversation with a woman whom I had not seen in many years. "How is your dad?" I asked her. "I remember him as one of my favorite people."

"I lost my dad last summer" she said sadly. "Cancer. But he lived a long and good life," she added, "and in many ways he died a peaceful death. The last few moments of his life were amazing.

"My sister, my brother and I were with him when he died. He had a stroke a few days before and lost his speech. You can imagine how hard that was on my father."

"Yes," I nodded. "Your father loved to talk, loved to tell a good story."

"About an hour before he died, he began a hard struggle. He was using this last bit of energy to try to speak. He seemed to have something he really wanted to communicate. It was terribly frustrating for him and painful to watch. Finally he pointed at my brother and motioned toward the sink in his room. My sister said, ‘He wants some water,’ and my brother went to the sink and poured a glass. He brought it over to my father, but Dad refused it and made a gesture toward my brother as if to say, ‘No, you drink it.’ My brother hesitated for a moment and then took a sip from the glass. My father then motioned with his hand, as if to say, ‘Pass it to your sister.’ My brother handed me the glass, and my father repeated the gesture.

"It was then that it dawned on my sister. ‘He’s serving communion,’ she said quietly."

Through these gestures, her father communicated that this was no ordinary hospital room, but a chapel; no ordinary dying, but a sacred and faithful death. In an even deeper way, Mary’s anointing made the house at Bethany into a sanctuary and transformed that meal into a Eucharist "showing forth the Lord’s death until he comes." The whole world is now filled with the fragrance of that perfume.

On a Sunday morning in a certain city church, the Gospel lesson had been read and the minister was about to begin the sermon. Suddenly a stranger seated in the balcony stood up and interrupted the service. "I have a word from the Lord!" he shouted. Heads whipped around, and ushers bounded up the balcony stairs like gazelles. They managed to escort the man into the street before he could elaborate further on just what "word" he had been given.

Week after week, preachers in countless pulpits stand up and say, in effect, the same thing as the man in the balcony: "I have a word from the Lord!" But no alarms sound, no one is astonished and no apprehensive ushers race forward to muscle the preacher into the street. If a sudden unexpected shout erupts from the balcony, the place gets set on edge, but when a preacher starts into the Gospel word for the day, people crease their bulletins and settle in. No wonder some clergy, in hopes of putting a little electricity into the sermon event, have taken to wandering the aisles Oprah-like with handheld mikes.

It is somewhat reassuring to realize that the first Christian sermon ever preached did not register high on the Richter scale either. When the women came back from the cemetery on Easter morning, they brought with them word of an empty tomb and astonishing news: "He is not here but has risen!" All Christian preaching begins here, and all Christian sermons are reverberations of this Easter news, first announced by the women to the apostles. The response? The translations differ; you can take your pick. The words seemed to them like "an idle tale," "empty talk," "a silly story," "a foolish yarn," "utter nonsense," "sheer humbug."

Why? The women have come with a revolutionary announcement, "He is risen!" so why did the apostles dismiss the first news of Easter with a wave of the hand? Some have suggested that this initial Easter proclamation was poorly received because the messengers were women. "From women let not evidence be accepted," reads the Mishna, "because of the levity and temerity of their sex."

The gender of the speakers may be part of the reason for the apostles’ indifference, but not all of it. After all, the women were confirming a message that Jesus himself had already told the disciples. Before he entered Jerusalem, Jesus informed them that he would be killed but that on the third day he would rise. When the women came racing back with the news that these words had come to pass, the disciples should have been prepared, eager, receptive, believing. Instead they yawned, checked their watches and wondered when the sermon would end so that they could shuffle off to coffee hour.

Maybe the news of Easter was simply too overwhelming for them to believe. Many years ago, a friend told me that his young son was a great fan of both Captain Kangaroo and Mister Rogers. The boy faithfully watched both of their television shows, and one day it was announced that Mister Rogers would be paying a visit to the Captain Kangaroo show. The boy was ecstatic. Both of his heroes, together on the same show! Every morning the boy would ask, "Is it today that Mister Rogers will be on Captain Kangaroo?" Finally the great day arrived, and the whole family gathered around the television. There they were, Mister Rogers and Captain Kangaroo together. The boy watched for a minute, but then, surprisingly, got up and wandered from the room.

Puzzled, his father followed him and asked, "What is it, son? Is anything wrong?"

"It’s too good," the boy replied. "It’s just too good."

Maybe that’s it. Maybe the news of the empty tomb, the news of the resurrection, the news of Jesus’ victory over death is just too good to believe, too good to assimilate all at once.

One suspects, however, a deeper and more complex reason for writing off the women’s proclamation. Like the Emmaus Road travelers in the story that follows, the disciples are not merely bored, they are "slow of heart to believe. They are not just indifferent to the news of Easter; they are resistant. Perhaps a clue can be found in what the disciples are called in this story. Initially Luke tells us that the women told the news of resurrection to "the eleven," but later he changes their title to "the apostles," to those who are sent.

If the Jesus story ended on Friday, then the disciples can simply be "the eleven," and after the appropriate rituals and a season of mourning, they can go back to life as it was. If the story ended on Friday, then they can be "the eleven," alumni of Jesus’ school of religion, students of an inspiring though finally tragic teacher. In short, if the story ends on Friday, we can close out the Book of Luke.

But if the news of Sunday is true, they must become "apostles," those sent to Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and the ends of the earth. There will be arrests and shipwrecks and outpourings of the Spirit and persecutions and gentiles and stonings and miles of weary travel. If we believe the news of Sunday, then the scary truth is that the story is just beginning and we will need a Book of Acts with the apostles as its main actors.

Perhaps this Easter the preacher should climb not into the pulpit but into the balcony to say, "I have a word from the Lord!" Maybe this time it will be the congregation that heads into the street -- sent with good news to the ends of the earth.

In the little Georgia country church of my childhood, there was a story the older folks loved to tell again and again, laughing over it and savoring it and embellishing it. The tale involved a certain Sunday night in October 1938. Evening prayer services were in full swing when a man named Sam, a member of the congregation who lived down the road from the church, charged into the prayer meeting trembling with fear and excitement. Finally gaining the breath to speak, he shouted, "Martians are attacking the earth in spaceships! Some of ‘em have already landed in New Jersey!" The preacher halted in mid-sentence; the congregation stared at Sam blankly. "I s-s-swear," he stammered, now a little unsure of his footing. "I h-h-heard it on the radio."

What Sam had heard, of course, was Orson Welles’s now infamous Mercury Theater radio production of War of the Worlds, but no one in the congregation was aware of that at the moment. For all they knew, the world outside was coming to a flaming end. The little flock looked apprehensively at the preacher, but he was mute and indecisive, never having had a sermon disrupted by interplanetary invasion. Finally one of the oldest members of the congregation, a red-clay farmer of modest education, stood up, gripped the pew in front of him with his large, callused hands, and said, "I ‘speck what Sam says ain’t completely true, but if it is true, we’re in the right place here in church. Let’s go on with the meetin’." And so they did.

Spaceships landing in New Jersey? Signs of the end of the world? The old farmer sized it all up, measured it against his rough-hewn view of providence, and decided it was better to be in church praising God than running around the cow pasture shooting buckshot into the night sky

According to Jesus, most of us are not nearly as astute as this farmer at reading the signs of the times, at distinguishing what matters and what doesn’t, at discerning what is truly happening in God’s world. Indeed, Jesus says that most of us are far better at meteorology than theology. "You hypocrites!" Jesus thunders. "You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present time?"

Jesus is talking, of course, about God’s pregnant time, the breaking-in of God’s reign like a thief in the night, plundering and destroying the old order. "Watch for it" Jesus says. "Be on the alert. Be dressed for action and have your lamps lit."

The signs of this new reality breaking in and summoning us to a new way of life are all around us. But what are we looking for? Armageddon-like rumblings in the Middle East? Some readers of the "Left Behind" novels might say as much. Violence in the schools? The deepening resentment of American power and arrogance? The spread of AIDS?

"You haven’t a clue," Jesus said, "about how to interpret the present time." No sooner had Jesus issued this challenge than some in the crowd stepped forward. "Don’t say we cannot read the times. How about that terrible incident in the temple, the one where Pilate’s police slaughtered some innocent worshipers from Galilee?"

"No," Jesus responded, "it isn’t a sign. And don’t bother bringing up the tragic case where the tower of Siloam collapsed, killing 18 people," he added. "That is not the kind of sign I mean either."

What is the sign of God’s pregnant time? We must watch closely and faithfully, or we will miss it. To sharpen our vision, Jesus tells a parable about an orchard owner who was frustrated by a barren fig tree and ordered the gardener to cut the tree down. "Sir," pleads the gardener, "let’s nurture it, care for it and give it one more year."

That’s it. That is the sign of the times, the clue to the breaking in of God’s reign. Not the Hale-Bopp Comet, not invaders from space, not Clinton as King Belshazzar redux, not wars or rumors of war, but instead the gracious and patient hand that reaches out to halt the ax, the merciful gesture woven into the fabric of life that stays all that would give up on the barren and the broken, the merciful voice that says, "Let’s give this hopeless case one more year.

"Even now," cried John the Baptist, "the ax is lying at the root of the trees." But Jesus said, "The Spirit of the Lord has sent me to bring good news to the poor and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. Let’s give this one more year.

Pastoral theologian Seward Hiltner used to tell about the state-run mental hospital where truly hopeless cases were relegated to a back ward. The psychiatrists and other medical staff avoided this ward, making only the bare minimum of calls and writing off the patients there as unsalvageable. Then a women’s group from a local church began, as a matter of compassion, to visit the patients in this hospital. No one bothered to tell them that the patients in the back ward were abandoned cases, so they visited them regularly, bringing flowers, fresh baked cookies, prayer, cheerfulness and mercy. Before long, some of the patients began to respond, a few of them even becoming healthy enough to move to other wards. At one level, this was merely a church group doing what church groups do. At another level, it was a sign of the times.