The Raising of Tabitha

Sermon at Open Table, by The Rev Mark Waters, at St Bride's 21.04.2013

The raising of Tabitha contains strong echoes the story of the raising of Jairus’s daughter by Jesus. The same details in a narrative. The mourners kept outside. The command from the holy man for the dead to person to get up. And the purpose of the story we assume, is to demonstrate that the early church and its leaders, were able to perform the same acts of healing – and raising - as the Master.

Defying death, the ability to reverse the effects of mortality, is something which intrigues us as human beings. It is the ultimate answer to our condition. The subject of countless legends and stories. What all the money on cosmetic surgery and beauty products are also trying to do. To wind back the remorseless effects of time on the human body.

So as a story to set as the main text for a Sunday in the season of Easter I am not really very impressed with the raising of Tabitha. Because for me it’s a story about resuscitation, not a story about resurrection. And there’s a world of difference in between.

 Richard Chartres, Bishop of London in his address at the funeral of Margaret Thatcher said that in her death she was “one of us, subject to the common destiny of all human beings”.

Giles Fraser writing on the same theme in the Guardian, said:

‘The Christian funeral is an unsentimental acknowledgment that death is the ultimate democracy. It comes to us all – the good and the bad, the rich and the poor, the powerful and the weak. 

So all the stuff about how great a leader Mrs Thatcher was or wasn’t or whether or not she saved Britain from the knackers yard is about as irrelevant as how well Tabitha was devoted to good works and acts of charity or how good a seamstress she was.

Sometimes its as if raising dead bodies is the real knock down proof of God. Perhaps its what we want or yearn for more than anything else – a way of cheating death.

Stanley Hauerwas throughout his book Learning to Speak Christian talks repeatedly about the strong human tendency to want to ‘get out of life alive’.  I guess another way of putting that would be our efforts at the avoidance of death – despite its inevitability.

But I wonder if that is, in the end, what we do really want.

Because there is another thread in  Christian spirituality which goes in the opposite direction. Which suggests that while death might not be our friend, it is the only way in which we can understand life.

 In Jim Cotter’s book of daily prayer which I use he has chosen these words to introduce morning prayer for the Easter season:

Death and life have engaged in a wondrous struggle,

And death is swallowed up by life.

Death yields strange gifts to life,

its colours rich and deep and radiant,

life more solid and more real.

I find that really helpful. That speaks more to my experience than miraculous denials of death.

So in this line of thinking, Tabitha’s waking at the hands of Peter is merely a temporary respite.  And like Mrs Thatcher, and at some point all of us,  she would have come to the point of the common destiny of all human beings – Giles Fraser’s ‘ultimate democracy’ of shaking off our mortal coil.

And there is something else which for me marks out Tabitha’s raising as a resuscitation. And that is the mystery surrounding resurrection. All through the Easter season as we retell the scriptural accounts of Jesus’s appearance to the disciples after his death, the language is opaque. The language is of mystery. Hints. Suggestions. Shadowland. We see through the glass darkly. We are not given any clear and straightforward and transparent impression that this is how things are. We are left guessing. And that’s the only way it can be. 

Resurrection for me is something to do with the question of what ways the various dyings in my life are or can be involved in some sort of Rising. But that sort of question can only be answered with resort to the language of poetry.

I’ve recently come across a Norwegian poet called Olav Hauge. And I read a poem of his recently  called Across The Swamp. For me it carries the same resonance of mystery when talking about resurrection:

Across the Swamp

It is the roots from all the trees that have died out here, that's how you can walk safely over the soft places. Roots like these keep their firmness, it's possible they've lain here centuries. And there is still some dark remains of them under the moss. They are still in the world and hold you up so you can make it over. And when you push out into the mountain lake, high up, you feel how the memory of that cold person who drowned himself here once helps hold up your frail boat. He, really crazy, trusted his life to water and eternity.

It’s this sort of poetry that is the only useful handle that I have to try and make sense of resurrection, and what my own rising might be in both the shadow and the light of my own dyings.

Christ is risen. Alleluia.