THE NORMALITY OF THE EXTRAORDINARY

In my Easter Day sermon I quoted the lovely e.e.cummings poem that begins ‘i thank you God for most this amazing /day.’ And there is indeed a breath-taking sense of awe and wonder that should overwhelm us when we think of the miracle of God’s love revealed in Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection.

Yet, on reflection, there is another theme to all the Easter accounts. There is something very normal and ordinary about the appearance of the risen Christ. Mary Magdalene mistakes him for a gardener; Cleopas and his companion walk beside him for 5 miles and sit down for a meal before they recognise him; and on the lake, Peter and the other disciples initially believe him to be just a stranger on the shore.

Initially, they didn’t expect Jesus to have been raised from dead. But when they do encounter him, he does not look like a triumphantly victorious Messiah – who might have been expected to be some kind of superhuman, transcendent figure. Instead, he seems to look like anyone else! Something has changed, which may be why they fail to recognise him; but it may that they are not expecting to see him at all, except in some apocalyptically transformed way. But this Jesus in almost every way behaves as he always had, even to the extent of still enjoying a meal with them. (The only difference is his habit of entering locked rooms, and departing unexpectedly.)

What might this mean? I suggest there are two aspects. The first is what we might call the ‘normality of the extraordinary.’ Although the God of the Bible is indeed ‘wholly other’, God’s dealings with his people often take apparently unsurprising forms. God walks through the garden of Eden, looking for Adam; Abraham sees God in the visit of three men; at times, Moses speaks to the Lord, ‘as one talks to a friend’; angels never have wings or other distinguishing features. God speaks to Elijah, not in the powerful manner of winds, earthquakes or fires, but in a ‘still, small voice’ – a whisper. We have a God, it seems, who is to be encountered at least as much in the everyday and the insignificant, as in the ‘otherworldly’. Typical of this is Isaiah 49:31

                Those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength.

                They will soar on wings like eagles;

                they will run and not grow weary;

                they will walk and not be faint.

Might we not expect a different order? But the Lord’s final promise here is that our faith will enable us to do the normal thing – to walk – without flagging. Divine grace perfects our human nature, it does not overwhelm it, or replace it (to paraphrase Aquinas.)

The other aspect of the ‘normality’ we are considering is that it underlines the fact that Christian faith is grounded in reality. The mistake of many heresies is to try to separate God from his creation, to deny the humanity of Jesus, to propose ways of escaping from the mundane world into mystical ecstasy. The fact is that God loves the world he has made. Christian hope is not for some super-spiritual absorption into a nirvana – but for the resurrection of the body. John the Divine’s vision is of a new heaven and a new earth.

Hannah Arendt famously commented on the ‘banality of evil’ she perceived in Nazi war criminals. Against this, perhaps we Christians should rejoice in the ‘normality of the extraordinary’, the down to earth solidity of the saint, the God we meet in everyday life. After all, as Genesis reminds us, in creation ‘God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.’