R is for the Rags,

Day 2
dead-last least of all the many witnesses to the resurrection of Jesus and therefore--of course--the first in line for the privilege of making their testimony. John tells us about them, that little heap of linen wrappings that Peter and the beloved disciple found in the tomb (Jn. 20:6-9). They lay there mute, inert; and in their use-lessness they preached the Easter Gospel so well that the beloved disciple heard it, and believed (8).

Is it much too cheeky, by the way, to call them Lutheran linens? Before they turned to God's Gospel they preached God's law in just the same way that the law gets preached by their uppity American kin, those best suits and dresses that cover the corpses so nicely laid out in the funeral homes we visit. "You need us," they say. "There's an ugliness here that you can't abide, a depth of shame that we have to conceal. Is there somewhere in cyberspace a pornographer who specializes in naked corpses? So vile a cretin will be a pariah even to other pornographers. The suits and dresses speak silently of a nudity so obscene that none dare expose it, least of all to our nearest and dearest, the very few we trusted so deeply that we let them see our prior nakedness. To perish in such obscenity is our final shame, the last consequence of our sin. The rags tell us that the Lamb of God who bore the sin fell victim to the shame. In the end no one could bear to behold him as he was.

And on the third day the shame was gone. What had to be hidden was suddenly no more. Death was dead, the dead one lived--and the rags lay in that heap, singing the joy of their newfound futility. To trust the witness of the rags is, among other things, to make like Paul who consigns his moral finery to their company on the grounds that in Christ he needs it no longer (Phil. 3:4-9). In this age of sin and shame our good deeds serve necessarily as fig leaves. Our better deeds, the ones we do in keeping with God s law, are the skins, those sturdier coverings that God in his mercy replaced the fig leaves with (Gen. 3:21). Whether good or better, the coverings accuse us. They announce the presence, behind them, of something to be concealed. Whether good or better, in the end they fail us. Shuck them, says Paul, in favor of the best deeds, the ones Jesus did for you. Sufficient for our nakedness is the righteousness of Christ. It will, like lesser dressings, signal our present shame. Unlike all others, it also sings the glory of a day to come when we stand wholly unwrapped, altogether unblushing, before God the Nearest and Dearest. Already he sees us in Christ as at last we shall be, created anew, and in the best and truest sense, shameless.