Sherry Chandler

On the Importance of Watering your Garden

After Easter, my brother says, we will have some better weather. I really hope that this piece of folk wisdom is true. So far, March has been colder than February, a skewing of the seasons that seems to reflect the skewing of our society. I have been promising spring for several weeks on this blog and I suppose the birth of a litter of coons in our attic – there are disadvantages to tarpaulins – should be a sign that spring is here but somehow I miss the sun.

On this gray and rainy Easter Sunday morning, a day no doubt of gloomy sunrise services, I have been reading Harvey Cox’s When Jesus Came to Harvard: Making Moral Choices Today (Houghton Mifflin 2004). This book is a sort of reprise of the lectures Cox has given over 15 years of teaching a course – Jesus and the Moral Life – in moral reasoning to undergraduates at Harvard.

Cox places Jesus as a rabbi teaching in the midrash tradition. Midrashim are imaginative expositions of Torah. Not necessarily parables, but definitely not fables that end with a moral, the midrashim are meant to bridge the gap between ancient texts and contemporary society. They can be as cryptic as a Zen koan. Alicia Ostriker, one of the “dangerous poets” discussed here earlier, is a contemporary midrashist as is my friend Jeff Hess.

Cox sometimes annoys me with his blanket dismissals of Biblical scholarship and his easy optimism. At a time when women survivors of the tsunami are being raped in refugee camps, when Iraqi women are being forced behind the veil, when Pakistani women are being sentenced by tribal courts to gang rape, when all those other whens that are “too much with us late and soon,” it can be jarring to be told that:

The birth of Jesus to Mary is not principally about virginity at all…It is about God becoming flesh. Its point is a simple one. God needed and wanted a body. Even if Adam and Eve were not satisfied with being human, which means having a body, God went the other way to demonstrate – and maybe to satisfy himself – that being human, with all its limitations, is not so bad after all.

Still, after a Holy Week in which our political leaders have shown themselves willing to rip at the very fabric of our government over a difference in morals, it is a comfort to hear a voice that speaks quietly, puts “moral” and “reason” in the same sentence, and recognizes the holy mission of story.

So on this Easter morning when the temple has not yet been rebuilt in Jerusalem, I would leave you with this midrash from When Jesus Came to Harvard:

The tactic I finally settled on with my students for thinking about [the end time] was this: Follow the advice of Jesus. Avoid speculating on the “when” and “how.” In the meantime, it is probably best to follow the counsel of the Hasidic rabbi who was interrupted by one of his followers while he was tending his garden. “What would you do, rabbi,” the student asked, “if you knew the messiah was coming today?” Stroking his beard and pursing his lips, the rabbi replied, “Well, I would continue to water my garden.”

Related posts:

Importance of women on the court

“Let us cultivate our garden”

Control

Lonely as a cloud…

Lupercalia

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.