Breath of God

The most arresting and transforming image from worship yesterday was the London church which pictured the crucifixion with the caption ‘I can’t breathe’.

It didn’t need spelling out. 

We’ve been taught that it is suffocation which ends the life of those being crucified; pain and exhaustion means tortured victims can no longer hold themselves in a position on the cross in which it is possible to breathe. 

We’d seen footage in the week of a black community activist’s death as he was arrested; his being knelt upon until the life was squeezed out of him; his final ‘I can’t breathe’ being taken up as the cry of riotous reaction. 

We instinctively make the link: lawful controlling authority’s tendency over the millennia to be almost casual in eliminating those it sees as possible sources of insurrection in the majority community around it; now here yet again as God’s story and our world’s story side-by-side.   

And we know that Covid19's deadly work is when it overwhelms lungs so that even invasive ventilation fails to deliver enough oxygen.

An image of the crucifixion with the caption ‘I can’t breathe’ startles because the crucifixion uncaptioned is such a familiar sight that normally it fails to provoke any real reaction in us at all.

And it is an image which unsettled yesterday because it wrong footed some of the standard worship at Pentecost; pious generalisation trotted out with a broad smile (about the breath of God – and about peace, joy, and forgiveness) can seem glib or superficial if simply spread about as if the Holy Spirit is like a pixie dust which will make everything alright.

We would have been reading of locked-down fear in John’s account of Easter Day:

When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you.’  After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side.  Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord.  Jesus said to them again, ‘Peace be with you.  As the Father has sent me, so I send you.’  When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit.  If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.’

Perhaps we are being freshly invited this year to pray - tentatively, painfully and realistically - that the gift of the Holy Spirit will do the hard work of properly arresting us and transforming us.  And those with forceful authority around us.  And those most vulnerable to having life squeezed out of them, even alongside their last gasps.    

We do so with a strange recognition that, at the centre of the reading, the newly risen Lord who is suddenly there speaking peace (and who is about to send them, breathe on them, and warn them that there are implications in their reactions to other people’s sin) appears to be recognised and authenticated precisely by his showing them the wounds of his killing. 

May be the whole movement of the passage suggests something strange but essential about the places where our fear will turn into joy.  It is the one who has had not been able to breathe who breathes Spirit on us.  It is the scarred one who sends us to discern where human sin still deeply scars ourselves and others. 

Resurrection possibilities can only ever be squeezed out of lifelessness.  The teachings have always been that it is from apparently dead seeds, often those sown in tears, that joy and peace and forgiveness have a chance of beginning to grow.