Here follows a story -- a true one -- about how research ruined Easter for a member of the congregation in my last parish. It was in a liturgical year that calls for a gospel reading from St. Mark -- specifically the last eight verses of its last chapter.
It includes no sighting of a resurrected Jesus, only word from a young man "dressed in a white robe" who tells three women who have come to anoint Jesus' body for final entombment that he has "risen." Their reaction? "They fled from the tomb and told no one anything because they were afraid." End of reading. End of gospel.
"Risen" is an approximate translation of a Greek word that can and often does mean "aroused" as from sleep or "to be shaken awake." The women's fear may have had to do with the idea of grave-robbing -- who knows? And their fear of telling anything to anyone is the direct opposite of what anyone would do if she believed that a loved one had come back to life. Something, as we say around our house, is cucuzza with that text.
My research and analysis of the passage -- and not by any means for the first time -- leaked out in an Easter homily in which I said that we would do well to seek a more rational understanding of the whole idea of resurrection -- that is, if we would not like to be adrift upon unlikely propositions. I suggested that we trust the text and admit that its ambiguity might be a signal to us to re-examine our often too easily arrived at beliefs.
I will always remember the woman who approached me after the liturgy that day with tears streaming down her face and, to go with them, a look in her eye that told me danger was near. "Why, Father Cook, couldn't you just tell us that Jesus was resurrected and send us away with hope that we will be, too?"
Somewhat nonplussed, I said that I could convey only what the text said and point out what it didn't say. I asked if she would prefer that I just say things that simple intellect would strongly suggest are wrong or at least misleading. I made the mistake of saying that I had struggled in my research with the text in question for years.
"Research?! That's what you think you're here to do? Research? This is not a university," she said. "You're here to comfort us, not to teach us."
Thus did I learn that the fruits of research are not always welcome. Taking them seriously often requires people to change their minds.
For more than 50 years, I have engaged in the research of biblical and related extra-biblical texts to puzzle out sources, meanings of words, their history, usage and intent. I keep up with the research of my betters in the field.
Graduate school professors in my time who were in the business of preparing young men and women to be religious leaders were themselves involved in research. It was part of the job. They were urged to publish the results of their work. Those of us who showed interest in research were helped along and assured that our leadership of congregations would be enhanced thereby.
One of my professors made me promise to produce a research-based book by the first 10 years out. Events that followed my leaving graduate school slowed up even the most avid biblical research, including mine. First came the horror of the Vietnam war, then the civil rights and women's liberation movements, all of which demanded the attention of religious leaders, however minor. The civil rights movement in particular and the work of helping Detroit rake itself out of the ashes of the summer of 1967 put my own research on the back burner to simmer the while.
By the time I got back to it, much had transpired in the work of senior scholars, especially those who emerged from the Roman Catholic Second Vatican Council. I had a lot of reading to catch up with and had to reset the clock. The promised book came out 33 years late.
Following the academic rubrics of research, I began to regain some of the ground I had once covered and to explore new territory. All that was reflected in what I preached and taught for the last 22 years of my active ministry. There were those who thought my stuff terrific and others, like the woman whose Easter I'd ruined, who objected to the teaching instead of the preaching and faulted my failure to offer comfort as I ought to have done.
Knowing, as we do, that language appeared in the lives of Homo sapiens 100,000 years ago and has since been at the rational basis of most human endeavors, shouldn't aspiring Christians want to know at least some fundamentals about the origins and developments of the languages used in the literature upon which their belief systems were founded? Somethings, too, about what can be known about the history of that literature and the meaning of its words?
It was the most colossal error of my professional life to assume that most people who went to church would want to know such things. They did not.
