The Conspiracy of the Resurrection
On breath and the power of peace | The Word in the Wild, Easter 2, Year B
All the world breathes. The flowers bursting into bloom, the leaves spreading out, the forage grasses turning bright with light caught in chloroplasts—all is rooted in breath, the conspiracy of life that breaths in and out, offering and receiving. Even the soil, that ground in which roots run deep, is most full, most alive and healthy, when it breaths. In the ground, bacteria and fungi, nematodes and protozoa, teaming with energy, inhaling and exhaling below the surface. They take the death of the world—fallen leaves and animals, tree branches and broken bones—and turn it all to growth, new life working up from the depths. As they do this work, they transform the ground, gluing it together, creating space for air to get in, space for more life to join the common breath of all creation.
It was a wise of the priestly-poet who first sang the words of Genesis 1 to begin with the Holy Ruach, the Holy Breath, hovering above the formless waters—ready to begin the work of life. It is by breath that we find our kinship with the other animals, the other spirit-filled creatures of the earth, all given life through the breath of God.
When the first person was made, he was called adam because he was formed from the adamah. He was a human from the humus soil. When God bent down and breathed life into the adam, God’s breath was joining the breath of bacteria and fungi, earthworms and amoeba already offering their spirits, their inhale and exhale, in the ground.
To breathe, deeply and easily, calms the heart, enlivens the brain, and fills the whole body with peace. Shalom is the Hebrew word for peace and it means far more than a lack of conflict. Shalom is wholeness, health, restfulness. When we breathe well we experience shalom, that peaceful state that is the settled default of our lives.
To not have breath, to not be able to breathe—is a fearful thing. One summer just after college, I was living in Chicago, where I caught the bus each day to work. One of those mornings the humid heat and air pollution were so strong that I gasped for breath on the bus, a sense of suffocation pouring over my oxygen starved body.
Fear takes away our breath. The shoulders move forward, the lungs are constricted. We take short breaths, each delivering only a fraction of what the body needs. And so a sense of desperation deepens. The students of Jesus, his disciples, were afraid. The doors were locked, the windows closed. There was little ventilation in that room—all anxious, heart rates erratic, breaths shallow.
Rome, which promised peace, had joined with the Temple authorities to kill their teacher. It was a death of suffocation, the cross a means of forcing the lungs to collapse under the pressure of the body. The peace that Rome offered and maintained was a peace that relied on taking breath. It was a peace not of wholeness and health, but of stasis and exploitation, violently enforced. The religious leaders had made a compromise with that peace, agreeing to its terms as long as they could continue all the apparatus of clean and unclean that had replaced the call for justice. Jesus had challenged all of that and now he was dead for the sake of a false peace, and the disciples knew that they were next.
It was into that closed and claustrophobic, fear-filled room that Jesus came saying, “Peace be with you.” Imagine the gasp of seeing him, the flooding burst of air coursing through their bodies. This was the peace of shalom, the peace of deep, slow breath that he offered. How could it be that Jesus was now before them, a man with a body of flesh, lungs filled with breath?
There was a tradition in the world of that time, that a loved one would receive the final, dying breath of a relative or friend. It was a way of holding on, in a way, to their spirit. In his last moments on the cross, Jesus had given over his final breath to God: “Father, into your hands I give over my life’s breath.”
In that moment of offering, Jesus did not succumb to fear, though he suffered. Instead, he did what he had done throughout his life, what he taught his followers to also do. He completely entrusted his life to God and with it any hope of justice in response to the wrong against him, any hope for the future of the mission of love that he had so faithfully carried out. He gave his breath to God, knowing that God would hold it, and breathe it into the world again.
God exhaled and Jesus was resurrected, his suffocated lungs now filled with new life. In his surrender and trust, his refusal of all the means of violence by which the sham peace of Empire was maintained, Jesus was now vindicated. And he came now to his disciples to give them the breath of his life, the breath of peace and wholeness that would free them from the fears that had overwhelmed them. “Take the holy life-breath,” he said and offered the new air of resurrection life.
That Holy Spirit, that Holy Breath, that stirred among his disciples, freeing them from the claustrophobic walls of fear, still moves among us. To live from it, we must give over our own breath, so inadequate and gasping, and surrender ourselves like Jesus, our example, trusting our lives to God. With the Holy Breath inside us, we too will be called beyond the confines of safety and into the open and risky air of love.
The world wants to breathe. But the false peace of Empire, the peace that takes breath for the sake of safety and security, the false peace that provides abundance by pollution and extraction, are suffocating us at every turn. We who have received the peace of Christ, and offer it to each other in return, must learn to breathe by the new air of resurrection. In taking in that Holy Breath we can move boldly into the suffocating world and offer Christ’s shalom—his rest and wholeness—as fresh air even in the midst of death.