THE “DIVINE COMEDY”

Traditionally there are two kinds of plays or stories: tragedies and comedies. We all know about tragedies. That’s the kind of film or opera I can never get my wife to see. You know from the beginning that things are going to turn out badly. Hamlet is going to end up stabbed with a poisoned rapier. Romeo and Juliette are not going to “live happily ever after.” The hero or heroine is going to end up a failure or a corpse. We think of a comedy as a story that makes you laugh a lot. But, of course, that is not what comedy originally was. Dante’s Divine Comedy, is a work that has few scenes that would provoke even a slight smile. Originally a comedy was any work that had a more-or-less happy ending, the opposite of a tragedy. Many comedies, in this sense, start out looking like tragedies. Everything is going wrong until the final scene of the final act when, miraculously, everything comes out all right. The gospels, the stories of Jesus’ life, are good examples of comedies in this sense. They are what we might really call “divine comedies.”

As of Good Friday the story of Jesus’ life and ministry is a tragedy. Here was someone who preached love in a “dog eat dog” world, who proclaimed that the two great requirements for our human existence is that we love God and that we love our neighbor as ourselves. Here was someone who brought healing and peace into people’s lives. Here was someone who promised to transform human ignorance and vice into wisdom and virtue. Here was someone who defied the human prejudices that said that some races and nations and genders were superior and were to be served by all those who were considered inferior. If you were the mythical person from another planet reading the gospels for the first time, reading up to the Holy Week narratives, you might get carried away into believing that this is how people on earth were transformed, reborn into a higher civilization, until, that is, you read the Good Friday stories and feared that it had all been a failure, a noble attempt that was defeated by overwhelming evil. “These humans, apparently, will never learn.” “Right forever on the scaffold. Wrong forever on the throne.” This is tragedy in its highest form, tragedy that captures the whole history of the race.

But then our friend from outer space discovers that the stories do not end there. In this evening’s Gospel from Matthew we discover the beginnings of something new. Wrong, sin and death, do not have the last word on earth. While the human story is a tragedy, the divine story is a comedy, a story not just of how the good people win in the end, turning the tables on their adversaries, but a story of how God transforms the tragedy into something new. It isn’t just a clever deception, but a revelation of a love so great and powerful, so beyond human comprehension, that all of life is filled with new possibilities. Of course the story isn’t simple. Evil still persists. The last two thousand years have not meant a return to the Garden of Eden for humans. There is still human cruelty in the name of “ethnic cleansing” or “racial purity,” or even religious truth! There are still millions in the world who feel they have a right to violate the rights and the dignity of others. There are still innumerable people with economic or political power who have no concern for the well being of others, no regard for the violence they are doing to the earth and its resources. But with the Resurrection of Jesus Christ something new, something out of the very heart of God has come into human life. Where compassion, healing, reconciliation, justice prevail, there the power of the Resurrection is breaking forth anew and we can affirm with all the saints throughout Christian history, “Christ is risen. The Lord is risen indeed!”