Scriprure Easter Sunday Luke 24:1-12 Jan Savory
How do we understand the Resurrection?
There are many ways people have understood and continue to understand the resurrection – Jesus emerging from the tomb in solitary splendor; Jesus emerging from the tomb with all who died already, often leading Adam and Eve or Moses and the prophets by the hand; some say Jesus wasn’t really dead, just pretending. Was the resurrected Jesus physical (he ate bread and fish on the beach); or was he a spirit (he passed through walls into a locked room); or the resurrected Jesus was a vision or hallucination … whatever happened, the resurrection is a mystery. With an infinite number of ways of being understood.
How do you understand the resurrection?
What I’m saying today, is another way to think about the resurrection. It’s the way I have come to understand the events around the first Easter and how the Gospels came to be written as they are. As Anglicans, we can hold different beliefs and yet we respect each other and can worship together. I am not trying to undermine anyone’s cherished and heart felt beliefs, but it’s easier to accept that others believe differently if we can understand and talk about our differences.
This is also a way which may help people inside and especially as yet outside the church who don’t think that they can maintain their intellectual integrity if they participate in a ritual that assumes belief in a phenomenon, we Christians call “resurrection”. When you are dead, you don’t reappear on earth in your physical body – it just doesn’t happen!.
Way back then …
Resurrection stories weren’t new. Ancient peoples told many resurrection stories, such as the one about Thulis of Egypt, who died around 1700 BCE; he reportedly was crucified, died, rose and ascended to heaven. There are stories about many other people who were “resurrected” long before the Jesus story.
Jewish writers had a habit of hiding truth in stories – we call them parables. The surface stories were often totally fabricated. For example, we don’t think the prodigal son actually existed, but the moral of the story about the power of agape love is total truth.
Resurrection Accounts
Do you know that there are over 20 known “gospels” that claim to tell the life of Jesus, but only the four in the New Testament speak of a physical resurrection event? And each of these four stories have different details about how Jesus’s “resurrection” happened and the post resurrection experiences. Further, the first written story about Jesus’s appearing to his disciples after the resurrection was penned about fifty years after Jesus was executed. That is in Matthews’s Gospel. [ An aside here: Mark’s Gospel is earlier that Matthew, but the oldest scrolls end at Mark16:8 with an angel telling the women that “[Jesus] has been raised. he is not here”]
There is an earlier written summary of Jesus resurrection appearances, different again from the Gospels, in 1 Corinthians 15 where Paul writes that: “Christ died … and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, 5 and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. 6 Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters[a] at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died.[b] 7 Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. 8 Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me”.
Paul sees his experience of Jesus on the Damascus Road, some years later as being just another one of a series of experiences, yet he didn’t see the bodily Jesus; he saw a bright light and heard a voice.
Why are the accounts so different?
What are we to make of all this? Why the stories? Are they lies? Or, as I believe, parables to explain the unexplainable, to tell truths that the early Christians had no words for.
Picture this small group of Christ followers in the days and weeks after the crucifixion. They experience something; it feels like Jesus is still with them. Some of them might have had visions of their friend. They have to find words to use to tell others about their friend, that in them he is still alive, so others will come to believe and experience ths joy. No longer are they fearful, but ready to live or die for the truth. There is a power that is changing them.
Most of us have experienced this power from time to time, as have Christians and others through the ages. In Acts, Luke describes it as the power of the Holy Spirit coming to the disciples at Pentecost. It’s wonderful; its exhilarating.
Struggling to describe a Mystery
But it was new to them. How to describe it? “It felt like he was walking alongside us and explaining the scriptures to us”.” It was just like when we used to have communal meals – he could almost have been there”. As Jesus’ followers passed on their experiences from year to year, the stories became parables, with more details – ways to articulte the inexplicable. To express the truth that Jesus is still with them in a new and different way. How does one describe the inexplicable but in metaphors, in stories, in word pictures? There really is no way to describe the truth of the resurrection, that Jesus who died, is alive in some inexplicable way and transforms us, our lives, to make us more fully alive. We have to be experience it to know it to be true.
Yes, it;s True!
However we understand the resurrection, these stories are true in a deeper than literal sense. Jesus does meet us: as we gather together to eat, like the disciples in the upper room; as we walk along the road like the disciples going to Emmaus; , as we finish a day or night of work, like the disciples who went fishing. He meets us where we need him, supports us and changes us. Yes, he lives. He lives in our hearts.
My prayer for each one of you, whether here at St George’s in person or watching online, – and however you believe and understand the resurrection stories – is that, this Easter Sunday and always, you too know the power of the Holy Spirit and feel this power of love as the living Jesus transforming your life and living in your heart.
Amen