Reflections on the Resurrection

Reflections on the Resurrection of Christ

March 19, 2015

We are approaching Easter, the day in the Christian calendar when we celebrate the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ more directly and intentionally than we do on any other day. Easter is the great feast of the resurrection. We proclaim with great joy “Christ is risen! He is risen indeed!” We sing “Christ the Lord is Risen Today,” and we feel lifted up into the realms of God’s unfailing love and grace. In our secular culture Christmas is the main holiday, celebrated even by people who don’t at all believe in Jesus Christ. In the church Easter is the main holiday. After all, every human there ever was or will be was or will be born (although of course not conceived by the Holy Spirit like Jesus was). Only Jesus has risen from the grave. So Easter is the defining celebration of the Christian faith.

We western Christians have been so influenced by our secular culture that we make a bigger deal out of Christmas than we do out of Easter. Our Eastern Orthodox Christian brothers and sisters know better. For them Easter is by far the biggest celebration of the year. One of my most powerful spiritual experiences was attending the Easter vigil service at St. Sergius Holy Trinity monastery outside Moscow on Orthodox Easter in 1976. The service lasted from 10 pm on Saturday until dawn on Easter Sunday. I didn’t understand a word of it of course. The Russian Orthodox service isn’t even in Russian. It is in an old language called Old Church Slavonic, which is related to Russian but isn’t Russian. Still, the beauty of that long Orthodox Easter service is simply overpowering. You can feel the joy of Christ rising from the dead without understanding a word of the liturgy. Easter is that powerful. Easter is that joyful.

Yet most of us Christians aren’t much given to stopping and thinking about the central elements of our faith, about what they mean and how we know what they are and what they mean. I think that’s as true of Christ’s resurrection as it is of any other aspect of our faith, so here I want to reflect a bit on the resurrection of Christ. What is it? How do we know about it? What does it mean for us? Those are powerful questions, so come along while I share with you some of what I think about those things.

We read about Christ rising from the dead in some of the oldest Christian writings that we have. In 1 Corinthians 15, for example, written in the mid-50s of the first century CE, Paul says “For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day….” 1 Corinthians 15:3-4 Paul doesn’t recount any real resurrection appearance stories except to say that the risen Christ appeared to him as well as to many others, apparently a reference to his conversion experience on the road to Damascus. Still, Christ’s resurrection is of central importance to Paul, his resurrection being for Paul the time when Christ became Lord and Savior.

There are accounts of Jesus rising from the grave, or at least of his tomb being empty on the third day after his crucifixion, in each of the four Gospels in the New Testament. The oldest of them is Mark, written probably in the early 70s of the first century CE. Unfortunately, with Mark we immediately run into a problem in understanding Jesus’ resurrection. In its current form Mark ends at chapter 16, verse 20. Scholars are convinced, however, that Mark originally ended at chapter 16, verse 8. Verses 9 through 20 truly don’t sound anything like Mark. They sound a lot more like Luke than like Mark, and there is little doubt that some other author added them to the Gospel of Mark at an unknown time after Mark was originally written. So originally Mark ended at verse 16:8. That’s a problem, for at verse 16:8 three women, identified as Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome, have come to Jesus’ tomb to anoint his body, that is, to perform the typical burial customs of their culture. They find Jesus’ tomb open with a figure identified as “a young man dressed in white” sitting in it. This figure, apparently intended to be an angel but who in any event clearly is not himself the risen Christ, tells them that Christ has risen. He tells the women to go tell Jesus’ disciples that Jesus is going to Galilee and will meet them there. Then comes verse 8, which reads: “Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid.” That’s how the Gospel of Mark originally ended, with terrified women having seen an empty tomb, having been told that Jesus has risen, but saying nothing to anyone about it.

It’s not hard to understand why someone later added stories of Jesus appearing to the disciples to the Gospel of Mark. Most of us find Mark’s original ending immensely unsatisfactory. We’re told Jesus has risen, but he doesn’t appear to anyone. The women who receive the news say nothing to anyone. So we’re left with an empty tomb, and we’re left wondering how anyone knows anything about Jesus resurrection if the only humans who know about it don’t say anything about it to anyone. I actually quite like the way Mark’s original ending leaves the meaning of the empty tomb open and unspecified. Mark invites us into the empty tomb to contemplate for ourselves just what Jesus rising from the dead might mean. Still, we have to contend with the fact that in its original form the oldest Gospel we have has no resurrection appearances at all.

The other three Gospels, all written at least ten or more years after Mark, of course do have resurrection appearance stories. Yet there is an undeniable truth about those stories that I have rarely heard anyone in the church pay much attention to. That truth is that the other three Gospels each has its own resurrection appearance stories, and no resurrection appearance story appears in more than one Gospel. These stories do all have a few things in common. Jesus’ tomb is empty, or at least he isn’t in it. It is women who first discover the empty tomb, and one of those women is always Mary Magdalene, as she was in Mark. In John she is the only one who goes to the tomb and finds it empty.

The other three Gospels besides Mark contain these resurrection appearance stories:

Matthew: Mary Magdalene and another woman identified only as “the other Mary” go to the tomb. There’s an angel sitting on the stone that he has rolled away from the entrance to the tomb. He shows them the empty tomb and tells them to go tell the disciples to go meet Jesus in Galilee. As the women are leaving Jesus meets them and says “Greetings.” He too tells them to tell the men to go to Galilee, where they will see him. The disciples go to Galilee and meet Jesus on a mountain. He says to them “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.” Matthew 28:19

Luke: Women identified as Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and others go to the tomb on Sunday morning. They find the stone that had closed the tomb rolled away but they don’t find Jesus’ body. Two men in white, clearly intended to be angels, appear and tell the women that Jesus has been raised. They go back into town and tell the others, but no one believes them. Peter goes to the tomb, sees that it is empty, and wonders just what has happened. Then comes the wonderful story of the disciples on the road to Emmaus. Jesus appears to two disciples as they walk toward their home outside of Jerusalem, but they don’t recognize him. They get him to agree to spend the night at their place. Then we read: “When he was at table with them, he took bread, gave thanks, broke it and began to give it to them. Then their eyes were opened and they recognized him, and he disappeared from their sight.” Luke 24:30-31 Jesus then appears to other disciples. Luke ends with Jesus ascending to heaven, something that happens in neither Mark, Matthew, or John but does appear with slightly different details in Acts, which is actually the second volume of Luke.

John: John’s resurrection stories are by far the longest and most complex in any of the Gospels. In John Mary Magdalene goes to Jesus’ tomb alone on Sunday morning. She sees that the stone that closed the tomb has been rolled away. She runs to tell Peter and the mysterious figure from the Gospel of John called “the disciple whom Jesus loved” that someone has taken Jesus out of the tomb, and she doesn’t know where he is. Peter and the other disciple run to the tomb, see that it is empty, and just go home. Mary Magdalene, however, stays at the tomb crying. She sees two angels who ask her why she is crying. She turns around and sees Jesus standing there, but she doesn’t recognize him. She takes him for the gardener and asks him where Jesus’ body is. Jesus then addresses her by name, and she recognizes him. She goes and tells the others “I have seen the Lord.”

Then comes the famous and intriguing story of “Doubting Thomas.” Jesus appears to the disciples in a locked room, but the disciple Thomas, identified as a twin, isn’t there. Later the others tell Thomas that they have seen Jesus. Thomas replies “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe it.” John 20:25 A week later the disciples are again gathered in the locked room, and this time Thomas is with them. Jesus appears again. He says to Thomas “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe.” Thomas doesn’t actually do what the risen Christ has invited him to do. Instead he replies “My Lord and my God!”

There is reason to believe that the Gospel of John originally ended right after the story of Doubting Thomas. John 20:30-31 read: “Jesus did many other miraculous signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not recorded in this book. But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.” Sure sounds like the end of the Gospel, but in its current form John continues with a chapter 21. In it resurrection appearance stories continue.

The disciples have returned to Galilee and to their old occupation of fishing. Jesus appears on the shore while some of them are on the Sea of Galilee fishing, but they don’t recognize him. He asks them if they have caught anything, and they say no. So he tells them to lower their nets on the other side of the boat. They do and bring in a huge catch of fish. The disciple who Jesus loved recognizes Jesus and tells the others that it is the Lord. When they come ashore Jesus has a fire going, and they eat some fish together. Finally John gives us an account of Jesus commissioning Peter to care for the people of the Christian movement. Three times, in slightly different wording, Jesus asks Peter if Peter loves him. Peter protests that he does. Jesus responds “Feed my sheep,” or words to that effect.

So it is clear that while all of the empty tomb or resurrection appearance stories have a few basic things in common, they are all different. No one story of Jesus actually appearing to anyone appears in more than one Gospel. In the different stories Jesus appears to different people in different places. I say that not to upset you but just to point out a simple fact about the stories. Although three of the four Gospels (all four if you count the additions to Mark, which I don’t) have resurrection appearance stories, they don’t have any of the same resurrection appearance stories. Now, it is of course perfectly possible (or nearly so) to believe that all the stories actually happened the way the different Gospels tell them and that different authors simply chose to include different ones in their Gospel. It that works for you, fine. I have to tell you, however, that it doesn’t work for me. I just can’t help wondering why original Mark ends just with an empty tomb and no appearance by the risen Christ and the other three all have different stories in them. So let me give you a different way of understanding what’s going on here. It is a way that works for me and a lot of other people today. That doesn’t mean it has to work for you.

It seems to be undeniable fact that after Jesus’ crucifixion his followers had some kind of powerful experience that death was not the end for him and that somehow he was still alive in their midst. Not alive the way you, I, or any human person is alive, but alive in some mysterious, powerful, spiritual way. We know that they must have had some such experience from the simple fact that the Jesus movement didn’t die when he did. There had been other would-be messiahs before Jesus. There would be others after him. The Romans killed them all, their movements ended, and we’ve never heard of most of them. That didn’t happen with Jesus and his movement. When the Romans (not the Jews, by the way) killed him his movement didn’t end. His followers somehow stayed together despite the threat that the Romans might come after them next, and they started saying that he had risen from the grave. They stayed together. They preached Jesus risen from the grave to others. They took their word of Jesus’ resurrection out from Jerusalem to most of the Roman Empire and perhaps beyond. It seems clear that they told stories the purpose of which was not to communicate mere facts but to convey their profound conviction that though Jesus had most definitely died, death was not the end of him. He still lived in spirit though he was dead in body. He lived among them. He lived in them. So they told stories of having seen him risen from the grave. In different places different early Christian communities told different stories of having seen him risen from the grave.

Now, please don’t think that I am saying they were lying when they told those stories. They weren’t, but to understand just what they were doing we have to understand a profound difference between their world and ours. You see, in the ancient world there were no newspapers. There were no weekly news magazines. There was nothing that today we would call part of the media. Beyond that, their world was nowhere near as interested in facts as we are in our modern world. Our preoccupation with facts is a product of the European Enlightenment and the scientific revolution, and those things were at least sixteen hundred years in the future in Jesus’ time. The culture of ancient times was far more interested in meaning than it was in facts, and the ancient world communicated meaning less by writing essays than by telling stories. The purpose of stories was less to convey facts than it was to convey meaning. The question we should ask of the resurrection appearance stories (or of any other story in the Bible for that matter) is not did things happen just as the story says but what does the story mean.

Perhaps a couple of examples will help. Let’s start with the story of the disciples on the road to Emmaus in Luke. The culmination of the story occurs when Jesus is at the table with the two disciples. The scene is thoroughly Eucharistic. Jesus acts as the host though he is in someone else’s house. He goes through the four part Eucharistic liturgy with the bread. He takes, blesses, breaks, and gives it. That is precisely what we do with the bread in every Communion service. The first audiences for this story would immediately have seen the Eucharistic nature of the story. The meaning of the story seems clear. The sacrament of the Eucharist goes back to Jesus himself, and Jesus is present with us in that sacrament. He is the host, we are not. In the story the disciples recognize Jesus in the breaking of the bread. The point is that we too can recognize Jesus in the breaking of the bread. Don’t look for the facts in this story, look for its meaning. If you can do that you will honor the intent of the author, and the story will have real meaning for you.

Then there’s the story of Doubting Thomas from John. I find this one particularly meaningful, perhaps because my name is Thomas and I am a twin. Some of Jesus’ disciples see him risen and standing among them, but Thomas does not. He isn’t there, not at first. The disciples who have seen Jesus tell Thomas that they have seen him, but Thomas doesn’t believe them. Then he too sees the risen Christ, and he believes. The story ends with Jesus saying “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” John 20:29 This story is in a Gospel that was written around seventy years after the time of Jesus. We can safely assume that no one in the community in and for which the Gospel was written had themselves seen Jesus, either during his earthly life or risen from the grave. Even if the author of the Gospel had himself been an original disciple and had known and seen Jesus (something we can’t know about him, by the way), his audience certainly had not. By the time John was written the world surely was full of people like Doubting Thomas. They are the ones for whom the story is told. It wasn’t told to convey facts. It was told to encourage people to believe in Jesus’ resurrection though neither they nor anyone they knew had seen it happen. The meaning is that you can believe though you have not seen. It’s an important message for John’s community. It’s an important message for us too.

So did Christ rise from the grave? Yes, but to understand that confession you have to understand what you mean by “rise from the grave.” Go ahead and accept the resurrection stories as factually true if you want. I won’t try to stop you, but those stories come alive for us and have power for us when we ask not did they happen but what do they mean. They mean that death did not end Jesus. It did not end his message. It did not end his power. His brutal execution by the Romans didn’t mean he was a failure. It didn’t mean he had lost. Jesus’ resurrection means that he was indeed the Son of God. Whatever the facts of Jesus’ resurrection were, that incredible event is God saying to us he is the one. Listen to him. Follow him. Believe in him. Jesus’ resurrection says that just as death was not the end for him it is not the end for us either. Our lives with God never end. Jesus’ tomb was empty, the stories say. So, in a way we can’t really comprehend, are ours. All that is what Jesus’ resurrection means. Thanks be to God.