On
Easter
April
5, 2022
The Scripture quotations contained here are from the New
Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian
Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A., and
are used with permission. All rights reserved.
Today we’re just
under two weeks away from Easter Sunday. Easter is of course the most joyous
and for many Christians the most important celebration of the church year. It
is the day when Christians around the world proclaim “Christ is risen! He is
risen indeed!” Jesus’ resurrection is the culmination, the final act, in the
Christian story of salvation. Christianity really isn’t Christianity without
it. Saint Paul told the troubled church in Corinth, “If Christ has not been
raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain.”
1 Corinthians 15:14. For us Christians the Resurrection is God’s sign and seal
that Jesus is indeed the one we are to follow. It is also God’s sign and seal
that death does not have the last word. Christianity is at least incomplete
without the great good news of Christ’s Resurrection.
And let’s face
it. It is difficult if not impossible for us rationalistic children of the
Enlightenment to accept the truth of the Resurrection. I mean, for us dead
people stay dead. They don’t come back to life, not if they are truly dead they
don’t. Jesus truly died on the cross. As the Munchkin coroner in The Wizard of
Oz says of the witch on whom Dorothy’s house fell, he was not merely dead, he
was really most sincerely dead. So that’s the end of his story, right? It has
to be the end of his story because dead people stay dead.
There’s another
reason we can’t believe in the Resurrection too. The Bible’s stories of Christ’s
Resurrection aren’t all the same. They all have in common that Mary Magdalene goes
to Jesus’ tomb on the Sunday after his crucifixion and finds the tomb empty.
Beyond that, the stories’ details are all different. They differ in who the
women are who go to the tomb. They differ in whether the women see the risen
Christ or not. Matthew’s version is much more dramatic than the others. Our
rational minds say that if Jesus really had risen from the grave the stories of
such a miraculous event would all be the same. They aren’t, so we think they’re
just stories. They aren’t reporting actual facts. And, we think, since they
aren’t fact, the whole Christian story is false.
Those of us who
cling to the Christian story as our connection with a salvific God must
therefore ask: Is there a way around the conclusion to which our rational minds
lead us that Christianity is just false? The great good news here is that there
is indeed a way around that negative conclusion. Saint Paul points us to it. In
his letter to the church in Rome he wrote that “if you confess with your lips
that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead
you will be saved. For one believes with the heart and so is justified, and one
confesses with the mouth and so is saved.” Romans 10:9-10. Paul tells us here
that belief in the Resurrection is not a matter of the mind. He of course knew
that the best minds of the Greek culture in which he operated were quite
rationalistic. The Greeks produced the greatest philosophy the world had ever
seen by their time, and that philosophy proceeded logically, rationally. Yet
Paul was trying to convince people in that culture to accept something that
wasn’t, and isn’t, the least bit rational or logical. He was trying to convince
people that the man Jesus of Nazareth had died and then indeed risen from the
grave.
So, he told them,
and he tells us, that belief in Christ’s resurrection was not a matter of the
rational mind at all. It was instead a matter of the heart. Now, at the most
basic level of course the heart is merely a bodily organ that pumps blood
through the body. Yet even we post-Enlightenment rationalists use the word
heart to mean more than that. We speak of the heart as the seat of love. We say
to one we truly love, “I love you with all my heart.” We say “I heart”
something or other, using a symbol for the heart here as a symbol of love. In
our culture we make a strong connection between the heart and the human emotion
of love.
In the ancient
worlds of the Bible the heart was a symbol of love like it is for us, but it
was much more than that too. The ancients saw the heart as the seat of all
human emotions. It was for them the location of all non-rationalistic aspects
of a human being. To believe something with your heart wasn’t to give cognitive
assent to the thing’s reality. It was to accept the truth of something far more
deeply than merely to think that the thing is true. It was to commit your whole
being to the thing you believe with your heart. It was to trust in the thing
you believe with your heart to feed your soul and never to let you down. That,
I think, is what Paul meant when he touted believing in the Resurrection not
with the mind but with the heart.
Now, Paul certainly
also believed that the Resurrection was a biographical fact about Jesus, but
heart belief doesn’t depend on the thing you believe being true as mere fact.
The Resurrection, like every great truth of faith, is a symbol and not merely a
fact. The stories of the Resurrection point beyond themselves to a divine
truth.[1]
They point first to the truth, that is so much more than fact, that Jesus
Christ is indeed the one God calls us to trust and to follow. Then they point
to the truth that with God death is never the end of the story, not Jesus’
story and not our stories. When we trust in the Resurrection as a symbol of
divine truth we live our relationship with God fully, richly, confidently, and
joyfully. We know the God Jesus came to show us, a God of boundless love and
limitless grace for us and for everyone.
So this year and
every year let us celebrate Easter without worrying about the factual truth of
the Resurrection. Sure. If it works for you, accept the Resurrection as
historical, biographical fact. There’s no harm in doing so. Yet whether you
accept the Resurrection as fact or not, let yourself enter into the truth of Resurrection
that is so much deeper than fact. Rejoice in the truth of the Resurrection that
is so much more, so much deeper, than a superficial fact. Let us all celebrate
with joy this Easter. Let us exclaim with energy and enthusiasm “Christ is
risen! He is risen indeed!”
[1] For
a more complete discussion of the meaning of the terms symbol and myth as the
language of faith see Sorenson, Thomas, Liberating Christianity, Overcoming
Obstacles to Faith in the New Millennium, Revised Edition. Chapter 3, “The Language
of Faith: Symbol and Myth.”
No comments:
Post a Comment