Resurrection: What? And so what?
“Jesus said to him (Thomas): ‘Do you believe because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.”
“If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain.... But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead....So it is with the resurrection of the dead....It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body.”
April 18, 1982
Put up, or shut up! Bluntly, this is the situation Christians are in during the Easter season. Is there anything to this God business or not? Or are things really the way they seem to be so much of the time? That is, the most powerful forces are death and the ones who have the most money and the biggest guns.
Who better than Thomas is there to identify with in the resurrection accounts of Jesus in the New Testament? Thomas did not want to be Doubting Thomas. He simply wanted a reason to believe Jesus was alive after all. And does not Thomas live inside every one of us here? We want to believe that God is for real, that we can count on him before death and after death, that being a caring Christian in a dog-eat-dog-world doesn't make us a sucker. But the doubts come. We don't want to doubt. We want a reason to believe.
So, Preacher, put up or shut up. Resurrection? What are you talking about? And so what, what difference does it make?
Resurrection: What? Something happened, just what remains a mystery. When all good sense said that Jesus was a dead and gone dreamer, another one who had lost to the ways of the world, like trying to spit against the wind, some people experienced him very alive and
close.
It may surprise you to know that the very first people to read the Gospel of John's account of Thomas were in the same boat you and I are in. The Gospel was written some 75 years after the life of Jesus, three generations. Like us, they had not been first hand spectators either.
What did they have to go on? Like us, simply the witness of the people who experienced the resurrected Lord? But wait a minute. We post-Watergate people know what geniuses humans are at scams and tricks. Maybe the disciples just cooked up the resurrection story to save face after the dismal death and defeat of Jesus.
But this does not quite wash. It is pretty clear that the disciples cut out fast after Jesus was arrested. Peter chickened out before the rooster crowed three times: "Jesus, Jesus who? Never heard of the man.” People running to save their necks do not tend to return to save their faces. But something happened that made them come back. Each disciple finally died spreading the Jesus news in the far corners of that old Greco-Roman world. You don't die for a hoax.
What about the women, Mary Magdalene and the rent? Let's face it. In a time and world where they really knew how to keep women in their place, no one would try to cook up a convincing resurrection gimmick using women as witnesses. True, it was the women who had guts enough to stick around after Jesus was crucified, when the tough masculine disciples were in shall we say strategic retreat. (And this should have something to say about just who is the stronger and weaker sex, but that is another sermon.) Yet each of the Gospel writers attest in their own way that the women at the empty tomb were taken totally by surprise at what happened. It scared them out of their wits!
Something happened. Just what will probably always be a mystery. But something happened so compelling and convincing that lily-livered disciples came back to serve a Lord they had been afraid to claim as a friend. The women who were first scared out of their wits became witnesses of the good news.
Something happened, but what exactly? Was Jesus a resuscitated corpse? After all, we have a story of Thomas putting his hands in the wounds today. But just a few verses before Thomas' coming to faith, we have Mary Magdalene encountered by the post-resurrection Jesus. She does not recognize him by sight until he calls her name. In Luke we have some travelers on the way to a place called Emmaus. The risen Jesus walks with them, talks with them, and explains some scripture to them. Yet they do not recognize him until they eat and recognize him by the special way he breaks the bread. Paul lumps himself with Peter and the rest as a witness of the resurrected Lord. But his experience does not occur until 15 or so years later on the road to Damascus and his conversion. His experience is of a voice coming from a blinding light.
Putting the Thomas encounter together with that of the others who required more than simple physical proximity to Jesus to know who he was, we can say that the Jesus experienced as alive was the same Jesus who had died, yet the same with a difference.
Remember how Paul talks about "physical bodies" and "spiritual bodies" in that passage in I Corinthians 15? If you are not careful you will miss something. He does not speak about physical bodies and spiritual souls. He talks about bodies: earthly bodies and resurrection bodies. Bodies just the same, but bodies with a mysterious-inexplicable-qualitative difference.
Paul, John and the rest, I believe, are speaking about an experience of Jesus that is MORE real not less real than a resuscitated corpse, something more dramatic and durable than a rotty-body that gets up and walks around scaring folks. Just because we do not have a logical cubbyhole in our brain for something does not necessarily make it false. Maybe, the big truths of life – not the little truths like 2 + 2 = 4 – but the big life and death truths of life – like love over hate, life over death – really are more than our mental circuits can hold. Maybe our brain synapse circuits are just not wired to hold the big truths and therefore maybe this is why the truths that really count have to spill over our brain and into our hearts.
Resurrection: what? Something happened. Just what is a mystery. But, you know, you just can't nail Jesus down. You just can't keep him nailed on a cross or pinned into a neat concept. Something happened. Scaredy cat disciples came back for something.
Resurrection: So What? Okay, preacher, maybe something did happen. So what? What does it have to do with getting by in 1982? Two biggie answers to the “so what?” question. One has to do with what we have to hope for after death. The other has to do with the difference the resurrection has for the way we live before death.
After Death: In Biblical fashion, sometimes it is better for the last to be first, so what about death's other side?
There is a theological-biblical scholar word that can help us here. The word is "prolepsis". A "prolepsis" is something that happens in the now to show you the way it is going to be in the then of the future. For Christians, the resurrection of Jesus is a proleptic event. The resurrection of Jesus is God's way of showing what he has in store for people who live and love like Jesus. The resurrection prolepsis – the future thrown into the now – creates trust in us that death just cannot hold for long one who lives and loves like Jesus. The mysterious something that happened to Jesus becomes the bedrock of our hope that God's love does not let us go, even when the hell of evil and the darkness of death lunge at us.
Some of you have heard me share this account from the life of Albert Schweitzer. Schweitzer as you remember was an accomplished musician, Biblical scholar (we still used his New Testament books when I was in seminary), pastor, and finally medical doctor. With his skills he could have rendered great help to humans and lived himself comfortably in Paris, Berlin, or London. Yet he spent most of his life in a hot, insect-infested jungle mission in what was then known as French Equatorial Africa. Shortly before his death, an enterprising reporter made his way to interview the old doctor at Lambarene where he had ministered as doctor and pastor to the people for years. The reporter said, "For you to have given up so much of the comforts of life on earth, you really must have a good idea of what heaven will be like. The old man answered: "No, I really don't know what will happen after death. But whatever God does about it will be alright with me.
That's resurrection faith. We don't know what happens after death, but we know who does. Because God, not death, was in the end with Jesus, we trust that God in the end, not death, will be with us. And whatever God does about it will be alright. Friends, that's faith you can live on and die on.
Before Death: What difference does the resurrection mystery make?
Back in the 1300's, the Roman Church with its Pope, Cardinals, and Bishops, held great power over all areas of life. Even Kings, princes, and knights had to be very respectful of the ecclesiastical leaders if they wanted to keep their land and power. One can imagine what awe common people must have felt for these leaders of heaven and earth. Yet, around the first of each year, there was celebrated what was called the Feast of Fools Day. On that day, nothing was held sacred. Everything was turned upside down. The ill-paid and ill-clad lower clergy put on the clothes of the Abbots, Bishops, and Cardinals and strutted about. In worship services, the dressed up monks would substitute gibberish for the usual stately and unctious Latin chants. In the choir, people dressed up like animals and would sing bawdy songs. Some people might play dice in the middle of the service. The grand finale would be a parade through the town with someone dressed up like the Pope drawn about in an ox cart. As the mock Pope gave his "blessings", the people shouted insults and threw rotten tomatoes at him. Strange. The Feast of Fools Day was the one day a year when those usually last could be first, when people got some relief from the burden of business as usual, when people got the message that things do not have to be the way they are or the way they seem. Even though the next day things were back to "normal", things probably were not really ever the same because of that one day.
In a way, Easter is a sort of Feast of Fools celebration. Not a time for being bawdy, but a time to consider that things may not have to be the way they so overwhelmingly seem to be most of the time. Most of the time, people are so afraid of dying, they never really live. Easter gives us that foolishness of faith to just believe that God is in charge of our lives and deaths, despite appearances to the contrary. Most days, we know that if you want to get ahead you have to get the other guy before he gets you, that you have to break some eggs, step on some heads, to get ahead. But the resurrection foolishness gives us the crazy idea that maybe the power of Christlike loving really is more powerful in the end than the power of the buck and bomb. After all, Paul did say that the foolishness of God is wiser than the wisdom of men.
The Feast of Fools in Europe came and went a long time ago. But there is another observance that has been around each Easter Eve for 15 or 16 centuries. It happens each year at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. The dark windowless church is built on what many believe is the site of the tomb in which Jesus was laid. About midday on the day before Easter, a number of priests descend into the crypt as hundreds of people wait above in the dark church. A torch is lit and as the torch lights the lamps of the priests in the crypt, they in turn begin to light the candle each worshipper has in her/his hand. In this way, the people reenact the light the resurrection of Jesus kindles in a dark frightened world.
Christian people like you and me are to live our lives like walking resurrection candles into the dark and deadness into our predicaments and problems. For John writing to the early Christians three generations after Jesus, Thomas, Mary, Peter and the rest were witnesses of God's death and evil conquering love. Now you and I are the witnesses to God's death defying love in the world. And there are only two choices. We either light candles in the darkness or we blow out what light there is.
The resurrection has much to do with life before death. We suffer deadness in our relationships because we have betrayed someone or they have let us down. Resurrection light on this side of death happens each time new life and love are kindled by forgiveness. I see walking corpses every day. People who are dead on their feet because they feel no one really cares. Just a phone call, a card, or hug can resurrect someone. People now are lighting some resurrection candles in the world today for peace. Bombs kill. Only God's way of taking risks of love can bring life. Remember it is the way of Jesus we celebrate at Easter, not Caesar.
Resurrection: what? Something happened, strange and mysterious which turned cowards into God's heroes. So what? The future has come for a moment into our now. And that makes all the difference. We can face death with the faith of a Schweitzer: "I don't know what happens after death. But whatever God does about it will be alright. " We become God's resurrection people bringing new life to each other with forgiveness, caring even when it costs us to care, and willing to wage the death defying battle for peace. The time is now for you and me to light our candles. Not tomorrow. Today. Amen.