Easter day 4 April 2010
Isaiah 65. 17, 21-25 Acts of the Apostles 10. 34-43
Luke 24. 1-12
I have written in my letter in the April newsletter about the resurrection. In it I’m asking: what actually was the resurrection event? But, more importantly I ask: what does it mean? Then, as it’s recorded as happening, and in our own time. What is the resurrection? We talk about it rather glibly – as though we know what it’s all about and with some certainty we claim that we do or do not believe in it.
The trouble is we have only four accounts of this rising of a dead person and they’re all about the same person and the records of this state of being in each of the four accounts don’t really agree. And the fact is that the word resurrection is not actually used about Jesus, or this happening on the first day of the week, following the crucifixion in the gospels. The hopeful expectation of a raising up of just and innocent martyrs after death had been a source of Jewish longing for a couple of centuries by the time Jesus lived and it is language for Paul which seems very familiar. But it is difficult for our fact bound minds to get a handle on what actually happened on that morning.
I point out in my letter that we will never settle the question, at this late remove, of what form the resurrection took; whether it was a bodily event or is a metaphor for some new and utterly radical way of imagining the world. The question for me is what does it mean now? For people of faith the resurrection is not some event long past but a continuing and present reality.
Does the resurrection make a difference: in how people perceive the world; a difference in how they live in it; a difference in how people live together with their neighbour and on the face of this wondrous gift of God, the earth.
This was the trouble which Jesus created; he caused people to choose to live in radically different ways to the status quo. He lived differently and proclaimed that we needed to and, in fact, could live differently; loving God and neighbour as self; but he was killed for it. But his disciples, found that what Jesus said and did, especially after the gruelling events of the passion, gripped them and transformed them and the way they lived together.
Something stood out for me as we heard Luke’s passion on Friday. It was the record of what happened after Jesus uttered the cry, father into your hands I commend my spirit, and before Joseph of Arimathea asks to be able to take down Jesus’ body. Luke writes: when all the crowds who had gathered there for this spectacle saw what had taken place, they returned home, beating their breasts. But all his acquaintances, including the women who had followed him from Galilee, stood at a distance, watching these things. The followers of Jesus had rightly distanced themselves from the grizzly spectacle but could not drag themselves away and not see the events unfold – so they stood at the back, traumatised, but mesmerized by what was happening. Luke tells us that the way in which Jesus died profoundly affected those who had carried out the order to execute him and especially those gawkers who had come to jeer and satisfy their bloodlust. I sense in between the lines in Luke that something in the crowd’s transformation galvanised the followers of Jesus – maybe not yet clear to them but nevertheless part of the transformation that would be wrought by the time of the day of Pentecost. ... they stood at a distance, watching these things.
Last Sunday I described that great slaughterhouse that was the temple in Jerusalem. An immense religious sacrificial industry geared to keeping some God appeased. The temple comprised a hierarchy of areas that were increasingly exclusive. Firstly their was that whole immense temple terrace – 160 by 960 metres, which any person could enter; then there was a raised terrace which only Jews could enter, then there was an area which only Jewish males could enter, then there was the Holy Place which only the allotted priest could enter daily to offer incense, and then there was the Holy of Holies, an utterly empty space, which only one priest would enter on one day of the year. Now at the steps which went from the main terrace into the exclusively Jewish area there was a sign, carved in stone at each entrance to it, which read so: No foreigner may pass within the lattice and wall around the sanctuary. Whoever is caught, the guilt for the death which will follow will be his own" No gentile may approach God any closer than this – on pain of death.
We have heard the speech of Peter to a group of Gentiles from the Acts of the Apostles not terribly long after the Easter events. His understanding of the embrace of God, the reach of God has been utterly transformed, from a God who requires the execution of any Gentile, who might approach the temple God too closely, to the notion that God’s reach extends further than they could ever have imagined. Luke tells us that Peter addresses a crowd of Gentiles, saying: I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him. You know the message he sent to the people of Israel, preaching peace by Jesus Christ—he is Lord of all. No wonder the early disciples got in trouble because they began to comprehend that the reach of God was a reaching out like that of the waiting father; longing for the son to return.
This is the transformation that the resurrection of Jesus has wrought; that all boundaries have been broken down; that all notions of God’s partiality have been broken open in the raising up and vindication of this crucified one. This is the difference that the resurrection makes. A new creation has appeared around the memory of this crucified and risen one.
What I plan to focus on during the Easter Season is what it means as church to be the resurrection community. What I want us to wonder about as people of the Way in our own time is what does it mean to be transformed through the death and resurrection experience that comes from taking up our cross and following. This journey is not something we do by our own planning or effort but by travelling to the dark place and finding, by the grace of God, the way through our hells, we too are raised like Christ to newness of life. This is the gospel hope and our call to be Christ’s people in our own time.
Do you know this experience of the transforming grace that comes from being willing to travel through your own little, or sometimes not so little, deaths? Do you long for healing, but fear going to that dark place which you, nevertheless, know is your destiny, your cross? My understanding of the compelling nature of the early Christian community and dynamic Christian communities in our own time is the willingness of people to travel this path – to openly acknowledge and share our own sense of brokenness and our own experience of being touched and healed by the grace of God. The people of the resurrection are people who have followed in the pattern of Jesus and travelled to their own place of spiritual death and beyond to resurrection. May we be a people who know and proclaim this in our being together too.
The character of the people of Jesus gathered around the Lord’s table are ones who know that we gather sharing the tragedy and life-giving mystery of Jesus’ suffering and are renewed in it.