3rd Sunday of Easter

Every year there are certain things we look for in the early Spring, certain signs that tell us we are entering the season of Easter.  There may or may not be one last big snowfall in the mountains.  We may or may not get soaked by El Niño rains.  The dandelions may or may not suddenly show up in our front lawns and the lilies may or may not bloom in time for our Easter morning services.  But one thing you can absolutely count on as Easter approaches is that there will be a rash of articles showing up in our newspapers, our magazines and on social media debating whether or not Jesus actually rose from the dead.

In 1999, Marcus Borg and N.T. Wright collaborated on a book called The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions.  In an Easter season interview that same year with National Public Radio’s Chris Roberts, the two well-respected scholars summarized their very different understandings of the Resurrection.  

Marcus Borg said, “I do believe in the Resurrection of Jesus. I’m just skeptical that it involved anything happening to his corpse… The truth of Easter really has nothing to do with whether the tomb was empty on a particular morning 2,000 years ago or whether anything happened to the corpse of Jesus. I see the truth of Easter as grounded in the Christian experience of Jesus as a living spiritual reality of the present.”

N.T. Wright responded by saying, “When [the early followers of Jesus] believed in Resurrection, they were talking about what we would call some kind of embodiment. A disembodied Resurrection is a contradiction in terms…We can be completely confident on Easter day that the things we’re saying in church are true. For the very good reason that, historically speaking, it’s actually impossible to explain the rise of early Christianity without it.” ^[1]

I have to tell you that I really resonate with what Borg says about the truth of Easter being grounded in the Christian experience of Jesus as a living spiritual reality of the present.  Yes.  That should be the Easter experience we carry with us every single day—Jesus as a living spiritual reality alive in our own physical bodies.  

But when all is said and done, I think that Wright is right.  We must explain why the earliest Christians believed in Jesus Christ’s bodily Resurrection and risked hostility and danger to rapidly spread the message that he had been raised from the dead and appeared to them in person.  

People have had doubts about the Resurrection of Jesus from the very beginning, and one of the things I really appreciate about the New Testament is that these early witnesses to the Resurrection take those doubts seriously and meet them head on.  

The original ending of the Gospel of Mark, the earliest of the gospels written sometime around 69 or 70 C.E. during the height of the Jewish rebellion against Rome, plays on that doubt.  The gospel ends with the women finding the tomb empty except for a young stranger clothed in white who tells them that Jesus is risen and that they are to meet him in Galilee.  They run away terrified, which leaves the reader hanging, but also leaves us with the implied message that the risen Christ is out there in the world and we need to go find him. (16:8)

The Gospel of Matthew ends with the disciples doubting even as Jesus gives them the Great Commission.  In Matthew 28:16-17 we read, “Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them.  When they saw him, they worshiped him, but they doubted.” 

In the Gospel of Luke when the risen Jesus appears suddenly in the midst of the disciples in the upper room, they believe they are seeing a ghost, so Jesus says to them, “’Why are you frightened, and why do doubts arise in your hearts?  Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself. Touch me and see, for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.’  And when he had said this, he showed them his hands and his feet.  Yet for all their joy they were still disbelieving and wondering.”  To prove he is really physically, bodily there, he asks for something to eat.  Because ghosts don’t eat.

The Gospel of John, of course, gives us the story of Thomas who refuses to believe that Jesus is risen until he sees him with his own eyes and touches him with his own hands.  Thomas has become a paradigm for reasonable doubt but also for confession of the faith.  He is the one who first bows down before Jesus and says, “My Lord and my God.”

But the very earliest testimony to the Resurrection comes from the Apostle Paul, and he, too, directly addresses those who doubt.  In 1 Corinthians 15, written about 15 years before the Gospel of Mark, Paul wrote: “I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died because of our sins . . . and that he was buried and that he was raised on the third day . . .  and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.  Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep.  Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. For I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God.” 

Paul testified to his own encounter with the risen Jesus, and to the experience of a surprising number of others.  It’s almost as if he is saying, “If you don’t believe me, fine.  There are lots of others who have seen him, too.  Go ask one of them.”  

Paul goes on to speak to the doubt that some in Corinth are experiencing when he writes, “Now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say there is no resurrection of the dead?  If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised,  and if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation is in vain and your faith is in vain.  We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified of God that he raised Christ . . . If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.  But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep.”

N.T. Wright wrote, “In the New Testament Gospels’ depiction, the risen Jesus was no ghost, disembodied spirit or vision. Jesus did not have a merely resuscitated corpse but a body with uncanny new properties, yet a physical body nonetheless.”

In that resurrected body, which was the same but not quite the same as the body he died in, Jesus cooked fish on the beach for his friends.  He left footprints on the dusty road to Emmaus as he walked, unrecognized, beside his friends and opened their minds to understand the scriptures so that they could see that everything that had happened to him was in perfect continuity with what God had been doing all along.  They recognized him when he broke bread with his wounded hands.

In his resurrected body with uncanny new properties, he appeared behind locked doors and offered his wounds for inspection.  He ate a piece of broiled fish to prove he wasn’t a ghost, and in so doing, as Debi Thomas wrote, he turned their trauma into communion.

We need the Resurrection.  We need an embodied Jesus because we are embodied.  I love how Debi Thomas expressed this:  

“I know that it might be unfashionable to ‘need’ the resurrection.  Isn’t this the criticism so often leveled at Christians?  That our faith is a crutch, an opiate, a refusal to face the harsher aspects of reality?  But here, too, I will bear witness and insist that I need Jesus’s bodily resurrection precisely because I, too, am embodied.  As the ancient Psalmists and prophets so beautifully describe it, my spiritual life is inseparable from my physical one: my heart melts like wax, my throat grows parched, my bones go out of joint, my tears cover my pillow, and my groans, sighs, and moans reach wordlessly for God.  Every experience I have of the holy is grounded in my body.

“And so I need a Savior with a body like mine — a body that adores, worships, and celebrates, but also a body that fails, ages, aches, breaks, and dies.  A body that carries wounds and scars, visible and invisible, fresh and faded.  A body that is profoundly and often terrifyingly vulnerable to forces beyond my ability to mitigate or control.  A body that is, for the most part, defenseless against injury, violence, illness, injustice, and cruelty.  A body that might die — as Jesus himself died — too soon, out of season, away from loved ones, in random, inexplicable, cruelly traumatic circumstances too frightening to contemplate.  I need a God who resurrects bodies.”^[2] 

I know I need Resurrection.  Ten years ago when I was diagnosed with prostate cancer I found myself confronting my mortality, especially since both my mom and my dad died of cancer.  My surgeon assured me that my chances of coming through the surgery and radiation were probably good.  Don’t you love the language doctors use once the “C” word has been spoken?  You hear the word “probably” a lot.  The point is, once the word “Cancer” has been spoken, it sharpens your focus.  Things that had been theoretical either become the life raft you cling to or they get discarded.  I realized during that time that, while I’m willing to entertain and discuss all kinds of ideas and theories about Resurrection, for me personally a psychological or philosophical understanding isn’t enough to carry the weight of my hopes and fears.  I need something with some bones in it, some skin on it.  And I’m not alone in that.

I have seen a lot of death in my decades as a pastor.  I have accompanied people up to death’s door and held their hand as they crossed the threshold.  Resurrection is what has given many of them the courage to walk peacefully and fearlessly through that door.  And Resurrection is what has given me the courage and confidence to walk through the valley of the shadow with them.

And that’s the point.  Resurrection gave the earliest followers of Jesus the courage to risk hostility and danger so they could carry on his work of proclaiming that there was a better way to live, a better way to be community, a way to live in the commonwealth of God’s kindness and justice.

Jesus was a real physical person who was tortured to death in a first-century lynching.  The state and the religious authorities colluded to crucify him, to physically destroy him and in so doing to destroy his opposition to their power.  His crucifixion was a political statement.  What they failed to see and understand, though, was that in Jesus there was a power and authority that dwarfed any power or authority they imagined they had over him.

For that reason,  nothing less than a bodily resurrection would do to nullify their violence and call their power into question.  It was his physical body they killed.  It would have to be his physical body that would proclaim their work undone.  

The resurrection of Jesus was God’s way of saying that violence will not have the last word.  Pain will not have the last word.  Fear will not have the last word.  Anger will not have the last word. Disease will not have the last word.  Suffering will not have the last word.  Death will not have the last word.

The Resurrection of Jesus was God’s way of saying that love, grace, forgiveness, kindness, hope and faith—these things will have the last word.  

The resurrection was God affirming that Life will have the last word.  

And will be the last word. 

Through Jesus Christ, our Lord.

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^[1] The Resurrection of Jesus; Religion and Ethics Newsweekly; NPR/PBS, March 26, 1999

^[2] Embodied; Debi Thomas, http://www.journeywithjesus.net; April 11, 2021