In 2001, St. Catharines author
Richard B. Wright won the Governor-General’s Award and the Giller Prize for his
novel Clara Callan. Wright’s subsequent novel Adultery did not
receive nearly the same critical acclaim. Yet it contains an incident to spark
our thinking this afternoon. It tells the story of Daniel Fielding, a Toronto
editor who has an affair with a colleague while on a business trip to England.
A transient murders the young woman near a car park. When her body is shipped
back to Canada, Daniel attends the funeral, much to his wife’s chagrin.
The priest stood by the open grave, her
grayish hair blowing across her face as she held the fluttering pages of the
prayer book in her hands. The coffin rested on the apparatus that would lower
it into the earth. “In the midst of life we are in death,” she said…
Forasmuch as it hath pleased
Almighty God of his great mercy to receive unto himself the soul of our dear
sister here departed, we therefore commit her body to the ground, earth to
earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, in sure and certain hope of the
Resurrection to eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ; who shall change
our mortal body that it may be like unto his glorious body, according to the
mighty working whereby he is able to subdue all things to himself.[1]
Fielding was listening carefully
to the serious, old words, to the stately luster of this High Anglican language
from over four hundred years ago. Yet to believe such words at the beginning of
the twenty first century seemed to him preposterous.
So let me ask, is it preposterous
to believe such words in 2006? What does it mean to say “in sure and certain
hope of the resurrection to eternal life”? Can we believe that “the Lord Jesus
Christ will change our mortal body so that it may be like his glorious body”?
As you may be aware there are a
number of ways of understanding the resurrected Jesus. There always have been
differing interpretations of the Easter event from the early days of the Church
until now. However in the past few decades, serious questions have been raised
concerning the traditional understanding that in some way God raised Jesus from
the dead, signified by an empty tomb and attested to by a variety of first hand
witnesses.
The fictional character Daniel
Fielding is not the first person to raise objections to the resurrection hope.
Arguably, the most prominent name within today’s Christian community to raise
similar objections is Bishop John Spong. Particularly in our United Church circles,
Spong’s writings have carried significant influence. Let me state my bias at
the beginning and say that I see the Christian faith through much different
lenses than Spong.
For example, I find it highly
unlikely that Spong would ever use as a title of an Easter message my personal
favourite from twenty-eight years of preaching on Easter Sunday, “Dead Man
Walking”. Nor do I think that he would
use the title that is rattling around my mind for this or some subsequent year,
“Jesus Is Alive, Elvis Is Alive, What’s the Difference?” By the way, if you are preaching this Easter
and need a title, those are on the house… a little bonus for attending the
symposium.
So let’s see what bishop Spong actually said. Here in part is his
explanation of the Easter event:
“…Let me be specific about the
following parts of the resurrection story: An angel did not
descend from the sky on the wings
of an earthquake in order to roll away the stone from the door of the tomb in
order to make the resurrection announcement. A deceased man did not walk out of
his grave physically alive three days after his execution by crucifixion.
(There goes “Dead Man Walking”) The risen Jesus did not walk, talk, eat, teach
or invite his disciples to handle his physical flesh…These legendary aspects of
the Easter story are no longer viewed as literally true in the world of
Biblical scholarship. We are not going to make sense out of the meaning of Easter if we have to defend
the accuracy of these pre-modern details…”
Yet, even if one is skeptical of
these details can one with credibility still argue that nothing of profound
significance actually occurred? I do
not think so. There was something powerful and life-changing about the Easter
experience that the earliest Christians could not deny. That something must be
examined deeply even as we move far beyond miraculous claims of erupting
supernatural power… Easter seems to have captured people inside a sense of
transcendence that was not bound by time. It removed the barriers impeding human
consciousness, and it emerged in a startling realization that a life-changing
power was connected in an intimate way with Jesus. That is the reality that
cries out to be explored.
Easter dawned when a small group
of people felt that their lives and their consciousness had been expanded to
new dimensions. .. It was real beyond dispute, and yet no words in the human
vocabulary could capture that reality. So our task when trying to understand
the meaning of Easter is not to look at the ancient descriptions, but rather to
examine the effects that occurred in the lives of those who claimed this
experience.
Those effects are seen when the
disciples who had forsaken Jesus in fear and abandoned him in cowardice
suddenly became heroic, fearless people ready to die for the truth that had
possessed them … (Bishop John Spong, “Resurrection- Myth or Reality”,
www.searchforjesus.com.)
So, Spong would say, don’t concern
yourself with the details. Jesus did not really come out of the grave but God
brought Jesus to life in the disciples and still does in us today. Spong
emphasizes a point that is a common denominator in almost all who examine the
Easter event and that is the changed lives of the disciples. Whatever one understands
about the resurrection no one debates the changed lives of Jesus’ followers. My
question for Spong would be, “Can there be any better explanation for the
changed lives of the disciples than the historic understanding of Jesus
resurrection?
A second popular theologian who
takes Easter seriously but has doubts about the resurrected Jesus is Marcus
Borg. The March 2006 issue of the United Church Observer has an interesting
story about Borg and “emerging Christianity”.
Borg is Spong’s theological cousin. With N.T. Wright, Borg has
coauthored an enlightening book titled The
Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions. Borg states:
As a child, I took it for granted that
Easter meant that Jesus literally rose from the tomb. I now see Easter very
differently. For me, it is irrelevant whether or not the tomb was empty.
Whether Easter involved something remarkable happening to the physical body of
Jesus is irrelevant. My argument is not that we know the tomb was not empty or
that nothing happened to his body, but simply that it doesn’t matter. The truth
of Easter, as I see it is not at stake in this issue…
For me, the historical ground of Easter
is very simple: the followers of Jesus, both then and now, continued to
experience Jesus as a living reality after his death. In the early Christian
community, these experiences included visions or apparitions of Jesus…Thus I
see the post-Easter Jesus as an experiential reality. Christians throughout the
centuries have continued to experience Jesus as a living spiritual reality, a figure
of the present, not simply a memory from the past. The truth of Easter is
grounded in these experiences, not in what happened (or didn’t happen) on a
particular Sunday almost two thousand years ago.”[2]
Notice the similarities of the
argument: the physical resurrection is not understandable or not important to
the Easter event. What is important is the response of the disciples, and of
course, our response today as current disciples. My hesitation with writers
like Borg and Spong is that it seems to me they are like the ancient Greeks who
thought that there may or may not be life after death but one thing that
doesn’t happen is resurrection. Dead people stay dead. Therefore there cannot
be a resurrection. But is that really true? Is Daniel Fielding right?
Over the years on an Easter Sunday
morning, I have occasionally quoted the late Bruce Marsh, a CBC newscaster and
elder at Deer Park United Church in Toronto. In the mid-seventies shortly
before his death, Marsh claimed: “You can quibble about the virgin birth and
still be a Christian. But you must believe in the resurrection. If you don’t
believe in the resurrection you aren’t going to make it.”
I don’t think that I would want to put the issue that starkly
anymore. I would not want to say that you have to believe one particular way to
be a Christian. There are two visions of the meaning of Jesus. There is more
than one way of understanding the cross. There is more than one way of
understanding the resurrection. And even if personally, I hold a different
position, I am still thankful that writers like Borg and Spong and the whole progressive Christianity
movement have opened the discussion of the Christian faith to many people who
would not otherwise give Jesus a second thought.
The so-called progressive
Christianity movement is not all that new.
During my days studying New Testament Theology at Queens Theological
Seminary one of the highly recommended books was Günther Bornkamm’s Jesus of Nazareth. A couple of weeks ago I pulled it off my shelf for a re-read. But it was thirty
years ago while on my first summer mission field that I first read these words
from Bornkamm:
The event of Christ’s resurrection from
the dead, his life and eternal reign, are things removed from historical
scholarship. History cannot ascertain and establish conclusively the facts
about them as it can with other events of the past. The last historical fact
available to them is the Easter faith of the disciples…Wherever there were
early Christian communities, and however varied their message and theology
were, they are all united in believing and acknowledging the risen Lord… the
Apostle Paul says that faith absolutely stands or falls with this message of
Christ’s resurrection: “If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching 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, whom he did not raise up” (1
Cor.15:14)…
There would be no gospel, not one
account, no letter in the New Testament, no faith, no Church, no worship, no
prayer in Christendom to this day without the message of the resurrection of
Christ, even so difficult and indeed impossible is it to gain a satisfactory
idea of how the Easter events took place…The resurrection message and the
resurrection faith in the early church do not depend on uniform versions of the
manner of the Easter event, or the physical nature of the risen Christ… But it
is just as certain that the appearances of the risen Christ and the word of his
witnesses have in the first place given rise to this faith. What became clear
and grew to be a certainty for the Church was this, that God himself had
intervened with his Almighty hand in the wicked and rebellious life of the
world, and had wrested this Jesus of Nazareth from the power of sin and death
which had risen against him, and set him up as Lord of the world. Thus
according to the interpretation of the early Church, Easter is above all else
God’s acknowledgement of this Jesus, whom the world refused to acknowledge, and
to whom even his disciples were unfaithful.[3]
The Bishop Spong’s and the Marcus
Borg’s of our world stand on the shoulders of theologians like Günther
Bornkamm. From their perspective what
is at stake is not the resurrection itself but the Easter faith of the
disciples. If that is enough for you, God bless you. But it has never been an
adequate explanation for me. Why would the first apostles risk their lives for
a vision? Maybe it was just a hallucination? Why didn’t the Jewish leaders produce
the body and stop this Jesus movement in its tracks? Sure there is a sucker
born every minute, no disputing that quip, but what did those first believers
have to gain by continuing a charade if Jesus was still cold in his tomb?
I find myself asking with the
Apostle Paul, if Christ has not been raised, why bother? Call me cynical but
why mess with this Christianity stuff if Christ has not been raised? If the resurrection is a nice idea but not a
historical fact, I’m going golfing on Sundays. If Jesus is still in a tomb
somewhere, I’ve not interested in presiding at any more funerals. I just don’t
have the heart for it. If I’m going to
believe in a god, I want one who can raise the dead! As a matter of fact I carry
around in my wallet a small picture that one day I may have tattooed on my
forearm. At the age of 53 I am not convinced about getting my first tattoo but
if I do it will be this picture of a stone rolled away from a tomb.
To be honest this has been my
attitude from the get-go. I was delighted in Doug Crichton’s
“Systematic Theology” class at Queens to read Wolfhart Pannenberg’s vigorous defense of the
resurrection. As a newly ordained minister in1977, I requested as one of my
ordination gifts George Eldon Ladd’s book I
Believe in the Resurrection of Jesus . When Lee Strobel published his best
seller The Case for Christ, I bought one of the first copies. Two
years ago here at St. Andrews; we gave away 200 copies of the excerpt from that
book, The Case for Easter. So I have continued reading books that have
convinced me of the historical reality of the resurrection.
Consider the question of the
appearances of Jesus. Those followers who first encountered the risen Jesus
were inevitably shocked, shaken and perturbed. It couldn’t have been otherwise.
Sometimes recognition dawned slowly, other times they doubted. But what else
would we expect? As George Ladd describes it:
Jesus resurrection body was not of this
world; it belonged to the age to Come. Jesus resurrection body was no longer
subject to the laws of time and space. He had entered the world of God. But
what can the historian know of a world to come? What can a historian know of
the world of God? These are matters of Christian faith, not of historical
investigation. …Furthermore, the resurrection itself did not mean the
revivification of a dead corpse; it meant the radical transformation of the
body of Jesus from the world of nature to the world of God. Nature knows of no
bodies like Jesus’ resurrection body; it was utterly unique…[4]
Or as N.T. Wright puts it: “It is
silly to think that 1st-century Christians were ignorant of the fact
that dead people stayed dead. They knew this but were convinced that Jesus was
the one exception.”
The experience of meeting the
risen Jesus was literally beyond words. So we are left with the Gospel accounts
of stammering witnesses who know what they saw but do not know how to
adequately describe him. Peter had no doubt whatsoever that Jesus had appeared
to him, but could describe this appearance no further. At the end of the day
the appearance was so intensely personal that its full significance could not
be conveyed in words and would only be lost in the telling. He could only say,
“Jesus is risen. He has appeared to me.”
The same was true of the women. At first they were not certain of whom
or what they saw. Their account was confused and because the testimony of women
did not count anyway it that time period, it was not accepted by the other
disciples. When all was said and done they could do no other than affirm, “I
have seen Jesus. He is risen from the dead.”
When he was still known as Joseph
Ratzinger, the theologian now known as Pope Benedict XVI wrote:
First of all it is quite clear that
after his resurrection Christ did not go back to his previous earthly life, as
we are told the young man of Nain and Lazarus did. He rose again to definitive
life, which is no longer governed by the chemical and biological laws and
therefore stands outside the possibility
of death, in the eternity conferred by love…That is why it is so difficult,
indeed absolutely impossible, for the gospels to describe the encounter with
the risen Christ; that is why they can only stammer when thy speak of these
meetings and seem to provide contradictory descriptions of them…People
recognize the Lord and yet do not recognize him again; people touch him, and
yet he is untouchable; he is the same and yet quite different.[5]
In the space of this talk, I can
not go into all of the convincing details that confirm for me my initial belief
in the historicity of the resurrected Jesus. It has been fun on certain Easter
mornings to preach on themes like “The Case of the Missing Body” and “CSI:
Easter” as I did a few years ago. And I was fascinated to learn, three years
ago, that one of my theological heroes N.T. Wright had finally published his
opus on the resurrection, an eight hundred page tome, The Resurrection Of The Son Of God.
In November 2003, my wife and I
went on a week’s vacation to celebrate our thirtieth wedding anniversary and I
carted along this dense volume. On numerous mornings, I was the first guy up at
the resort, sitting over a coffee and croissant in the dining room, gradually
working my way through this book that Richard Ostling of the Associated Press
called “the most monumental defense of the Easter heritage in decades”. Please
rest assured, I did not spend the whole week reading about the resurrection.
And I’m not going to use an 800 page quote this afternoon…I considered it …but
I want to be home for dinner.
In one of his lectures, Tom Wright
summarizes his thoughts:
What can the historian say that will
account for the early Christians’ claim that Jesus of Nazareth had been raised
from the dead, the explanation they themselves offer for their drastic
modification of the Jewish hope?
There has been no shortage of hypotheses designed to explain why the
early Christians really did believe that Jesus really had been raised from the
dead. These come in many shapes and
sizes, but most of them feature one of three types of explanation. (1) Jesus did not really die; he somehow
survived. (2) The tomb was empty, but
nothing else happened. (3) The disciples
had visions of Jesus, but without there being an empty tomb.
(1) The first can be disposed of
swiftly. Roman soldiers knew how to
kill people especially rebel kings.
First-century Jews knew the difference between a survivor and someone
newly alive.
(2) The second is only a little more complicated. Faced with an empty tomb, but with no other
evidence, the disciples would have known the answer; the body had been stolen
by someone. These things happened. They were not expecting Jesus to rise again;
by itself, an empty tomb would prove as little to them as it would to us.
(3) Visions were frequent and well known — including visions of someone
recently dead. We did not have to wait
for modern medicine, psychology and pastoral records to tell us that these
things happen….To cut a long story very short: to explain why the early Christians
really did believe that Jesus really had been raised from the dead, we must
postulate three things: Jesus really had been dead; the tomb really was empty,
and it really was his tomb; they really did see, meet and talk with a figure
who was not only demonstrably the crucified Jesus but who seemed to be in some
ways different …Can we go beyond this?
What then can and must be said?
Historical investigation, I propose, brings us to the point where we must
say that the tomb previously housing a thoroughly dead Jesus was empty, and
that his followers saw and met someone they were convinced was this same Jesus,
bodily alive though in a new, transformed fashion. The empty tomb on the one hand and the convincing appearances of
Jesus on the other are the two conclusions the historian must draw. I do not think that history can force us to
draw any particular further deductions beyond these two phenomena; the
conclusion the disciples drew is there for the taking, but it is open to us, as
it was to them, to remain cautious.
However, the elegance and simplicity of explaining the two outstanding
phenomena, the empty tomb and the visions, by means of one another, ought to be
obvious. Were it not for the
astounding, and world-view-challenging, claim that is thereby made, I think
everyone would long since have concluded that this was the correct historical
result. If some other account explained
the rise of Christianity as naturally, completely and satisfyingly as does the
early Christians’ belief, while leaving normal worldviews intact, it would be
accepted without demur.
That, I believe, is the result of the investigation I have
conducted. As far as I am concerned,
the historian may and must say that all other explanations for why Christianity
arose, and why it took the shape it did, are far less convincing as
historical explanations than the one the early Christians themselves offer:
that Jesus really did rise from the dead on Easter morning, leaving an empty
tomb behind him. The origins of
Christianity, the reason why this new movement came into being and took the
unexpected form it did, and particularly the strange mutations it produced
within the Jewish hope for resurrection and the Jewish hope for a Messiah, are
best explained by saying that something happened, two or three days after
Jesus’ death, for which the accounts in the four gospels are the least
inadequate expression we have.
Of course, there are several reasons why people may not want, and often
refuse, to believe this. The
historian’s task is not to force people to believe. It is to make it clear that the sort of reasoning historians
characteristically employ — inference to the best explanation, tested
rigorously in terms of the explanatory power of the hypothesis thus generated —
points strongly towards the bodily resurrection of Jesus; and to make
clear, too, that from that point on the historian alone cannot help. When you’re dealing with worldviews, every
community and every person must make their choices in the dark, even if there
is a persistent rumor of light around the next corner.[6]
That is it isn’t it? A persistent rumor of light, of those who with Mary
keep saying, “I have seen the Lord.” (John 20:18) Or of those with Paul who keep saying, “he appeared to me also.”
(1 Cor.15:8)
Let’s listen to one of the modern witnesses. As a personal
aside, let me say, since my days at Queens Theological College, I have read
with great benefit to my soul the sermons of Stan Lucyk. In his Easter sermon to the congregation of
Timothy Eaton Memorial Church in 1981, Stan Lucyk said:
It was the winter of 1947/8. I was a teenager, grade Eleven at
collegiate. I’m not sure at all about my motivations for attending church at
that time, not having been inside a church door for the first 14 years of my
life while living in an isolated rural hamlet in northwestern Saskatchewan. But
there I was, an usher at the evening service at North Battleford, Saskatchewan,
at Third Avenue church, waiting for the evening service to end so that the fun
and games of the Young People’s union could get under way. The sermon was over.
We rose to sing the final hymn:
Rise up O men of God,
Have done with lesser things:
Give heart and soul and mind and strength
To serve the king of kings.
And with that, a mystery I have never been able to explain but one which
has continued to haunt and bless: an overwhelming conviction of one tapping me
on the shoulder and saying, “You’re mine!” Despite the times I have denied the
implications of that experience for my life, despite the times the sinful self
within me wished it would go away, the experience of the divine Presence has
been the most crucial, formative, unrelenting reality of my life,
From that I work back. That experience verifies what the New testament
claims- namely, that when a community structures itself around the word of
scripture, when that community comes together to listen to that word and to
conform it—then Christ, as the Spirit (therefore unseen as the wind is unseen,
but as near and as life-giving as the very air we breathe) will draw near and
make his presence known. He is not held by the tomb- he is alive as the Spirit.
Now, if one talks about proof of the resurrection, it can be in this
sense only- that you have the history of the Church across two thousand years,
people in every place who claim that what the New Testament said could happen
has been validated by their experience: they have been encountered by the
living Christ! That leaves us with two alternatives: they have been deluded, or suffer from hallucinations or mental
illnesses in need of much compassion--either that- or there is validity and
supreme joy in their testimony that they have experienced the risen Christ.[7]
I wish that Daniel Fielding had been able to hear that Easter message. It
might have made a difference in his response at the open grave.
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