The Truth about Resurrection

       This political season has produced a number of candidates who claim to be Christian and trumpet that above everything else.  Like their faith covers over all of the defects that seem to trouble their candidacy.  It doesn’t take me long to get very tired of listening to them.  When Christianity’s proclamation becomes essentially self-righteousness, it loses most, if not all of its appeal.

Jesus resurrection is an incredible event.  It is no wonder that the disciples had a hard time believing it.  Jesus shows up on the road to Emmaus and talks to two strangers who were simply on their way.  By, as the Gospel says, “opening the scriptures” to them, he convinces them that he is somebody special.  When he breaks bread with them when they invite him to dinner, they recognize that he is the Jesus who was crucified and died on the cross, but who has come back from the dead and has been with them on the road.  He then appears to his disciples and shows them his wounds and eats some fish in their presence.  This is an astounding account of the resurrection with Jesus offering proof of his existence.

Unfortunately, we don’t have that kind of scientific evidence before us to prove the resurrection beyond argument.  We are stuck with the problem of faith in simply believing in the truth of Jesus’ resurrection without anything but the accounts in the scriptures to bolster our faith.  I know that there are many, many Christians who have a problem with this and who wonder over and over again at the possibility that the resurrection of Jesus may not have happened quite as we have heard.  This leads us to a shortage of faith when death and loss catch up with us in our lives.  How is it that we reconcile the death of a loved one with the shortage of proof of resurrection in our feeble faith?  What is it that we need to do to see new life beyond the grave?

Death is not only physical death, but it also devastates life in other ways.  We become addicted to alcohol, drugs or the making of money and become lost to each other because of our behavior.  When these things happen to us, we sometimes become  estranged from each other and we need to be resurrected back into human community.  Encouraging resurrection is what I believe to be the function of Christian fellowship.  To do this, we need to keep track of each other, to know when lives are going off the rails and without harsh judgment to be present with each other to offer a way back to life when the real nourishment of life seems to be lost.

What really annoys me about the Christians on the campaign trail is the way that they ignore Jesus’ call to compassion and caring for the poor and the outcast in favor of the rich and the secure.  It is easy to court the votes of the rich, who will supply the candidates with needed money.  It is harder to be cognizant of the sometimes extreme needs of the poor who not only have no money for the candidates but also do not have enough for themselves or their families.  I understand the desire to cater to the rich.  They provide good things for those who care for them; but  to ignore the poor is not only a problem for the poor, it is a problem for all of us.  Jesus asked us to care for them because nobody else will.  That is the essence of Christianity and it is also a guide to resurrection.  When we help people out of poverty and need, we provide a way for them to celebrate life.  What better mission can we have?

The Wonder of Forgiveness

       What a wonderful Easter we had.  Our kids, our oldest grandchild and our great-grandchild were here with their spouses.  Rosie cooked a spectacular leg of lamb, everyone brought something for the dinner, and we enjoyed each other and celebrated the day together.

We got to church in the morning and celebrated the day of the Resurrection.  I’ve always been astonished at the large turnout on Easter.  I think mostly it is people coming back for a second look.  Maybe I’ll hear something this time that catches my spirit.  Easter is such a mysterious holiday.  We all yearn for resurrection, but we don’t really know very much about it.  An article in Time this week talks about heaven and how we all look at it, but the article is simply a encapsulation of the views that we have all had of the afterlife since the beginning of time.  None of us really know anything at all about it.

The spectacular news about Jesus’ resurrection is the intensity of the surprise of the women at the tomb, and later the apostles themselves.  They were all genuinely changed by this event, and that is probably the best proof that we have that Jesus rose from the dead and came back to them.   When he appeared to the disciples in the room that they had locked in fear, they were astonished.  He gave them his Peace and the Holy Spirit, and then his commission:  to go and forgive sins.  That is it in all simplicity.  This is the risen Christ with his continuing mission for the world:  the forgiveness of sin.
 
I have found that guilt and forgiveness are the biggest part of ministry.  I have spent hours counseling people who simply couldn’t give up their guilt for whatever it was that they had done.  I have seen others who were so consumed by their guilt that it changed them into difficult, cranky people who had a hard time getting along with anyone.  No wonder Jesus sent his disciples into the world to forgive sins.

When I did my ministry at Western Penitentiary in Pittsburgh, I had a group of men, all of whom had killed someone.  Over the years that we were together, I heard their stories.  Often the killings were perfectly understandable.  One of my inmates killed a man who was in the process of killing his best friend.  “I’d do it again in a heartbeat,” he said.  Forgiveness wasn’t what he was after.  He wanted understanding and he wanted out of jail.  He got the understanding of the group and eventually he got his freedom, also.  But most of them wanted forgiveness for what they had done.  They understood that their prison sentence was just, even if the experience in prison was worse than anything that they could have imagined.  Over the years, I helped several of them to come to terms with how God saw them and what forgiveness meant.

One man in my group had come to prison at the age of seventy-five.  He had been a brown-bag drunk in his little town, had fallen in love with a local bag woman, who then threw him over for another woman that she knew.  His puritan spirit was outraged by this.  He went back to his room, got the gun that he always kept under his bed and went and killed both of them.  He then ran away to the west coast where sheriffs’ deputies found him and brought him back for his trial.  He would listen to me when I talked about forgiveness, but I could always see him shaking his head.  He would come to me after the group and say “that doesn’t apply to me padre, there are two people in the cemetery because of what I did.  God will never forgive that”.  I’ll never forget the moment when he finally “got” it.  There was a light that came from his face and he relaxed beyond belief.   He was in his late eighties when he died, but the last few of his years were elegant ones.  They would bring him from his hospital room in a wheelchair across the yard for group.  When he was in the yard, other inmates would crowd around him.  They saw what he had been given and they wanted it also.  I know that this is what Jesus had in mind when he sent his disciples out into the world with their simple mission.  Simple?  Hardly.  It is the most important thing in the world.

The Miracle of Easter

       Inside the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem is a stone enclosure that is supposed to be the tomb of Jesus.  Inside this place is a platform made of stone where the body of the Lord supposedly laid, beside which stands an Orthodox priest who smiles and gives you a candle when you enter.  There is a place to deposit money if you so desire.  The whole church is a curious affair.  In one place is an altar that is a memorial to Golgotha, where Jesus was crucified; in another is an Armenian chapel, and numerous other chapels dedicated to various denominations that have arisen in Christianity, all of whom want to stake their claim on this place.  I am certainly not surprised at this.  The Church of the Holy Sepulcher is certainly the most holy of all Christian locations.  The Orthodox create a firestorm every Easter at the tomb with light flowing out of it and gigantic processions to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus.   There have been numerous instances of fights between clergy on Christmas and Easter as the various sects try to use their space to claim their rights in the place that they all consider to be the epitome of holiness.

What almost stunned me about this site when we visited it, is what I saw as the difference between the stone tomb and the description in the Gospels.  When the women came to the tomb on that first Easter morning, they found the stone rolled away and angels guarding it, and no Jesus in evidence.  “He has risen”, said the angels, “he is not here”.  The response of the women and the apostles who came to the tomb was not extreme joy, but terror and what seems to be anger.   In John’s Gospel,  Mary Magdalene asks Jesus, whom she assumes to be the gardener, Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away. You can almost hear the despair in her voice before she sees that she is talking to her Lord.  In the account in the Gospel of Mark, the women go to the tomb, meet an angel who tells them that Jesus has risen and is not there, and gives them a message for the disciples to meet him in Galilee, but the women flee from the tomb and say nothing to anyone about it because they are so afraid.

None of them had ever seen a resurrection and neither have we.  We gather on this great day to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ, who on Friday was crucified on the hill outside of Jerusalem and who was laid in the tomb that evening.  Like the women, we would also be terrified if we had had their experience and we would have had no idea of what to do about it.  The Easter that we celebrate is the one that has emerged from that time, after it became certain to his followers that Jesus had indeed risen from the dead and appeared to his apostles who then went and joyfully told the world.  

  That is how we got this festive day.  We have all confronted death and loss and when it happens, we know grief.  Grief is what we experienced from Good Friday through Holy Saturday until this morning.  If we are going to come to an understanding of what resurrection means, we need to first experience the grief.  It isn’t enough just to look forward to the joy of Easter as a kind of a given --  Easter comes, like Memorial Day or the Fourth of July.  There is a particular point to Easter:  it is the defeat of death by God as he promised in the 25th chapter of Isaiah:

                                      And he will destroy on this mountain the shroud 
                                  that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread 
                                 over all nations; he will swallow up death forever.
                                                                                         - Isaiah 25: 6

This has been a passage frrequently chosen at funerals because it is such a wonderful statement of what God has in mind for all of us regarding our mortality in the face of our grief.  That is why Easter is such an important day.  What we are celebrating is the certainty of our own resurrection and our joyful reunion with all who have gone before us.  That is ample reason for chocolate bunnies, Easter baskets, lamb dinners and family gatherings.  May God bless our Easter celebration.