Did the words written in the Gospel of Matthew about the empty tomb account make the empty tomb happen? Did the words written in Mark, Luke and John make the resurrection of Jesus happen?
Some times we get the words of explanation about an event and the cause of the event mixed up. Words about an event do not make an event happen. The scientific law which states that water boils at 212 degree Fahrenheit does not cause water to boil. The law is only the statistical approximation of many observed and tested occasions of water when it is brought to a boil.
The Gospel words about the resurrection of Jesus did not make the resurrection happen. In fact the Gospel words about the resurrection appearances of Jesus are not the first writings in the New Testament about the resurrection.
The first New Testament writings about the resurrection of Christ were written by St. Paul and he never saw Jesus in his lifetime and he was not in Jerusalem on the reported Easter morning and he did not see Jesus before he left this earth.
St. Paul had a resurrection manifestation of Christ on the road to Damascus when he had an intervention which changed his life. St. Paul immediately became involved with the group of people who had formed themselves into new community because they were confessing that they too had experiences of Christ still being alive in their lives.
This experience of Christ being alive in their lives made them speak in a very poetic language. St. Paul spoke and wrote about being raised with Christ in heavenly places. Not only had Christ arose and was with them, but they themselves believed that they too had risen and were seated with Christ.
This language of the poets can make scientists crazy. How can you be raised with Christ in heaven? Show me. For people who have had experiences of the presence of Christ cannot put such experiences into a scientific laboratory to test and replicate. But enough people believe in the truth of such experiences to make them very meaningful and life changing. Just as you cannot put "falling in love" into a scientific formula, so too the many experiences of the continuing presence of Christ are like the experience of falling in love.
The people in the decades after Jesus left this earth knew about as much about the resurrection as we do today. Why? Rare events create great wonder. Rare people create great wonder. For rare events and a rare person of wonder there are many answers and explanations which arise as responses to what is impossible to explain.
We have Christian people today who are very confident that they know precisely what happened at the resurrection of Christ. Some people seem to treat their beliefs in the resurrection of Christ as being more valid, truer and better than ours. They would say that their belief is better because they really believe what the Gospel writers wrote. If you and I don't believe those words precisely in the same way then our belief is not valid. And someone may say that you have to believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus. But then one must ask what kind of body? One that goes through doors and one that can be in Jerusalem and in Galilee in mere moments in a way that would make a Star Trek transporter seem primitive. How can a body which seems to behave like a ghost be bodily in the same way it was before it manifested ghostly behaviors? How can one say that the resurrection of Jesus is a physical resurrection when many of the characteristics of the risen Christ are reported as ghostly or like the visions of angels?
You see how one could argue endlessly about the resurrection and its meanings.
Even without having precise certainty, belief statements and the spiritual poetry about the living Christ in the church are not mere poetry, there is a very rare person and a very rare event which they actually do refer to.
Jesus was and is a very rare person. The resurrection of Christ was and is a very rare occurrence. And it is the rareness of both the person and the occurrence of the resurrection which make Easter such a wonderful ambiguous day which is completely chock full of many, many meanings, including a child's desire to get out of church quickly to get the Easter chocolate eggs in the Easter Egg hunt today. Chocolate Easter eggs, one of the many collateral effects of Easter.
What is not a rare event for humanity and for each of us and for each of our dear family members and friends is the event of death.
We might wish that death could be a totally rare event! But even as we think this we know with our commonsense minds that if death were completely rare, the world would have been over-populated long, long ago.
Death is not a rare event in this world. Death is an event which allows the entire world to accommodate the birth of new people. Death is not rare but for human beings it is a very pronounced transition. Death is the natural population control that makes room for others in this world..
In the human sphere, the degree of our attachment to our lives and to each other means that we can cannot regard the human life cycle as being like the agricultural cycle of life. Does the wheat field mourn when a plant dies at harvest? Does the field rejoice at all of the seeds produced for new plant life in the future? In the human sphere, death may not be rare, but it is special, it is holy, it is profoundly transitional for a person and for that person within a community.
So how do we live with the fact that death as a sort of human population control is not rare and it happens and occurs in many different circumstances? Do we live with fear? Do we live with anxiety? Do we live with resignation? Do we live halfheartedly? Do we live our lives as the proverbial ones who are but rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic as it is going down?
Because death is not rare, to live we have to find a realistic, cautionary, actuarial, probabilistic relationship with death. In short, we want to survive and live as long as we possibly can. We have to find way to live without the thought of death paralyzing us from effective action. We need to find way to live inspired by the possibility and probability of our death and the death of those we love. How can we live inspired by the probability of death?
This is the ageless question of life? How do we live with death without fear as though death were the sword of Damocles hanging over us and able to fall at anytime?
People in other times and places, in times of war and occupation, in times of slavery, in times of famine and plague, had worse life expectancy situations to live with than we do in our country with our relative higher standard of living and freedom from day to day terror. But even for us in good conditions, living with death is one of the main issues of life itself.
The followers of Jesus spontaneously and with many different kinds of experiential events discovered that this rare person Jesus of Nazareth, provided to them rare experiences of knowing his afterlife. There were many people who had these truly significant experiences of the various forms of the afterlife of Christ made known to them. Many people were joined together in having a sense of unity about the continuance of the life of Christ. The continuance of the afterlife spread like wildfire and people who were far from Palestine in location and time from the year 33 of the Common Era needed to account for the reality and strength of a vast variety of these experiences of the afterlife of Christ. And so they wrote down in the poetry of Paul and the Apostles and in the Gospel account many different ways of how and why they felt that Christ was risen and alive in the church. In their accounts they traced stories of the transition of Jesus of Nazareth walking in Galilee and Jerusalem to his death but they also wrote about his reappearances, first in places close to Jerusalem and Galilee but then as appearing to many in the people who lived in many places in the Roman world who gathered in local gatherings because they shared this common experience that Christ was still alive and with them.
Today we are gathered because we in some way have discovered that Christ is alive in our lives. We have discovered it when we can live by and for something beyond death and execute faithful and hopeful and creative action in our world. We have discovered that Christ is still alive when we experience love and when we experience justice, when we experience the heroic examples of people who sacrifice for the common good in dying to slavishly selfish egotism. We discover that Christ is alive and well in us when we have the ability to lay down our lives for the good of each other.
I have had the holy privilege of being with people as they approach death. I have had people who did not want the last rites of “Prayers said at the time of Death” because to the very end they did not think that they would die. They merely believe that there would be a continuation of that consciousness of eternity which they were already sensing in themselves. It is almost like some people think, “Death? Not I, that’s for other people.”
We who have been raised with Christ in his resurrection can affirm this sense of eternity which we know now and we can live knowing that this state of eternity will continue through the gate of death.
At each burial requiem, the celebrant says, “For to your faithful people, O Lord, life is changed, not ended; when our mortal body lies in death, there is prepared for a dwelling place eternal in the heavens.”
The early followers of Jesus traced the eternal hope of the risen Christ within them back to a mysteriously rare event in the afterlife of a very mysterious rare person Jesus Christ. They wrote and confessed the post-resurrection narratives as the reason for the reality of the presence of Christ living in them and who would be in them and with them for ever.
And so again today, we confess this mysterious, unique and rare person, Jesus Christ and the rare circumstances of his reappearances after his death. And we exclaim this about the reality of the hope of Christ in our lives: “Alleluia, Christ is risen! The Lord is Risen, indeed! Alleluia!. Amen.
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