Physicality as Metaphor for Real Presences of the Risen Christ

3 Easter Sunday  b      April 19,2015     

Acts 3:12-19  Psalm 4
1 John 3:1-7  Luke 24:36b-48

 Lectionary Link

   If you were living two or three decades after the time of Jesus and you were a part of a spiritual movement which was catching on in the cities of the Roman Empire and the people in your religious gathering were of mixed demographics, some from the city, some recent arrivals from of rural areas,  some a part of that group of Jews who were dispersed far from Israel in the Diaspora communities, how would you explain to new members in your community the origin of the Jesus movement and why it was significant?  There would be many questions to answer.  Some of the questions might be?

  You Christians; are you members of one of the Jewish sects or not?  How is that you claim some Jewish heritage and yet why are you no longer a part of the synagogues?   And why do you still read from the Hebrew Scriptures?   Why do keep referring to your Judaic heritage but most of you no longer practice the ritual purity rules of Judaism?

  How come you behave like cafeteria Jews?  You take what you like and ignore what you do not want?  Why is it that you seem to have a love/hate relationship with Judaism?

  The answers to these questions lie in the fact that the Christian movement was formed out of Judaism.  Christians did a whole scale reinterpretation of Judaism with significant innovations and departure from ritual Judaism.   The Christian movement took “literal” practices and topics of Judaism and spiritualized them.  So the church was interpreted to be the new Israel and there had to be 12 disciples who would be the spiritualized new leaders of the “12 tribes of the New Israel.”  Jesus was not a Levite but he was interpreted to be the new exclusive “High Priest.”

   It is true that personal and community identity get formed by what we used to be.  And if we are too vociferous about what we have left,  it can result in a very negative polemic against the former group which we once associated with.  Parents can be offended when their children choose a significantly different path in their lives.  Children can find the traditions of their parents inadequate to the ways in which they have come to define their needs.  People when changing parishes or religious communities have various rites of closure to enable them to feel justified to embrace their new calling.  Part of the closure has a negative side; I have to feel bad about what I am going to leave, in order to justify the good and positive which I feel in a new situation.

  One could say that most of the New Testament writings are writings of closure for the people who came to become a part of the messianic movement centered on Jesus of Nazareth.

Since you and I do not need any closure from Judaism, we do not have to identify with any of the negative relationships which are evident in the writing of Christians who were both leaving Judaism at the same time they are being excommunicated from the synagogues. It is important to understand the formation of Christianity as a movement during a time of achieving closure from Judaism.

  The post-resurrection appearances of Christ figure prominently in how people like Peter and St. Paul came to lead the Christian movement out of Judaism.

  Remember that Rabbi Saul of Tarsus was chasing down the Jews who had had post-resurrection experiences of Christ.  Such people for him were regarded to be heretics of Judaism; persons with wrong interpretation about the identity of the Messiah and the meaning of the Messiah.

  By the time the writings of Luke and Acts were completed,  the church leaders had to explain to new members how they had received most all of their traditions from Judaism and the Hebrew Scriptures but how they understood this tradition differently than the Jews who remained within the synagogues and completely committed to traditional ritual Judaism.

  There had to be a way of accounting for the active success of the Christian movement.  Why were people still following this Christ, even after he had been gone for two or three decades?

Why were the Christian communities successful at inculcating this effervescent life and energy into new people?

  First of all, Christ was seen to be a renewable and dynamic presence within the lives of people in various ways.  The renewal and dynamic presences of Christ were traced in continuity with all of the events in the life of Jesus.  His birth, childhood, baptism, ministry, teaching, wonder working signs, wisdom parables, apocalyptic predictions, his misrepresented kingly competition with the Caesar which got him crucified, and yet his profoundly effective afterlife appearances to his closest followers.  His afterlife appearances continued in visions and apparitions to people like St. Paul and there was a Spiritual energy and the experience of a Holy personage which got transmitted from person to person in gatherings and meetings which could only be explained as the presence of God and Christ in the Person of the Holy Spirit.

  The post-resurrection appearances of Christ were important teaching tools to explain the progression and transition into the many varied presences of Christ which came to be known and experienced by the early communities of the Risen Christ.

  If many Jews were rejecting Jesus of Nazareth as being the true Messiah, how could followers of Jesus Christ explain him as a real and genuine Messiah?

  The preachers and writers looked at two strains of the Messiah in the Hebrew Scriptures.  There was the Davidic and kingly Messiah and there was the Suffering Servant Messiah.  So the early Christian apologists said that Jesus of Nazareth united these two interpretations of the Messiah.  In his passion and death Jesus was the suffering servant Messiah, but in his post-resurrection appearances and his ability to morph into a continued Spiritual presence in the lives of many, he was indeed a kingly Messiah now, but who would be the delayed Davidic and earthly kingly Messiah at his future return.

   The post-resurrection appearances of Jesus are recounted using a familiar habit of language.  Physicality becomes the metaphor for establishing the fact that something was truly a significant and telling experience.  We know that physicality as a metaphor can sometimes be wrongly interpreted, as when Jesus said, “Unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood, you have no part in me.”  This is a prime example of how Physicality can mean the experience of a significant presence of Christ without having the literal meaning.  So in the post-resurrection appearances of Jesus, there was the Risen Christ who seemed in his spritely appearances to be more like an angel or ghost in his resurrection body, and yet the Risen Christ is presented as real and actual enough to eat of piece of fish to prove his substantiality.  In our habits of language we use Physicality as a metaphor for asserting the substantial validity of an experience.  (As when it seems so real, I could also reach out and touch it).

   The Gospel writers in the early churches were affirming to their members that their experiences of the risen Christ were real, actual and substantial in the truth of their meanings because these truthful meanings were driving the moral and spiritual transformation of their lives.  Moral and spiritual transformation were the substantial results of their true encounters with the risen Christ.

  So we have the apology or the reasons given for the success of the church in the writings which we have read from the New Testament today.

   The proof of the risen Christ is the experience of peace and well-being.  We know that Christ is present because we are genuinely interested in the well-being of each other.  The presence of Christ was known in eating.  Bread and wine were only two items of the meals which eventually got exclusively associated with the Holy Eucharist.  But fish and lamb and greens and other foods were generally a part of a meal before two elements got isolated in our Christian ritual.  The metaphorical point is this, you can be as sure of the presence and closeness of the Risen Christ as the food which you eat and the wine which you drink.  The food and drink becomes you and part of you; The Risen Christ has become you.  And the Risen Christ is a real and certain experience.

   Another proof the presence of Christ is through Word and especially the specific words of Scripture.  The Risen Christ told the disciples that he was not an alien dropped out of the sky; he was in fact an expected fulfillment of their own religious and spiritual tradition.  He was saying that one could find signs of his life in the writings of the Hebrew Scriptures.  And so the Risen Christ is continuous with our human experience.  We don’t have to go out of our way; we are met within our human situation and can know the presences of the Risen Christ to be events in our common life pathways.

  You perhaps have heard about the Gnostic Gospels.  There were other writings which were destroyed because they were regarded to be heretical by later Christians.  From these other writings we can know that the Risen Christ also was significant to groups of Christians who were not specifically formed in the tradition of Judaism from which Jesus came.  Later Christians, decided that the specifics of the Judaism tradition were crucial to the identity of the church and that the influences from other Greek and Roman philosophical and mystery traditions were to be seen as incompatible with the Risen Christ.  We need to know today, that during the first two centuries of the Christian movements there was quite a diversity of interpretations of the valid post-resurrection appearances and manifestation of Christ to many people.

  Today, we do not have to understand ourselves as those who have left Judaism, because we cannot leave what we never were a part of.  The Gospel for us is that Risen Christ appears to us in continuity with the events of each of our own lives so that we can be certain of the substantiality of the real presence of Christ.  And so again today we take the metaphor of Physicality as way of convening a real and certain presence, as I will say again today.  Take, Eat, this is my Body.  Drink this cup; this is my blood.  As sure as  bread and wine are on the altar today in the physical sense, so too is certain and significant the presence of the Risen Christ to us.  Amen.