Easter Sunday
April 1, 2018
Act 10:34-43 Psalm
118:1-2, 14-24
1 Corinthians 15:1-11 Mark 16:1-8
If the butterfly breaking out of
the cocoon is a phase event in the life cycle of a marvelous beautiful
creature, we might ponder the resurrection of Jesus Christ as a most poignant
phase in bringing the message of Christ to the entire world.
Even as we might think about the
butterfly as the end of the phase, the butterfly is but a new beginning of the
cycle. Why? The butterfly will go on to lay eggs that
will continue the endless cycle. The
birth of one butterfly means that there will be many more future butterflies.
When the New Testament was being
written, the early Christians had become the very results of the Risen
Christ. It is a though if Jesus had been
the first butterfly, there were many more butterflies because the Risen Christ
had entered the lives of many people.
The Risen Christ had become known in the lives of so many that it had
become a significant social phenomenon.
How could all of this have happened?
How could Jesus of Nazareth be gone and no longer seen still be known in
special ways to so many people? How
could the talk about Jesus shared be so infectious that it resulted in
spiritual experience and conversions?
The Risen Christ effect was profound.
The effects of the Risen Christ were profoundly recognized in the life
of so many people. We might call the New
Testament writings the testimonies of people who were trying to explain the
effects of the Risen Christ in the lives of people.
To explain the effects, it is
natural to try to recount a sequence of events to trace what came before and
what came after. On Easter Sunday, we
celebrate the most intensive phase of the Risen Christ. It is the phase that happened when the grief
of many people was profound because they had lost their friend and hero teacher
to something they did not believe was possible.
They believed Jesus was so wonderful, it was inconceivable to think that
he could die. The friends of Jesus
believed that he was too good to die.
And because they believed he was too good to die, his death seemed
unnatural. How could such a God-Person
be brought to death?
The death of Jesus must have been
for them profound disbelief. If God did
not protect a person as good as Jesus was, who would God protect? When love and adoration has been profound and
when one profoundly depends upon loving a person, the death of that person can
make recovery from grief seem impossible.
The post-resurrection events
happened to a deeply grieving community of people who knew Jesus to be their
beloved best friend. One could even
believe that their collective grief was so profound that it was a deep prayer
to God to do something special to heal that great grief.
For a favored few,
post-resurrection appearances of Jesus occurred. Most people who came to believe in Christ,
did not have these profound post-resurrection appearances which gave proof to
the fact that Jesus was still alive and still able to be present in new ways to
people.
On Easter Sunday, we celebrate the
phase when Jesus goes from being the crucified, dead and buried Jesus of
Nazareth into becoming the Risen Christ who was launched and, on his way, to
becoming available in new ways to as many people who wanted to know him. St. Paul did not see the Risen Christ in the
way that Mary Magdalene did; he was blinded by a bright light and heard the
voice of Christ. He regarded that to be
valid proof of his calling to be an apostle of Christ. Many others became aware of the Risen Christ
in many ways including through the preaching of the Gospel and reading it
too. Why? Because there is not just one way that Christ
re-appears. Christ re-appears and is
made known to each person in ways that are appropriate and compatible with the
personal circumstances and differences of each person.
As different as all the ways in
which the Risen Christ has become known to people, the shared element in all of
these experiences is hope. Hope is the
sense that we will always have a future, even after our deaths and the deaths
of our loved ones.
There have long been beliefs and
theories about the afterlife.
Transmogrification of the soul or reincarnations or journeys into the
afterlife. What humanity has always
needed was a substantial and validating event to verify the deep intuition of
hope for a future after our lives. And
the event of the resurrection of Jesus Christ has been the substantiating and
validating event for our hope.
Each of us is invited to tell the
story of the hope of our lives; the hope that we will not be dissolved like
some sugar cube in a cosmic ocean of energy and lose the sense of any future
personal identity. We look to the
witness of Jesus of Nazareth having a personal identity after he had died, and
from that we reaffirm that we too will have a continuing, recognizable personal
identity in our future. We will not be
just impersonal collections of atoms that pass into other collateral elements
in our final earthly environments.
There is something that is quite
contradictory about the emphasis on a bodily resurrection. You and I know what happens to our bodies. We get old, we age, and we show the effects
of aging, so knowing that this is what happens to bodies, why do we want
another one? Why was the bodily
resurrection notion important in the early church?
The New Testament writers are like
us; we tend to use the physical presence as a metaphor for saying that
something is really, real. To speak
about the resurrection of the body, is to say that we believe our personal
identity will be preserved in a real and substantial way. It is not to say that we'll just have another
future body that will wear out like this one has.
More importantly, the resurrection
of Christ and our future resurrection tells us what we believe about God. It tells us that God loves us enough to
cherish our unique personal identity enough to preserve it in a recognizable
way into the future forever. And if
you're like I am, I don't feel all that worthy to be preserved forever, but I
think it is wonderful to believe that God believes that I am worth preserving
in some way for ever.
And that is what I want to leave to
each of us today regarding the resurrection of Christ. God believed that Jesus was wonderful enough
to preserve forever. And God believes
that you are lovable and wonderful enough to preserve in your unique personal
identity forever. And the possibility of
such care and love of God for us is a very humbling thought.
And as we accept this love of God
for us today, let us be grateful as we make our Easter shout:
Alleluia! Christ is Risen. The Lord is Risen Indeed. Alleluia!
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