3 Easter Sunday
b April 19,2015
Acts 3:12-19
Psalm 4
1 John 3:1-7 Luke 24:36b-48
1 John 3:1-7 Luke 24:36b-48
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.
