Today’s readings: Acts 10, 34. 37-43; Colossians 3, 1-4; John 20, 1-9.
There is hardly any other article of belief with which people today have greater problems than with the Resurrection. After 2,000 years, many continue to ask whether Jesus really did rise from the dead or even what it meant. It’s a question that puzzles.
On one hand, there is the unprovable character of the Resurrection. On the other, there are myriad proofs of a different kind from those one would look for.
Easter is not an escape from, but the celebration of history itself. The starting point for the Lenten journey was Jesus being tempted to escape history. Instead, he lived to develop and show us a new manner of living, remaining within history without ending up being its victim.
Jesus never promised a rose garden. The one thing Jesus stands for, and it is outstanding this Sunday, is that the more we grow in love, the more vulnerable we make ourselves.
In Theology for Sceptics, Dorothe Soelle writes: “if Jesus had just kept to multiplying loaves of bread and healing the sick, perhaps we could have had the illusion of a god of fortune in whose kingdom it is possible to remain free of want and suffering”.
John’s account of how he learnt of Jesus’ mysterious disappearance from the tomb and how he and Peter ran to the scene, reveals a sense of cautiousness. But John says he ran faster and reached the tomb first and that “he saw and he believed”.
This seems to close the long bracket which John opened in his gospel’s first chapter when the only response Jesus gave to the first enquiring disciples was “come and see”. Closing this bracket, as if with a touch of guilt or admission of hard-headedness, John acknowledges that till that moment they had failed to understand the Scripture teaching that he must rise from the dead.
Throughout the gospel narratives, Jesus is seen as a man unlike any other. Though he was subject to all the infirmities we experience as mortals, he could walk on water, bring dead people back to life, feed thousands with a few loaves, heal by touch, and turn water into wine.
There are explicit displacements of Jesus’ physical body in which the divine was manifested: the transfiguration, the Eucharistic supper, the crucifixion, the resurrection and, finally, the ascension. Jesus’ resurrected body sums up all these modes of displacement. And yet it is no longer recognisable.
The two disciples on the road to Emmaus talked to him for hours, but it is only when he broke the bread that they recognised him. Mary at the tomb mistook him for the gardener, recognising him only when he called her by name. From the hiddenness comes the revelation.
In The displaced body of Jesus Christ, Graham Ward writes “the body of Christ keeps absenting itself from the text, and what it is replaced by is the witness of the Church”.
In reply to queries about the Resurrection, the issue of witness and of the Church’s mediation of that living witness is of major importance.
We betray double standards when we close one or both eyes from seeing the bloody reality around us and promote the good fight to keep crosses hung to our office walls. The Cross, beyond its cultural significance, stands out as the merciless violence people carry out on people.
We continue to live in denial where violence at all levels of society and life is concerned. But as Soelle writes, “that which is denied, forgotten and suppressed, grows and some day can choke us”.
We know it was not God who erected all the crosses still standing and making people suffer . It is the lords of this world who continue to erect those crosses, and we are all eligible to be such lords, irrespective of our status in life and society.
Easter challenges our state of denial and rebuts that if the rule of love is at work, our mandate as Christians is not to draw into a cocoon of safety, but to be out and alive in the world to courageously defy all that seeks in some way or other to silence the inner voice of love.