Believe It! (Easter ABC)

 

“Believe It!” 
The Rev. Dr. Anthony Hutchinson

Easter ABC
20 April 2025 10 a.m. Sung Eucharist

Mission Church of the Holy Spirit, Sutherlin (Oregon)

Isaiah 65:17-25; Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24; Acts 10:34-43; Luke 24:1-12

 

May the light of Christ, rising in glory,
banish all darkness from our hearts and minds.   Amen.

 

The story of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead is the heart of our Christian faith.   But we live in a secular time, and in our nation’s largely unchurched “Left coast.” I have gotten used to hearing the question about this time of year, from believers and unbelievers alike, But Tony, do you really believe it?

 

It just seems too fantastic, as some kind of wish fulfillment fantasy.  It goes against what our universal experience as human beings is:  Dead people just don’t come back to life. 

 

Occasionally some of the better informed add, “How can you believe it? If you compare all of the stories about it in the gospels, it’s clear they are late, contradict each other, and grew in the telling.”

 

But though these stories were in fact written decades after the events they recount, and though they show up all the marks of having grown in the telling, the earliest form of this tradition that has survived is not found in the stories in the Gospels at all.  It is not even a story.  It is a fragment of apostolic preaching found in St. Paul’s first Letter to the Corinthians.  Writing barely 15 years after Jesus’s death, Paul tells us of what he was taught after his experience on the Road to Damascus:

 

 “For I passed on to you the tradition that I also received: that Christ died for our sins …, that he was buried, that he rose the third day, … and that he appeared, first to Cephas and the Twelve, then to over 500 Christians at once (some of whom … are still alive), then to James and the apostles. … and last of all … to me” (1 Cor 15:3-8).

 

It is from this early citation of the preaching of Jesus’ comrades that grow the later gospel stories.  And the direction of evolution is clear. 

 

The earliest story as such that has survived is in the earliest Gospel, Mark, written about 40 years after Jesus’ death.  There, in the original form of the Gospel that ended abruptly with the women fleeing from the tomb and saying nothing because they were afraid (Mark 16:8), the story as such is just about the women returning to the tomb early on the morning after the Sabbath with spices to properly anoint the body of Jesus, which had been dumped unceremoniously in the tomb in haste before the Sabbath started the evening of his death.  They see the stone has been rolled back, and a young man (an angel) in a white robe tells them that “Jesus … has risen, he is not here; see the place where they laid him” (Mark 16:6).  You see, the words of the early apostolic proclamation “he rose,” have been placed onto the lips of a character in the story, the angel: “He is risen.”  Then the angel adds, “Go tell the disciples … that he is going to Galilee.  There you will see him, as he told you” (Mark 16:7).  Here again, the early apostolic proclamation “he appeared” is placed onto the angel’s lips in this narrative, but now in the future: he will appear.  Mark does not narrate the resurrection of Jesus as such, but tells of an empty tomb.

 

The next Gospels to be written, Matthew and Luke, about 15-30 years later, take Mark’s story and develop its narrative, using their own sources and concerns.   Matthew adds a great deal of narrative detail. He develops the story about the guards and the stone, and brings in an earthquake that opens graves throughout the city, marking this event as linked to the resurrection of the martyred righteous in late Jewish apocalyptic literature.  This is how he fleshes out the apostolic preaching’s “he was raised.” The women run excitedly to report to the disciples. As the women are running to tell the disciples, Jesus actually appears to them  (Matt. 28:9) and the early apostolic preaching’s “and he appeared” becomes part of a narrative rather than simply a list of affirmations as in Paul.

 

In Luke, the women tell the disciples, but they don’t believe them, thinking that they have heard just women’s “idle tales” (Luke 24:11).  But Peter runs to the tomb, and looks in—there he sees “the linen clothes by themselves” (Luke 24:12).  This added detail seemingly is trying to explain the actual raising of Jesus proper, suggesting that somehow the corpse of Jesus had simply evaporated when he rose, leaving the burial clothes lying there. This element of the story in Luke is later taken up in exquisite detail in John.  

 

Luke then adds the story of the two disciples on the road to Emmaus on Easter evening (Luke 24:13-35).  Jesus incognito appears to them, talks to them, and finally they recognize him as he explains the scriptures (in the early apostolic preaching, Jesus died and was raised “according to the [Hebrew] scriptures.”    In looking back on it, they say they recognized him in the breaking of the bread, suggesting that the eucharist was one of the ways Jesus appeared.    This story in Luke was circulating among early Christians, for it shows up in extremely abbreviated form in the later longer endings to Mark (Mark 16:12-13), added by scribes to help bring that seemingly truncated Gospel into harmony with the others. 

 

Luke then has the two disciples return to Jerusalem to tell the news.  All of this is on Easter evening.  When they tell their story, the disciples reply that Jesus has appeared to Peter (Luke 24:35).  Again, the apostolic proclamation is placed on the lips of characters in the story.  But Luke narrates Jesus appearing to the disciples as well (Luke 24:36-43).  There is great detail—“See my hands and my feet—it really is me!” he says, “I am no ghost, look I have flesh and bones!”  Then to prove it, he eats some broiled fish they give him. 

 

John, written another 20 or 30 years later than Matthew and Luke, tells the story about Mary mistaking the risen Jesus for the gardener, the competition between John and Peter to run to get to the tomb first, and greater elaboration on the strangely placed burial clothes.  A form of Luke’s story of Jesus appearing to the disciples the evening of Easter is taken up by.  It is the familiar story where Thomas is not present, but then is at a later appearance.   Interesting, for John, the sending of the Spirit occurred not on the Day of Pentecost, but on the evening of Easter Sunday, when Jesus “breathes” it into his disciples (John 20:19-29). 

 

Other snippets of differing stories show up in the four Gospels, with Jesus appearing also in Galilee, whether on a mountain or on the lakeshore. 

 

If we move another few decades ahead, we start seeing in Gospels that were not included in the canon actually recounting in narrative the resurrection itself.  In the Gospel of Peter, the two soldiers see it all:  the heavens open, two angels descend in a great flash of light, the stone rolls away by itself, and then angels come out of the tomb, supporting a third person walking with difficulty, apparently Jesus still wounded from the cross.  There follows a glowing floating cross.  A voice comes from heaven “You have preached to the dead,” and the cross, which also is apparently a talking cross, replies, “Yes.” 

 

It is clear that over time, greater and greater details were added.  It is also clear that reflection on Hebrew Scripture, especially the Psalter, informs each retelling.  But those of us who pray the Psalms daily know that this collection of poems and hymns is above all a book about emotion—the whole range of human emotion, from love, and adoration, to joy, to sorrow, to homicidal rage.  It is understandable why such a book would have exerted such a central role in the process of the formation of memory and the retelling of such emotion-laden stories.   Memory, after all, is a matter of emotion, not stenographic recording.  And all memory morphs over time. 

 

But that does not mean that all the details in the canonical Gospels are simple artifacts of story-telling, with no grounding in events.  Remember—the earliest reports, even before the story-tellers’ art began to spin these tales—was this: “Christ died, was buried, was raised, and appeared.”  

 

As a historian, I find a purely mythological reading of the resurrection stories to be unconvincing. The early disciples were no fools.  They knew the difference between wishful thinking and personal experience.  The idea that the reports of Jesus’ being was raised was merely a creation of the hopeful imagination of early Christian grief groups is to my mind hardly likely.  There is just too quick a shift—from utter demoralization and despair at Jesus’ death to bull-headed and joyful optimism and willingness to suffer martyrdom for Jesus’ sake—at the origin of Christianity. 

 

For me, it is a much more probable to say that something shocking and unusual, something unique, happened on Easter morning than to argue that the early apostolic proclamation arose simply as the result of a group of Jesus’ followers sitting shiva and proof-texting the Hebrew scriptures.  The problem, of course, is whether we allow for the possibility of such a thing.  It was the experience of witnessing this unique thing, the bodily reappearance of the living Christ ,that led the disciples to reconsider everything they had seen in his life, and reaffirm their faith that he was indeed the hoped for Messiah, despite the fact that he didn’t conform to all the triumphant connotations that figure held in many Hebrew scriptures. It led them to relabel his miserable sufferings and death as the embodiment of the suffering servant songs of Second Isaiah as well as the psalms talking about suffering and persecution.     

 

The fact is, I really do believe that Jesus of Nazareth, dead and buried after being brutalized by the Roman Imperial authorities, was somehow raised from death into a new and more vital form of life, and came to his friends more alive than they had ever seen him before.  I know from personal experience that he somehow continues to engage us, challenge and teach us, and love us even today.   

 

Siblings in Christ:  Christ died for our sake.  He was buried.  One and a half days later, he came forth again, and he appeared to his disciples. He appeared in such a way that they knew he was no resuscitated corpse, no ghost, no dream, no wish-fulfillment.  It was wholly unprecedented and the disciples clearly had problems finding adequate language to express what they had seen, felt, and experienced.  They finally settled on an obscure mythological image from the Book of Daniel to describe what they had seen and experienced.  There, the deep injustice of the death by torture of righteous Jews by the Seleucid Greek Syrians before the Maccabean revolt was seen as rectified by the idea that in the last day, the dead martyrs would come to life again, be reconstituted with their bodies, only “shining like the stars in heaven” (Dan12:2-3). Thus the historical experience of Jesus’ bodily reappearance seen in the apostolic preaching was interpreted and explained as “resurrection from the dead” as an eschatological act of God.  Many of the details in the stories as they evolved reflect this mythological understanding of that unique historical event.     

 

Christ’s victory over death, hell, and evil is a victory over fear. meaninglessness, bitterness, and remorse.   It is God’s great joke on the world, and must silence all hopeless irony that says “don’t you believe it!”  No.  Rather, “BELIEVE IT!” We are not doomed to failure and despair.  We are not destined for permanent oblivion after sickness, diminishment, inevitable decline and dignity-destroying death.   We are invited to share in his life. 

 

Jesus’ coming forth as life itself means that death does not have the final word.  Fear does not have the final word.  Law and judgment do not have the final word.  Vengeance does not have the final word.  Oppression will cease.  We are not doomed to regret and pain.  War does not have the final word, nor does violence. 

 

Alleluia!  Christ is risen, the Lord is risen indeed.  Alleluia!