Believe (Easter Sunday 1B)

“Believe”

Easter 1B

1 April 2018; 8:00 a.m. Said Mass and 10:00 a.m. Sung Festival Mass

Homily Delivered at Trinity Episcopal Church

Ashland, Oregon
Isaiah 25:6-9; 1 Corinthians 15:1-11; Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24, and Mark 16:1-8

Lord Jesus, as you were known to your disciples, known to us in the proclaiming of the word and the breaking of the bread. Amen.

Think of the phrase “if it seems too good to be true, it probably is.” “It’s just too good to be true!”  What does this say about us? 

Today is Easter Sunday, the feast of the Resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. 

Some people today find it hard to believe, let alone publicly proclaim, the fact of Jesus’ resurrection.  It is too literalistic and physical for many of us. Some say it works better when understood as a story expressing our faith and values, but not as an affirmation about something that actually happened. 

I understand these feelings.  It is hard to conceive of life after death.  The one thing we know, and that our experience tells us again and again, is that when you’re dead, you’re dead.  There is no coming back.  If someone does seem to come back, either they never were dead in the first place, or someone seems to be having a hallucination, a dream, has been transported into flights of poetic beauty, of really good story-telling based in wishful thinking and not the hard, cruel facts of our existence. 

So some modern scholars and theologians believe the early disciples, after the disappointment, shock, and grief of his death held little bereavement groups. Trying to make sense of Jesus’ teachings, life, and death in light of the Hebrew Scriptures, they began to tell hopeful stories that ended up taking a narrative life of their own, reflected a generation later in the various contradictory resurrection stories found in the Gospels.

 

Behind this way of thinking is an underlying assumption, at least at the emotional level.  The story is just too good to be true.  

I agree that these stories are full of meaning beyond simple recounting of “what happened,” and admit that the details and differences in the stories handled down to us show the marks of oral tradition and story-telling that call into question their value as detailed chronicles of historical events. 

But I must say I personally find such a purely mythological reading of the resurrection stories to be unconvincing.

The earliest account of the story that has survived is not found in the Gospels.  It is found in today’s epistle, where St. Paul, writing only about 15 years after Jesus’s death tells us of the “tradition” of “Good News” that was passed on to him by earlier Christians: that Jesus died and was buried, was raised, and then appeared.  It is from this early apostolic preaching that the various stories about Jesus’ death and bodily reappearance develop, moving from barebones angelic proclamation in the earliest Gospel, Mark, to more and more developed stories in the later Gospels.

The early disciples were no fools.  They knew the difference between wishful storytelling and personal experience.  The idea that the stories arose in small groups sitting shiva for Jesus 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, even unique, happened on Easter morning than to argue that these stories arose simply as the result of proof-texting of the Hebrew scriptures.  The problem, of course, is whether we allow for the possibility of such a thing.   

It is clear from the stories themselves that the early disciples were themselves doubters.  It was too good to be true.  St. Thomas in John’s Gospel won’t believe it until he sees for himself.  The women in today’s reading from Mark see an angel at the tomb proclaiming that Jesus is not there but has risen.  The women run away “trembling with astonishment” and tell no one “because they were afraid” (Mark 16:8).   That is where Mark in its earliest copies ends.  In Luke, as the women come back, they remember words that Jesus had said to them while he was alive, and this gives them the confidence to announce what the angel has said.  But the apostles take it as “an idle tale,” and do not believe them (Luke 24:10-11). 
In Matthew, when Jesus finally appears to the disciples after their return to Galilee, “they saw him and worshipped him, but some doubted” (Matt. 28:17). 

It is clear that the disciples here do not know what to make of what has occurred—it was so unusual.  They believe in ghosts, but clearly this is no spirit.  They know that Jesus was dead and buried and are certain that people do not come back from the dead.  But here is Jesus talking to them, more alive than he has ever been before. 

They struggle to understand and find the right words for it. 

They finally settle on an obscure image found in the Book of Daniel: the raising on the Last Day of the martyred righteous. Written during the Maccabean revolt, the book is concerned with the fate of righteous Jews who suffered torture and death at the hands of the Greek Syrian tyrants.  It says that God will act to right injustice.  He will create the righteous martyrs anew, and bring them forth alive from their graves, shining like the stars in heaven.

To be sure, talk about resurrection at the end of time is a literary and mythological image, not an historical one.  But the belief of the earliest disciples that Jesus after his death reappeared to them in bodily reality, itself the origin of the tales of specific resurrection appearances that developed later, to my mind is a fact of history.

We all have our own thresholds of trusting God, of believing, of having faith.   Mary needs to hear his voice; Peter see his eyes; Thomas see the wounds; others his breaking the bread, his eating fish.  

We are in the same place as the disciples before they actually see the risen Lord:  we each have our petty thresholds and barriers we set up for faith.  “I won’t believe in God if he doesn’t prevent evil and suffering.” “I can’t believe in God unless I see some miracle or vision.”  “I can’t believe in God unless I understand everything I desire to know.”  But this is just our beaten down hearts talking, afraid to trust because we have been hurt in the past, disillusioned by the world.  “It is too good to be true.”   This is not a description of the world, but an expression of our pain. 

That is the point of these stories.  Jesus taught by word and deed that this whole world is occupied enemy territory.  God’s putting things right, the in-breaking of God’s true kingship, was already set in motion in his person.  But Jesus’ death seemed to prove the foolishness of his teaching.   It was unjust, wrong, and horrible, proof of just how bad this monstrous world actually is. 

But a day after his burial, Jesus, more alive than he had ever been before, came back to his friends.  They had no doubt that he had been dead.  And the one before them now was so burningly alive that many of them had problems recognizing him. 

We too can learn to recognize Jesus, and see God’s hand in our lives. Listen to these stories again and again and engage with the one they tell about.  It is important that we care passionately about it, and if this means sometimes expressing our thresholds and being labeled as “doubters,” that’s O.K.  God can break down the walls we place around our hearts only if there is something there for him to grab onto.  It is our passion and yearning, for the good, the right, the holy, and the beautiful that provides the traction necessary. 

Let us be more honest in our prayer life, and express our complaints and conditions, so that God might break them down, and give us the great gift of a believing heart.

In the name of God, Amen. 

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