SUNDAY 27 MARCH 2005 : EASTER DAY
Acts 10: 34 – 43; Psalm 118: 1 – 2, 14 – 24; Matthew 28: 1 – 10
The carved wooden Christ figure in the centre of the chancel on Good Friday and today is on loan to us from the artist, Richard McWhannell. It has been on display in the church on a number of occasions in recent years as part of exhibitions of art. It was loaned to us again for last Wednesday’s “Spirit in a strange land” evening, and for us to have for this weekend.
One of the people who was keen to have it on display again refers to it as ‘baby Jesus’. She has decided on that because of the child-like proportions of the figure from neck to feet. I’ve never been particularly convinced by the ‘baby Jesus’ idea because of its adult face and outstretched arms. Then someone pointed out to me on Good Friday that to him the carving is using both M?ѬÅori and European forms. The body, with its slightly bent knees and slightly protruding tummy, is of the same proportions and design as you will see in the carved male figure at the front apex of a M?ѬÅori meeting house. The outstretched arms are disproportionate to the body, and tend to become a major focus of the piece, making it like the figure in a crucifixion. The slightly hung head is more European in appearance and is in proportion to the arms but not to the rest of the figure and could also be seen in a crucified pose.
Is the figure a representation of the crucified Christ? If so, it is without the wounds normally associated with a representation of the crucifixion. Is it perhaps the risen and ascending Christ, arms outstretched over his followers in blessing? That is my preference. Or is the person who refers to it as ‘baby Jesus’ on the right track?
I think part of the charm of the figure is its ambiguity. I suppose I should ask the artist what he was intending – but then, he might turn out to be one of those artists who says that what you see is what it is, for you.
I think part of the charm of Easter is its ambiguity. For just about forty years now, ever since Lloyd Geering spoke aloud that which others had been whispering in their hearts about the resurrection of Jesus and the empty tomb narratives, Easter day has been an ambiguous festival. Many, probably most, possibly all of us, have moved on from wondering about the “how” of the resurrection of Jesus, and have become quite content to regard the empty tomb narratives as not the kind of thing someone could have recorded on a video camera, and yet are stories still worth telling with another level of truth within them.
Even more than when we go to church at Christmas, we find ourselves coming to church on Easter Day and singing hymns which loudly proclaim things we don’t actually believe to be literally true. There is at least a good range of contemporary Christmas hymns and songs, which can be sung with integrity. Easter and the resurrection seem to fall into the ‘too hard’ basket, and there are comparatively few contemporary hymns which don’t put us in the ambiguous situation of singing one thing and believing something else. Most of us have learned to live with seeing what were once regarded as literal truths as more or less useful metaphors.
I think one of the unfortunate side-effects of the theological controversy of the mid nineteen-sixties is that the resurrection of Jesus was turned by one portion of the Church into something that you either believe in, or do not believe in. To believe in it means to believe in a literal bodily resurrection and a literally empty tomb. Not to believe in those things was not to believe in the resurrection and warranted at least tut-tutting, deep sighs and eye-rolling, and at worst muttered insinuations about whether one really was a Christian or whether one should continue to be a minister.
I don’t think it matters what one thinks or believes about the resurrection narratives in the four Gospels. I don’t think it matters at all what one thinks about the empty tomb stories in particular. If it was good enough for the apostle Paul to go through his Christian life without apparently knowing, let alone believing, anything about an empty tomb, then it is good enough for the rest of us. Paul, who makes not even one vague hint about an empty tomb, was nevertheless convinced that Jesus Christ was risen, and what’s more he was convinced that he had experienced the risen Jesus first-hand, as had Peter and the rest of the apostles, Mary Magdalene and many others as well.
A key word in that last sentence was the word ‘experienced’. And it leads me to ask some questions this Easter Day, questions which if asked by a lawyer of a witness in a courtroom would receive a caution from the judge for ‘leading the witness’, because the answer is implied in the question.
The first question is, was resurrection something that happened to the body of the crucified Jesus? Or was resurrection something that happened to his followers in the weeks and months and years following his crucifixion?
The second is, is resurrection something to be believed in? Or
is resurrection an experience that turns one’s life around,
or upside down?
Or, to put it another way, is resurrection a doctrine, or a
lifestyle?
Another question is, was resurrection a historical event of nearly two thousand years ago, which we commemorate today like we commemorate something historical at Anzac Day? Or is resurrection a contemporary experiential reality?
Another way to put that question is, if you were to make a television documentary about the resurrection of Jesus, is it the kind of documentary that would play on the history channel? Or would it be shown on one of the competing 7pm current affairs programmes?
As I said, my questions are framed in a way that tells you what the resurrection means for me. Clearly something happened way back then following the ignominious crucifixion of Jesus. Clearly something happened to his followers which transformed them from a confused, frightened, scattered group of erstwhile followers of an executed wannabe prophet, into a bold, inspired and inspiring, cohesive and coherent community of women and men who were the beginning of a faith-story which spread around the world.
I am one of the last of a number of generations of liberal ministers who trained for ministry between the nineteen-forties and early nineteen-seventies. I am also one of the first of the baby boom generation of ministers. As one of the first of the baby boom generation of ministers, I brought with me – not that I recognised it as such at the time – some of the mind-sets and world-views characteristic of that generation. It was a generation which placed emphasis on the importance of experience, and which was as suspicious of the purely rational as it was of authority figures. It was the generation that gave the world the experiential realities of free sex and the drug culture – not that I am implying that my generation should be congratulated for those, but they are representative of the desire to experience rather than just to ‘know’ or be told. This was the generation which began the drift away from formal religion dominated by rationality and doctrine, and which began the journey into spirituality, something that could be experienced not just believed in. It is the generation which launched the charismatic movement, experiential rather than learned, traditional Christianity.
Being a baby boom minister, albeit a liberal one, made for an occasional uneasy relationship with the older generation of liberal ministers, such as the very intelligent and intellectual man who was my senior minister in my first parish. That older generation, perhaps born of reaction to the horrendous world war they had been through, trusted reason and was deeply suspicious of what they called ‘emotion’. Anything that smacked of mysticism, for instance, such as meditation or contemplative prayer, and which couldn’t be dealt with rationally, was not to be trusted.
I give this little piece of autobiography because it relates back to the self-answering questions I posed for Easter Day. Nowadays, writers firmly in the liberal or progressive tradition are emphasising resurrection as something profoundly experiential and transformational. I think especially of Bishop Jack Spong, Marcus Borg, and John Dominic Crossan. Yesterday I treated myself to a speed-read re-acquaintance with Jack Spong’s 1994 book on the resurrection. It is a very rational and considered examination of the subject. And it recognises a mystery – the mystery of a transformation of the disciples. That comes through more strongly in more recent publications. As with other writers, the so-called ‘resurrection appearances’ are not explained away, but recognised as symbolic representations of very real, vivid experiences which changed the disciples for ever. In some ways we live now in a less sceptical age, one which is more open to being surprised by things which are beyond explanation – such as vivid and dramatic experiences of non-physical realities such as Mary Magdalene must have had, and Peter, and Paul on his road to Damascus.
To be sure, we celebrate something historical on Easter Day – not one day in the distant past when some women found an empty tomb and disciples ran about in confusion, but a whole sequence of days and weeks, months and years. I have quoted before Dominic Crossan’s question, “How many years was Easter Day?” We commemorate a passage of time which so turned people around and made new people out of them that by the time Paul had his vivid and dramatic experience some five years after the death of Jesus, there were living, lively followers of Jesus making such a religious nuisance of themselves that he could set out to find them in Damascus, as well as in Jerusalem.
And it goes on. Josephus, a Jewish historian writing at the end of the first century, wrote about what he called “the tribe of Christians” that still “has to this day not gone away”. It could be said much more firmly now.
I recognise the danger of speaking about ‘vivid and dramatic’ experiences, because we know it is not like that for most people. But that doesn’t mean transformation does not take place, that people do not become new. Resurrection, as something which happens to the followers of Jesus, as something which turns lives around, as a lifestyle, as a current affairs documentary subject, is about those rare, single, dramatic events, but is more about the more common lifelong process of gradual change and renewal. It is about those shorter rhythms in many people’s lives, processes of transformation and newness that may occur at various points of our lives in times of major life-experiences such as death or a change in one’s physical condition for instance, or a job change or an age-change.
But I’m talking too much. Maybe it is the baby boomer in me speaking when I say, as I think I have said for all my thirty-two years in ministry, that in the end Easter is not something to talk about, it is something to do, it is an attitude towards life and other people, it is a lifestyle. Whether what we say and sing fully represents our rational apprehension of what Easter is about, is relatively unimportant. What is important is that we are ‘Easter people’, that is, people of transformation and renewal, people of hope, people of trust, people who not only believe but know deep within their experience that love comes again, and that love makes all the difference.
He is risen! He is risen for us, and in us, that with him we may continue his work of the healing and transformation of our broken world and its broken people. He is risen, and his hands are outstretched over us in blessing and empowerment, giving us what we need to do and be Easter people in the communities of our daily lives.