Many
of us have demythologized Jesus. Others have deconstructed Jesus. Now it’s time
to give some thought to resurrecting Jesus!
I
don’t mean we can assume divine power to restore life or create the eternal.
But just as God is revealed in the sacraments only with our willing suspension
of disbelief, the resurrected Jesus is said by scripture only to have appeared
to believers. Some of those believers hesitated or doubted, but they showed up
anyway. Many of us showed up this past Sunday for Easter celebrations of
resurrection. Woody Allen once quipped that 90% of life is just showing up!
This
train of thought began for me on Good Friday, in an afternoon conversation
about “the empty tomb” with a friend from seminary days, Kim White, visiting us
briefly in Atlanta en route home to Nashville. I asked him what difference the
story of Jesus’ resurrection makes to his faith in the 21st century.
Like me, he’s more interested in Jesus than the appellations attached to him,
like “the Christ.”
As
for me, I have discovered the ongoing presence of those closest to me after
their deaths, continuing to offer me their joy and wisdom and strength. It’s
easy then to imagine that those closest to Jesus felt the same, and this
intimacy manifested itself in the stories of resurrection we have in the Bible,
including what some scholars consider to be a misplaced resurrection story we
call the Transfiguration, in which Peter, James, and John were given a mystical
experience of Jesus’ spiritual intimacy with Moses the lawgiver, Elijah the
prophet, and Yahweh, who proudly booms again about Jesus as a chosen child,
just as Jesus heard at his baptism.
Literalists
would say we have to take these stories as literal truth, not as mystical
visions or explanatory mythology. But why? Even the early followers of Jesus
differed on these manifestations of a risen Christ. Some biblical stories
suggest a spiritual resurrection that allows Jesus to pass through locked doors
or out of his burial garment, still in place. Others suggest a physical
resurrection that allows Jesus to eat with disciples and permit them to touch
his wounds. Some stories mix the two. And Mary Magdalene’s encounter and that
of the disciples traveling to Emmaus indicate he is not immediately
recognizable, and may be known in a garden (nature) as well as in sacrament (the
breaking of bread), in grief as well as in hospitality to strangers.
For
me, all of this is to say that we actively participate in Jesus’ resurrection
by our own desire to see him, to experience his joy and wisdom and strength, to
manifest his presence to those around us through compassion for “the least of these” as well
as our neighbors and opponents and sisters and brothers in faith.
I
have always been fond of the concluding paragraph of Albert Schweitzer’s Quest for the Historical Jesus:
He comes to us as One unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lakeside, he came to those who knew him not. He speaks to us the same word: “Follow thou me!” and sets us to the tasks which he has to fulfill for our time. He commands. And to those who obey him, whether they be wise or simple, he will reveal himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in his fellowship, and, as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience Who he is.
Copyright © 2013 by
Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of
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And now I have the hymn with words by Timothy Dudley-Smith that uses Schweitzer's words as the beginning running through my head. I love it!
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