In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Alleluia. Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by dying, and bestowing life on those who were dead.
Christ is indeed risen from the dead. All four of the Gospel accounts are unambiguous on this point. Jesus Christ, the man from Nazareth, the man who was put to death by Pontius Pilate, who had been nailed to a tree, who had had his heart pierced by a lance, who was wrapped in a shroud and put in a grave – THIS man, on the third day after he was murdered, rose again from the dead. He rose and went around, and many of his friends saw him and spoke with him.
This is the central mystery of the Christian faith. In the end, beyond the bluster and the politicking, at the metaphysical bedrock of the faith, to be a Christian means to believe THIS – that the only and eternal Son of God became a man, that he was born of a woman, that he grew up, that he was tortured to death by Roman authority, and that three days later he rose again from the dead.
There are all kinds of reasons not to believe this. It sounds like a myth. And this time of year, there has evolved a little cottage industry of Biblical scholars who will appear on cable television to introduce you to a man they call “the historical Jesus.” He’s usually someone around whom one can pretty easily wrap one’s mind. He’s a sage, a prophet, a rabbi, a liberator, a Marxist revolutionary, a capitalist revolutionary, a proto-feminist, a gay rights activist. The most excruciatingly “relevant” biographical detail I’ve ever heard propounded by the television scholars is that Jesus crossed the Hindu Kush, where he learned from Tibetan gurus and lamas how to be the all-round awesome guy who went on to capture the world’s imagination.
All of this represents a common impulse – the impulse to package the Christ into something marketable, something consumable. We want the Christ to be something around which we can wrap our minds – and we understand politics, we understand the impulse to liberate, the desire for liberation; Tibet captures the imagination. So Jesus, in upper middle class, educated, white culture, takes on our form: he comes to look like us. His values and teachings come to reflect the values and beliefs of people who drink Starbucks coffee and listen to NPR.
But all of this bluster obscures the metaphysical claim lying like a scandal at the center of the Christian faith: that the Son of God became a man, was nailed to a tree until he was dead, and three days later rose again. If you want to figure out whether you can believe something, see if you can believe THAT. It isn’t easy. Its much easier to believe in politics or the esoteric. St. Paul wrote:
“For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. (1 Cor. 1).”
We don’t need to package Christ so that he’s marketable, so that he’s palatable, so that we can wrap our bourgeois minds around the mystery he is. We need to MYTHOLOGIZE him. We need to hold up the central impossibility at the center of our faith. We need to hold it up in front of others in the conviction that it GIVES LIFE, and we need to hold it up in front of ourselves as a challenge for the continual renewal of our own minds.
What difference does it make whether Christ really rose from the grave? It makes all the difference in the world. My favorite 20th century philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, wrote the following, in a moment of candor:
“What inclines even me to believe in Christ’s Resurrection? It is as though I play with the thought. – If he did not rise from the dead, then he decomposed in the grave like any other man. He is dead and decomposed. In that case he is a teacher like any other and can no longer help; and once more we are orphaned and alone. So we have to content ourselves with wisdom and speculation. We are in a sort of hell where we can do nothing but dream, roofed in, as it were, and cut off from heaven. But if I am to be REALLY saved, -- what I need is certainty – not wisdom, dreams, or speculation – and this certainty is faith,. And faith is faith in what is needed by my heart, my soul, not my speculative intelligence. For it is my soul with its passions, as it were with its flesh and blood, that has to be saved, not my abstract mind. Perhaps we can say: Only love can believe the Resurrection. Or: It is love that believes the Resurrection. We might say: Redeeming love believed even in the Resurrection; holds fast even to the Resurrection.”
The Resurrection means that what was hitherto the central and equalizing fact of human existence: DEATH – that death has been overcome, once and forever. The resurrection of Jesus means that death no longer holds universal sway – that there was ONE man for whom death was not the last word. It means that the sort of life possessed by this man was the sort of life that is not susceptible to the power of corruption.
And if you have ever faced death, either your own or the death of someone you love, then you know that this would be truly good news: that the horrible, silent question mark standing at the end of every human life, has been taken away, and it in its place is light and life, fulfillment and peace.
Our Easter proclamation is our insistence on exactly this point. That the impossible is, in fact, TRUE. That this myth came to pass on a hillside outside Jerusalem. That Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death. That belief in him and incorporation into his life means immortality. Alleluia.
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