Easter 2016

Easter 2016

Each year at Easter we rotate through one of the four Gospel accounts of Jesus’ resurrection. One reason is because we have a Lectionary that schedules the readings each year, but more importantly because each account tells us something different—some different aspect of this powerful event.

In truth, each of the Gospels are distinctly different in their own ways, some are major differences, while others may have the odd turn of phrase or detail. However, all of that said, the overarching message of the crucifixion of Jesus and his resurrection are at the core, and are in fact the reason for the Gospels to begin with…

Beyond these main themes, however, one of the most striking similarities that appears all across the Gospel accounts of the resurrection is this idea of fear. Not “joy,” strangely. Not relief that Jesus was not dead. Fear.

Fear is a big deal. Fear can make us mindful of real hazards and keep us from potential dangers. But fear can also be debilitating. Fear can cause us to act irrationally, or not act at all, and has the power to lead us into the very same hazards it could otherwise help us to avoid.

And yet, here when it comes to the resurrection of Jesus, we see fear being the reaction to the very news that Jesus in not in the tomb—he’s no longer dead. Scholars say that earlier versions of Mark’s Gospel actually ended with the women running scared from the empty tomb—a scene more like something from an Ed Wood film perhaps than the Bible. Then again, this might not surprise us since almost everyone is always afraid in Mark’s Gospel.

But if the resurrection of Jesus is “Good News” (that is what the Gospels were originally called), and the very people who carried this Good News into the world to change it are the same people whose response was fear… Well, what were they afraid of, then?

I suppose the easy answer is that they were afraid of supernatural beings showing up to tell them Jesus wasn’t dead anymore. That, understandably, would make anyone’s hair stand up. Then again, after seeing the signs which Jesus performed so often (the raising of Lazarus being a good example)…well, angelic beings ought to be easy.

Then again, what might this fear mean in a bigger sense. Like, what if what these people feared wasn’t simply what was there at the empty tomb, but what if it was even all of the things that were subconscious fears that they couldn’t possibly have realized fully in that moment? After all it wasn’t only their friend and teacher who died on the cross. We believe that they somehow understood him to be the Son of God, the Messiah. And as the Messiah, Jesus represented a long awaited promise to the children of Abraham.

As the Son of God—well, that alone was a major game-changer, especially for Israel who self-identified as having One God.

However, these ideas of sonship as well as this identity as descendants of Abraham both have deep historical resonances for Israel. Even the sacrifice of a son is a motif that has echoes in the story of Abraham. In fact, we generally read the story known as the “Akeda,” (the binding of Isaac) at the Easter Vigil specifically because we believe it is a kind of foretelling of the sacrifice of Jesus.

Isaac, of course was the son born to Abraham and his wife Sarah in their extreme old age. Isaac was a child of promise who was a sign that God would make Abraham the father of multitudes of people. However, we have this disturbing story of God telling Abraham that he is to take his son Isaac to this mountain called Moria, and kill him.

Well, as you might recognize, they borrowed this name Moria from the Lord of the Rings movies for obvious reasons (they apparently even made the movies into books). But this word Moria means “darkness…” and this command from God was very dark. I have to say, this is a really difficult story to try and explain to your children, especially because Abraham was going to do it.

We have to remember, of course, that in the predominant culture, tribal gods were telling their followers to kill their children all the time. Why should this one be any different? What’s more, “Gehenna,” which Jesus mentioned sometimes in the Gospels, and we often assume is an allegory for hell, was this place for burning garbage … Well, apparently this was a place that used to be used for child sacrifice, and therefore became (by Jesus’ time) an ‘unclean’ place only good enough to burn trash.

So, it seems to me that more than God testing the faith of Abraham, I believe God wanted Abraham to ‘put to death’ this idea—this image of a God who would demand child sacrifice. In other words, it wasn’t Isaac that God wanted Abraham to kill. It was Abraham’s wrong God Image, which had become an idol, which God wanted to see Abraham sacrifice…

In the case of Jesus, not only was the idea that God could never dwell with God’s People in a wholly physical way proven wrong, but so was the illusion that God could never be killed. Jesus is not sacrificed by God per se, but is made victim to the crushing institution of sin and violence in our world. But these were only two of the “God delusions” which were put to death on the cross.  

And, really, I’m sure we could imagine any number of other things that died with the death of Jesus. One thing that certainly stands out was the misconception that God was only interested in Israel. Jesus, as we know, regularly told the Gentiles he encountered (people who are not Jewish) that he was sent to the lost sheep of Israel, and really had no time for them. The story of the Syro-Phoenician woman is a great example. Of course, after saying this sort of thing, Jesus still did what they asked of him—but, it’s still a little difficult to understand.

But, just to be fair, we should keep in mind that the promise of the Messiah, and the life and ministry of Jesus were all rooted in God’s history with Israel. Some of the prophets of Israel, like Moses, Micah and Isaiah all promised that Messiah would come when the time was right.

Christians, then, even look back at other places in the Old Testament and find even more places which we believe foretell the coming of this Messiah, and that this Messiah is Jesus of Nazareth.

  

One particular place where we find a lot of this is in the writings of Isaiah—especially in those places which Isaiah talks about the “Suffering Servant.” These sections are actually referring to Israel, personified as a servant—but they also certainly seem to speak of the suffering Jesus would endure some 9 centuries after the time of Isaiah.

The point is, however, the Messiah was always supposed to belong to Israel. That was the promise for centuries. And so Jesus, as the Messiah, should by all rights belong exclusively to Israel—the Chosen People of God. Maybe this is why it had to be the Jewish religious authority who orchestrated his betrayal, and forced the execution of Jesus. Of course, the culpability doesn’t belong only to the Jews. The Gentile authorities had just as much power to stop the whole thing. But, that’s to say, it wasn’t the misunderstood God Image of the Romans that got Jesus crucified; instead it was the delusion of the Jewish religious elite, and the godless miscarriage of justice by the Roman authority helped it along. Everyone is guilty, because even today we perpetuate this system.

And yet, on that morning when Jesus rose from the dead—it wasn’t a Jewish Messiah who had defeated Death. Instead the One who emerged, Deathless, with a physical body, and wounds made glorious, claims victory on behalf of all of humanity, because he suffered and died at the hands of all of it. In other words, Jesus gave himself a Perfect Victim to the whole system of sin and death, which supersedes any ethnic or religious identity. Being the promised Jewish Messiah was simply the means that led him there… But it was in defeating Sin and Death that his true Messiah-hood was revealed, and he became Savior of the whole world.

However, even as Jesus emerged from the tomb as the Resurrected One, there were all of those things that remained dead in the tomb. The belief that God remains transcendent and far away from Creation, for instance. Perhaps the hubris that we understand, or have an exclusive claim on God’s truth and salvation… Maybe the sense of entitlement that comes with our association or group identification…

Who knows what other misconceptions about God were left laying among the burial shrouds. Whatever they were, they were important once to the people who held them, because all of them were enough to kill the Son of God.

And I would imagine they were all as powerful as that, because as each of us know, dispelling our own illusions is hard enough—but, losing our illusions about God can at first feel like the death of something sacred. When something sacred is lost—dead, well that is a fearful thing. So, with all those precious things that they believed sacred still lying dead in the tomb, even after Jesus had been raised; I think I can understand the fear that the women and the other disciples experienced at the tomb. I can imagine how disorienting it must have been.

But you know, I had a teacher (a Martial Arts Instructor) in high school who taught us that fear can be understood as an acronym. It’s “False Evidence Appearing Real,” he said. Now this means that in the case of fear, we can choose to give that fear more power by believing that it has power over us. We can allow anxiety to dictate how we perceive, or understand, or react to situations.

In the case of the disciples and their fear…‘so what’ if those things that they had taken for granted as true were proven not to be? And ‘so what’ if the things that they had assumed as birthright were proven instead to be miserly expectation?

Jesus, the one who loved them, and was himself God’s love for them, had been raised from the dead! He arose from death, left all of their sacred illusions behind, and yet remains the Son of God, and Messiah. And even though their fear might have persisted after the resurrection, that’s not to say that fear is stronger than death, or that it wasn’t itself defeated by Jesus. Yet while it remains, like mortal death, fear is something that we have to learn to live beyond. And yet the question that lingers year after year for us at Eastertide is: “What dead things do we need to leave in that tomb?” Whatever they are, no matter how sacred we believe them to be—if they’re in that tomb, then they are where Jesus ain’t. The tomb is a place for dead things, and the fear of what is there should never control us, because if we’re looking for Jesus, we won’t find him among the dead.