John 20:1-18
I Corinthians 15:3-5, 51-57
A Sermon Prepared for the Hollywood Presbyterian Church
Rev. Stephen A. Herring
April 24, 2011
Easter Sunday
The amazing truth about Easter is that we all experience it in slightly different ways. We call it Easter because our celebrations of the resurrection of Christ coincide with older celebrations of the festival of the rising sun in the east. The sun rises in the east, and so we face east for the sunrise every Easter. We use eggs and candy, chicks, and the Easter Bunny because all these things belong to older folk festivals for celebrating the return of spring. It amuses me, and sometimes it annoys me that some of our fundamentalist brothers and sisters find fault with any such celebrations that predate the Christian church. I find no harm at all in any of these decorations, stories, or festivals. These things give us an opportunity to have conversation with the secular world about the power of life and death as the seasons change. They allow us to touch upon something wonderful, something deep and powerful in our human experience of mortality, and transformation within this natural world. We all know that we are going somewhere in this life, and we all share common fears, and common hopes about where it is that we are headed.
We experience Easter in different ways because we experience life in different ways. It is all about good news though, and we all need good news. With this in mind, I have written the following exposition of the Easter message as we find it in scripture. Please pay attention to the footnotes. This blog posts them as end notes, but they are an important part of this exposition of the resurrection story. My hope is that by reading this message and meditating upon it, we can grow in our own awareness of the awesome God “in whom we live and move and have our being.”[1]
The Apostle Paul gives us the Easter message in First Corinthians 15:3-5 briefly and simply as follows: “For I delivered to you first of all what I also received, that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, that he was buried, and that he arose on the third day according to the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the twelve.”[2]
Paul uses a formula here to give full significance to his own experience of the Risen Christ. The key words of this formula are: died, was buried, arose, appeared. By this formula, Paul has encapsulated the whole Easter message. Jesus died on a cross and his death was the atoning sacrifice for all our sins. He was buried in the normal way one would expect for a body that has died. Burial signifies the complete and unconditional experience of death. This was not a death that could be faked. The word “arose” signifies resurrection, and resurrection signifies the complete victory of spiritual life over all mortal limitations. Resurrection changes everything. Resurrection needs to be understood, for it is not a mere illusion, or momentary glimpse of a person who has died. Resurrection is the complete setting aside of the whole process of death. It is literally the undoing of death. The word “appeared” signifies the attestation of the truth by reliable witnesses. We only know about the resurrection of Jesus because of the testimony of those to whom he appeared. Their accounts may differ, but these differences serve to allow us to identify more fully with the amazing mystery they experienced.
In Romans, Paul tells us that we have the ability by faith to be united with Christ in resurrection. Paul says; “If we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.” (Romans 6:5) When we make the choice to participate in the death of Christ, we can also participate in his resurrection.
Later on in his First Letter to the Corinthians, Paul spells out his full vision of the meaning of resurrection and immortality. This is my own, somewhat literal translation.
“Behold, I tell you a mystery[3]
We shall not all sleep[4].
But we shall all be changed.[5]
In an indivisible moment[6],
In the sparkle of an eye,
At the last trumpet.
For the trumpet shall sound
And the dead shall be raised imperishable.
And we shall be changed.
For this perishable nature must[7] put on the imperishable.
And this mortal nature must put on the immortal.
When the perishable puts on the imperishable and the mortal puts on the immortal
Then shall come to pass the LOGOS-WORD[8] that is written;
Death is swallowed up[9] in victory.
Where, O death is your victory?
Where, O death is your sting?
The sting of death is sin.[10]
The power of sin is nomos-law.[11]
But thanks be unto God
Because God has given us victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.
It was many years later that the Gospel writers gathered their accounts of this first Easter. Their accounts are full of the singular flashes of images we use to compile a narrative of some momentous event we have witnessed. When we remember any great event, our minds notice certain things and overlook others. We see a woman coming at dawn to anoint the body of a man she loved. We see flashes of two men, one younger, one older running toward a tomb to see why it had been disturbed. We see a flash of the grave wrappings laid aside. We see the face cloth neatly rolled up in a place by itself. We see two men. Are they angels? We hear one asking; “Woman, why are you weeping?” (John 20:15) “Why do you seek the living among the dead?” (Luke 24:5)
Mary Magdalene bore witness that someone was standing behind her. This unknown person asked the exact same question Jesus asked of his first disciples: tina zhteis; “Whom do you seek?” (John 20:15 cf. John 1:38)
The one thing that Mary remembered better than anything was that he called her by name, “Mariam!” When it became personal in this way, when he called her by name, it all became so totally real. This is when Mary took the strength to go to the disciples, to confront their fear, and to tell them that he had risen from the dead and he would soon ascend to God the Father of us all.[12]
So there we have it, an account of something amazing and life changing, an account given by different people who remembered this amazing event in different ways. These diverse people looked back on one event which would change everything for ever. It is an imperfect account, one which various critics have chosen to question. Yet, for those who choose to believe it, these words have the power to change us once and for all. These words can change our lives, and they can certainly change our attitude toward death. These are the words of salvation. This is the good news in which we stand and by which we are saved. All we need to do is to hold it fast, to believe with all our hearts that Jesus has risen from the dead, and he is ready to live within our hearts and to guide us through any trouble this life may bring our way. All we need to do is to hold it fast within our hearts and to believe that Jesus will show us the way to eternal life. Let us believe that Good News. Amen.
[1] These words were used by Paul in his speech to the Greeks on the Areopagus at Athens
[2] In the historical development of the books of the New Testament, scholars agree that the letters of Paul predate the Gospels by at least 20 to 30 years. This makes Paul’s testimony the earliest account we possess of the resurrection of Christ. We also note that Paul’s account of the witnesses to the resurrection in I Corinthians 15: 5 ff. differs significantly from the witness accounts in John and Luke. In this discrepancy we encounter an amazing truth about the early history of our church. These witnesses were human beings who came into confrontation with the essence of divinity in the death and resurrection of Christ. While the accounts of his death are remarkably consistent, the accounts of his resurrection show tremendous variation. The people who first witnessed these events did so in their own unique way. The different accounts reflect the need each person has to account for mortality and eternity in their own unique way. Our scriptures give us differing accounts because we are different people who will experience Christ in different ways. Uncertainty is part of our nature, and so uncertainty is reflected within these accounts. Because they were human, these witnesses were by nature deeply uncertain of exactly what they saw and exactly what it meant. This is important for us because God has the ability to speak in many and various ways to us so that we can receive the fullness of the message in the amazing diversity of our own opinions and experiences.
[3] A mystery is a deep teaching which requires meditation and contemplation in order to understand. A mystery is also frequently paradoxical. It requires the reconciliation of two opposite concepts into one whole idea. In this case, the two opposite concepts have to do with being conscious or unconscious, awake or asleep, changed, or unchanged, perishable, or imperishable. As we live and as we die, we must go through these paradoxes.
[4] Sleep refers to the temporary loss of conscious awareness. Paul is stating here that some of us will lose our awareness of Christ, and some of us will keep our awareness of Christ in this life. In the end, all of us will be completely transformed by the discovery of our own immortal nature. This verse has been used to support rapture teachings, to the effect that Jesus will return to “rapture” those who are yet alive at the time of his appearing. My reading of Paul’s intent is that he directs us to the awesome universality of transformation when we each hear that last trumpet. We may be asleep or awake at the time, alert, or not alert, dead or alive, but we will all hear it and we will all be changed. The point is that we will move from the physical world into the spiritual world, and we will be transformed.
[5] We shall move from one way of being to another. We shall move from one place to another in respect to our awareness of the eternal nature of our own soul.
[6] The Greek word here is atomos, atomos. It refers to an indivisible unit, and so describes the smallest possible unit of time. This transformation of consciousness will occur in an instant. This instant is the intersection of the historic narrative of our lives in time and space with the eternal life which awaits us in the Spirit.
[7] Literally, “it is necessary for this mortal nature to put on immortality.” Necessity drives the process of atonement. It was necessary for Jesus to be raised from the dead. (See John 20:9 and Luke 24:26) All of the visions of the end times shared by John in the book of Revelation are also “necessary.” (See Revelation 1:1) All this had to happen in order that we would come to perceive the perfection of grace which defines this universe.
[8] LOGOS is the original word which was with God at the beginning. See John 1:1 The use of LOGOS here is cosmological in significance, pointing out to us that grace and redemption are basic design components belonging to the nature of the created universe.
[9] Normally we think of death as swallowing us up. This is what happens to our bodies within the tomb. They are literally consumed by death. In this resurrection teaching, Paul is completely transforming our perceptions of death. Death itself is destroyed because death is an illusion. The soul is eternal by nature, and death is only a means of transformation.
[10] Sin happens when we try to make something temporary into something eternal. Our physical conditions, be they desirable or undesirable, are all totally temporary, totally subject to change. If we try to assign eternal value to these temporary conditions, we will fall into the trap of trying to make something more than it is. This gives death its sting. The idea of death’s sting is our feeling that the conditions and complications of death are somehow eternal. This illusion is what makes hell. We make hell for ourselves whenever we refuse to let go of temporary reality.
[11] Nomos-law describes Paul’s experience of Torah being misused in order to presume that the temporary circumstances and conditions of mortal life are somehow empowered with eternal significance. We make this same mistake whenever we try to give the outward conditions of our lives more significance than we should. Our fundamentalist brothers and sisters also make this legalistic mistake whenever they use the spiritual precepts of scripture as if they were predictive for the geographic, political, moral, or other characteristics of this transient world.
[12] We owe our faith to this woman, Mary of Magdela. The evidence within John’s Gospel suggests that she is the same as Mary of Bethany. If this is the case, she is the one who anointed the Anointed One. A male oriented church has tried for years to down play her influence or to discredit her by suggesting that she was a prostitute or somehow immoral. All of this goes back to well documented hostility between her and the other disciples. They had a problem in that Jesus was open to allowing women to be among his closest disciples, something which was completely foreign to traditional teachers of his time. (See the Gospel of Thomas, log. 114, The Gospel of Mary, and the Pistis Sophia, all Coptic Gnostic accounts of the ministry and teachings of Jesus.)
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