Sermon preached by The Rev. Fredrick A. Robinson
Easter Day
Alleluia! Christ is risen! Years ago I was taught the same proclamation in Greek: Christos anesti! Christ is risen. Alethos anesti! He is risen indeed! That phrase is the heart of our faith, whether in English, or Greek, or in any of the other hundreds of languages in which it is said on Easter Day. Christ is risen! He is alive!
We proclaim it every time we say the Creed. We proclaim it in every Eucharistic prayer. Whether we realize it or not, every time we speak of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit we proclaim the resurrection, for God is not dead, but is living. When I have been in England, one of the things that I always noticed about their prayer book is the way they end all of their collects of the day. That ending is “through Jesus Christ our Lord, who is alive and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, now and for ever.” “Through Jesus Christ our Lord, who is alive.” Our collects say the same thing, but in different words: “Through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns…” I think that saying “through Jesus Christ our Lord, who is alive” is a much stronger way of saying it. It’s harder to miss the point.
That proclamation goes back to the first Easter Day, that day when the tomb in which Jesus’ cold, dead body had been placed, was found empty. Jesus in his resurrected body appeared to a few of his followers. The Gospel accounts don’t agree on who was actually the first to see him, which makes perfect sense if you think about it. Let’s say an accident occurs at a busy intersection and is witnessed by several people. Each one who saw the accident is interviewed, and not one of the accounts will completely agree with any of the others. It happened quickly, it startled everyone who saw it, and recall will be subject to individual perceptions. The one thing you know is that if two individuals agree completely on every detail, there has been conversation between the two. That would be the one testimony that would be suspect.
Likewise, the fact that none of the Gospel accounts agree on all of the details attests to their authenticity. If they all agreed on the details there would be no doubt that one had copied from another. What they all agree on is that there was an empty tomb, it was discovered first by at least Mary Magdalene, and the resurrected Jesus appeared to Mary Magdalene and to the disciples. They all agree on that. It wasn’t a ghost or an apparition. It wasn’t a strong feeling of a spiritual presence. It was Jesus in his resurrected body. That body was certainly different than it had been before his death. At times, they did not recognize him. It had the marks of his wounds, but he was healed. He could appear and disappear. But he could also eat, and he invited Thomas to touch him.
The disciples had not expected this outcome. They had thought that Jesus was the Messiah, but when he died the ignoble death of a common criminal, all of their hopes in him were dashed. It was only the bodily resurrection of Jesus that changed their thinking and made them realize the true nature of their Lord.
The resurrection is the heart of the Christian faith, yet from the beginning there have been skeptics. An ancient form of denial of the resurrection was a heresy called Docetism. In this form of thought, the whole earthly life of Jesus was not what it seemed. He only appeared to be human, according to the Docetists. He only appeared to suffer and appeared to die. So the resurrection was just one more magical act. A good deal of the Nicene Creed was directed at the Docetists, making sure that the Church affirmed the full humanity of Jesus.
In our own day, in fact in the whole modern era, the concept of the resurrection has been attacked as a vestige of an ignorant, superstitious age, from which we have, thankfully, emerged. In this way of thinking, if Christianity is to be relevant it must see the resurrection in a metaphorical way. Jesus had been such a strong teacher, that his teachings lived on in such a way that his followers spoke of Jesus as living on. The resurrection stories grew out of that mindset, as a way of coping with their grief in losing him. Anyone who thinks otherwise is labeled unenlightened, ignorant, fundamentalist, unscientific, conservative, and so on.
N.T. Wright and Craig Evans, in their book, Jesus, the Final Days: What Really Happened, state that this way of dealing with the resurrection stories is totally implausible. They state: “We know…of several other movements where the leader was killed, the one upon whom everyone had pinned their hope; but at no point do we find such movements then suffering from the blessed twentieth-century disease called cognitive dissonance, where they make up stories about something glorious that has happened in order to try to come to terms with their grief. That just doesn’t work as history.”
But most all of us grew up in that skeptical environment, or in the case of our young people, they are growing up in that environment. I believe in the resurrection as an actual event because of what it did to the disciples. Every one of the original disciples, minus Judas, plus Matthias, who took his place, and with the exception of John, died a martyr’s death, simply because they believed that Jesus was resurrected from the dead. I don’t believe they would have done that if he had not been raised.
Admittedly, it’s easier on us all if it is a metaphor. If that is the case, then Jesus is not unique. He is not God, any more than any of us is God. There isn’t a Holy Trinity, and all of the other world religions are just as true as ours. Furthermore, there is no real need in that case to evangelize. My truth is no better, no truer, than someone else’s truth. That seems so much more enlightened, it certainly is more politically correct, and let’s not forget it, it is so much more comfortable. A belief in Jesus’ resurrection as metaphor demands nothing of us other than what we want to make of it, for it is truth that is purely subjective. But make no bones about it, it isn’t Christianity.
If Jesus was indeed raised from the dead, then he really has ascended to the Father, his Spirit is with his Church, and he will lead us into all truth. All that he said about himself is true. We have been given that revelation and we are to live it out in our daily lives, and we are held accountable for it. “Of him to whom much is given, much is required.”
The irony of the Gospel, though, is that when you really allow yourself to believe that Jesus rose from the dead, not metaphorically but physically, that he is alive, that his Spirit is with his Church; and if you allow this Jesus truly to be Lord of your life, it is the most freeing thing that can happen to you and it is truly life-giving. When we say Alleluia! Christ is risen! The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia! May we truly mean it.