Easter Sunday - "Do not be afraid"

Easter Sunday – “Do not be afraid”

Filled with awe and great joy the women came quickly away from the tomb and ran to tell his disciples. (Mt 28)

The women mourned. They went to the tomb of Jesus early in the morning. Who knows what brought them there? Perhaps the came simply to be close to the body of their beloved rabbi just as we hold on to articles that evoke memories of those we love who have died.

What happened on that morning can only be described in imagery of other visitations of angels in the Jewish scriptures. Whatever biblical analysis makes of the images in the Resurrection accounts, one thing remains – that early group of disciples tried to explain something utterly strange. This was no ghostly encounter. This was real.

Like good Jews they turned to their Scriptures to try to explain their meeting with Jesus, now Risen and vibrant with a life so strange and yet familiar that it changed them forever. The threads through the different Gospel accounts are those of mystery and familiarity; material but different (Thomas, put your fingers in my wounds); intimacy and distance; joy, awe, surprise. This person was the Jesus the knew yet there is something ‘more’ to him now. They rejoice and are in awe.

What happened at the Resurrection of Jesus? The experience of the disciples is that God had raised him to a totally new life. All that made him who he was is now alive in God. In a sense, all theology since then has been, and continues to be an attempt to understand this moment in history. It took the believing community time to articulate that Jesus was so fully human that indeed he was God, it took time for the believing community to understand that because of Jesus divisions of privilege don’t matter (well, perhaps we are still trying to learn that one). Theology, all words will always fall short when trying to understand this moment of inbreaking of God. But we must try.

I am reminded of J.R.R. Tolkien’s words to C.S. Lewis who was undergoing a faith crisis. Tolkien said that it was a lack of imagination rather than a lack of faith that was the problem. I think that applies when we try to understand what happened in this moment of Resurrection.

Jesus’ Resurrection was not only something that happened to him. It also happened to those followers. They were changed and their change continues to change us today. The intuition of those early disciples was that he was now abidingly with them in a way never before experienced. That he was with them in such a way that he was in them and they were in him. This is not some quasi-identification but something more profound.

I think that one of the most consistent and profound intuitions of humankind is that we are connected to each other and to all creation in a way that is beyond the functional and superficial. Societies that have suppressed this intuition and called it ‘primitive’ become destructive, as we are learning to our cost. Even the early concept of human and then animal sacrifice is founded on this intuition that one is able to represent the many because we are connected in a profound way. The theology of vicarious suffering and the Hebrew Go’el who redeemed one enslaved are grounded in this web of creation.

The Resurrection of Jesus must not be seen then as God’s reward to him after a job well done. God raised Jesus as the first fruits of the healed and redeemed humanity, and all creation. In the risen human body of Jesus that web of life is taken to a new moment. Jesus is now in creation with an intensity and intentionality that we only previously knew darkly. Now, because of this he is in us and we in him we are connected to each other in a manner that is both material and spiritual and real.

If this is so, what we celebrate today is a reality that is sometimes hard to imagine, yet we believe. However the bond between Jesus risen and we who share that life means that we continue, in him, the life of forgiveness, compassion and making visible by our lives what those women saw on that first day of the week.

We share in the great awe and joy of the women at the tomb as we celebrate with all creation and make visible the new life that pulses through all creation.

So, the Resurrection greeting, “Do not be afraid”.

“Do not be afraid – of this Risen life.”