Of all the Sundays of the year when people might need a helpful nudge with the lectionary texts, Easter is probably not one of them. Easter is one of the most theologically determined days of the year; most people are probably not grasping at which text or texts they want to follow. Easter does not look the same everywhere, to be sure, but almost everywhere there will be an obvious path to take, informed by the particular tradition and history and theology of your community.
In that spirit, and since I am writing my own sermon for Easter right now too, I want to offer some mostly-unconnected thoughts about the texts of the lectionary for Easter Sunday. These are the things I notice when I look at the text, and the things that I want to bring to the attention of folks who are working their way through these passages.
· The first thing to notice is that there are many different ways to tell the story of Easter. The lectionary gives us two of the four gospel accounts, Mark and John, plus a version embedded in one of Peter’s speeches from Acts, and another passed on by Paul in 1 Corinthians. What’s true of the whole New Testament (and the whole Bible for that matter) is true of the story of Easter morning: the same story is told many different times in many different ways. It can be fashionable to view this as a defect in the biblical text—to say that the repetition of stories is a sign that the narrative is unreliable or messy. But that’s post-Enlightenment nonsense; we ought to be able to hold more than one version of a story in our heads at the same time, and we ought to be able to recognize that more viewpoints are almost always better than fewer viewpoints. The four versions of the resurrection story offered by the lectionary this week (Mark, John, Acts, 1 Corinthians) share things in common, and they differ in important ways. That should not scandalize us.
· What I like about both the Acts and the 1 Corinthians versions is that they are presented as memories. There is a tendency—again, derived from post-Enlightenment nonsense—for modern people to think of biblical accounts as something like newspaper reports or encyclopedia entries. But that’s not at all what they are, or what they were ever meant to be. Biblical stories like these are memories; they are remembrances of distant but consequential events, refracted through both time and later experience. So we should expect them to have been passed down and “received,” as Paul puts it—memories turned to stories turned to texts. When we read these stories of resurrection, we are not hopping into a time machine see what “really happened.” Instead, we are being granted access to a tradition and a dearly-kept recollection.
· The two gospel accounts included in the lectionary this week, Mark and John, are about as different from each other as two stories can be. Mark’s story is brief, straightforward, and unwilling to make too many grand proclamations. The Gospel of Mark famously ends on a cliffhanger; verse 8 is an abrupt ending in English, and even more so in the untidied Greek. (The two other endings—the “Shorter Ending of Mark” and the “Longer Ending of Mark” that appear at the end of the gospel in modern translations—are likely later additions, attempts to make the abrupt ending less jarring). John’s account, meanwhile, is longer, more narratively detailed, and more theologically confident. This mirrors the Christologies of these two gospels; Mark’s Jesus is very human, even as he is lauded with divine titles, while John’s Jesus is very divine. I think it might be really effective to use both stories in an Easter Sunday worship, and to dwell on the tension between them.
· Lately I have been captivated by the wounds in John’s account. I wrote a recent article on this subject, in case you missed it, and I’m planning to spend a lot of time with this idea in my Easter sermon. It’s striking to me that the Gospel of John, the gospel that spends the most time emphasizing Jesus’ divinity, is also the gospel that spends the most time emphasizing Jesus’ wounds. There is an embodiment to the resurrection that I don’t see as clearly in the other gospels—an insistence that we look, like Thomas, at the resurrected Jesus’ scars.
· In three out of the four resurrection stories in this week’s lectionary—in Mark, Acts, and 1 Corinthians—something interesting is happening with the grammar. Notice the way the verbs relate to Jesus, with my emphasis added. Mark 16:6 reads “he has been raised.” Acts 10:40 says “God raised him on the third day and allowed him to appear.” In 1 Corinthians 15:4 Paul writes that “he was raised on the third day.” In all three of these cases, Jesus is the recipient of the action, not the one doing the action. Jesus doesn’t rise, he is raised. This might not seem like a big deal, but it points to a difference between ancient and modern understandings of Jesus and the resurrection. Modern Christians, perhaps especially Protestant ones, tend to view Jesus as the main protagonist, the main agent, and the main character of salvation history. And that is true, to some degree. But ancient Jesus-followers tended to assign the agency to God, not to Jesus, and they tended to understand the saving actions as belonging to God. Paul writes frequently about Jesus in these terms, as the recipient of God’s action, not as the actor himself. This is probably because as a Jew, Paul would have hewed toward a monotheistic stance. Paul probably wanted to reserve truly divine behavior for God. Modern Christians blur this line continually, saying things like “Jesus rose from the dead,” singing things like “up from the grave he arose,” and using “Jesus” and “God” interchangeably. That might be ok, but we should also recognize that it is at odds with how ancient people thought. Acts 2:32 reads “This Jesus God raised up,” and that summarizes pretty well how ancient followers of Jesus thought about his resurrection—as something that happened to him, not something he did.
· I think it’s interesting how post-resurrection appearances work in these texts. Acts stipulates that Jesus was allowed to appear “not to all the people but to us who were chosen as witnesses, and who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead.” John dwells at length on Jesus’ appearance to Mary Magdalene. In Mark, Jesus does not make any post-resurrection appearances at all. In other places in the New Testament, we get post-resurrection appearances like the story of the road to Emmaus (Luke) and the scene of the disciples fishing and Jesus grilling fish on the shore (John), among others. There is a certain caginess about these appearances; it seems to me that they are always qualified in some way. The text wants us to know that some people saw Jesus and not others, or that the people who saw Jesus did not recognize him by sight, or that (as in the case of John’s story of Jesus’ encounter with Mary Magdalene) it was not an ordinary meeting, but a meeting where Mary’s expectations (an embrace?) were deflated by Jesus (“do not hold on to me”). It’s like the biblical texts don’t quite know how to talk about resurrection…there’s clearly something there to talk about, but the New Testament authors are not quite confident yet in what to say. There’s a conflictedness to it. That’s quite a contrast to later, modern discourse about resurrection; Christians seem to be very full-throated about Jesus rising from the dead. So, there is this curious circumstance where the further a follower of Jesus is from the resurrection, the more confident they are in knowing what happened.
· I always notice, this time of year, how many magazine and tabloid covers have to do with Jesus. You can’t stand in line to check out at the grocery store without seeing cover stories asking some provocative question about Jesus. I guess they trot these out for Christmas and Easter—half-baked conspiracy theories or speculation about Jesus’ love life or medieval church coverups or “lost” gospels. Most scholars I know roll their eyes at these things, but apparently that kind of a cover story sells magazines. To me, this suggests two things: a curiosity about Jesus (and religion more generally), and a deficit of well-informed public discourse about Jesus (and religion more generally). Despite the bottom falling out of religious identification and participation in Mainline Protestant churches in particular, there does seem to be a steady appetite for religious ideas, and even religious texts and theologies. It often seems that academics are too consumed with navel-gazing and infighting to serve this public appetite for learning more about Jesus and religion, and churches are too preoccupied with their own survival. Academics want to nitpick what someone has insufficiently nuanced, and churches want someone to help pay the bills, and no one is serving the public’s need for conversation and discourse. I don’t know how to fix this—though you should stay tuned for some announcements on that front—but I do perceive it as a real problem with the way our culture intersects with religion. I should note that there are some folks doing this kind of thing really well, sometimes even in the same publications that run salacious Easter/Christmas stories. Candida Moss’s recent piece in Time is a great example of serious scholarship, mediated for the general public.
· I can’t help but contrast these texts’ conflicted and halting takes on Jesus’ resurrection with the glee and confidence with which Christians experience Easter today. Easter, at least in the communities where I have been a participant, is filled with “He is Risen!” and lots of excited and triumphant rhetoric. I don’t see anything like that in these passages, especially the gospel passages. Mark and John are telling the resurrection story hesitantly, mournfully, and partially, leaving gaps where the certainty ought to be. We should pay attention that, in my opinion. Some of the first witnesses to the resurrection didn’t seem to know what to make of it, and that kind of humility and practiced uncertainty might do us well, in an era when North American and European Christianity is on the retreat, and a lot of the old certainties have turned out to be less sure than we thought.
Easter is one of the highest of holy days in the Christian calendar—perhaps the most important day in the Christian year. More than most other days, Easter will come with traditions and expectations that are particular to your tradition, your community, and even your family. There isn’t always much room to maneuver within those things, but insofar as there is, I hope these thoughts have been helpful.
Eric, I so hope that you're preaching at FPUCC on Easter so I can hear your sermon on this topic. Ever since adolescence, I've struggled with the meaning of the resurrection and why Christians even need it. To me it's not necessary to validate Jesus's compelling ethical imperatives. And I don't need it to reassure me about whatever comes after my embodied consciousness on this earth. God's grace alone convinces me that whatever awaits me after I die will be unexpected and joyous. I understand that what the disciples experienced, and later called resurrection, was so powerful that it engined a whole new religion. But that's an historical importance. I look forward to your insight on the resurrection's religious importance for Christians today - hopefully without all the traditional hype about proof of Jesus' divinity and the promise of individual immortality.