Resurrection of Revitalization?

April 10, 1965
Plainfield

Resurrection of Revitalization?

More often than not Christian celebrations seem to magnify the doubtful rather than rejoice in the certainties. A human body which dies, and remains dead for three days, does not become alive again in any spiritual sense. Our common, human, every-day experience testifies to this reality.

On this Easter Sunday, I would speak to you about the story of the resurrection of Jesus, point out some of the difficulties in it for the reasonable mind, and then propose what I believe are the enduring feelings which make every Easter celebration of liberation a pageant of joy - revitalization, not resurrection.

All the gospels tell a resurrection story - but it is not the same story. According to Matthew, the empty tomb is discovered by Mary Magdalene "and the other Mary." As they arrived, a great earthquake was the cue for "an Angel of the Lord" to roll away the stone and sit on it. "His appearance was like lightning," frightening the guards into a state of shock.

Mark's account is not only more restrained but has some interesting differences. In his story, Salome is a third person in the group bearing spices to anoint the dead body. There are no guards. The women see, not an angel of the Lord, but a young man sitting inside the tomb. The oldest [manuscripts] of Mark do not include an encounter between the woman an the risen Jesus.

Luke has other variations. The women are Mary Magdalene, Joana, Mary the mother of James and "other women with them." They meet neither an angel nor a young man, but two men in dazzling apparel,. After the women are told that the Son of Man has risen on the third day, the women bring this marvelous story to the disciples. Right at this point, there is a report which is amazing - the disciples do not believe the women! According to the gospels, Jesus had told his disciples that he would be crucified and rise on the third day. When the women brought this news, the disciples should not only have believed, they should have said, "of course, this is just what the master predicted." This is just one more indication of the several layers of tradition, [which] from different times report ... legends which have become a part of the gospel stories.

The gospel of John reports a fourth variant. Joseph of Arimithea secretly entombs the body in the garden sepulchre. In the early dawn, Mary Magdalene comes alone and discovers that the stone has been rolled away. She runs and tells Peter and another disciple who came rushing into the garden to visit the empty tomb.

Then as Mary weeps, she sees two angels sitting inside the tomb who ask the reason for her weeping. Then Jesus appears before her, but she does not recognize him immediately.

If you are intrigued by theological puzzles, the resurrection stories represent a difficult problem to reconcile.

Several well-known circumstances deserve review. First of all, the myth of the savior-god who rose from the dead after being sacrificed to humanity was almost universal in the ancient world. Osiris, Adonis, Attis, and numerous other saviors were the heroes of resurrection myths. In the inter-action of influence, amid the cosmopolitan traffic of the Roman World, how inevitable that the Gentile followers of a Jewish messiah should come to believe that he was a God, too; and also had demonstrated divinity by the miracle of resurrection.

Matthew's gospel has an even more astonishing report (27 51/53). Immediately following Jesus' death-cry, we read, "and behold the curtain was torn in two, from top to bottom; and the earth shook and the rocks were split; the tombs also were opened and many of the bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised, and coming out of the tombs after his resurrection they went into the holy city and were seen by many." Many people saw the resurrected bodies of saints who had died and been buried! Why did this not cause a mammoth furor? Why are Roman records almost completely lacking in reference to the life and death of Jesus, not to speak of the marvel of the resurrection [Editor’s note: sentence is completed by the fragment, “but also of some of his followers?”]

If you would add another dimension to the mystery, incidents of his post-resurrection meetings with his disciples Jesus talks and acts not so much like the Messiah king, but more as a person who is deeply conscious that his followers should know his continuing love and that they should pursue the difficult mission of bringing better ways of living to the world.

Unless there is some amazing find of manuscripts or scrolls more ancient and authentic than any yet discovered, we will never be able to get at the historical realities. Many years of thinking about the puzzles and reading the scholars leave me with an interesting hypothesis and an abiding certainty.

Towards a hypothesis: The one common tradition among the gospel resurrection stories is the empty tomb. Jesus' body had disappeared.

Then look at the tradition of Joseph of Arimithea. When he asks for the body of Jesus, Pilate is surprised Jesus died so quickly. One who was crucified sometimes lingered two to three days before dying. The death of Jesus is indicated as coming only a few hours after he is hung on the cross. If Jesus was aged, poor in health or weak of stature, one could understand a quick death. But we have no indication that Jesus was sickly – quite the contrary. If any impression comes through the diverse traditions, it is one of a man of vigor, probably hardened by years of outdoor work, able to accomplish long marches and arouse the fear of rulers. The tradition shows strength, not weakness.

Then look at the tradition in John where Joseph of Arimithea and Nicodemus remove the body in great secrecy.

It is necessary to a Christian story of salvation that Jesus died on the cross, then came to life and burst out of the tomb of death, thus making redemption possible for those who believe.

But if one is not under the co-ercion of this theological necessity, then another solution appears probable. That is this: Jesus did not die on the cross, but was removed from it by friends who were able to revive him somewhere in secrecy, perhaps in the tomb of Joseph of Arimithea. Then the appearances of Jesus were those of a living man, who, perhaps, returned to Galilee and lived for an indeterminate time, undoubtedly a brief time.

There is no more evidence for this hypothesis than for the orthodox insistence on the resurrection of a dead body, but it fits the traditions just as well. A bible scholar, Professor Roland Wolfe of Western Reserve University, favors this hypothesis and one day may publish his complete theory.

But lingering no longer on theological confusions or historical puzzles, Easter represents life's revitalization.

The ancient and eternal cycle of returning life is beginning to assert its unfailing renewal as returning life thrusts through the hardened winter crust. When we open our sensitivities, we feel the pulse of the revitalization of life. The swelling bud and the spring rains overwhelm our eager senses with a burgeoning life that dispels the winter's barren hiatus (sic). The sap rises, our spirits lift. The water-courses once more rush eagerly to the ancient seas and our deep-lying, primitive yearnings respond more wildly than we care to acknowledge. There is a revitalization of life and we celebrate life at the Spring festival which is older than the Christian Church, older than the time of Jesus, more ancient than man's historic record.

But beyond nature's ancient, recurring rhythms there are other certainties which can revitalize us. A good influence dues not due (? sic); great sacrifices are never quite overwhelmed either by persecution or inertia; unmistakable examples of justice and caring resist being sealed in the tomb of oblivion.

This I believe – after all the hymns are sung, after the legends are recited, when the creeds have been chanted, when all that is superfluous is sloughed off the Easter victory, we will discover [a story of human character that was sensitive to the highest values, fulfilled the great demands that life makes upon all as it is, faced up to life as it is, and overcame fear of death and disgrace].

Jesus was revitalized, not because a dead body revived, but because before death, the fear of death had lost its power to halt his activities, drain his strength or dilute his faith. When one overcomes such fears for self or fear of failure, then one has revitalized his life. The ancient Greek philosopher, Epicetus said wisely, "for it is not death or hardship that is a fearful thing, but the fear of death and hardship (quoted by Paul Tillich, THE COURAGE TO BE, p. 13).

Like the plant and animal, men and women respond in blood and bones to the Spring. But unlike the plant and animal, men and women know that one day they will die – "no one lives forever and dead men rise up never." Poignantly conscious of life and individual personal self-identity, we fear death and we dread the possibility that our individual, conscious personality may one day be no more.

This is the fear from which we need liberation – not the pain of death but the anxiety that we all know of faces and forms, of people and poetry, of memory and motion which will be gone beyond recall; that personal consciousness is no more than the temporary and unstable gathering of molecules and circumstance. The most agonizing anxiety is the dread of meaninglessness, of nothingness. We have our agonizing apprehensions of a time when we shall cease to be.

The Easter story is more than a doctrinal pivot for the Christian theological formula; more profound than a historical puzzle. For this is the season when ancient people celebrated, as the reviving earth suggested that human hopes for survival might come true and wild was the joy and excessive the rituals. For this is the season when modern man celebrates with song and story new fashions, sometimes only dimly aware of the smoldering inherited emotions that become vital again.

The disciples must have been persons much like us. They responded to a great idea. When the stranger visited them at the lakeside, they left their nets at his invitation "follow me and I will make you fishers of men." But their spiritual odyssey was not crowned with individual success or glory. They sought spiritual adventurer and found insecurity. They followed their leader until, to their dismay, he was despised and rejected by men. Then they ran, they denied him, cursed him, not only in fear that they might share his shameful death, but also terrorized that their lives and purposes were of no real consequence.

After they were scattered, they came together again and formed the group that within a generation or so had led to the earliest Christian movements. They were revitalized after the Winter of their master's execution and their own running-out on the cause they had believed. Somehow they were revitalized and fr

Somehow they were revitalized and freed from that most destructive of anxieties, the fear of death. They were to die and die young. But they no longer were willing to seek to disguise the face of death in a multitude of masks.

When the disciples re-gathered, it was to establish a fellowship of the followers of Jesus the purpose of which was to persist in establishing the goals he had taught them; and to endure whatever came in spite of consequences. In MY BROTHER DEATH, C.L. Sulzberger says, "To a degree, we can control the style of our dying, even if we cannot influence death itself."

As conscious, anxious persons the disciples feared that death would be the end of their being. Jesus seemingly shared this same anxiety in the garden. The Talmud comments, for all creatures, death has been prepared from the beginning.

When we think of our own fears, when we listen to the conversation of little children, when we are sensitive to the raw shock we know when someone near and dear dies, we must realize that to be emancipated from the fear of death is an experience that rewards a person with inner strength and renewed energy.

A half-century ago when Captain Robert F. Scott led that tragic expedition to the South Pole from which no one returned, his diary, which was recovered, reveals the terrible and heroic days through which these men knew the growing certainty of death. One of Scott's notations read, "How hard death must be for those who meet it having done nothing." On the same expedition, Captain Oates, knowing he could not survive long, deliberately left the camp and walked into the white blizzard, to die alone, so that others might have more food. (see MY BROTHER DEATH, p. 186-7).

Such is life's revitalization at Easter. It is more than a story of an empty tomb and dead men walking. It is the affirmative answer to the question in Luke's gospel, "Why seek ye the living among the dead?" For there are gifts of human excellence given by men and women to their fellows, and these are gifts which cannot die.

Maurice Maeterlinck's THE BLUEBIRD is one of the enduring and touching illustrations of this truth – this truth that requires imagination as well as reason. In that story the two children, Tyltyl the boy and Mytyl the girl had been searching for the bluebird because a queer old woman had asked them to find the bird because it would help a sick child become well. The children had been given a magic jewel which enabled them, by turning this jewel into a certain position, to see things as they actually are. The children searched for the bluebird in the Kingdom of the Past, the Kingdom of the Future, the Kingdom of the Dead and the Realm of Night. In the kingdom of the Dead, as they come through an old country churchyard, the little girl Mytyl is fearful because her brother has told her that at the hour of midnight, the dead leave their graves. She wants to run away, but Tyltyl, though he is frightened too, insists on staying. The clock strikes twelve, the children hold their breaths and tremble, there is a moment of silence and the slabs lift. They look for the dead, but no dead appear. Instead of that, suddenly the cemetery is transformed into a beautiful garden – white flowers fill the air with beautiful perfume, dew sparkles on the grass, birds appear – there is sunshine, life and joy. Struck with wonder and amazement, the children hold tightly to each other's hands, looking for the dead, but there are no dead.

[So] with those who are revitalized by new life – liberated from fears born of tribal jealousies, free of the fear that only selfishness can bring happiness and free of the fear that death can erase the hard-won achievements of good persons. For truths live on and flower again, just as the spring demonstrates that the universe is alive. Not a clod of earth, nor a drop of water nor a particle of air can be destroyed. Forms change, life endures. This is the reality of the great festivals of Spring, older and more sweeping than theological ceremonies of any one religion. For we celebrate the great cycle of reviving life. We would feel that life in our bones and blood as the rhythms of nature; we would feel that life in our minds and hearts as the call to what is better in the priorities and needs of the particular human adventure everywhere under the sun.