The implications of the resurrection
Commentary
Object:
Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians contains the kernel that blossomed into the heart of Christianity. It is here that he says that the resurrection is the belief that defines what it means to be a Christian. There are actions that are required of Christians, to be sure -- the giving of alms, which is more than the 10% the Law required; Christ said that if we have two coats, that was more than a poor woman would have, and the second was to be given away. It is not enough to wish the poor well or to drop a few coins in a panhandler’s cup; we should see to the welfare of the poor, feed them, and find them shelter, even if it means we don’t build a new barn to house a bumper crop.
But Paul had seen to the principles beneath these dictates of Jesus. We must have the courage to step out and care for others, even at our own expense. And we will never have that kind of courage if this life is the only hope we have. Who would risk spouse and children, home and livelihood to give our hearts to God, if we thought that this life is all we will ever have? Who would speak truth to power, if we didn’t have the certainty that just as Christ died and yet rose again, we too have a future that stretches beyond the grave into eternal happiness?
This assurance, that God will reward us for our steadfast faith and our courage in the face of pain and even death, makes Christians some of the most dangerous people in the world as far as despots and tyrants are concerned. We threaten their power. Afraid though we may be, we have a courage that cannot be taken from us.
More, Jesus preached that God loves humankind; that God wants the best for us; that God wants us to live in peace, free to plant a tree and live to see it grow and produce fruit for us and our grandchildren. And when it happens that some powerful person or nation takes all that away, God sees that and promises us help us in this life and an eternal life in the next.
This belief that death is not the end of us is what gave our ancestors the courage to cross oceans to come here and set up homes in the wilderness. It gave them the courage to dream dreams of a nation where no ruler can reign over us except by the will of the people, working together. It gave them the courage to see when they had entered into the twin sins of slavery and racism, and to attempt to reverse the effects of those sins. Not that we Christians are perfect, by any means. We still fight the effects of those sins today. But we have the courage to work to perfect ourselves and our nation and even our world, to fight injustice and inequity in ourselves first, and to work for peaceful negotiation rather than war.
This is the radical nature of the Christian message.
Acts 10:34-43
This selection from Acts is taken from the story about the apostle Peter and Cornelius, a centurion who had become a believer in the Jewish God rather than the multitude of gods the Romans honored. Earlier in the chapter, we are told that this event was precipitated by God, who talked to Cornelius while he was at prayer, telling him to send a messenger to Jaffa, where Simon Peter was staying with Simon the Tanner. Notice that he wasn’t told why, just to do this.
Meanwhile, Peter was meditating on the roof of the house, waiting for lunch to be ready. He fell into a trance, and God gave him a vision in which he was told three times that “What God has made clean, you have no right to call profane.” He was still trying to make sense of the vision when the contingent from Caesarea knocked on the door. Even then Peter had to be told by God, “Do not hesitate about going back with them; it was I who told them to come.” In this way, God has prepared Peter to talk with them. In fact, Peter did something he would never have done before this: he opens the house to them and lets them sleep there overnight.
We need to understand the context. The Jews had been told to keep themselves separate from Gentiles as they entered the land of Canaan. The people there practiced fertility religions, which entailed sexual contact with the priests and priestesses of the Canaanite religions in order to ensure the fertility of the land. Many of them also sacrificed the firstborn of their sheep, goats, and cattle; but not only the animals were sacrificed, they also sacrificed the firstborn of each of their wives. This was both an act of faith that this child was not the only one she would have, but also that both she and her husband would be virile and future children would be healthy. God expressly forbade these practices, and many of the laws in Leviticus are designed to make the Israelites look and act differently than their neighbors.
These prohibitions went so far as to keep the Israelites out of not only the temples of Canaan, but also the homes of their neighbors. They never sat down to a meal with the Canaanites, because it could be that the meat they were being offered had been sacrificed to one or another of those gods, and that would be the same as entering into the sacrifice itself. In addition, when the Jewish priests performed the sacrifices at the Temple they slit the throat of the animal and drained all of the blood out of it. The eating of blood was strictly forbidden. But the slaughter of the sacrifices of the Canaanites apparently were not prepared in this way. So there was this further concern about sharing a meal with non-Jews, that the meat being put on the table might still be blood-soaked, and so unclean.
And then there was the matter of what kind of meat might be on the table. Pigs, rabbits, horses, squirrels, camels, dogs, cats, and bears are all unclean, forbidden to be eaten. Since their neighbors might be serving unclean meat, it was forbidden to eat with those who did not follow the kosher laws. Peter was shocked that God would give him a vision of all these unclean animals and instruct him to eat. But God can be quite insistent, and repeated the lesson two more times (Acts 10:9-20).
So when Peter heard that there were Gentiles at the door wanting to see him, he invited them inside and even invited them to spend the night in the house where he was staying. The next day he left for Caesarea with them, to speak to Cornelius and all his household.
Peter had always been the most impulsive of the disciples. He was the one who broke the tension and awe of the Transfiguration by announcing that they ought to build three shrines on that mountaintop, one for Moses, one for Elijah, and one for Jesus. When they were out in the boat on a choppy Lake Galilee and saw Jesus walking on the water toward them, Peter asked for permission to jump out and walk with Jesus -- and nearly succeeded, until his fears overwhelmed him and he started to sink. He is the one who proclaims that he willingly would die with Jesus, and has to be told, “No, you will deny me three times before the rooster crows tonight.” He was the one man who would admit that he didn’t understand the parables Jesus told (for example, Matthew 15:15), and he was one of the three whom Jesus took with him wherever he went, including to the Mount of Olives after the Last Supper. It is true that Peter denied he knew Jesus, but he was also the one who used a connection with a servant in Herod’s household to gain access to the secret trial of Jesus. When the women came and told the disciples that the tomb was empty, Peter ran to the tomb to check, even though there were guards posted there. Jesus charged Peter to “feed my sheep,” and in front of the other disciples said “You are Peter” (which means rock in Greek) “and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades [in the past, often translated as “hell” but we now know it means “death”] will not prevail against it” (Matthew 16:18).
The incident in today’s lectionary text comes after Peter has developed into the strong apostle Jesus knew he would be. And it occurs at a breakpoint in the early church, a time when the people of Christ begin to argue over what it takes to be a Christian. Does one need to be a Jew first? If a convert is a Gentile, will he need to be circumcised? What parts of the Jewish Law will the new Christians be bound to follow? As he stands up to speak, he tells the Gentile household members that “it is forbidden for Jews to mix with people of another race and visit them, but God has made it clear to me that I must not call anyone profane or unclean... [so] I made no objection to coming when I was sent for.”
Peter then goes on to say “I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him. You know the message he sent to the people of Israel, preaching peace by Jesus Christ -- he is Lord of all.” How hard this is to preach! He has a willing audience, because they are outside the church; but the Jewish Christians are much less willing to hear what he has to say. And so, often, are our churches today. We are used to being the believers, those who belong to Christ because we are in church. It is often difficult for us to actually apply Peter’s words to those who are, in effect, standing outside our doors, waiting and hoping to be called.
One Easter some years ago, I was serving a small urban church. This church had been built by the hands of the members in the 1930s when a group of Italian immigrants decided they no longer wanted to be Roman Catholic. They had found a former priest who had converted to the Evangelical church and paid his way to this country, where he built up a nice-sized congregation. Over the years, however, several things happened to shrink the congregation: a new freeway was built right across the street from the church; a railway line attracted businesses that replaced homes; and the children and grandchildren of the immigrants married outside their immigrant groups and faith, or moved away.
In order to begin an outreach to our surrounding neighborhood, we sent out invitation cards to the sunrise and the later service and the Easter breakfast between the services. We had three new people come, all of them immigrants themselves: one man from the Philippines, and a couple from Guatemala! Even more interesting -- and sad -- each of them said they had never been invited to a church before.
It may be that we Gentile Christians have forgotten that we were once the outsiders, being judged and avoided by those who thought Jesus had come only to the Jews. We might ask ourselves: “What will it take for us to take the difficult step Peter took?”
1 Corinthians 15:19-26
“If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.” What does Paul mean by this? Well, the disciples and those whom they had called to follow Jesus were in many ways pariahs in their society. If the loss of family brought on by their conversion, if the persecution, imprisonment, and torture many of them had endured counted for nothing -- if there was no heaven, no reward for having stood fast in their faith -- they most certainly were to be pitied. They had endured mockery, as had Jesus. They had emulated the life he had lived, and in some cases his death. And they were generally despised, not praised, for it. Had they given up so much for nothing?
The Romans despised the Jews nearly as much as the Jews despised the Romans, or for that matter any Gentiles. The Jews also despised the followers of Jesus. In their eyes, the “Followers of the Way” (as the Christians then called themselves) were blasphemers, not just for considering Jesus to be the long-awaited Messiah, but because Jesus did not hold to the Law as strictly as the Pharisees wanted. As for the upper-class Sadducees, it wasn’t bad enough that these followers of Jesus were of the lowest strata of society, they also held to a belief in a heavenly life after death. The confrontation in Matthew 22:23-33 rests on this basic difference between Jesus’ teachings and the Sadducees. (The Pharisees also believed in a life after death, which was one of the reasons they put so much emphasis on the close following of the Law.)
Despite the resurrection of Jesus, the disciples were not firm in their hope for an afterlife. Far from it; the reports of his resurrection left them deeply confused. Even those who actually saw Jesus after his resurrection were uncertain as to the meaning of it all. What were they to make of a Being who could suddenly be inside a locked room with them, but who then takes a piece of fish and eats it? Is he solid flesh or not? Thomas had declared he wouldn’t believe it until he could put his finger in the wounds that had been inflicted on Jesus -- and the next thing he knew, he was doing just that! So there was much discussion among them about what kind of a resurrection this was. The later Apostles’ Creed (first mentioned in 390 AD) went so far as to declare that “we believe in the Resurrection of the body.” No spiritual resurrection tolerated there. No ghostly presence of the Lord. The Christian hope is that Jesus became alive again in the flesh, and we should expect the same for every follower of Christ as well.
Paul is writing to reassure the Corinthians (and all Christians, as these letters were circulated around the early churches and preserved for us today) that Jesus was really and truly raised from the dead. He goes on to assure them, and us, that death has been put aside. Not that we don’t die -- everything that lives dies. He points to the introduction of death “in Adam” [Paul understood that Adam was Hebrew for “human being,” not “a man”], and since that was the case, the resurrection also had to “come through a human being,” meaning Jesus.
This is a major philosophical understanding. In Paul’s world, things needed to be symmetrical. If they were not, they were “eccentric,” a bad thing. God had brought order out of chaos in Genesis, and the introduction of sin threw things out of sync. When Cain killed his brother Abel, he reintroduced chaos into the creation. The Ten Commandments and the rest of the Jewish Law were God’s way of countering chaos in favor of order. The prophets had been sent by God to remind the people that there are consequences to disobedience, but they were ignored, threatened, and even killed. So at last God took on human flesh so as to live among us and to bridge the gap between God and human beings. This was Paul’s understanding of the history of God and the world.
The disciples had been devastated when Jesus died as a despicable criminal. They hid from the authorities, who they knew would be after them next. They mourned Jesus, and they tried to make sense out of all that had happened. But they couldn’t. Only Jesus could show them how God was working through all of these events. It was only after they saw their resurrected Lord that they began to understand.
Paul is describing what will happen in the future in this passage. Everyone dies (because of Adam), but everyone will be made alive (because of Christ). Paul uses the language of the harvest: Christ is the first fruits (those fruits, by the way, that are to be sacrificed to God according to the Old Testament). Then “those who belong to Christ” (Christians -- which, by the way, means those of us who don’t object to being “owned” by Christ). Then Christ will go up against everyone who has authority and power over others. Not only all earthly powers, but also the power of death will be destroyed. Death is one of the enemies of God, because in the beginning God did not intend for human beings to die. So death is outside the perfect will of God, and as such will also be destroyed. This is all part of what Christ has accomplished.
John 20:1-18
John’s gospel was the last one to be written, and is quite different from the other three (synoptic, that is to say, “seeing together” or “alike”) gospels. His story of the resurrection is also quite different from the other three. Mark, the first gospel to be written, says Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome went to the tomb and found “a young man dressed in white” who told them to tell the disciples that Jesus had been raised from the dead, but that they told no one out of fear. Later on someone added the next verse, which says that the women did tell the disciples the instructions the angel gave them, to go back to Galilee, and that Jesus did meet them and sent them out to preach salvation to everyone.
Matthew says that there were only two women: Mary Magdalene and “the other Mary,” and that the stone was rolled away in their presence by an angel who “had the appearance of lightning.” As they hurried back to the disciples, Jesus greeted them. Their response was to bow down (worship) and grasp his feet. Jesus repeated that he would meet the disciples in Galilee, and when they did so he gave them the Great Commission.
In Luke’s version there were a large number of women -- but the ones he named were Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and Mary the mother of James, who went into the tomb... and then two angels appear to them. They tell the rest of the apostles, but “they did not believe them.” Only Peter got up and ran to the tomb. He stooped and looked in and saw the linen cloths lying by themselves, and wandered off in a state of amazement.
John’s gospel is the narrative most people remember. Mary Magdalene seems to be the only one at the tomb (although she says in v. 2b “we do not know where they have laid him,” an indication that she was not alone). There is no angel with any explanation for what has happened, so she assumes that someone has stolen his body. She shares her story with “Simon Peter and... the other disciple...whom Jesus loved,” and the two of them ran to the tomb. True to their natures, the “other disciple” looked in but didn’t go in. Peter, on the other hand, went into the tomb, and saw the linen wrappings in one place, and the head cloth on the other side of the tomb.
Why do we give so much attention to the details? Not because they are different, though there are many differences. We look at all these details to see what they have in common, because they do, in fact, all sound alike. For example, we know that Mary Magdalene was at the tomb on the first day of the week, because she is the only one who is in all four gospels. We may nitpick over the possibility that “the other Mary” is the same as Mary, the mother of James -- she who asked that her two sons be given the honor of sitting at Jesus’ right and left hands when Jesus comes into his power -- but what difference would it make? There are nice little details in this sort of close reading that jump out: Luke includes Joanna in the group at the tomb (Luke 24:10), whom he earlier (Luke 8:3) introduced to us as “the wife of Chuza, Herod’s steward,” so she may be the person who snuck Peter into the courtyard on the night of Jesus’ trial. That sort of detail makes the scene fuller, more real to us. So we look at all of these accounts so that we may flesh out the resurrection for our listeners on Easter.
John’s story about Mary Magdalene is the most poignant of any of them, however. Here she is, alone, confused, weeping next to the tomb of the man she had followed for the past three years. She is truly one of the inner circle around him; perhaps, as modern speculation has it, she and Jesus were married. Jewish rabbis had to be married men, so the fact that no wife is mentioned in any of the gospels is the stranger of the two possibilities. But we do not know.
What we do know is that Mark says she had had seven demons cast out of her by Jesus. But what that means is, again, a matter for speculation. Seven is the divine number, applying to the work of God, who created the earth in six days and then rested on the seventh. Therefore, the seventh day of the week is the sabbath, a day of rest for all of the people of God, including any houseguests, servants, and slaves. So we might speculate that to have seven demons inside of a person might mean that, to quote a Broadway song, “She’d gone about as fur as she could go.” It could mean she had been insane, but it could mean that she swore, fought, prostituted herself, drank to excess, etc. Or it might be that she had seven diseases. It has been commonly assumed that she was the woman who washed Jesus’ feet while he was in the home of the Pharisee Simon the Leper, whom Jesus had cleansed. All speculation. One point is certain: Mary loved Jesus. Loved him so much, that she is crazy with grief, crying her eyes out. So much was she weeping that she couldn’t see that the man in front of her was Jesus. He was certainly the last person she expected to see standing in the garden.
She recognizes him by his voice. His voice, speaking her name in the tender way people speak to those they love. The voice she had no hope of hearing again in this life. She is astounded, of course. She says, “Teacher!” She is probably holding out her arms to him, because he says, “Do not hold on to me.” (In direct contradiction to Matthew’s account, where the women bow down and grasp his feet.) He tells her something that none of the other gospels say: that she must not hold on to him because he has not yet ascended to the Father. What difference does that make? In other gospels, Thomas touches him at Jesus’ express command. This too could provoke more hours of speculation.
Most important, Mary Magdalene is the first evangelist. In all of the gospels, she is the one who first knows of the resurrection, and she is the one entrusted by the Lord to carry this message to the disciples and to convey Jesus’ instructions to them. On Easter, she is the one to watch. She is the one who “gets it.” She is the one who first overcomes her confusion with glad obedience. She is the one who shows us the way.
But Paul had seen to the principles beneath these dictates of Jesus. We must have the courage to step out and care for others, even at our own expense. And we will never have that kind of courage if this life is the only hope we have. Who would risk spouse and children, home and livelihood to give our hearts to God, if we thought that this life is all we will ever have? Who would speak truth to power, if we didn’t have the certainty that just as Christ died and yet rose again, we too have a future that stretches beyond the grave into eternal happiness?
This assurance, that God will reward us for our steadfast faith and our courage in the face of pain and even death, makes Christians some of the most dangerous people in the world as far as despots and tyrants are concerned. We threaten their power. Afraid though we may be, we have a courage that cannot be taken from us.
More, Jesus preached that God loves humankind; that God wants the best for us; that God wants us to live in peace, free to plant a tree and live to see it grow and produce fruit for us and our grandchildren. And when it happens that some powerful person or nation takes all that away, God sees that and promises us help us in this life and an eternal life in the next.
This belief that death is not the end of us is what gave our ancestors the courage to cross oceans to come here and set up homes in the wilderness. It gave them the courage to dream dreams of a nation where no ruler can reign over us except by the will of the people, working together. It gave them the courage to see when they had entered into the twin sins of slavery and racism, and to attempt to reverse the effects of those sins. Not that we Christians are perfect, by any means. We still fight the effects of those sins today. But we have the courage to work to perfect ourselves and our nation and even our world, to fight injustice and inequity in ourselves first, and to work for peaceful negotiation rather than war.
This is the radical nature of the Christian message.
Acts 10:34-43
This selection from Acts is taken from the story about the apostle Peter and Cornelius, a centurion who had become a believer in the Jewish God rather than the multitude of gods the Romans honored. Earlier in the chapter, we are told that this event was precipitated by God, who talked to Cornelius while he was at prayer, telling him to send a messenger to Jaffa, where Simon Peter was staying with Simon the Tanner. Notice that he wasn’t told why, just to do this.
Meanwhile, Peter was meditating on the roof of the house, waiting for lunch to be ready. He fell into a trance, and God gave him a vision in which he was told three times that “What God has made clean, you have no right to call profane.” He was still trying to make sense of the vision when the contingent from Caesarea knocked on the door. Even then Peter had to be told by God, “Do not hesitate about going back with them; it was I who told them to come.” In this way, God has prepared Peter to talk with them. In fact, Peter did something he would never have done before this: he opens the house to them and lets them sleep there overnight.
We need to understand the context. The Jews had been told to keep themselves separate from Gentiles as they entered the land of Canaan. The people there practiced fertility religions, which entailed sexual contact with the priests and priestesses of the Canaanite religions in order to ensure the fertility of the land. Many of them also sacrificed the firstborn of their sheep, goats, and cattle; but not only the animals were sacrificed, they also sacrificed the firstborn of each of their wives. This was both an act of faith that this child was not the only one she would have, but also that both she and her husband would be virile and future children would be healthy. God expressly forbade these practices, and many of the laws in Leviticus are designed to make the Israelites look and act differently than their neighbors.
These prohibitions went so far as to keep the Israelites out of not only the temples of Canaan, but also the homes of their neighbors. They never sat down to a meal with the Canaanites, because it could be that the meat they were being offered had been sacrificed to one or another of those gods, and that would be the same as entering into the sacrifice itself. In addition, when the Jewish priests performed the sacrifices at the Temple they slit the throat of the animal and drained all of the blood out of it. The eating of blood was strictly forbidden. But the slaughter of the sacrifices of the Canaanites apparently were not prepared in this way. So there was this further concern about sharing a meal with non-Jews, that the meat being put on the table might still be blood-soaked, and so unclean.
And then there was the matter of what kind of meat might be on the table. Pigs, rabbits, horses, squirrels, camels, dogs, cats, and bears are all unclean, forbidden to be eaten. Since their neighbors might be serving unclean meat, it was forbidden to eat with those who did not follow the kosher laws. Peter was shocked that God would give him a vision of all these unclean animals and instruct him to eat. But God can be quite insistent, and repeated the lesson two more times (Acts 10:9-20).
So when Peter heard that there were Gentiles at the door wanting to see him, he invited them inside and even invited them to spend the night in the house where he was staying. The next day he left for Caesarea with them, to speak to Cornelius and all his household.
Peter had always been the most impulsive of the disciples. He was the one who broke the tension and awe of the Transfiguration by announcing that they ought to build three shrines on that mountaintop, one for Moses, one for Elijah, and one for Jesus. When they were out in the boat on a choppy Lake Galilee and saw Jesus walking on the water toward them, Peter asked for permission to jump out and walk with Jesus -- and nearly succeeded, until his fears overwhelmed him and he started to sink. He is the one who proclaims that he willingly would die with Jesus, and has to be told, “No, you will deny me three times before the rooster crows tonight.” He was the one man who would admit that he didn’t understand the parables Jesus told (for example, Matthew 15:15), and he was one of the three whom Jesus took with him wherever he went, including to the Mount of Olives after the Last Supper. It is true that Peter denied he knew Jesus, but he was also the one who used a connection with a servant in Herod’s household to gain access to the secret trial of Jesus. When the women came and told the disciples that the tomb was empty, Peter ran to the tomb to check, even though there were guards posted there. Jesus charged Peter to “feed my sheep,” and in front of the other disciples said “You are Peter” (which means rock in Greek) “and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades [in the past, often translated as “hell” but we now know it means “death”] will not prevail against it” (Matthew 16:18).
The incident in today’s lectionary text comes after Peter has developed into the strong apostle Jesus knew he would be. And it occurs at a breakpoint in the early church, a time when the people of Christ begin to argue over what it takes to be a Christian. Does one need to be a Jew first? If a convert is a Gentile, will he need to be circumcised? What parts of the Jewish Law will the new Christians be bound to follow? As he stands up to speak, he tells the Gentile household members that “it is forbidden for Jews to mix with people of another race and visit them, but God has made it clear to me that I must not call anyone profane or unclean... [so] I made no objection to coming when I was sent for.”
Peter then goes on to say “I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him. You know the message he sent to the people of Israel, preaching peace by Jesus Christ -- he is Lord of all.” How hard this is to preach! He has a willing audience, because they are outside the church; but the Jewish Christians are much less willing to hear what he has to say. And so, often, are our churches today. We are used to being the believers, those who belong to Christ because we are in church. It is often difficult for us to actually apply Peter’s words to those who are, in effect, standing outside our doors, waiting and hoping to be called.
One Easter some years ago, I was serving a small urban church. This church had been built by the hands of the members in the 1930s when a group of Italian immigrants decided they no longer wanted to be Roman Catholic. They had found a former priest who had converted to the Evangelical church and paid his way to this country, where he built up a nice-sized congregation. Over the years, however, several things happened to shrink the congregation: a new freeway was built right across the street from the church; a railway line attracted businesses that replaced homes; and the children and grandchildren of the immigrants married outside their immigrant groups and faith, or moved away.
In order to begin an outreach to our surrounding neighborhood, we sent out invitation cards to the sunrise and the later service and the Easter breakfast between the services. We had three new people come, all of them immigrants themselves: one man from the Philippines, and a couple from Guatemala! Even more interesting -- and sad -- each of them said they had never been invited to a church before.
It may be that we Gentile Christians have forgotten that we were once the outsiders, being judged and avoided by those who thought Jesus had come only to the Jews. We might ask ourselves: “What will it take for us to take the difficult step Peter took?”
1 Corinthians 15:19-26
“If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.” What does Paul mean by this? Well, the disciples and those whom they had called to follow Jesus were in many ways pariahs in their society. If the loss of family brought on by their conversion, if the persecution, imprisonment, and torture many of them had endured counted for nothing -- if there was no heaven, no reward for having stood fast in their faith -- they most certainly were to be pitied. They had endured mockery, as had Jesus. They had emulated the life he had lived, and in some cases his death. And they were generally despised, not praised, for it. Had they given up so much for nothing?
The Romans despised the Jews nearly as much as the Jews despised the Romans, or for that matter any Gentiles. The Jews also despised the followers of Jesus. In their eyes, the “Followers of the Way” (as the Christians then called themselves) were blasphemers, not just for considering Jesus to be the long-awaited Messiah, but because Jesus did not hold to the Law as strictly as the Pharisees wanted. As for the upper-class Sadducees, it wasn’t bad enough that these followers of Jesus were of the lowest strata of society, they also held to a belief in a heavenly life after death. The confrontation in Matthew 22:23-33 rests on this basic difference between Jesus’ teachings and the Sadducees. (The Pharisees also believed in a life after death, which was one of the reasons they put so much emphasis on the close following of the Law.)
Despite the resurrection of Jesus, the disciples were not firm in their hope for an afterlife. Far from it; the reports of his resurrection left them deeply confused. Even those who actually saw Jesus after his resurrection were uncertain as to the meaning of it all. What were they to make of a Being who could suddenly be inside a locked room with them, but who then takes a piece of fish and eats it? Is he solid flesh or not? Thomas had declared he wouldn’t believe it until he could put his finger in the wounds that had been inflicted on Jesus -- and the next thing he knew, he was doing just that! So there was much discussion among them about what kind of a resurrection this was. The later Apostles’ Creed (first mentioned in 390 AD) went so far as to declare that “we believe in the Resurrection of the body.” No spiritual resurrection tolerated there. No ghostly presence of the Lord. The Christian hope is that Jesus became alive again in the flesh, and we should expect the same for every follower of Christ as well.
Paul is writing to reassure the Corinthians (and all Christians, as these letters were circulated around the early churches and preserved for us today) that Jesus was really and truly raised from the dead. He goes on to assure them, and us, that death has been put aside. Not that we don’t die -- everything that lives dies. He points to the introduction of death “in Adam” [Paul understood that Adam was Hebrew for “human being,” not “a man”], and since that was the case, the resurrection also had to “come through a human being,” meaning Jesus.
This is a major philosophical understanding. In Paul’s world, things needed to be symmetrical. If they were not, they were “eccentric,” a bad thing. God had brought order out of chaos in Genesis, and the introduction of sin threw things out of sync. When Cain killed his brother Abel, he reintroduced chaos into the creation. The Ten Commandments and the rest of the Jewish Law were God’s way of countering chaos in favor of order. The prophets had been sent by God to remind the people that there are consequences to disobedience, but they were ignored, threatened, and even killed. So at last God took on human flesh so as to live among us and to bridge the gap between God and human beings. This was Paul’s understanding of the history of God and the world.
The disciples had been devastated when Jesus died as a despicable criminal. They hid from the authorities, who they knew would be after them next. They mourned Jesus, and they tried to make sense out of all that had happened. But they couldn’t. Only Jesus could show them how God was working through all of these events. It was only after they saw their resurrected Lord that they began to understand.
Paul is describing what will happen in the future in this passage. Everyone dies (because of Adam), but everyone will be made alive (because of Christ). Paul uses the language of the harvest: Christ is the first fruits (those fruits, by the way, that are to be sacrificed to God according to the Old Testament). Then “those who belong to Christ” (Christians -- which, by the way, means those of us who don’t object to being “owned” by Christ). Then Christ will go up against everyone who has authority and power over others. Not only all earthly powers, but also the power of death will be destroyed. Death is one of the enemies of God, because in the beginning God did not intend for human beings to die. So death is outside the perfect will of God, and as such will also be destroyed. This is all part of what Christ has accomplished.
John 20:1-18
John’s gospel was the last one to be written, and is quite different from the other three (synoptic, that is to say, “seeing together” or “alike”) gospels. His story of the resurrection is also quite different from the other three. Mark, the first gospel to be written, says Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome went to the tomb and found “a young man dressed in white” who told them to tell the disciples that Jesus had been raised from the dead, but that they told no one out of fear. Later on someone added the next verse, which says that the women did tell the disciples the instructions the angel gave them, to go back to Galilee, and that Jesus did meet them and sent them out to preach salvation to everyone.
Matthew says that there were only two women: Mary Magdalene and “the other Mary,” and that the stone was rolled away in their presence by an angel who “had the appearance of lightning.” As they hurried back to the disciples, Jesus greeted them. Their response was to bow down (worship) and grasp his feet. Jesus repeated that he would meet the disciples in Galilee, and when they did so he gave them the Great Commission.
In Luke’s version there were a large number of women -- but the ones he named were Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and Mary the mother of James, who went into the tomb... and then two angels appear to them. They tell the rest of the apostles, but “they did not believe them.” Only Peter got up and ran to the tomb. He stooped and looked in and saw the linen cloths lying by themselves, and wandered off in a state of amazement.
John’s gospel is the narrative most people remember. Mary Magdalene seems to be the only one at the tomb (although she says in v. 2b “we do not know where they have laid him,” an indication that she was not alone). There is no angel with any explanation for what has happened, so she assumes that someone has stolen his body. She shares her story with “Simon Peter and... the other disciple...whom Jesus loved,” and the two of them ran to the tomb. True to their natures, the “other disciple” looked in but didn’t go in. Peter, on the other hand, went into the tomb, and saw the linen wrappings in one place, and the head cloth on the other side of the tomb.
Why do we give so much attention to the details? Not because they are different, though there are many differences. We look at all these details to see what they have in common, because they do, in fact, all sound alike. For example, we know that Mary Magdalene was at the tomb on the first day of the week, because she is the only one who is in all four gospels. We may nitpick over the possibility that “the other Mary” is the same as Mary, the mother of James -- she who asked that her two sons be given the honor of sitting at Jesus’ right and left hands when Jesus comes into his power -- but what difference would it make? There are nice little details in this sort of close reading that jump out: Luke includes Joanna in the group at the tomb (Luke 24:10), whom he earlier (Luke 8:3) introduced to us as “the wife of Chuza, Herod’s steward,” so she may be the person who snuck Peter into the courtyard on the night of Jesus’ trial. That sort of detail makes the scene fuller, more real to us. So we look at all of these accounts so that we may flesh out the resurrection for our listeners on Easter.
John’s story about Mary Magdalene is the most poignant of any of them, however. Here she is, alone, confused, weeping next to the tomb of the man she had followed for the past three years. She is truly one of the inner circle around him; perhaps, as modern speculation has it, she and Jesus were married. Jewish rabbis had to be married men, so the fact that no wife is mentioned in any of the gospels is the stranger of the two possibilities. But we do not know.
What we do know is that Mark says she had had seven demons cast out of her by Jesus. But what that means is, again, a matter for speculation. Seven is the divine number, applying to the work of God, who created the earth in six days and then rested on the seventh. Therefore, the seventh day of the week is the sabbath, a day of rest for all of the people of God, including any houseguests, servants, and slaves. So we might speculate that to have seven demons inside of a person might mean that, to quote a Broadway song, “She’d gone about as fur as she could go.” It could mean she had been insane, but it could mean that she swore, fought, prostituted herself, drank to excess, etc. Or it might be that she had seven diseases. It has been commonly assumed that she was the woman who washed Jesus’ feet while he was in the home of the Pharisee Simon the Leper, whom Jesus had cleansed. All speculation. One point is certain: Mary loved Jesus. Loved him so much, that she is crazy with grief, crying her eyes out. So much was she weeping that she couldn’t see that the man in front of her was Jesus. He was certainly the last person she expected to see standing in the garden.
She recognizes him by his voice. His voice, speaking her name in the tender way people speak to those they love. The voice she had no hope of hearing again in this life. She is astounded, of course. She says, “Teacher!” She is probably holding out her arms to him, because he says, “Do not hold on to me.” (In direct contradiction to Matthew’s account, where the women bow down and grasp his feet.) He tells her something that none of the other gospels say: that she must not hold on to him because he has not yet ascended to the Father. What difference does that make? In other gospels, Thomas touches him at Jesus’ express command. This too could provoke more hours of speculation.
Most important, Mary Magdalene is the first evangelist. In all of the gospels, she is the one who first knows of the resurrection, and she is the one entrusted by the Lord to carry this message to the disciples and to convey Jesus’ instructions to them. On Easter, she is the one to watch. She is the one who “gets it.” She is the one who first overcomes her confusion with glad obedience. She is the one who shows us the way.
