{"id":1679,"date":"2009-04-13T11:38:03","date_gmt":"2009-04-12T22:38:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mhjb.co.nz\/blog\/?p=1679"},"modified":"2009-04-13T12:56:31","modified_gmt":"2009-04-12T23:56:31","slug":"sermon-for-easter-sunday","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/mhjb.co.nz\/blog\/archives\/1679","title":{"rendered":"Sermon for Easter Sunday"},"content":{"rendered":"

12 April 2009
\nSt Michael\u2019s Kelburn<\/a><\/p>\n

Psalm 118; Acts 10:34\u201343; Colossians 3:1\u20134; John 20:1\u201319<\/a><\/p>\n

Last Sunday, after the evening service, Substance, I gave everyone who came a short questionnaire with three questions to answer: 1. Do you think Jesus physically rose from the dead? 2. Why do you think that? 3. What does the resurrection mean? The Substance service is made up of mostly university students and recent graduates. Their answers are flicking through on the slideshow here, between the artworks. I found the responses very interesting, perhaps you will too. Most interesting perhaps is the diversity in the responses to the question of what the resurrection means. <\/p>\n

Our Gospel reading, John\u2019s version of the resurrection, is surprisingly mostly silent about what it means \u2013 and in fact this is true of all four of the gospel accounts. It\u2019s \u201cjust the facts, ma\u2019am\u201d. Little details are included \u2013 Peter outrunning the other disciple to the tomb, the facecloth folded up by itself apart from the other cloths \u2013 little details that give the account a ring of truth. Elsewhere in the Gospels, there are often explanations given to interpret some action or other of Jesus\u2019 \u2013 but not here. Why not? One possibility is that they see the event of Jesus\u2019 resurrection itself as the crucial thing to get across. Maybe the writers were thinking something like \u201cwe aren\u2019t going to nail down every single thing that this means, and we\u2019re not yet sure of its every implication, but you must know that it really happened \u2013 we saw it\u201d.<\/p>\n

A friend of mine once said that \u201cthe New Testament is the rubble left after an explosion\u201d. The explosion, of course, is Jesus\u2019 resurrection. The earliest Christians, who were almost all Jews, had to reorganise everything they thought they knew about God, the Law, their history and about the world, in terms of Jesus. As in the responses to my questionnaire, the New Testament writers give a diversity of interpretations of Jesus\u2019 resurrection. Here are some of them: it represents the defeat of death; it is God making Jesus Lord and Messiah; it is a sign to cause people to repent; it is forgiveness of sins and a new freedom that Moses couldn\u2019t offer; it is evidence that Jesus will be a just judge of the world at some future time; it is a pattern for our life, and our own resurrection; it is the beginning of a \u2018new creation\u2019; it is something we somehow participate in; it is the enthroning of Jesus over all other authorities, institutions and powers. I\u2019m sure I\u2019ve missed others, but you get the idea.<\/p>\n

We can zoom in on one particular strand of interpretation of the resurrection, in our reading from Paul\u2019s letter to the Christians as Colossae (in modern-day Turkey). In the previous chapter he described the Christians\u2019 lives as intimately tied to Jesus\u2019 life \u2013 symbolically joining in his terrible death in their baptism, and being enlivened by God in the same way that God brought Jesus back to life. In our reading Paul is explaining how that \u2018mystical union\u2019 should make itself evident: \u201cset your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth\u201d. It\u2019s unfortunate that the lectionary reading ends where it does, because the impression you get is of a sort of escapist spirituality \u2013 \u2018so heavenly minded they\u2019re no earthly use\u2019. Is Paul inviting us to the contemplative life? Pondering heavenly scenes and eternal verities? No he isn\u2019t, at least not to what we normally might think of as the contemplative life. As the chapter continues he gives us a specific list of what he\u2019s putting in the two categories \u2018earthly things\u2019 and \u2018things above\u2019. The earthly things are sexual immorality, greed, anger, maliciousness, slander, abusive language, lying, racial discrimination. On the \u2018things above\u2019 list: compassion, kindness, humility, patience, forgiveness, peace, gratitude and, most of all, love. As the Reverend David would say, it\u2019s \u2018ethical religion\u2019 \u2013 the kind of spirituality that has consequences for how we actually conduct ourselves in the world and with each other.<\/p>\n

One of those odd little details in the Gospel of John reading is that Mary Magdalene, when she first sees the risen Jesus, supposes him to be the gardener. I think this is a subtle hint \u2013 Jesus is the gardener because this graveyard is a new Garden of Eden. Paul develops this idea elsewhere in his letters: A new creation has begun in Jesus. A creation without meaningless suffering, without violence, without war, oppression, ecological degradation (see Romans 8), terrorism, unpayable debt; that is, a world freed from sin. I think this is Paul\u2019s way of talking about what Jesus was always on about \u2013 the Kingdom of God. These two big ideas of Paul\u2019s \u2013 the new creation begun in Jesus, and the \u2018mystical union\u2019 of Jesus and his followers \u2013 make sense of this list of \u2018earthy things\u2019 and \u2018things above\u2019. It\u2019s like the Lord\u2019s Prayer: \u201cyour will be done on earth as in heaven\u201d. Heaven being not so much a place to go when we die, but the realm where God\u2019s will is fully realised. Paul expects a future appearing of Jesus the Messiah, when he will return and the whole earth will be filled with new creation \u2013 wiping away every tear. In the meantime, Jesus followers, united with him, are to in their life together prefigure, picture, actively participate in the new creation begun in Jesus\u2019 life, death and resurrection.<\/p>\n

Earlier I mentioned the Gospel writers\u2019 \u2018just the facts\u2019 style when it came to recording the resurrection, and gave one possible reason for them having avoided interpretive comment in those passages. Another possible reason is that they see Jesus\u2019 whole career \u2013 his teaching, healing, casting out demons, feeding multitudes, confrontations with various antagonists, and his eventual violent death as together the sufficient explanation for the significance of the resurrection. <\/p>\n

\"Rubens'<\/a> There is a danger of disconnecting the big events of Jesus\u2019 life the Church celebrates from the whole story. Obviously I\u2019m nothing like an art historian, or an historian for that matter, so you ought to take this next point with a grain of salt \u2013 and please correct me if I\u2019m wrong. But perhaps you noticed that many of the paintings that have been sliding past on the projector, particularly from fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe, show a victorious Jesus brandishing a flag, with terrified soldiers at his feet. The strange thing is that in the one Gospel account that features terrified soldiers \u2013 Matthew\u2019s \u2013 it is an angel who terrifies the soldiers, not the risen Jesus. Perhaps it is a valid conclusion to draw (or paint) \u2013 that soldiers will be terrified by the Prince of Peace, but that departure from the text is interesting. [Of course by the time you get to the nineteenth century it\u2019s all flowers, pale women and flowing robes.] \"Mikhail<\/a> Part of Stanley Hauerwas\u2019 point in the contemplations on the seven words from the Cross some of us read here on Good Friday is that we don\u2019t know what to do with a crucified God, a suffering God. We want a strong-man who will smite anything that gets in our way. It\u2019s as if the resurrection was a reversal of the cross, rather than God\u2019s vindication of it. As if for Jesus the cross was an accident, or a sort of game that he played on the way to being revealed as the all-powerful all-conquering ruler. This seems to be a perpetual temptation for the Christian church: grabbing at the victory represented by the resurrection without following Jesus\u2019 costly, self-giving, non-violent pattern. But as we saw, participation in the new creation entails discipleship: following Jesus, not just believing certain things about him. <\/p>\n

Before I finish, I want to go back to something I said earlier \u2013 namely my claim that the reading from John had \u2018the ring of truth\u2019 to it. But can we really believe, in the age of the Large Hadron Collider, biochemistry and nanotechnology, that Jesus really rose from the dead? Not just as a warm feeling in pious hearts, but as a physical man who ate cooked fish on the beach?<\/p>\n

Well, that depends. As Australian historian John Dickson has said<\/a>, if you start with the ironclad assumption that this sort of thing just can’t happen \u2013 that the world is ruled by orderly laws which emerged in the first nanoseconds of the big bang, and those laws are utterly unbreakable \u2013 then you will rule any evidence for this sort of thing inadmissible. That\u2019s fine, but that option still leaves the historical problem. As the late historian and Orthodox Jew Pinchas Lapide wrote (and I will end with his quote):<\/p>\n

When these peasants, shepherds, and fishermen, who betrayed and denied their master, and then failed him miserably, suddenly could be changed overnight into a confidant mission society, convinced of salvation and able to work with much more success after Easter than before Easter, then no vision or hallucination is sufficient to explain such a revolutionary transformation \u2026 If the defeated and depressed group of disciples overnight could change into a victorious movement of faith, based only on autosuggestion or self-deception \u2013 without a fundamental faith experience \u2013 then this would be a much greater miracle than the resurrection itself. In a purely logical analysis, the resurrection of Jesus is \u2018the lesser of two evils\u2019 for all those who seek a rational explanation of the worldwide consequences of that Easter faith. (The Resurrection of Jesus: A Jewish Perspective<\/em> (2002), Wipf & Stock)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If it\u2019s true, then everything is different, and the world has a beautiful future, which we are all invited to begin living in, now.<\/p>\n

In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, Amen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

12 April 2009 St Michael\u2019s Kelburn Psalm 118; Acts 10:34\u201343; Colossians 3:1\u20134; John 20:1\u201319 Last Sunday, after the evening service, Substance, I gave everyone who came a short questionnaire with three questions to answer: 1. Do you think Jesus physically rose from the dead? 2. Why do you think that? 3. What does the resurrection […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1679","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/mhjb.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1679","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/mhjb.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/mhjb.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mhjb.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mhjb.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1679"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/mhjb.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1679\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1689,"href":"http:\/\/mhjb.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1679\/revisions\/1689"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/mhjb.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1679"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mhjb.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1679"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mhjb.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1679"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}