On Easter morning once again, people who are in church nearly every week and many people who have not been to church since Christmas will sit in pews, listening to a message that contradicts their own experience but that somehow they need to hear. Amazing, isn’t it? The resurrection defies everything we take for granted. Not one person in those pews has had a loved one return to life after burial.
The belief that spread like a grassfire through the countries of the Mediterranean basin was not a philosophical concept, or a symbolic gesture, or a wishful feeling of a continuing presence after death. It was the conviction that a real person had come back from the other side. Greek culture believed that death meant crossing the River Styx to the other side, an exile from which there could be no return. As late as 1675, British author John Bunyan echoed a similar vision. In Pilgrim’s Progress, Mr. Valiant-for-Truth waded into the river of death, “and the trumpets sounded for him on the other side.”
If the resurrection is merely symbolic, all of us have known it. Alcoholics “hit bottom” before they bounce back towards sobriety. When we grieve the loss of a child, a parent, a spouse, we cannot imagine life without them -- but somehow, life returns.
But none of us have ever experienced a physical resurrection. Oh, we’ve longed for it. Who hasn’t in some measure after the loss of a loved one?
So I cannot help being moved by the story of Mary, in the garden. She had been to the tomb. The body was gone. She believed grave robbers must have stolen it. Blinded by her tears, she sees a person.
“Tell me,” she pleads, “tell me where you have taken him, so that I can go to him one last time!”
And a familiar voice says, “Mary, Mary…”
Anyone who has ever lost a loved one will know exactly how she would have felt.
It was not just Jesus’ spirit that rose from the tomb on Easter morning. It was his human body. A body that spoke, and walked, and ate bread. A body with unhealed wounds.
The earliest writings about the resurrection are not the gospels, although they are the story that we customarily read at Easter. The earliest writings we have are Paul’s letters.
“If Christ is not risen,” Paul told his tiny colony of Christians in
It was not the experience that people had had that captured their imaginations. It was the experience that they had not had. In the universal reality of death -- often brutal, often early, often needless -- the yearning for a different outcome triumphed over practical experience. And so Paul could write (paraphrased by Eugene Peterson in The Message), “Who’s got the last word now, hey, Death? Death, who's afraid of you now?”
My head tells me that a physical resurrection is nonsense. It doesn’t happen. Death is final. Period. My heart says, “If only…”
Perhaps that’s why I go to church on Easter morning. Not to hear something new -- I’ve heard the familiar Easter story all my life. No, I go because I need to be reminded that reality is not limited to either/or choices. Both/and is also possible. Rational analysis and emotional yearning are both legitimate ways of responding. Easter reminds me not to get complacent about what I think I know, and what I believe. As Hamlet told his friend, “There are more things between heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
Happy Easter. May it challenge your understanding too.
