FINDINGS II
Easter
Sunday - C - April 4, 2010
Isaiah 65: 17-25; I Corinthians 15: 19-26; Luke 24: 1-12
 By Harry T. Cook
3/29/10
RUBRIC
The RCL affords plenty of options for readings at the
principal liturgies on Easter Day. The three above are chosen from the fuller
offering because 1) a selection from the Hebrew scriptures for such a day as
Easter helps us keep in mind our unbreakable connection with that senior and
formative tradition, 2) the Corinthian reading puts us in touch with one who in
his own words claimed to have had a vision of a risen Christ and then tried to
figure out what it meant, and 3) the Luke reading because we have followed the
Lucan trajectory for the past four months and it appropriate to work with his
take on the resurrection myth in this year that we will hear much of Luke's
gospel.
An argument could be made that the reading from the Acts of
the Apostles appointed as an option for Easter Day would be likewise
appropriate as it is also from Luke's pen. However, Luke's depiction of Peter
in Acts 10: 34-43 is surely a huge leap into larger fiction, as the Peter we
meet otherwise in the gospels -- and even there, too, a probable fiction -- is
nothing like the magisterial character we are asked to embrace in the Acts
text.
WORKSHOP
If there exists a central core to the gospel, such texts as Luke
24: 1ff compose it. The First Century C.E. Jesus Jews and Gentile converts came
in due course to believe that, inexplicably, Jesus was not finally done in by
his execution. On the strength of visions and other unverifiable experiences,
they came to believe he was with them in some real way. Such a claim must have
become difficult to maintain, giving way to the predictions about his triumphal
return and also to attempts to account in some material ways for his undeath.
It was Mark sometime after 70 C.E. who first crafted a story
about an empty tomb (16:1-8) though he never directly said Jesus was
resurrected. Mark put the words "he has risen" on the lips of a "young man . .
. dressed in a white robe," who tells the women (Mary Magdalene, Mary the
mother of James, and Salome) that Jesus is gone. They are invited to "see the
place where they laid him." Luke agrees with Mark and Matthew that Galilee
plays a part here - but only Mark and Matthew have the angel (or young man)
tell the women, in turn, to tell the disciples that Jesus has returned to
Galilee where he will meet them.
Mark and Matthew have the women instructed only to pass on
the word to the disciples about meeting Jesus in Galilee. Luke has them telling
the disciples "this" -- presumably the news that the tomb was empty and all
that its emptiness implied. As near as I can tell, that would make those women
the first apostles, perhaps part of the author(s)/editors) agenda. Perhaps it
is from that feminist point of view that Luke relates the inevitable, viz. that
the "real" apostles considered the women's news "an idle tale" and did not
believe what they had said.
For a supposed eye-witness account of the resurrection, one
must go to the Gospel of Peter which survives in fragmentary form. The
scholarly consensus is that it is of mid-second century C.E. provenance. At
10:39-40 of the document appears this text: "[The soldiers] saw again three men
come out from the sepulcher, and two of them sustaining the other, and a cross
following them. And the heads of the two reaching to heaven, but that of him
who was led of them overpassing the heavens ..." It is interesting to
speculate on the reasons the canonical evangelists resisted such imagery in
their narratives. One reason may be that they had at hand accounts of so-called
post-resurrection events in which people still living averred that they
actually saw, heard, conversed with and even touched Jesus (see Luke 24: 13-35;
John 20: 11-18, 19-23 26-29; 21:1-22; I Corinthians 15:8 [compare Acts 9:1-9]
and even possibly Mark 9: 2-8, Matthew 17: 1-8 and Luke 9: 28-36). If what
those people are said to have seen, heard and felt was Jesus in some form, then
it may not have been important to the evangelists to go into detail about an
actual physical resurrection even they probably (like us) would not have
understood.
The most immediate "resurrection" experience in the
canonical gospels is that depicted by John at 20:11-18, in which one of the
women (Mary Magdalene -- the only woman to approach the tomb, according to
John) while in grief is depicted as encountering and conversing with Jesus whom
she fails to recognize as such until he speaks her name.
(In some manuscripts of Luke 24 a twelfth verse is included:
"But Peter rose and ran to the tomb; stooping and looking in, he saw the linen
cloths by themselves; and he went home wondering what had happened.")
The more convincing post-resurrection in Luke is found at
24: 13-35, which appears in the RCL as the gospel lection for Easter III-A, and
for Wednesday in Easter Week in all three years.
Meanwhile, the homilist has before her or him an abundant
opportunity and great intellectual peril as this Lucan passage (24:1-10) is
considered on the day when a congregation is likely to be at its annual high
for attendance. One temptation is simply to say in one way or another that
"Christ is risen" and send people off to their baked hams and turkeys, the
children to what's left of the sugar-laden contents of their Easter baskets.
The opposite temptation is to give a complex exegetical
analysis of the reading as an intellectual hedge against telling the truth,
viz. that the church's ancient (and modern) proclamation of the resurrection
has never been adequately rationalized or appreciated for what it is and is not.
It is not a statement of fact that could be rendered as a "Who? What? Where?
When? Why" news story. The resurrection was not an event. Over time it became a
surmise and was retrojected into a story or series of stories. That doesn't
make the resurrection as proclamation untrue, but it does make it a
proclamation rather than a reportable fact.
Footnote: The pre-Jesus messianic figure "discovered," as
Israel Knohl puts it, in the Qumran literature was left slain in the street
where his body began to decompose.* I have heard J. Dominic Crossan refer to
what occasionally happened to the crucified, namely that their bodies (still
living or already dead) were cut down from their roods and let lie in the
humiliation of being torn asunder by feral dogs. Evidently crucifixion was as
much a Roman instrument of public humiliation as it was or torture and death,
perhaps explaining the existence of the burial/resurrection narratives.
*Knohl, Israel, The Messiah
Before Jesus: The Suffering Servant of the Dead Sea Scrolls, 2000, University
of California Press, p. 3
HOMILETIC COMMENTARY
You may think that Easter is about resuscitated bodies or at
least one in particular. It may be more about setting you free. Why? Because
the sense of the metaphorical language and literature of the day is one of hope
of the kind that can enable a person to transcend a limiting anxiety at least
long enough to put it into perspective. Luke was a major contributor to that
literature, and it is from that work that folk may well hear on this Easter
Sunday.
In no important way does Luke's Easter story differ from
others we know. There is an empty grave and the strong suggestion that it is
empty because its former occupant had no further need of it. Just as near the
beginning of the gospel Luke depicts the "heavenly host" announcing the birth of the universal messiah, so in the Easter story two such
beings are made to announce that "He is not here, but has risen."
This is Luke's story framed by news bulletins. In
each case, a class of persons is the first to know: shepherds near the lowest
end of the economic order and women who counted for very little in the social scheme
of the time.
In the Lucan scheme, shepherds and women get to know the big
story. The shepherds, knowing no one would believe them anyway, go back to
shepherding. The women, good enough to be sent on the unpleasant errand of
dealing with a corpse, felt compelled to tell the official tell-ers, but are
shushed.
The story got loose anyway, and maybe the fact that women told
it first is the point of the whole thing. If the Easter story is -- like the
recession of Noah's flood, or the Exodus or the return from the Babylonian
exile -- a story of deliverance, maybe it points to a truth still aborning that
women, liberated, will save the world to the extent it can be saved.
Note to homilists: I said as much in my Easter homily of
1998, only to inherit the wind that comes from troubling one's own house (see
Proverbs 11:29).
| |
