|
FINDINGS IV By Harry T. Cook
Easter Sunday - C - March 31, 2013
Isaiah 65: 17-25; I Corinthians 15: 19-26; Luke 24: 1-12
 | | Harry T. Cook |
By Harry T. Cook 3/25/13
The Revised Common Lectionary 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 Lukan trajectory for the past four months and it appropriate to work with his (or her) 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.
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 CE 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 eyewitness account of the resurrection, one must go to the Gospel of Peter that survives in fragmentary form. The scholarly consensus is that it is of mid-second century CE 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 Lukan 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.
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 angelic 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 Lukan 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 a major point not to miss.
*Knohl, Israel. The Messiah Before Jesus: The Suffering Servant of the Dead Sea Scrolls, 2000, University of California Press, p. 3
|
