RESURRECTION

RESURRECTION STORIES

1.     A rough and ready guide to the Resurrection stories in the four Gospels is to imagine that each of the Evangelists is engaged in answering the question: Where is Jesus now? Marks’ answer is: He is coming soon, be ready and stay awake. Mathew’s is: H is Emmanuel, God with us when we meet in his name; he continues to proclaim the coming Kingdom, to teach us and to heal us, and to be our ransom. Luke’s answer to the question is: He is at God’s right hand in heaven, pouring forth the Spirit so that we can preach repentance and forgiveness of sin in his name. To John the answer is: He is in us and we are in him, through the Spirit he has breathed upon us.                                                           The Easter stories are expressions of the Easter faith; that is the way they should be read.

2.     Modern theology has been notoriously coy about dubbing the Resurrection an event in “history”.

3.     Modern scholarship starts from the fact that the stories are contained in written documents, and therefore subjects them to literary analysis. This requires different methods, depending on the purpose which the analysis is intended to serve. If the aim is to establish the historical value of a tradition, the various tools of historical criticism must be brought into action. These include source criticism to establish the relationship between the Gospel accounts, form criticism to identify their social function in the community in the underlying oral stage of transmission, and redaction criticism to establish the tendencies of the different Evangelists in the way they have presented them. It is also necessary to compare them with such historical evidence as may be preserved outside the Gospels. From this point of view the letters of Paul have special importance, partly because he wrote them before any of the four Gospels reached their present form, but chiefly because he has preserved a formal statement concerning the Resurrection which he received from the Jerusalem Church, probably from Peter himself (1 Cor 15, 3 – 7). Other scholarly approaches, such as structural analysis, are concerned with the literary character of the Resurrection stories as they stand in the text, regardless of their Synoptic relationships and their historical values.                                    A connection between appearances and apostolic commissioning is a feature of the Gospel stories. The fact that the foundation appearance to Peter himself (1 Cor 15, 4; Luke 24, 34) is nowhere described suggests that the development of the traditions was not primarily concerned with proof of the Resurrection but with its meaning in experience. This explains the meal setting in the walk to Emmaus (Luke 24, 30 – 35) and assembly of the Apostles (Luke 24, 36 – 43), possibly also John 20, 19 – 29, as it appears to reflect the Sunday Eucharist. See also John 21, 9 – 14. For it was pre-eminently in the Eucharistic assembly that the presence of the Risen Jesus was experienced in the life of the Church.

Resurrection does not mean the sloughing off the human and the resumption of the divine. The divine is rather channeled through and manifested in the human both in the earthly life of Jesus and in his risen glorified humanity. In Chapter XI of her Biography, St. Teresa of Avila maintains that we cannot attain God except through the humanity of Christ. This is one of the main differences between Christian incarnational belief and Hindu avatar belief. Vishnu appears on earth in many temporary forms, animal and human, but the human form of Krishna, for example, is only a screen. With the death of Krishna, Vishnu resumes his full unmediated deity.                                                                                               In Christianity God is known concretely and personally in so far as he renders himself knowable through the Incarnation, Resurrection, and the Holy Spirit’s inspiration. But this is not just a question of our knowledge of God. The humanity of Christ is the vehicle of our union and communion with God through all eternity. We have been incorporated into Christ’s risen body and are raised into the life of heaven. In the communion of saints in heaven, as on earth, it is through Christ’s glorified body that we continue to be embraced and sustained in the love of God. In heaven we shall know God more and more profoundly, but we shall also see his human face, since God is man forever. All our life long we have been trying to know Jesus Christ, Son of God, Son of Mary, trying to know him in prayer, reading the Gospel, listening to teaching. It would be supreme joy to see what he looks like, see him as he looks in himself.                                                                                “Truly, this man was a Son of God” (Mark 15, 39). Notice the irony here. A centurion, a symbol of Roman power, confesses that this crucified Jesus – who couldn’t be more powerless on the cross – is the Son of God. Mark stresses, then, that true power is expressed in embracing human suffering, as Jesus did on the cross, and that discipleship means identifying with Jesus in a ministry of expressing God’s power and love by embracing human suffering.