EASTER KNOWING

EASTER KNOWING

            Jesus was not a mythical god whose fabled life was played out in a timeless kingdom. Nor was he merely a first century hippie or Gnostic or social proactivater opposing structures and hierarchies. Those who present Jesus like this are playing down or totalling ignoring his divine sonship and salvation ministry. Jesus Christ was no gaunt, shadowy figure, but a person of flesh and blood, hard as nuts and gentle as the dawn in springtime. He dealt with men and women with unconventional etiquette, and even though they often failed to understand him, he made a great difference to their lives. Seen, heard, felt, and touched, here was someone who was just ordinary yet mysterious, but, in the last instance, worth living and dying for. That was what his disciples finally found out, though they had to go a long way to do so.

            There are touching bits of evidence in the gospel that spin off from the disciples’ pride in their association with Jesus. Well, at least till his arrest and death, when they disintegrated and scrambled for safety. Till much after the resurrection of Jesus the disciples do not come off as recruitment-poster models, flawless and handsome genotypes. The amazing honesty of the gospels is that they avoid sculpting the disciples as heroes in marble. And yet Jesus had planted in their hearts the seeds of transformation, a transformation that was triggered at Pentecost.

The memories of the early Christians, treasured and utilised in their preaching and church life, were precisely those words and works of Jesus that had the power to transform lives. How could they forget the risen Lord breaking into the isolation of the upper room where the disciples huddled in fear, or the hauntingly beautiful Emmaus story ? The New Testament’s bare bones narration of the essential words of Jesus are lean and to the point; they bear the sure traces of countless repetition. Despite the cross  -  the emblem of disastrous and monumental failure  -  the Christian community knew one thing, the most basic fact that they encapsulated and proclaimed in a single powerful phrase: “HE IS RISEN.” This has unceasingly reverberated in a community that has remained unshattered for over 2,000 years.

            It was not faith that created the resurrection, but the resurrection that created the faith. The empty tomb may excite our curiosity as a preliminary, but it is the new presence of Jesus in his community that ignites our faith and feeds our proclamation. The earliest form of Easter preaching was that “he was seen.” People saw him, and it was not a ghost they saw. They not merely saw him, they knew him. Thus a new stage was reached in their relationship with him as against the previous stage of earthly life and death. Jesus did not return to the scene like a bizarrely resuscitated corpse, but had traversed death to a new and transcendent existence, neither this side of the grave nor beyond. He belonged here and yet did not. The disciples had a new knowledge of him but at once found it impossible to “place him” in their mental atlas. It was rather their atlas that took on new contours by this new knowledge, the power of which liberated their hearts from the stranglehold of death. Knowledge is power. Knowing Jesus relativises death and tames it. According to the book of Revelation, Jesus holds the keys of death and Sheol, and he turns the key in the heart of the faithful ones to transform their death and abolish Sheol.

So, who is Jesus Christ ? He is the death-perfected Son of God and man, the source and rationale of the Easter proclamation. And the burning of the heart is the test of authenticity, as is made plain at the end of the profoundly touching Emmaus story. What matters is not so much the emptiness of the tomb as the fullness of the heart, which the Lord promised when he said, “....and it shall be given you in full measure, pressed down and flowing over.” From then on hacks have become heroes, and they can now be cast in gold, silver, and bronze.