Emmaus never happened. Emmaus always happens.
—John Dominic Crossan
So it all comes down to Easter, does it not? Isn’t the whole of the Christian enterprise left stone cold and wrapped in a shroud if the body of Jesus was not raised from the dead? What else can vindicate this shameful treatment of God’s chosen? What else can truly reward those who profess to believe it, save the resurrection of their own bodies—or the bodies of all believers at the end of time? Take the shout of Easter morning away, and what remains to rouse the faithful from their sleep? Leave the rock unmoved, and what is there to move us to do battle with the ultimate enemy? If he did not “get up” on Easter Sunday, then why should we get up on any Sunday?
Is the resurrection not the good news, the nonnegotiable verdict of a God who turned death into life and defeat into victory? Or is it just the final fiction about the end of Jesus’ life, a mythical bookend to match the miraculous infancy narratives? Isn’t the guilt-induced presence of those who come to church only on Christmas and Easter a sign of the last vestige of belief in the supernatural Jesus, or what one might call “airport theology”—the life of Jesus reduced to an arrival and a departure? Take this away and what is left? If the empty tomb is a metaphor and not a description of the resuscitation of a corpse, then shouldn’t all the crosses in the world be turned in and melted down for scrap? Shouldn’t all the churches be razed and an amnesty program implemented to allow everyone to turn in their Bibles without sanction?
Besides, haven’t the gospels told us the truth about what happened after the death and burial of Jesus, if indeed he was buried at all? Doesn’t the Bible say, plainly and consistently, that on Easter morning the tomb was found empty, and that by Easter evening the risen Christ had appeared to his closest followers as proof that he was back? As one scholar puts it with obvious sarcasm, “Friday was hard, Saturday was long, but by Sunday all was resolved.”1
First, we must ask ourselves whether these are three literal days or three liturgical days, like the six days required by the God of Genesis to create the universe. Second, we must ask whether an Easter faith requires us to believe in the resuscitation of a corpse. And third, if the answer is no, then the next question is obvious: To what can the church point as proof that Jesus was indeed the Christ? Is it possible to rise from the dead without one’s body, and if so, how would this be verified? Is Easter a molecular event or a spiritual one?
The great New Testament scholar Rudolph Bultmann wrote, “Jesus rose into the kerygma”—that is, into the faith of the first believers.2 In other words, the conviction of the followers of Jesus that he was still with them was itself the resurrection. To ask the question of whether the resurrection is true, and to mean by this that only a resuscitated corpse constitutes such proof, is to impose the standards of the modern mind upon a prescientific culture of myth and magic. The dualism of body and soul was a Greek idea, so for the Jews there could be no resurrection without a resurrection of the body. How could one “rise” without a body to rise in? What we refer to as the “inner voice” would have to have come from the clouds in the first century. The nonspatial “interior life” is a modern, psychological concept. The ancients simply located the mysteries of the spirit in the movement of objects. Something was not “known” unless it could be described as something “happening.”
All that the early Christians needed to know was that Jesus died for our sins, was buried, and was raised on the third day, all in accordance with the scriptures. This was the original “kerygma” (the first faith of the believers). Oddly enough, the arguments over the validity of this claim would have centered on the scandal of Jesus as the object of that claim, not on the idea that someone had been raised from the death. That claim was made all the time, but only about those of noble birth or institutional power.
Today we stumble over the claim because we find it incredible, missing the real scandal of saying about Jesus, “He is risen!” The church has failed generations of would-be followers of Jesus by confusing the transrational with the irrational. They come to Easter service believing that they must believe the impossible in order to feel the implausible. Before they can sing the “Hallelujah Chorus,” they must check their brain at the door. God’s “yes” to Jesus is assumed to be a “no” to the laws of the physical universe. Tears of joy are then, by definition, the counterfeit symbols of sentimentality. Why not say it as plainly as the renowned biblical scholar John Dominic Crossan: “I do not think that anyone, anywhere, at any time brings dead people back to life.”3
What can be known with certainty is that the Jesus movement in Judea did not cease after the execution of its leader under Pontius Pilate—but expanded. By the early decades of the second century it had reached all the way to Rome. Because there was neither a crucifixion nor a resurrection story until around 70 CE, it is obvious that after the death of Jesus his followers did not cease being his followers. That is, they went right on healing and teaching and hosting the open table that was the centerpiece of his kingdom. Jesus was a figure of the present, not simply of the past. As the angel in the story puts it, “Why do you look for the living among the dead?” (Luke 24:5). You won’t find Jesus here. He has been raised into the land of the living—resurrected in his disciples, who have all the proof they need: hearts that burn within them.
What could possibly explain this empowerment and courage? How is it that the death of their teacher did not mean the end of their own course in miracles? In the early Gospel of Thomas we read nothing about resurrection or atonement, but only about an abiding presence that sustained his followers like the wisdom of God on earth. In fact, to explain this physical absence but spiritual presence, the only title in Thomas for Jesus is “the living Jesus.”4
Fundamentalist Christians would quickly assert that what sustains them is their certain knowledge of his bodily resurrection, followed by his bodily appearances, and all on the same weekend! Don’t we have the empty tomb stories and a rash of postresurrection appearances—all before the first gospel was written? And besides, we have Paul’s word on it, right? Sometime around 53 or 54 CE, didn’t the great missionary apostle tell us in no uncertain terms that the bodily resurrection was both real and essential?
If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised; and if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain. (1 Cor. 15:13–14)
As a Pharisee, Paul believed in the resurrection of the dead, and certainly he believed that Jesus had been raised from the dead. But the question Paul goes on to ask is, “With what kind of body do they come?” His answer is remarkable and seldom gets heard in the debate about the resurrection of the body:
So it is with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable… It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body… What I am saying, brothers and sisters, is this: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. (1 Cor. 15:42, 44, 50)
Whatever sort of vision Paul claims to have seen on the road to Damascus, it had nothing to do with a body. This “disembodied” vision does not occur until 34 or 35 CE, or three to four years after the death of Jesus. If he had been raised physically from the death, this begs the question: Where was he during this long interval and what was he doing? In fact, Paul has no empty tomb story to tell, and even decades later Mark has not a single postresurrection appearance story to tell. A decade later Matthew is ambivalent, combining two resurrection narratives, one involving women at the tomb, the other involving the disciples in Galilee, which is more like a vision.
It is only when we get to Luke-Acts and John, or the late ninth to early tenth decade of the common era, that the Easter story depicts the resurrection of a physical body walking out of the tomb. Before this, Paul does not even recognize Jesus; neither does Mary; neither do the two men walking down the road to Emmaus; neither do the seven when he appears on the shore of the sea (Acts 9:5; John 20:14; Luke 24:16; John 21:4). It is the elusive Jesus that is standard fare, because he was not a mass of molecules. But as time passed and the tradition grew, these visions lost their luminous quality and took on flesh and bones.
FROM APPARITION TO ANATOMY
The irreconcilable differences between the gospel accounts of the resurrection are well known to any student of the New Testament. In Mark’s earliest account three women go to the tomb—Mary Magdala, Mary the mother of James, and Salome—and find it empty. The large stone has been rolled away and inside they find a young man in a white robe who advises them that Jesus has been raised. They are to go tell the disciples to precede him to Galilee, where he will appear (as promised), but they are fearful and don’t tell anyone. The risen Jesus appears to no one.
In Matthew, written about a decade later, there are only two women, Mary Magdala and another Mary—Salome has disappeared. An earthquake signals the arrival of a heavenly messenger, who has rolled away the stone and now sits on it. The instructions are the same as in Mark, but Matthew adds the tremor (perhaps to explain how the stone got moved) and a description of the angel’s glistening white robe. Also, as the women hurry away from the tomb to report the news to the disciples, Jesus meets them and repeats the angel’s instructions: “Go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me” (28:10). This may well be “a defensive move on Matthew’s part to cover the flight of the disciples and to provide official permission for something they have already done.”5
Matthew also adds a new scene, in which guards report what has happened at the tomb, and the priests and elders offer a bribe to the soldiers if they will tell everyone that the disciples came at night while they slept and stole the body. The risen Jesus appears to the Eleven on a mountain in Galilee, where some worship him and others are dubious. The Great Commission is given, believed by many scholars to be the work of Matthew, not the words of Jesus.
In Luke and Acts, the number of women grows to include Mary Magdala, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and an unspecified number of other women who come to find the stone rolled away and the tomb empty. The number of angels present grows as well; two heavenly messengers remind the women of Jesus’ own predictions of his death and resurrection.
This larger delegation of women goes to tell the Eleven, who do not believe them. The impetuous Peter runs to the tomb to have a look, finding nothing but the shroud. In a first appearance, Jesus appears as a stranger to two travelers on the road to Emmaus and is only recognized later in the breaking of bread. Then he appears to the Eleven and the others assembled, and he is now “human” enough to be hungry—requesting something to eat. He is given a piece of grilled fish, and yet some are still terrified and think they are seeing a ghost. Luke wants to prove this is not a ghost, but a famished being. A ghost would not show his hands and feet, inviting the skeptical to touch them. A ghost would not lead them to Bethany and then float up into the sky, showing those below the bottoms of his feet.
In the first chapter of Acts, Luke develops the story further by having Jesus exit the world not by dying again (which did not succeed in taking him “out” of the world) but by rising into the sky, as Elijah does (2 Kings 2)—not in a fiery chariot, but with two men dressed in white robes who interpret his departure and also predict his second coming. More than any other writer, it is Luke who shifts the resurrection narrative decisively from vapors to entrails.
Finally, in the last gospel, John, which probably ended at chapter 20 (chapter 21 may have been added later as an appendix), the evolution from apparition to anatomy is completed. Mary Magdala goes to the tomb and finds it empty and the stone rolled away. She runs to tell Peter and the “disciple whom Jesus loved” (the unnamed one), and the men have a footrace to the tomb, which the other disciple wins—even though Peter enters the tomb first. They find the tomb empty and describe the strips of burial cloth left behind, including the odd detail about the one that wrapped the head of Christ “rolled up in a place by itself” 20:7). Such details add emphasis to the physical nature of the resurrection and beg the question: Who else but the risen Christ could have removed his own head bandage on the way out?
Meanwhile, Mary is hanging around outside the tomb, and two angels ask her why she is crying. She responds that someone has taken her Lord away, and she then turns to see someone she thinks is a caretaker. She recognizes the Resurrected One when he calls her name, and she reports this to the disciples. That evening, when the disciples are locked into a room “for fear of the Jews” (20:19), Christ appears, but he displays different parts of his anatomy (hands and side rather than hands and feet). He commissions them and breathes the Holy Spirit on them in what may be a kind of mini-Pentecost scene.6
The entire scene is then repeated for Thomas, who represents all of us who were either absent or “untimely born” or still stubbornly refuse to believe. The doors remain locked, as John writes in the heat of the Christian-Jewish divorce, and Thomas is invited to touch the hands and side of the risen Christ—now far removed from the crucified Jesus. Thomas will be persuaded only if the proof is entirely anatomical: “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe” (20:25).
In the appendix to the gospel of John (chapter 21), the beautiful story of the appearance of the risen Christ to seven disciples on the shore of the Sea of Tiberias is told. After the disciples fish all night and catch nothing, a familiar voice from the past urges them to cast their nets to the right side of the boat. As in the walk to Emmaus, it is another Jesus memory that triggers recognition—either table fellowship or advice on how to fish. The unnamed disciple who won the footrace to the tomb recognizes the risen Christ, while, true to form, Peter leaps into the sea to greet him first.
Think how far we have come now, from Paul’s earliest vision of a disembodied voice heard only by him to this final chapter in which a body walks out of the tomb to eat, drink, walk, talk, teach, and expound on scripture. What was an ecstatic inner vision at first has now become a tangible physical form. Christ is said to be standing on the beach, using a voice that is audible to all—followed by a narrative that includes peculiar mathematical details. The disciples drag their nets full of fish to shore, “about a hundred yards off” (21:8), and empty their catch of exactly “a hundred fifty-three” large fish (21:11). The narrative is concrete, and some of the elements seem to add nothing to the story except an unmistakable physicality:
When they had gone ashore, they saw a charcoal fire there, with fish on it, and bread. Jesus said to them, “Bring some of the fish that you have just caught… Come and have breakfast.” Now none of the disciples dared to ask him, “Who are you?” because they knew it was the Lord… This was now the third time that Jesus appeared to the disciples after he was raised from the dead. (21:9–14)
Here is the resurrected Christ cooking and serving a postresurrection Communion meal at the dawn of a new day, in contrast to the evening shadows of the Last Supper. No one doubts his identity, because all they have to do is look at him and listen to him. He gives them the bread and the fish, and what follows this sacramental breakfast is a poignant and real-time dialogue with the ever-recalcitrant Peter.
This is reported by John almost as a playwright would; it is a scene of give-and-take occurring in time and space. When breakfast is finished, Christ asks Peter a direct question and then repeats it twice more to drive home a point—that Peter’s authority is restored, and humanity’s own recalcitrance is again lamented. When will we get it?
When asked, “Do you love me?” Peter offers a quick and easy response. Christ responds, “Feed my lambs.” Then the question a second time, as if he didn’t get it, and a second imperative, which widens the flock, “Tend my sheep.” But when the question is asked a third time, Peter is “hurt,” and we hear John’s familiar theme of separation and misunderstanding. “Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you” (21:17). To which the risen Christ says a final time, perhaps while poking at the dying embers of the breakfast fire, “Feed my sheep.” The “triple statement of love from Peter to Jesus” and the “triple statement of mandate from Jesus to Peter” are apologetic in tone, restoring Peter and putting him in charge of the entire flock. “Peter is a specific leader given authority over both a leadership group and the general community.”7 Now we know what appearance stories were truly meant to accomplish.
THE POLITICS OF APPEARANCES
Just as there are irreconcilable anomalies in the birth narratives and the accounts of the resurrection, so it is impossible to trace the postresurrection appearance stories without becoming entangled in contradiction. That is, unless one understands the appearance stories as political, rather than historical. In fact, the strange and often baffling accounts of Jesus sightings have more to do with conferring authority on certain disciples or leadership groups than they do on persuading the audience to believe.
Once again, the pattern holds. As times passes, a Jewish boy born in obscurity becomes the preexistent Son of God. Then, after a brutal but routine execution, the ecstatic visions of his followers (which are common in all religious traditions) evolve into physical encounters with resuscitated corpses. Then as the early church begins to organize itself after the long delay in the second coming, it must produce stories that can mediate disputes over the pecking order in the apostolic community.
For years, the first generation of witnesses had their bags packed and sitting by the door. He would come as “a thief in the night.” They died waiting, and then a second generation waited and grew old. It became obvious that the bags should be unpacked. The beloved community of Jesus followers would need to organize itself into a community of worshipers with a written record. The evolution from folding chairs to pews had begun, and the inevitable hierarchies emerged, as did arguments over authority and status. Who better to promote some while demoting others than the risen Lord himself? What more powerful endorsement on a disciple’s resumé than to have been the first to see him?
Remember, in Mark (the first gospel) there are no appearance stories at all. But something must have happened in the decade before Matthew and Luke took up the quill and then John gave us the Gnostic Christ who hums in a parallel universe. What began as “luminous apparitions”8 and was then replaced by a material body may actually be the result of an ongoing conflict with the Gnostic tradition.
Near the end of the first century, the Gnostics began to claim only one form of revelation (their own, of course) to be normative. It was the bright light accompanied by some heavenly communication. As Robert Funk points out, this led “not only to different types of appearance stories, but to different kinds of gospels. The so-called Gnostic gospels incorporate the instructions Jesus gives the insiders in a dialogue between Jesus and his intimates—they are, in other words, revelation gospels.”9 But in what would become the orthodox tradition, the instructions given to the disciples are moved back inside his life, prior to his death and resurrection. “This move had the effect of restricting the circle of insiders to those who knew Jesus during his lifetime; that of course excludes Paul.”10 Hence, Paul must make it clear that he is one “untimely born” and received his gospel by direct revelation.
All told, the risen Lord appears to individuals (Peter, Mary Magdala, James, and Paul); to groups (the Eleven, the Twelve, all the apostles, seven disciples at the Sea of Tiberias, and five hundred at the same time); and to various others (two on the road to Emmaus, a second, unidentified Mary, two soldiers, a centurion, some Judean elders, and unspecified witnesses). These accounts are so varied and so impossible to locate that we are obviously dealing with legendary expansions meant to convey the kind of authority only a coveted appearance could bestow—especially if you were the first to see the Risen One, or the protophany.
According to Paul and Luke, that would be Peter. But according to Matthew, that would be the two Marys (one of whom was Mary Magdala). In John, it is definitely Mary Magdala. Only in a fragment of the Gospel of the Hebrews is James said to be the first to see the Risen One. How interesting that when Paul provides us with his list of those to whom the Risen One has appeared in 1 Corinthians, he doesn’t even mention Mary! If she was the protophany, she would be preeminent among the leaders of the Jesus movement. But she was a woman, and so in that society she did not qualify.
As to that strange footrace in John 20, what one scholar calls an “Alphonse and Gaston act,”11 Peter and the unnamed disciple stumble over each other to be first. The other disciple wins the race, but Peter enters the tomb first. John tells us, however, that the other disciple is the first to believe. Confused? It is the clearest indication we have that a rivalry has developed in the early church. The story is an obvious attempt to give a place of honor alongside Peter to the “disciple whom Jesus loved.”
Again, if one is reading literally, then the whole enterprise collapses. Who would be expected to believe, for example, that, as Matthew reports, at the moment of the crucifixion tombs were opened and “many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised” (27:52–53) and came marching into Jerusalem? Talk about an unforgettable parade! But if the New Testament can be seen for what it is—the unfolding, metaphorical witness of a community unalterably changed by the life, death, and abiding presence of Jesus, then it all represents an act of supreme devotion. In the community of his followers, this remarkable and unforgettable human being has become the Anointed One, and the integrity of their witness is to be found not in its objectivity but in its passion. What’s more, it can be recovered and brought forward as our gospel too, using new metaphors.
The Bible is covered with human fingerprints, and what the gospels reveal is the “gospel truth” about both enlightenment and the pride of authorship: what is born in revelation is invariably corrupted by pride. What startled the world when it first appeared in the flesh, with its wild-eyed countercultural ferocity, gets slowly tamed by being turned into a bloodless doctrine. The doctrine is well meant, to preserve the revelation for all those who missed it and to leave a record of this astonishment, so that every generation of those “untimely born” might come to believe. The problem is that no one ever falls in love with a doctrine.
It’s a little bit like staring over the edge of the Grand Canyon for the first time and then trying to explain this bluish gash of prehistory to a friend over the telephone. You can talk about height, depth, width, and the luminous Bright Angel Canyon as a “showcase of the forces of erosion,” to quote the brochure you picked up in the gift shop. But it just won’t do the trick. In frustration, you will add, “You’ve just got to see it for yourself.” Perhaps this is why Paul always felt like an outsider—like a tourist who arrives at the canyon at sundown, just after the last mule ride, and has only the box camera of his heart.
To be a witness was to be an authority; so the gospel writers used appearance stories to commission their first officers—beginning with Peter, then James, then all the apostles, and then Paul—so that the Jesus movement could spread beyond Jerusalem and Judea. Paul in fact reports his own ecstatic commissioning, and it may well be that the appearance to “the five hundred” represents the establishment of the Christian community at Pentecost. Whether the appearance is “to the eleven” or “to the twelve” (which may be the same group), the purpose was to authorize the true apostles and establish their successors. If you witnessed the resurrection, you were given special power in the ancient church, and the shape and substance of that community would be altered accordingly.
Biblical scholar Elaine Pagels insists that the doctrine of the resurrection cannot be understood solely on the basis of content but must be seen as a practical and political act. Note that by the second century, Tertullian was labeling everyone a heretic who did not accept the doctrine of the bodily resurrection and said that only believers could expect the resurrection of their own bodies. This was not just a theological position, argues Pagels, but an organizational and ecclesiastical one. The bodily resurrection “legitimizes the authority of certain men who claim to exercise exclusive leadership over the churches as the successors of the apostle Peter.”12
In the apostolic flowchart we begin with Jesus, who is commissioned at baptism and in the transfiguration. He hands over the keys of the kingdom to Peter, because he is the first to believe in the resurrection—even though he had “competition” at first—from Mary, James, and even Paul. But only Peter, as an original follower, had primacy. Only Peter could pass down this authority to all his successors, the bishops, and ultimately to the head bishop—the pope.
There were other appearances, of course, to Stephen and Paul, but they were clearly secondary. Then the ascension shut down the whole appearance business. Someone needed to turn out the lights and drop the curtain on the appearance scene—to put a period at the end of the Easter story. So with the ascension, the gospel writers officially “closed” the appearance canon.
This did not change the fact, however, that the first appearances did not depend on believing in a resuscitated corpse. They required only that one be open to ecstatic revelations, which became the Gnostic gospel. For this reason, the Gnostics didn’t need Peter for anything. They had direct access to the Risen One for perpetual instruction and inspiration. This independence was an obvious threat to orthodoxy, and so it should come as no surprise that by the second century Tertullian would find a simple way to close a different sort of canon—that of all “false” views of the resurrection. He declared all Gnostics to be heretics.
THE SCANDAL IS JESUS, NOT RESURRECTION
Sadly, the church has been declaring all those who do not believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus to be heretics ever since. This includes thoughtful, committed Christians who do not believe that Easter has anything to do with the resuscitation of a corpse or believing things you know are not true in order to get rewards you secretly doubt are available. We don’t live in a three-story universe anymore, and the disappearance and reappearance of corpses should be left behind with the ideas of demon possession, slavery, and the subordination of women.
Remember, the concept of resurrection as the resuscitation of a corpse by divine action, or as the giving back or recreation of the body by God after death, is not found in the pagan traditions of the first century, although multiple ideas existed with regard to life after death. In Judaism, the concept of resurrection evolved, moving away from a disembodied to a more embodied understanding of resurrection. It meant not “survival” of death, however, as if one might simply transition from death to life, but a redescription of death by some reversal in the future. Even so, Jewish beliefs about bodily resurrection in the time of Jesus ran the gamut, from denial of it (Sadducees) to insistence on it (Pharisees).
Like so many other Christian doctrines that developed late and are now assumed to be central to the faith and unequivocal, the resurrection of the body, or its transformation into a new body, is but one idea among a myriad of resurrection concepts so varied as to be maddening.13 We may be reading back into the gospel stories a concept the New Testament writers never intended, or one that developed during the period of the Maccabees to preserve God’s justice, as Crossan argues.
Anglican bishop N. T. Wright would have us believe that only a belief in the resurrection of the body can ultimately explain the transformation of the disciples, but this break from the spectrum of Jewish ideas about life after death is more easily explained. It is more likely that we have Paul (the Pharisee) to thank for the emphasis on resurrection, and the ultimate divorce from Judaism to blame for a doctrine that could set Christians apart from those like the Sadducees, “who deny the resurrection of the body,” and thus support a post-Temple Pharisaic Judaism.
Those who have left the church today and will not return until they are allowed to think for themselves can follow the argument so far, and any atheist can do so with delight. But this is a book meant not to do further harm to the church—rather, to help reconstitute it. What is tragically less obvious than the arguments against Easter are the arguments for it. Easter may have nothing to do with a corpse and yet everything to do with the mysteries of human existence and our hope for the redemption of the world. The church has expressed this distinction between the irrational and transrational in one parabolic afternoon: “Emmaus never happened. Emmaus always happens.”14
The stories of resurrection are acts of devotion, because “those who believed in Jesus before his execution continued to do so afterward. Easter is not about the start of a new faith but about the continuation of an old one. That is the only miracle and the only mystery, and it is more than enough of both.”15 It is a “terrible trivialization,” Crossan writes, “to imagine that all Jesus’ followers lost their faith on Good Friday and had it restored by apparitions on Easter Sunday. It is another trivialization to presume that even those who lost their nerve, fled, and hid also lost their faith, hope, and love. It is a final trivialization to mistake stories about competing Christian authority for stories about inaugural Christian experience.”16
Almost all biblical scholars agree that the abandonment of Jesus by his disciples at the darkest hour is historically accurate, because it is a negative assertion made about people who are otherwise meant to be exalted. Just as certain, however, is the belief that those same disciples experienced something remarkable and life-changing after the execution of their teacher and Lord. Even if Jesus died alone, something brought his disciples back and empowered them to take up the cause and face persecution and martyrdom. “They never wavered. The strength of their conviction was such that no threat or fear could now separate them from the God they believed they had met in Jesus.”17
The church now faces the fundamental challenge of recovering that view of God and the empowering way of life that Jesus taught and for which he died, while abandoning the creedal claims of the institutional church that separate the saved from the unsaved based on intellectual assent to discredited propositions. The former brings life; the latter bring division in the church and misplaced priorities. What must be celebrated at Easter is not a particular view of resurrection but the integrity of a first-century act of devotion. There is simply nothing unique about claiming that some notable person had been raised from the dead.18 What was utterly uncommon and turned human history on its axis was the claim that Jesus had been raised from the dead. It reset all the clocks in the Western world. Easter was God’s “yes” to a peasant revolutionary, and God’s “no” to the Roman Empire.
The refrain of every apostolic song was the same. “Death cannot contain him… We have seen the Lord… He is risen!” These lyrics are not metaphysical. They are confessional. Easter is God’s vindication of The Way, not a statement about the blood atonement. It is a daring and dangerous statement that says that when you live the way of Jesus, you will see God. And that when you dare to live in the radical freedom that is authentic faith, you need fear nothing at all—not even death.
To see the “human face of God,” as New Testament scholar John A. T. Robinson puts it, was an experience so liberating that it required a new Sabbath day on which to worship and turned the early church into a beloved community of “resident aliens.”19 But unlike the claims of orthodoxy, Jesus did not come to die, rendering his life and teaching secondary. He died because of his life and teachings. He was killed for the things that he said and did. Then the claim of his first followers and his first community is that God raised him from the dead to undo the injustice done to him and to place a divine stamp of approval on his words and deeds.
This may not sound like such an important distinction, but it is the Continental Divide that separates a dying church, on the one hand, from the possibility of a church reborn and freed from the American empire, on the other. Placing all the emphasis on the saving effect of the death of Christ as a cosmic bargain negates the life of Jesus. It not only gives us movies like Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (an anti-Semitic, sadomasochistic spectacle truncating the life of Jesus and reducing it to a feature-length act of divinely sanctioned torture) but actually legitimizes violence in a world already saturated with it.
In that movie, rated R for violence but attended by children as young as twelve whose parents know “good violence” when they see it, the life of Jesus and his message are reduced to a few “flashbacks” as he dies on the cross “for our sins.” The life is optional, but the death is not. It is no wonder that so many high-profile Christian fundamentalists have such a taste for torture and extraordinary rendition. After all, sometimes even an “awesome” God must do what “must be done”—inflicting pain to get good intelligence and accomplish a larger purpose. No pain, no eternal gain.
Again, think how far we have come from the noble death of Jesus, who was raised in the heart of the beloved community, to the “necessary” death of the divine scapegoat, who “pays the price” for all sin and appeases an angry Father, who can be satisfied only by the foreordained torture and death of his only son. In the former, access to the kingdom is unbrokered; Jesus never appoints anyone to anything. In the latter, God is the ultimate Broker, and death can be seen as the ultimate bargain. In the former, there is no hierarchy of privilege; true leaders are those who serve and make themselves slaves of all. In the latter, there is a perpetual pecking order, whose upper members are assumed to have the power to save souls and who have the utterly corruptible hubris to act as gatekeepers between heaven and hell.
To raise Jesus is to recover the liberating quality of the gospel, freeing it from precisely the obligatory rituals that have always been confused with righteousness. For Paul, circumcision, dietary laws, and other aspects of Mosaic law have given way to a new covenant and a new reality: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28).
Sadly, we have replaced one form of legalism with another. To insist that “Jesus was God” (the dominant American heresy) and that the only true resurrection is the bodily resurrection is not even biblically honest. What’s more, it reverses the inclusionary model of Jesus and cuts us off from all those generous and compassionate latter-day gnostics for whom Easter is a spiritual, not a molecular, event.
It is easy to understand why “eternal life” is such a powerful and appealing idea. Not only are we terrified by death, but we are sustained by the belief that good people (like us) will be rewarded and the evildoers (like them) will get what is coming to them. Surely if God is just, the afterlife will reflect that justice. The idea of a final judgment, with its separation of the sheep from the goats, is drawn from this universal human longing. And yet, strangely enough, there is more evidence to suggest that this was not the message of Jesus.
He was remembered as talking about the kingdom here and now—a way of being in right relationship to God and to one another that could be both present and future tense. It was both now, in his wisdom, and yet to come, when that wisdom would rule the whole earth. In his parables he sought to reverse human expectations of rewards and punishments, and he audaciously proclaimed that the first would be last, and the last first. Insiders would be outsiders, and the rewards of faith would be intrinsic, not extrinsic.
In the end, what right do human beings have to expect eternal bliss for being good—or on the cheap, for just believing the right things? And what single idea is more shameful or horrific than to project our human longing for vengeance upon God by claiming that in God’s infinite mercy God has made and maintains a place of eternal torment? It is no wonder that so many good people avoid the word “Christian” like the plague. It has become synonymous with hypocrisy, mean-spiritedness, and conspicuous consumption.
Yet some churches do not just celebrate Easter; they live it. There are Jesus followers who live as Easter people every day and provide more proof of the resurrection than any literalized metaphor of an empty tomb. They are all “untimely born,” but they have no need to boast of an ecstatic vision or cover their doubts by touching wounded hands or pierced sides. They accept the laws of nature yet refuse to live in a universe devoid of mystery or stripped of all enchantment. By following, not by believing, they remain open to the possibility of resurrection in this life, not just in the next.
A woman in my own congregation spent more than a decade despising me—or at least I thought she did. I was too liberal, and I had persuaded the deacons to remove the American flag from the sanctuary and place it in our fellowship hall. My explanation about any symbol of a nation-state in a “house of prayer for all people” could not be heard above her certain belief that I did not honor veterans, including her husband. Sunday mornings became an elaborate ritual of avoidance, including extraordinary measures to avoid passing in the hallway. If she saw me coming, she turned and went the other way. It was “her church,” but I was not “her pastor.”
When I greeted her, there was no response. She only communicated through surrogates, and near the end of her life she issued an ultimatum. If I did not insist that the congregation sing “Battle Hymn of the Republic” within six weeks, she would resign from the church. Needless to say, we did not sing that hymn in the required period of time, and she made good on her threat. She disappeared for several years, and I enjoyed her absence.
Then word came that she was dying. She was in intensive care in a hospital near my house, and I knew what I was supposed to do—go see her. But I didn’t want to. I reasoned that she was no longer a member and that I was the last person on earth she would want to see anyway. I joked with my wife, Shawn, about what the real impact of a visit might be—would I make her worse? What if she died when I entered the room?
Shawn persuaded me that a visit was the right thing to do, because about such things she is almost always right. “To what oath are you bound, Robin?” she asked me. “Visiting only the people you like?” I headed for the hospital, feeling vaguely as though I was about to be the first minister ever to kill someone by making a hospital call.
I approached the nurse’s station and decided to send advance notice to her room. That way, she could send word that she could not be bothered. After all, I had nothing good to report about our prospects for singing the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and I knew she was going to ask me. The nurse returned from her room and said, “Go right in.”
I turned the corner and from the corridor I saw her lying on her deathbed, with tubes running out of her nose and mouth and into numerous ports in her body. This is so often the soundtrack of death, the clicking and wheezing of artificial life support. I hesitated at the door, only to have her raise her arm and motion me to the bedside.
Before I could say a word, she lifted herself up in defiance of all those tubes and all that misery. She wrapped her arms around my neck and kissed me on the mouth. “I’m so glad you came,” she said.
We talked for two hours, catching up on children, the church she no longer attended, and the sad state of the world. She died the next day.
Some people would argue that this is not a resurrection story and has nothing to do with Easter.
That’s unfortunate.