It was the Sabbath—a day of rest and worship, a day when the God-consciousness of the Jewish man and woman was particularly intense. We must never forget that the disciples were all Jewish. Did they have time before the setting sun announced the arrival of the Sabbath to flee to the relative safety of Galilee? I suspect some did. I am convinced all did not. Peter had lingered to witness the arrest, the trial. My educated guess is that he was still in Jerusalem with a few of the others. Militating against departure was the fact that one could not journey more than three-fifths of a mile on the Sabbath without breaking the law. The story of Cleopas and his friend’s journeying to Emmaus on the first day of the week seems to me to support the idea that at least some of the disciples waited until the Sabbath had passed to depart.
I suspect those that stayed gambled on three things. First, the authorities would feel that destroying the leader would destroy the movement; a purge of the followers was therefore not necessary. Second, the swollen city would soon be back to normal when the Passover pilgrims departed, and their best chance for escape lay in blending into the crowd and leaving when the crowd left. Finally, there was a security about the Sabbath. Jews did not arrest criminals on the Sabbath unless absolutely necessary, for that too was work.
So the disciples who remained observed the Sabbath, I believe. They worshiped, they prayed, they were as inconspicuous as possible. But if they were arrested, they would want to be able to demonstrate their strict adherence to the Sabbath tradition.
I suspect that the scattered group did not congregate on that day. They may well not have been in contact with one another. It was every man for himself or perhaps several groups of two or three. I think it is also essential to try to understand their feelings. There was grief. One they had known and loved was dead. There was fear. He had been executed by the civil and religious authorities, and perhaps they were next. There was confusion. Somehow they had never expected Jesus to conclude his public career in this fashion. There was perplexity. If he had been the messiah, he could not have died. He did die; therefore, he could not be the messiah.
There was a mind-set that had elements of the old Jewish idea of moral retribution against which Job had railed. There was a common assumption that God was in charge of the events of life and that one got what one deserved. In this episode it was expressed in the voices of the mob, “Let God save him!” If God had wanted to spare Jesus, he somehow could have. He did not. Therefore, he must not have wanted to do so. Buthow could God say no to Jesus, they wondered, for that would be like saying no to love, to forgiveness, and to life? Could the power of healing and wholeness that they had seen in Jesus have been unreal or demonic as his critics charged? Over and over they posed these questions as they tried to make sense out of the traumatic events of Friday. Jesus was dead. He had been crucified under Pontius Pilate. If they had hope of the Resurrection, it was a future hope at the end of history, the general resurrection at the last day. That did very little to ease their troubled minds or calm their fears or comfort them in the present moment of grief.
The Sabbath day wore on, and when the western sky began to record the day’s end, a new problem emerged. Where would they spend the night? Where could they hide in relative security? Perhaps they had used the upper room on Friday night, but I doubt it. Judas obviously knew of it, and it did not seem a safe place in which to hide. If Judas’ suicide is historic, it seems to have occurred by this time. Perhaps those who knew of it now felt the upper room to be safer. It would not surprise me if some of their belongings had been left there, belongings that they wanted to reclaim before returning to Galilee. For whatever reasons, some of the disciples, I am convinced, began to converge on that upper room for the night, for sanctuary on the first day of the week until they felt safe to depart.
I am also convinced that some of the disciples had fled on Thursday evening and were by this time already back in Galilee. This was by no means a cohesive group. This is hinted at by John who states that the disciples were not all present on the first Easter. Thomas specifically was not present. In the Johannine appendix(chapter 21), only seven disciples are mentioned. In any event, some of the disciples gathered toward the evening hour or entered under cover of darkness into the relative sanctuary of that upper room.
When dawn broke, the women went to the tomb carrying the embalming spices to do the work that the Sabbath had prevented them from doing until this moment. What they found there I do not know, but it was enough to cause them to be disturbed. They reported this to the disciples. At that moment even an empty tomb would have conveyed more fear, not more faith. It would only mean that his enemies were not content to kill his body; now they had desecrated his grave. The few disciples who were in the upper room secured it as best they could. They locked the windows and barred the door. They waited more in silence than in comradeship at first. I doubt if they ate. Traumatized, grief-stricken people are not hungry. The hours passed. No knock was heard at their door, no voice that shouted, “Open up in the name of the law.”
As time wore on, their internal security level began to rise, and they began to talk among themselves. I suspect that the content of their conversations was not unlike the conversations of most bereaved people who gather when their grief is fresh. They tried to understand. Why? they must have asked over and over. What meaning is there in these events? They shared their doubts, their fears, their questions, their grief. It is also common in bereavement to relive again and again the last time you were with the deceased. That would be easy in this setting, for that last time together was the meal eaten here. Now they saw it as the Last Supper. The table was still physically present. One does not wash dishes or clean up the kitchen on the Sabbath. They discussed the strange conversation, the melancholy atmosphere. They retold Jesus’ words, seeking to understand his meaning. Finally, as the afternoon wore on, their bodies began to send them hunger messages. They were welcomed, for they signaled a return to normalcy, a transition away from trauma.
Preparation was made for the evening meal, which was in Jerusalem an event of the late afternoon. Electricity had not yet created night life. When they gathered around that familiar table, maybe only three or four, Peter took charge. That was his nature. This was the first meal they had shared together since Thursday. Peter took the bread and began the ceremonial blessing. It was inevitable that Peter would refer to their last meal with Jesus, especially Jesus’ command.
“You remember,” began Peter, “that Jesus commanded us whenever we gathered together to break bread and to drink wine in memory of him. He told us that in this way we would show forth his death until he comes. So we gather now in our grief and observe what he commanded. On the night Jesus was betrayed,” continued Peter, “he took bread. When he had given thanks, he broke the bread.” At this point Peter broke it, tearing it dramatically into two pieces. With one in each hand Peter continued, and this broken bread he identified with his body, which would be broken for them. The wine he identified with his blood shed to inaugurate a new covenant.
Peter stopped and pondered the meaning of his own words. It was as if dawn was cracking the darkness of his mind. Suddenly, Peter looked at the cross through the symbols of broken bread and poured-out wine, and the cross looked radically different. Instantaneously, Peter recognized that Jesus was not the victim, that noone, not even God, had done this to him. The cross was not God’s no to all that Jesus meant. It was rather a part of Jesus’ plan. How else could he have let us know how deeply we are loved? We betrayed him, denied him, forsook him, and crucified him; and his response was to accept, to love, to forgive. The cross was the way he proclaimed to the world that there is nothing we can do and nothing we can be that will finally separate us from the love of God.
At that moment, for the first time, Peter, the one who denied, experienced the power and the depth of that love. He stepped into it. Peter was resurrected to new life, a new being. He saw life in a new way with all of its depth and wonder, its transcendence and ecstasy; and that opened his eyes. With those newly opened eyes Peter saw Jesus resurrected, alive. For that moment timelessness invaded time. The limitations of the human transitory state were overcome, and Jesus’ death became the doorway into a realm of reality that constantly surrounds us but we never seem to see with our earthbound eyes. That which lies at the end of history had been experienced in history, and Jesus was perceived as the doorway through which one goes from one realm to the other. He is the door, the way, the life; no one comes to the Father but by him—that is the way the Fourth Gospel finally said it.
That risen Christ was real. I cannot say that too emphatically. He was not resuscitated, he was resurrected. He was changed. It was not the limited physical eyes of our humanity that saw him, but eyes of faith newly opened by the power of his life—but those newly opened eyes really saw him. This was no mirage, no vision, no hallucination. There is no vocabulary, no language of the eschatological realm; so we have to use our inadequate human language. Resurrection cannotbe explained or narrated. It can only be experienced and proclaimed. Death cannot contain him. He lives.
It was obvious, I suspect, to the other dinner guests that something had happened to Peter. He stopped talking. He stood as if in a trance with a piece of the broken loaf in each hand. For Peter it must have seemed as if an eternity had passed. To the others at the table perhaps it was only an instant, an eerie kind of instant. Then Peter, suddenly aglow with life, turned back to the table and led them step by step through the broken bread to look anew at the cross and then into the experience of their own resurrection and finally to open their eyes to see the resurrected Jesus.
There was an intensity about that Moment that burned all fear and cowardice out of the disciples. They had entered that room as fugitives in hiding. They would leave that room as transformed, fearless, resurrected men who would start a movement that would transform the world. That Moment had captured a reality that would forever stamp the day when that Moment would be reenacted as a special day, forever holy; for on that day followers of Jesus would meet and break bread together and experience his living presence again and again. So a new holy day was born.
Finally, when Jesus was seen, when the power of his life was experienced, when the realm beyond history broke into their consciousnesses, suddenly Jesus and God were seen as a single reality. He was both the servant of God who took upon himself the brokenness of the creation, was victimized by it, and vindicated through it; but he was also the Son of Man who would inaugurate the dawn of the new age when God would be all in all. Now they looked back at his life, his words,his actions, and they understood. Jesus is Lord, they exclaimed. It was the first and maybe the best Christian creed. They worshiped him, an unheard-of thing for Jewish people to do. “My Lord and my God” is the ecstatic cry that captures the impact of this revolution. Never again could they envision God without including in that definition Jesus the Christ. Never again could they think of Jesus without seeing him as included in all that the word God meant.
When the disciples stepped into the Moment of Easter led by Peter, the Spirit that had conceived this Jesus entered them. The love, the power, the fullness of life was theirs. The Spirit was the same as Jesus and yet different. John described it as “Jesus breathed on them, and they received the Holy Spirit.” It was all part of the Moment of Easter. Luke later for rational and apologetic reasons would separate the various movements of the Easter Moment, but at first it was one cascading, revelatory encounter with life at a depth never before experienced. They saw all that life could be, both in history and beyond history or, in the traditional language, both on earth and in heaven. And Jesus the giver and source of that life clearly belonged to both realms. The God-man they came to call him, ascended to heaven yet present on earth through the Holy Spirit.
Peter and whoever shared that Easter Moment with him now left Jerusalem and returned to Galilee to locate the other disciples to bring them into the Easter Moment. They found them, and in Galilee once more they saw the Lord. The disciple band was reconstituted, and they began to understand that the Easter Moment was not a privilege but a responsibility. They must feed my sheep. Freely they had received; freely they must give. They knew dimensions of life into whichthey wanted to invite others. They knew a depth of community that overcame all the human barriers—language, class, tribe, race. They were citizens of a new creation. In Jesus they were given life in all its fullness, open, honest, risking, free. They shared in the New Being which they had found in Jesus. And this New Being must be given away.
The Easter Moments in Galilee all seem to have this imperative quality. Matthew has the risen Lord give the divine commission: “Go into all the world—Judea, Samaria, the uttermost parts of the earth. Be my witnesses, baptize in my name. Lo, I am with you always to the end of time.” The words are clearly stylized, theologized, polished. But the dawning of a worldwide responsibility for those who had seen the living Lord was not to be denied.
Obviously at some point the disciples, including those who had fled to Galilee, gathered again in Jerusalem. It was in Jerusalem that the Christian movement burst upon the public. That gathering was clearly one of ecstatic joy. That day could well have been remembered as the birthday of the church, and it could well have possessed the qualities of Pentecost. This may be the historic event that underlies Luke’s story of the coming of the Holy Spirit, and Luke, knowing that this was sometime after the Easter Moment, adjusted his chronology to fit his understanding of this event.
Whatever lies behind the narrative, it is clear that the Easter Moment, which included Resurrection, Ascension, and the Holy Spirit, also carried with it a missionary imperative. The obligation to follow and to share the resurrected one are both inherent in having the eyes to see. The reality of the event and the significance of the event are indivisible.
Everywhere the Christians went, they told the story of their living Lord. They shared his love. They invited men and women into the experience of Easter, interpreting it with the symbols of broken bread and poured-out wine. Here was the context of Easter. Here successive generations could meet the living Lord and know the love that sets life free to be, to live, to love, to risk. The breaking of bread became the liturgical act for Christians, the meeting place with the resurrected Lord of life. Inevitably, just as with the Easter Moment, to proclaim this Eucharistic act as the meeting place with the Lord of life was not sufficient. It had to be narrated, explained, rationalized, and defended.
It was not long before theories abounded as to just how the Lord was present in this experience. Transubstantiation, consubstantiation, memorial meals, and that marvelously vague and typically Anglican view called the Real Presence are the modern names of the rational explanations. Like the narrations and explanations of the Easter Moment, the language, the vocabulary, the mind-set are all inadequate. They can only point to what they so ineptly try to describe. But that will not prevent men and women from arguing endlessly over their interpretations, even to the point of rending asunder the body of Christ to defend their version of the truth. And the Holy God must smile at the constant folly of those he loves and for whom that love was shown in the cross of Calvary.
That is how I would reconstruct the Moment of Easter. It is real for me, real beyond imagining. It is not a moment that can be measured by the scientist or by the historian, for its reality is beyond the domain of either discipline. But that does not mean that that Moment is not real. It only means that science and history have not exhausted all that is real. It means that lifehas a depth, a transcendence, that most of us never touch.
I look at Jesus, my Lord, and I see a life that reveals the source of all life. I see a love that reveals the source of all love. I see being that reveals the ground of all being. Since God is for me that personal center of the universe that is life, love, and being, I see God when I look at Jesus. But more than that I see what life can be beyond our brokenness, our fragmentation, our ego needs, our defense systems, our security barriers. In Jesus I meet God and a vision of complete and whole humanity calling me to dare to risk my own security by entering life, knowing another, being known, loving another, being loved, being myself without apology, without boasting, and allowing others to be themselves.
When the depth of a relationship is experienced, when true community is found, the same transforming, transcending reality touches life and calls each of us to grasp a new being. When one stands here, he or she cannot help looking anew at Jesus and understanding. Yes, he died, but he was more alive dying than those around him were living. And he touched life so deeply that in his power all of the barriers, even the barrier of death, melted away. That seems to me always to happen when real life is met, engaged, shared. At some point depth becomes transcendence, and death is seen as the gateway to life.
I shared with my readers in the opening part of this volume my experience with one of the people of God. His name was Jim Campbell. I am alive today in a way I could never have been had he not allowed me to share in all that his life meant, including the incident of his death. I do not mean to trivialize that death, for in many ways it was traumatic for Jim, for his wife, for his son, and for his daughter. In a unique way it wastraumatic for me. But nonetheless it was but an incident, for when he died, Jim was alive in a new way. And death could not touch that life.
There is another realm. Jesus entered it. He opened eyes to see it. I have experienced it. Many of you have also, though perhaps you do not always know how to articulate what it is you have experienced. Love gives life. Love expands being. Love opens eyes to new dimensions. Love leads us toward a completion of ourselves. In that process it is not hard to see the one who was fully alive, fully loving, fully being who he was, also to be the risen, life-giving spirit, and beckoning us to come to him, to share in his peace that passes all understanding—and I might add, all human categories of language.
Death could not and cannot contain him. Jesus lives. Jesus is Lord. Broken bread revealed and reveals him. Surely I am a skeptical child of a nonbelieving twentieth century. But on this truth I gladly wager my very life. I stand here unashamed, unembarrassed. For me the Easter Moment is truth. Truth I can enter. Truth I have entered. Truth I will more fully enter. For now I see through a glass darkly, but someday face to face.
Because I believe this, I am committed to living as fully as possible now in this moment, in every moment. I am willing to reveal myself and to allow others to trust me with revelations of themselves. I am committed to a life of risk, of love, of relationships, of honesty. The hope of heaven can never be an excuse not to live now. It must always be rather an invitation to live now, a challenge to be myself now. For I am a disciple of the one who said, “I have come that you might have life, abundantly, here and hereafter.”