Emphasis Preaching Journal

Some years ago someone asked me whether I believed that the resurrected Jesus was the Jesus whose corpuscles and muscles and cells and lungs had died and then were miraculously reinflated, reinvested with life, retriggered, and the like. Being a Bible-believer, I said no, because the Bible makes a point of the different character of the Jesus who makes appearances after death. Paul and the gospel writers struggle to find new language to match a new reality, and cannot find it. But they do not want to see the risen Jesus as the same old thing. Ever since, I've read in some of the right-wing press that I disbelieved the resurrection.

There is another way to fall off faith's tightwire: to say that the resurrection was "nothing but ..." a psychological transformation in the disciples. When you hear the word "nothing but" connected with faith, run for the door. The scriptures keep coming forth with narratives, proclamations, and twists that suggest a new kind of reality is present in the resurrection.

Just as important as the newness is the motif that connects the resurrection with the baptized, the believers. We shall see how in the Colossians text the resurrection is not something simply awaited by believers. In some senses it has already occurred. If so, Paul will be telling them, this ought to show. They ought to live different kinds of lives than before.

The Easter cycle that follows rings changes on that notion of new kinds of creation, new kinds of life. I am not sure that the reconstitution of the same old, arthritic, cremated body-in-ashes will do more for hope and love and faith than would resurrection as an idea in the mind of God and of humans. No, correct that: I am sure it would not. All this is new.

Grist For The Mill

Acts 10:34-43

The Hebrew Scriptures, our Old Testament, have few references to resurrection or life to come. Sheol offers little life and no hope. A passage in Isaiah, another in Ezekiel, a miracle resuscitation story or two, a hymnlet in Job -- these have to suffice. In the intertestamental period there are witnesses to resurrection within Judaism. But the celebration of a New Creation, a resurrection that represents More and Other, not Less and Same, awaits the activity of God in Christ. So for the Easter cycle the first reading comes not from the Old Testament but from preaching in the Book of Acts, much of it referring to roots in the Hebrew Scriptures.

Acts 10 tells the story of "the awakening of Peter," which ought to be as familiar as the Acts narrative of "the conversion of Paul." Both of them are stories about acceptance of vocations. Peter's is an opening to a God who "shows no partiality," but who works among Jews, Gentiles, and Romans like Cornelius. Cornelius, yes, a non-Jew who "feared God," was "well-spoken by the Jewish nation," and more. But he was an unfinished product, so Peter is glimpsed and overheard condensing the gospel, as Luke-Acts digested it.

There is a climax: "They put [Jesus] to death by hanging him on a tree; but God raised him on the third day and allowed him to appear ... to us ... who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead." The New Testament can be read as a library occasioned by what was referred to in those two lines. Many events in the Gospel antecede the death and resurrection, but most would not have been recorded or preserved apart from the hanging and raising. With good reason we pay attention to the readings that follow.

Colossians 3:1-4

People who grow up with New Testament preaching tend to have learned how to live with a jumbling of tenses. Past, future, present, future, past: they tumble together and seem to fall randomly. The preacher has to take some pains helping newcomers sort out or old-timers think through these juxtapositions. Commentaries are full of word combinations like "having and not having," "now and not-yet," "having and hoping," and the like.

Once the resurrection of Christ occurs, the deliberate, sometimes casual, sometimes formal mixing of tense usages increases. In the present case, people alive at Colossae are being told that they "have died," italics mine, as they say. Their lives are hidden with Christ in God. But they will be revealed with Christ in glory when he is revealed.

What sense does that make? Very much, as soon as one gets clear the understanding of Paul that faith in Christ, baptism in Christ, and identification with Christ mean that in real senses death is already behind. God looks at one in this identification with Christ. The Colossians are supposed to, too.

Scholars call sections like this "paranesis." This pattern of moral injunction, advice on how to be and to be good, can turn quite boring in the modern pulpit. Now, in the last three minutes, all the predictable and forgettable things get said. Not so in the letter to the Colossians.

Paul interrupts quiet talk about how to live with a shattering, dazzling vision of the future because the reader or hearer has died. Comedian Woody Allen once said he did not mind death so much; he just didn't want to be around when it happened. The Colossians had been around when it happened, and now their lives were "hid with Christ in God." So it goes, still.

John 20:1-18

A strange phrase colors the Johannine Easter story, a story enlivened by the poignant scene between Mary Magdalene, who mistakes Jesus for the gardener, and Jesus, risen, not a gardener. That phrase says that "as yet they [Peter and the Beloved Disciple] did not understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead."

We who read scriptures written decades after the event, documents that come to our attention centuries after the event, cannot think our way back into the world of the disciples, as described in the gospels. Certainly, in the evangelists' telling, Jesus threw out enough clues what the scriptures had written about -- scriptures has to mean our Old Testament -- was to be fulfilled in his rising. Still, we have found few anticipations
of resurrections in the Old Testament and very few that could connect with Jesus. (For clues, look in Acts 2:4-28, next Sunday, or Luke 24, two Sundays from now).

Now, Mary has come to the tomb, and seen it open; she has run to have her vision of things confirmed. The Beloved Disciple, favored in this gospel, won the race to the tomb but was deferential and let Peter look in. The "other disciple" believed; Peter did not, being among those who did not yet understand the scriptures.

Finding an empty tomb by itself was not the great event. Finding the tomb empty as a confirmation of scriptural promise made all the difference. Not that someone rose from the dead mattered. Who it was, and why it was, that the one who "must rise from the dead" had risen from the dead was the point from which proclamation began, and faith grew. Promise and fulfillment, scriptural anticipation and event: these connected for the first believers.


FIRST LESSON FOCUS
By James A. Nestingen

Acts 10:34-43

Being forgiven is a little bit like falling in love -- it is only after the fact that a person realizes, with joy, how it exceeds all sense of expectation.

The ecumenical and liturgical theologians responsible for the lectionary apparently declared that such expectation, and anything else that might be found in the Old Testament, is out of place in the Easter season. So they have set it aside in favor of texts from the Book of Acts. Eschatology generally doesn't have much place when ecclesiology takes over.

But the Apostle Peter, even in the more idealized portrait presented in Acts, isn't going to be bound by these or any other restraints. He is alive with the hope of the resurrection to the point where it is spilling over the edges of his sermon,
particularly as he speaks of the gift of Good Friday and Easter, "that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name" (v. 43).

It could be argued that there would have been good reason for Peter's appetite for forgiveness. The Gospels single him out in the accounts of passion week, devoting particular attention to his behavior through the tribulations that beset Jesus. So we hear him swearing loyalty and then snoring in the Garden of Gethsemane, see him pulling a sword on an unprepared soldier and then later betraying his Lord before a young woman tending a fire. Peter the Rock became Peter the Shale before it was over.
Forgiveness would be about his only protection. He knew what he needed and so do we, at times.

But this is where the gestalt, need-fulfillment, problem-solution structure of common assumption breaks down. No doubt forgiveness does have a way of fulfilling a need. But lovers know what those sunk deep in the forgiveness of sin also discover:
that there is more to the relationship than the fulfillment of personal need, a remarkably shallow way to talk of something -- better, somebody -- so rich.

Forgiveness is a matter of clearing a disturbed past, but the clearance is for the sake of the future, particularly for the sake of living in the constancy of an undisturbed love of the one responsible for the relationship itself. It is a gift worth dying for, dying and rising, in fact, so that our crucified and risen Lord appears to us in his Easter enthronement as Lord of all. He now holds both past and future in his hands, restoring one, bestowing the other on the basis of his sheer, abounding grace.