Easter lies too far beyond our experience for our
imaginations to grasp much more than impressions of startling appearances of a
beloved Lord and Master who is but isn’t dead, who is but isn’t a ghost, who is
but isn’t the familiar figure his followers knew so well. What was he like? Well, flesh but not flesh as we know it,
wounded but not with wounds as we know them, transformed but not in any we can
really picture. He appeared unannounced
in locked rooms, walked incognito with puzzled and discouraged disciples, ate
solid food but passed through solid walls.
Conceptual explanations of the resurrection don’t help much more than
our flawed images do. They make use of
words we know, but they use them to expound a reality we don’t, not
really.
We’re in good company, to judge by the general
confusion that seems to have left the first Easter Christians babbling
contradictory of accounts of who saw what when and who believed whom—but quite
often didn’t. A stammer was probably the
most honest way they could have described a reality into and over which they
stumbled in happy but fearful discovery.
I sometimes feel as if all our Easter alleluia’s are our own
contemporary way of stammering out a truth for which we have no really coherent
words.
The risen Christ, transformed into the Fire hidden
at the heart of human flesh which set Peter babbling on Tabor, sheds a light so
bright it blinds us. Paul could tell us
something about that from his experience on the Damascus road. But in fact, all the early believers
could. The gospel stories of Jesus’
appearances after the resurrection, and the Acts of the Apostles, which we read
in its entirety during the Easter season during the liturgy, is the story of
that light reaching out of an unimaginable future to touch one by one the dark
places in which Christ’s early followers walked: the apostles’ fear, Mary
Magdalene’s grief, Thomas’ angry doubt, Peter’s shame. Those are consoling stories because the
familiar and beloved Master, Teacher and Healer appears in person to cast light
into experiences we too have known.
Fear, grief, doubt and shame are all shadows, sometimes consuming
shadows, through which we all have walked.
But the story doesn’t stop with those personal
encounters. Jesus disappears from the
scene at the Ascension, or seems to, but the Light does not. We see a lame man condemned to a lifetime of
begging at the Temple Gate spring up and walk at the sound of Jesus’ name
invoked by Peter. We hear of fights
between Christians of differing ethnic origins settled by Peter’s creative
wisdom. Peter had learned a thing or two
about humility by then and saw that no one could do everything that was needed,
so he assigned some community members to be deacons who would care for
practical needs the apostles couldn’t address.
Time management through delegation is not a new invention, just a new
name for an old one. We recoil at the
sight of an angry mob driven by their religious beliefs to stone Stephen to
death only to see Stephen himself walk through a horrible death with the
courage inspired by the sight of the risen Christ, whom no one else,
apparently, could see. We see disciples
jailed and freed, Paul held in suspicion by fellow Christians (for very good
reason), apostles arguing about what to
require of Jewish converts, preachers thrown out of synagogues and cities,
communities split in their loyalties to different leaders. We see, in other
words, all the dark corners in which even Christians and Chrisitan communities
sometimes find themselves even now, some two millennia after the resurrection. We too know of crippling illness and injury,
of jealousies that split families and communities, of offended believers
casting killing stones—a story that appeared on this morning’s news, in fact—of
Christian ministers jailed, of Church leaders held in suspicion, of Church
leaders arguing policy and practice, of preachers fired or driven out of town,
of communities divided by loyalties to opposing pastors. The darkness of the New Testament church is
far from outdated.
When we read Acts, we do not have the consolation
of seeing the Jesus we’ve met in the gospels appear in these stories to solve
all the problems. What we see instead is
what he promised: the power of Spirit
and Word at work illuminating flawed human beings like ourselves to see things
in a new way, to discover suddenly what it means to “love your enemies as
yourself,” to pick up pieces and find creative ways to put them back together
so that the image of God can shine more clearly in a world still deeply held in
the grip of darkness.
The Light of the risen Christ still reaches long
fingers from the hidden depths of God into our present shadows to pry us out of
the dark grip of sin and death. I cannot
myself imagine the risen Christ, not really.
All my inner pictures seem unreal.
And I certainly cannot explain him.
But in the annals of the early Church, in the chronicle of the world,
and indeed in the story of my own soul, I can see the Light at work. And that Light is very real indeed.
Copyright 2014 Abbey of St. Walburga
