[A sermon delivered to the Oxford Unitarians congregation on Sunday, 4th of April 2021]
(Readings: Acts 10:34-43 and John 20:1-8)
The late, great Frank Schulman – a former chaplain, dean, and fellow in theology at Harris Manchester College advised Unitarian ministers-in-training that “with the Easter sermon there is a temptation to avoid the issue by speaking in broad terms about renewal of spring, flowers, and clouds wafting across the sky.” We can probably also add chocolate eggs to Schulman’s list of distractions yet, while I intend to remain faithful to Schulman’s advice today, I hope you will allow me to indulge you with a childhood memory of mine.
One of my first memories of Easter is entering an Easter garden competition at a small evangelical church whose youth group I attended. The youth group was one of the few places for young people to have fun and play games together outside school the small rural Sussex village where I grew up. I still have fond memories of the pastor taking us bowling and leading all sorts of other activities for us. One of clearest memories though is being proud of my Easter garden. I did not win many competitions for my creativity as I child, but I did win a prize for my Easter garden. What had started out as some soil in a tray I had managed to turn into a full miniature garden complete with a grassy hill that featured a tomb set into the hillside at its base, with a suitably sized stone that was part covering the entrance, and three crosses planted in the top. The tall one in the middle for Jesus and one either side for the two thieves.
Thinking about it, I had managed to capture, with the very best sculptural prowess of a six-year-old, two of the three most important features of the Easter story: The cross of Jesus’s public execution, and the tomb that should have been sealed and contained his body but was instead found open and vacant.
Yet, with all the unbridled imagination of my childhood self, there was one crucial part of the Easter story I did not even think of trying to capture in miniature garden format – the resurrection. I am still not sure how I would be able to capture it in garden format if I was to make a new Easter garden today! For the philosopher Terry Eagleton, the resurrection was not the sort of event one would have been able to capture with a photograph. Some theologians have gone further and, with many good reasons, have even cast doubt on whether a bodily resurrection happened at all. The New Testament scholar John Dominic Crossan has suggested that the body of Jesus was not subjected to miraculous resurrection and ascension but was instead more likely to have been eaten by wild dogs and crows – as were the bodies of the others subjected to the long torture of crucifixion by the Roman authorities. The late former Bishop of Durham David Jenkins was widely quoted as dismissing the resurrection as “just a conjuring trick with bones” – in reality, he claimed that resurrection was not a conjuring trick with bones.
There have been several attempts to offer a rational account for the narrative of the resurrection contained in the various New Testament writings. One being that Jesus never really died and was only presumed dead when taken down from the Cross and later revived in the tomb. Another is that the women who were the first to testify to Jesus’s resurrection simply went to the wrong tomb and, as a result of their mistake, found it empty.
This interpretation of the women getting their tombs muddled seems to me to be especially cruel. There are few women who are named in the gospel texts and who get a speaking role in the narrative. To retell the story of the resurrection as story of women getting their tombs in a muddle would, at least to me, provide less evidence towards a rational interpretation of the resurrection than it would provide evidence of casual misogyny and silencing of women’s voices that underpins such a theory.
However, there is a greater problem in these alternative “rational” theories of the resurrection. A problem that they share with the conservative literal interpretations of a bodily resurrection. In paying too much attention to the mechanics of the resurrection, both types of theory become less about resurrection and more about mere resuscitation. To claim that Jesus was resuscitated from a state of death is to put Jesus on the same level as Lazarus. Stories of resuscitation are far from unique.
When we concentrate on this side of the Easter event, we lose something vital. There is no room to draw theological or sociological conclusions from a debate about whether first century Palestinian Jewish man was resuscitated via supernatural magic as opposed to material mistake or early medical trickery. Indeed, I am not convinced that how one describes the Easter resurrection event is all that important at all. Instead, I believe the key to understanding the importance of resurrection must lie elsewhere.
That key to understanding the difference between the resuscitation of Lazarus and the resurrection of Jesus is that Lazarus was resuscitated to continue living before falling victim to the forces of death once more. Jesus however was seen by his disciples as having ultimately triumphed over death once and for all. The true evidence for this claim is not wholly contained in the New Testament accounts of the apostles encountering the risen Christ in a variety of conflicting ways. Instead, the evidence is to be found our actions – here today and tomorrow. As the theologian Peter Rollins once stated:
“Without equivocation or hesitation, I fully and completely admit that I deny the resurrection of Christ. This is something that anyone who knows me could tell you, and I am not afraid to say it publicly, no matter what some people may think… I deny the resurrection of Christ every time I do not serve at the feet of the oppressed, each day that I turn my back on the poor; I deny the resurrection of Christ when I close my ears to the cries of the downtrodden and lend my support to an unjust and corrupt system. However, there are moments when I affirm that resurrection, few and far between as they are. I affirm it when I stand up for those who are forced to live on their knees, when I speak for those who have had their tongues torn out, when I cry for those who have no more tears left to shed.”
In other words, it is not our beliefs or mental convictions over what really happened 2,000 years ago that lead us to affirm or deny the resurrection but in our actions in the present. In the ministry of Jesus, we have the fullest example of what we should do in a world were still too many know violence and oppression. While we, in God’s grace, continue to attempt to live in this radical way, the resurrection lives with us as a transformative event.
Transformative in that the truth of resurrection lies in how it continues to change our lives and the lives of our neighbours around us. Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come and the idea of radical love that Jesus embodied in his ministry was so powerful that not even his death at the hands of an imperialist power could snuff out the Christ-flame.
As long as that flame continues to burn within us, and we attest to its presence through the transformation of ourselves and our world around us in following his example, we can say with joyous confidence this Easter, even in the midst of pandemic pain and suffering – He is Risen! He is Risen Indeed!
Alleluia and Amen.
