[A sermon preached to Hinckley Unitarians on Sunday 17th of April 2022]
(Readings: John 20:1-18 and Being The Resurrection by Peter Rollins)
Do not act surprised. You had warning that this sermon was coming. Not just in the order of service, or the posts on the Facebook page. If the members here care to refer back to the notes that I’m sure you took while reading my monthly ‘Minister’s Musings’ in the chapel’s Calendar, you will have noted that in my third from last paragraph that I asked you all, “What does resurrection mean to you?”
In fairness a lot has happened since I wrote those words. So I won’t hand over and leave the rest of this sermon open as a talk among ourselves. While my question still stands and I am still eager to hear your answers, I certainly think such questions are best discussed with a cup of tea or coffee in hand rather than during the service – especially if a congregation is caught unawares!
I think it is only fair to warn you that, as Unitarians, others may well ask you that question and expect something of a coherent answer. Indeed, when I attended Hinckley Churches Together’s Good Friday Procession this week, someone did kind of ask me that question! If this sermon eventually makes it onto my blog, then they might finally have something of an answer!
In contemporary theological circles the debate around the nature of the resurrection has two broad camps. The first side holds to the broad belief that the resurrection was a event that really and truly, physically, happened – indeed many in this camp would argue that this event actually physically happening is of paramount importance even believing that, if it did not happen, then Christianity is a waste of time and we might as well not bother.
The second side holds that, while the resurrection may have been an event, it might not have been a physical one. Indeed, it could have been a metaphorical event that only found articulation through the scriptures many years after the death of Jesus, or that Jesus’s Resurrection was experienced by the disciples as a profound spiritual experience and was as real as such an experience can be.
Recently I have enjoyed both sides slugging it out on twitter, where members of the first side have taken to writing “metaphor” as if it was something of an insult and members of the second camp have mostly been quiet and not wanting to attract too much attention. Yet this is an old debate that predates twitter by many decades.
One of my favourite theologians, the Catholic Dominican scholar Herbert McCabe, was firmly on the side of a physical resurrection – so much so that in one of his Easter sermons he hints that he does not consider those who believe otherwise to be real Christians stating that “To believe the God creates the whole universe and holds it in being… but to find it tricky and untrustworthy of belief that he should raise a man from the dead to a human life of glory seems eccentric.” I know some Christians less comfortable being labelled as an eccentric than myself who would take some offence at this remark.
On the other side of the debate, the New Testament scholar John Dominic Crossan has written that he believes that the likely reason Mary Magdalen, Simon Peter, and the unnamed disciple from our first reading today found the tomb empty was because Jesus’s body had been removed and eaten by wild dogs and crows rather than any miraculous resurrection and ascension having occurred. This was certainly offensive to some too. Indeed, a heard lately of an Anglican Vicar who took a similar line in his Easter Sunday sermon, only for at least one elderly woman to leave the Church in floods of tears and spend the rest of her Easter Sunday completely distraught!
That said, if I personally was to choose one of these camps, I believe I would be more at home in the second rather than the first, preferring a metaphorical resurrection over a physical one – even if that does earn me the ire of some of my ecumenical colleagues on twitter!
But what if choosing a side in this debate over the resurrection is to miss the point? This is what the story by Peter Rollins, our second reading today, hints at. Rollins’s story tells of a group of disciples who, so terrified by what they see on Good Friday, run far away from Jerusalem, and start a small, isolated society somewhere far away where they can try and live out Jesus’s teachings even if they have to pay with their lives. Crucially they flee before news of the resurrection could reach them. Eventually missionaries discover them and tell them the good news only to find that the good news of Jesus’s resurrection has its discontents.
The point is that this community, despite having no knowledge of the resurrection, were able to affirm the resurrection in a far more real sense than many of those who subscribe to the doctrinal understanding of the physical resurrection or those who intellectually subscribe to a metaphorical resurrection. Rather than having any belief of the resurrection – they were instead able to live the resurrection out in their lives.
Once, Peter Rollins was quizzed about his own beliefs on the resurrection and replied with the following:
“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.”
Peter Rollins
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 world today. In the ministry of Jesus, we have the fullest example of what we should do when 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 COVID pain and suffering – He is Risen! He is Risen Indeed!
Alleluia and Amen.
