When my friend Al died it rocked my world. It was not that I had never known someone who had died before. I had lost grandparents and a mentor who I rarely saw anymore. I think with Al it was that he was such a part of my day to day life. We hung out on a regular basis. I had taken up housecleaning for him when he was unable to do it for himself. I was also helping him to sort through years of his possessions and consider what to keep and what to toss. Al would frequently call me up on the house phone and let me know what adventures might be in store for that day.
After Al died, I walked past that phone on more than one occasion and heard it ringing, but when I concentrated I realized the ringing was just in my head. Al couldn’t have been calling me. Still, he was present with me in a way that I can’t explain after he died.
If you have lost someone close to you, you may know what I am talking about. Death is not the clean cut off that one might expect.
I will be leaning on two of my favorite scholars in this sermon, Bart Ehrman of the University of North Carolina religion department and John Dominic Crossan of the Jesus Seminar who is an important historical Jesus scholar.
Unlike with Jesus, the connection with John seemed to end with his death. According to John Dominic Crossan, when John the Baptist “was killed, and God did not intervene. John was executed, and there was no apocalyptic advent of an avenging God.” John’s death was seen as a failure and a sign that his message was false. He would join the ranks of failed prophets and leaders.
In the same way, Jesus’ followers must have asked in Crossan’s summary, “Was Jesus’ death a divine judgment against his program? Did God destroy Jesus? How does it now stand between God and Jesus? And the question above all was this: Do we have a future?” Somehow, for Jesus it was not the same.
First, let’s take a step back. According to Bart Ehrman, the concept of resurrection arose within the Jewish community during times of intense persecution. Ehrman reminds us that the books of Daniel and Maccabees both speak of resurrection. They were written during the reign of the Seleucid Antiochus IV Epiphanes. Resurrection was seen as the answer when righteous men were tortured to death for following God’s laws. Surely, God would have to balance the scales another way. This resurrection was not for everyone, but only for those who died in extraordinary ways.
Next, Jesus passes several tests that would set him up for resurrection in the Maccabees’ eyes. He was killed by an oppressive foreign government. He was killed in an awful way. He was righteous, though more in the way of the prophets than a rule follower. He fails one test quite clearly. He was not killed for following one of God’s laws.
In the reading today, Paul cites Cephas, the Twelve, more than five hundred brothers and sisters, James, all the apostles and finally himself as people to whom Christ was revealed after Christ’s death. Jesus did not remain in the past for them.
For many, Jesus’s ongoing presence was revealed to them right in the current moment. It went beyond a spiritual experience to a sense of authorization to leadership and a continuing mission going forwards. This is part of Paul’s point. Jesus’s revelation was not merely a spiritual experience to a sort of commissioning. Yet, Jesus was revealed not just to key leaders, but also to the common people.
Jesus’ resurrection appearances were not limited to the time immediately after his death nor even a month after. Jesus continued to be experienced long after. Indeed, Jesus is still experienced even to this day by us, untimely born like Paul.
Many of Jesus’s followers believed he had been or would not just appear as a sort of revelation but be resurrected in the flesh.
Leigh covered the Gospel of Mark last week. For the writers of the Gospels of Matthew, Luke, and John, Jesus was not merely going to come again one day, but fully present right then. Jesus was resurrected in the present not the distant future nor even a soon to come end of the world.
As Quakers we bear witness to the continued presence of the Inner Christ. We believe that Jesus is not merely limited to the past. We believe that Christ is here with us now. As George Fox famously heard, “There is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition.”. As listeners to the Inward Teacher, we are ready to learn and be led into action. We are ready for the commission to be laid upon our hearts by that presence.
In the end, it’s not only Jesus’s presence that we carry with us. We carry the Way he taught. In the words of John Dominic Crossan, “The Kingdom movement…was not the Jesus movement, and to remove Jesus was not to remove the Kingdom. When he was executed, those with him lost their nerve and fled. They did not lose their faith and quit. What they found even after his execution, was that the empowering Kingdom was still present, was still operative, was still there. Furthermore, and however one expressed it, Jesus’ presence was still experienced as empowerment, not only by those who had known him before, but by others hearing about him now for the first time.” (209)
- How has Christ been revealed to you?
- How and to what have you been called?
Sources
https://ehrmanblog.org/why-romans-crucified-people
Crossan, John Dominic. Who Killed Jesus?: Exposing the Roots of Anti-Semitism in the Gospel Story of the Death of Jesus
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