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News and Ideas from around the Anglican World |
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April 2008
Wake up for joy!
By Anthony Burton
Our knowledge of the Resurrection that first Easter morning comes from a number of accounts in the four Gospels. These Gospel accounts come in two sorts – stories about the empty tomb and stories about people’s encounters with Jesus after he had risen from the dead. Contrary to what you might expect, the first set of stories about the discovery of the empty tomb is not particularly happy. Most of them start in despair and end in confusion. Grief is too mild a word to describe what the disciples were suffering that morning. Trauma would be better. Jesus had been tortured and executed. His death had completely destroyed everything they thought they knew. All their hopes for the future had been destroyed. In one of the stories, Mary Magdalene is on her way to do the sad task of washing Jesus’ corpse and preparing it for burial when she discovers – not that Jesus had risen from the dead—but rather that the body had been stolen (or at least that was what it looked like to her). To her it appeared that following Jesus’ torture and death, someone had now robbed the grave and stolen the body – to do what with she could have only shuddered to think. So the experience here is less a happy reversal of fortune than a living nightmare getting worse. In these stories, the disciples’ expectations were smashed one by one. They had expected that Jesus was going to lead a revolution and then set himself up as the King of an earthly kingdom, presumably throwing out the Roman occupying army; instead the Roman occupying army had crucified Jesus. They had expected to be big shots in Jesus’ government. But now they were in hiding for fear of being hunted down as criminals. That morning, they had expected to prepare him for a decent burial, and now even that modest expectation was shattered. Nothing was turning out as they hoped, nothing they expected was coming to pass. Nothing was working out. Happy Easter indeed! Jesus’ followers got over the disappointment of their shattered dreams only when Jesus appeared to them in his resurrected body and showed them that their hopes were too little and their dreams were too small. The Resurrection signaled that the Kingdom of God had begun to take over this world. Jesus wasn’t bringing merely a political kingdom that would last for a generation or so. Rather the entire world, the entire universe, was being broken into by God in a new and inescapable way finally and forever. On the Cross Jesus had defeated death and so for us death no longer has any finality. But that is just the beginning. The world of heaven has begun to take over this one, and God’s reign of justice and mercy and goodness and peace are overtaking this world. The Resurrection is decisive proof that life is about a whole lot more than we can put under a microscope or put in the bank. And best of all, Christ has reached out to give us a kind of life we never even dreamed of. The wood of the Cross has burst into bloom. One of the images that Christians have always used for embracing the new world that started that first Easter morning is the image of waking up. “Wake up, sleeper,” writes St. Paul, “Rise from the dead. Christ will give you light!” (Eph. 5:14) For people who have not accepted Jesus Christ are like people asleep, and people unaware that the bizarre dreams they are having are untrue: that the world where all truth is relative, where the rich inherit the earth until they too, like all of us, grow sick and die, the world where there is no God – that this idea of the world is a fantasy, a nightmare even. But Christians have been given the gift of sight, the gift to see that death is not the final word, that we can hope for solid joys and lasting treasure; that justice and the Author of justice will not be mocked, that love never ends.
“If
ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above,
where Christ sitteth at the right hand of God. Set your minds on
things above, not on earthly things; for you have died, and your
life is hid with Christ in God!” Alleluia! Christ is risen. He is
risen indeed. Alleluia!
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