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Jesus Lives! by The Rev. Hartshorn Murphy At our recent staff meeting, as we discussed what needed to be gathered in for this edition of the Ebb and Flow, I readily agreed to write a reflection piece on Easter. I should have been less forthcoming: only because I find major feast days -like Christmas and Easter - hard to talk about. The reason is that our civil religion has so effectively redefined these events in the Jesus story, that it sometimes feels as if we are struggling to regain, if not redefine, history. The death of Jesus is easy to talk about. Having challenged the prerogatives of the religious elite and being in his very person and presence a threat to good order during the charged season of Passover (in which the Hebrew people were re-membered of their deliverance from subjugation in Egypt and looked forward to their deliverance from Rome by the coming of a Messiah-King), Jesus had to go. Whether Caiaphas actually said that it is better for one man to die rather than for the whole people to suffer, is irrelevant. No responsible civil authority would have thought otherwise. The extent of the collusion between the Sanhedrin and the Roman prefect may well be exaggerated. It is quite possible that Jesus was summarily executed without much deliberation or due process. Indeed, such callous and almost indifferent state execution only deepens the pathos. Thousands were crucified in the ill conceived and desperate rebellions of young Jewish patriots and insurgents prior to and following the death of Jesus, and Rome was nothing if not efficient. So, yes, it's easy to see the profound truth of the Stations of the Cross whether enacted liturgically in congregations or recreated cinematically on the big screen (The Passion has been re-cut and re-released); the great caution is to realize that it was Roman authority, not Jewish power, that killed Jesus in such a way as to deter others; capital punishment always is seen by the government as a deterrent as well as a punishment, then as now. Rome - and King Herod - could not tolerate two kings in Israel. The crime was sedition. But something happened on Sunday. Something unexpected. The gospel stories do not agree in their particulars but rather seek to convey the shocking reality that Jesus lives. And when we, as Christians, say "Jesus lives!" we are not saying that he miraculously survived or was resuscitated or that his disciples had a profound "spiritual experience." Resurrection was a spiritual experience to be sure but it was far greater than that alone. What they witnessed to was Jesus who had entered into a new form of life which both resembled the life they had known and was something completely different at the same time. And so the stories are contradictory and trans -rational. Jesus shared a meal and was ravenous and yet vanishes from their sight. Jesus opened their hearts and imagination to understand the scriptures in new and exciting ways, teaching them for hours at a time, and yet they only knew that it was he in hindsight. ("Did not our hearts burn within us as he spoke to us on the road.") Jesus, in short, became what he was not or, to say it another way, he became fully what he always was. You see? Language fails. But in a way, the significance of Easter has little to do with Easter Sunday. Easter Sunday was the "presenting event" but Easter is to walk into the new life that Jesus' resurrection creates and inaugurates. To be an "Easter People" is to live without fear because death has been defeated. (To the extent that we live fear filled lives is the extent to which we don't yet get Easter.) To say that "Jesus is Lord!" is to say that Caesar is not - whoever those contemporary Caesars may be. And so Easter is profoundly political. The ongoing conflicts between the infant church and the Roman authority were grounded in a people who cared less about the claims of imperial power and authority because Jesus was Lord of All and who feared not the consequences of resisting (or ignoring) that power because the grave (or the cross or the wild beast or the sword) had been revealed as bankrupt by Jesus' ongoing new life among them. (To the extent that we separate the religious from the political is the extent to which we don't yet get Easter.) Civil religion is reticent to recover the power of the Lordship of Christ revealed by God's Easter "Amen!" Civil religion far too easily reduces Easter to a vague sense of individual spiritual renewal; to ecclesiastical triumphantism, or to a personal accomplishment of Jesus some 2000 years ago at Calvary (a done deal). Civil culture stresses new bonnets and new shoes in place of baptismal garments and bunnies in place of the sheer terror of life now dead, refused to die. But Easter is an on-going event and the revealing of the followers of Christ as Easter people, reclaiming the history of those first believers who walked in freedom and joy, is the task of the Church in this new millennium. It is to reclaim the empty cross and the empty tomb, not as historical artifacts or theological proofs, but as a claim on our future as God's people. As God's people, we are commanded to come down from our crosses and to walk forth from our tombs of death and fear. Easter is about becoming, with Christ, a new creature. And about living with integrity and fidelity in the values that new life reveals.
Copyright © 2005 St. Augustine by-the-Sea
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