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Resurrection in the time of Jesus: Jewish thoughts and a Christian comment. (Excerpted from a talk by Rabbi Jeffrey Marx on March 29, 2006) (Editor's note: Rabbi Marx described how Jewish thought was shifting at the time of Jesus from the widely held belief that the afterlife was an entrance into oblivion in Sheol ("So whoever goes down to Sheol does not come up; He returns no more to his home; His place does not know him" Job 7:10) to a growing hope of something beyond death proclaimed by the Pharisees but resisted by the Sadducees as being "novel" and "untraditional.") By the time of Jesus we are beginning to build the notion that the coming of God's kingdom will be resurrection. A way that you know that Messiah has come is that the dead have risen from their graves in Israel. (Just Jews- Romans are not being resurrected in the time of Jesus). By the time of Jesus the notion was that yes indeed, there would be an afterlife and it would be on this earth. There is no notion of an afterlife of everybody's going to heaven. Heaven is a reserved spot...only a few people get to sit in the highest heaven along side of God. Roughly speaking, a dozen or so folks are up there with God (Moses, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Elijah, Enoch etc…). The rest of us don't have that "e-ticket." It's not bad because when we're resurrected, we will live on this earth. This notion of an afterlife - after we die that we will be resurrected and live forever -is a Pharisaic notion. We're all together here on earth for eternity. Dead bodies will come to life again- not just souls, but bodies. An example of how Jesus is between two worlds is the story of Lazarus. Jesus can only convince his disciples and the Jews of his time using methods and miracles with which they are familiar. What Jesus will do to prove that he indeed is the son of God or God incarnate or the Messiah - to show that he has God's stamp of approval at minimum - Jesus has to emulate the miracles that have been done before. So the miracles he does are very familiar to the Jews of the time. These are the "established miracles" that prove one's power. Largely they are based on stories of Elijah and Elisha with which everyone is familiar - miracles within the inherited tradition of Israel. The miracles essentially involved healing people, raising the dead just like Elisha does; feeding the multitude, producing food. With Lazarus, Jesus is emulating a miracle that the people are well familiar with - which is restoring someone to life. It's exactly what Elisha does with the widow's son. But the problem is that by the time you get to the time of Jesus, what he's doing is seen as not only emulating what the prophets did, it's also making a messianic claim. In John, right after Jesus finishes raising Lazarus, the next section is about how the Pharisees are all upset and saying that this guy is gonna be a problem etc. Why would that be a problem? If all he's doing is indicating that God is with him? Because in the new model, raising of the dead is a sign of the absolute coming of the Kingdom: the dead will be raised, there will be resurrection once Messiah has arrived. So Jesus by the example of Lazarus is straddling both worlds. Both the old world of let's do what the prophets did to show our power and (the new world of) resurrections mean the coming Kingdom of God. Then there's Jesus' own resurrection. For the Jews of his time, the fact that the tomb is empty, the fact that Jesus is now alive from the dead is not just miraculous but it is also making a profound political statement - which is, the Messiah has arrived and resurrection of all has begun. In Matthew (see Matthew 27:50-54), it says that the saints that are in the tombs are resurrected as well and they start walking around and are in the city. Because that is what you would expect: Messiah comes; the dead start coming alive. That's part of what it means to be resurrected. And the fact is, we have to note that Jesus' resurrection is a physical resurrection. This is not a spiritual resurrection. This is body and spirit. For the Jews of Jesus' time, there was only one way that Jesus could have come back and that was as body and soul. Jesus coming back in spiritual form would not have registered with his contemporaries. It is not something they would have recognized. If the Messiah was going to overthrow the Romans and become the next King of the Jews, for the majority of Jesus' followers, once he's up on the cross, end of story: failed Messiahship didn't pan out, let's go home. The notion of a risen messiah was new to thought. The notion that Jesus' resurrection was a foreshadowing of the future resurrection to come had not percolated in public consciousness. The Rector's thoughts: Of course, the conflict - often called a "stumbling block" - for orthodox Jews and the Jewish-Christians of the first century, was precisely the conflict over the resurrection and its meaning. In time, Christians will claim both the uniqueness of Jesus' resurrection as a first-fruits of the general resurrection and the gospels will indicate that the risen body of Christ is both entirely the same as his historical body ("see my feet, my hands…") and yet is at the same time, completely different. (There are times when the disciples don't recognize him at first, when Jesus walks through solid doors, disappears from their sight while speaking with them, seems to be in two places at once - both Jerusalem and the Galilee.) This is not stuff of vision or altered states of consciousness but of entering a wholly new state of being; of being both spiritual and physical. A generation later, St. Paul will write to the Church in Corinth these words: "But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died…But someone will ask, 'How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?' Fool! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. And as for what you sow, you do not sow the body that is to be, but a bare seed, perhaps of wheat or some other grain. But God gives it a body as he has chosen, and to each kind of seed its' own body. So it is with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body. For this perishable body must put on imperishability and this mortal body must put on immortality. When this perishable body puts on imperishability, and this mortal body puts on immortality, then the saying that is written will be fulfilled: 'Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting.'" (See: I Corinthians 15 for full text)
The Easter season is not just the celebration of Jesus' individual victory over death; the miracle of his being raised by the power of God; but it is also the celebration of our victory in Him and our hope to, with Him, release resurrection power in the world.
Copyright © 2006 St. Augustine by-the-Sea
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