Jesus Lives!
John 11.25-26
1 Cor 15.12-19, 35-55
Preached Canberra Baptist Church 15th July 2007
We are exploring the theme of Sharing our Faith: four sermons will focus on the content of faith and three on the practicalities of sharing faith. All of the sermons are based on Jesus.
If we are to share our faith – it has to be OUR faith, not someone else’s, not what we think we should be saying about Jesus, but what we really believe. As Peter Chapman, a friend in Victoria whom our young people met last week, “When Christians get real about they believe, the people who know them become curious.”
We’re Baptists: our faith is not determined by creeds or statements or ministers. It is a matter for individual conscience under the guidance of the Spirit and the authority of the Scripture, This means we will always have a variety of views! Not everyone will agree. It is knowing YOUR faith that is important.
I this series we’ll be leaving a great deal out, but exploring some of the great doctrines of the Christian faith. We’ll be looking at a range of views: my aim to is to help you find out where your belief fits in. I’ll have my views and I’ll be preaching them, but if you hold another view that’s OK. THERE IS NO PRE-DEFINED THEOLOGICAL POSITION THAT YOU HAVE TO HOLD TO BEFORE YOU CAN BE TALKING ABOUT WHAT YOU BELIEVE WITH SOMEONE.
Today I want to explore with you the great Christian doctrine of Resurrection. There is nothing more central to Christian faith than the Resurrection. There is nothing that separates us more from modern skeptics and from other faiths who can accept Jesus as a great teacher and even prophet, than the Resurrection – the affirmation that God raised Jesus from the dead.
But, having affirmed the centrality of Resurrection, we have to acknowledge that within the Christian church there are different views of what the Resurrection is and what it means for us. For a full exploration of the meaning of Resurrection you can read Peter Carnley’s book The Structure of Resurrection Belief, or Thorwald Lorenzen’s book Resurrection and Discipleship. At the risk of gross oversimplification I want to talk about three ways of understanding the Resurrection.
This is not about rights and wrong (although clearly I’m going to preach that one of those three ways makes more sense -to me at least). Our aim is to mapping a field of thinking so that you can locate yourself in that landscape.
The first view we want to explore is the belief that the resurrection really didn’t happen in any kind of literal way: it’s a metaphor, a way of speaking of the great transition that happened between the crucifixion of Jesus and his death, and the break-out of the church with power in its early preaching and mission.
This view is clearly found in parts of the New Testament itself, at least in the early stages: in Luke 24 the disciples think word of the resurrection is ‘an idle tale’. In Matt 27 there is the story of the guard at the tomb, and the mention that this story put around by the Jews to this day. Matthew seems to have an ironical purpose: he recognises that the enemies of the church are more aware of the power of Resurrection than the disciples and the early church who seem almost armoured against the power of resurrection. These are clearly stories of either the immature understanding of the disciples or of the enemies of the church.
But some Christians do maintain that the Resurrection could never have happened as apparently described in the gospels: it’s a kind of psychological trick, wishful thinking by the disciples. If Jesus survives at all it is through his followers and the way they have taken up his mission in the world. There is much to be said for this view, and there is quite some empathy in the New Testament. The ‘body of Christ’ is consistently identified with the church – it is the only ‘body’ that is found after the Ascension. Paul talks about Christians as being ‘in Christ’. If the risen Christ is experienced anywhere it is in the fellowship, worship and mission of the church.
We also know that the appearances of Jesus after his resurrection were very short-lived, and then he was mysteriously taken away again. Whatever was happening in the immediate wake of the crucifixion, Christ lives now in the church, in the people of God, in the spirit-empowered community that holds to his teaching. Such a view of resurrection fits the facts of present experience reasonably well and is consistent with our understanding of the world.
Against this view stands the teaching of Paul in the early part of 1 Cor 15. Paul says that if there is no objective reality to the resurrection, if it’s just a metaphor or way of speaking then we are in serious trouble. He says our faith is in vain – it is purposeless and empty. We are deluded and still ‘in our sins’ à there is no liberating power in our faith. We have an existential problem: our faith simply isn’t real. But Paul suggest we also have an ethical problem, for we are lying about God. We are actually conning people with this metaphor. Paul writes, if the Resurrection didn’t happen then we Christians are quite pathetic: “If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.”
Are we then obliged to take the opposite view (the 2nd perspective I want to explore) that Jesus was physically resurrected, brought back from the dead, to walk around as he had before. This view is held by many evangelical Christians. A touch stone of conservative evangelical orthodoxy is an affirmative answer to the question “do you believe that Christ was physically resurrected?”
This too is a strong view and it gives great strength to faith. Someone holding this faith finds themselves in the company of Thomas the Doubter who would not believe until he could place his finger in the nail holes in the hands of Jesus, and place his hand into the wounded side of his Lord. They find themselves in the company of the disciples who ate fish on the beach with the risen Lord in the dawn of a new day. The faith of such believers has a tangible and very real sense of the risen Lord – some have even had visionary experiences where Jesus has come to them and they have seen a physical form. It is a faith that gives very strong hope in the face of death, because resurrection involves radical continuity of physical existence. This faith often has reduced death to almost a meaningless moment in the mysterious continuity of life in a form very similar to what we now know, but in a way totally hidden from our present sight. So it’s a wonderful belief to have – it grounds your life in very powerful ways.
But this view too has some issues. The first issue is that it flies in the face of the Biblical evidence itself. The appearance stories of Jesus (the earliest strand of Resurrection tradition) make it clear that the risen Christ was often not recognized straight away, which is hard to reconcile with a continuity of physical presence.
Secondly, the risen Christ behaved in ways that are completely inconsistent with the normal activity of physical bodies as we know them. He disappeared in the moment of recognition in the Emmaus meal (Lk 24). He comes through locked doors and stands in the midst of the hiding disciples (Jn 19). God can do miracles, but when we need to invoke miracles to protect our primary assumptions about a resurrected physical body we have to acknowledge that our position is weak.
Thirdly, the New Testament teaching on resurrection grapples with a mystery of presence and absence. Jesus is present, but is also strangely absent. He cannot be held on to, captured and reduced to the usual categories of human experience. The story of Ascension expresses the absence of Jesus, his going to another place, that whatever his risen life might be, it is not something for the physical world, but something lived in the presence of God the Father. Finally, this view flies in the face of all that we know about physical existence. Dead bodies do not simply come back to life after three days and continue as if nothing really had changed. Whatever is going on in this mystery of resurrection it has to be more than, or at least different to, this!
Let us explore a third position – that of Paul in 1 Cor 15 where he begins to teach on the nature of the ‘resurrection body’. Scripture affirms that Jesus was ‘bodily resurrected’, and many people take the reference to ‘body’ to mean a physical body. They take it as a reference to physicality, rather than a reference to embodiment. These two are quite different dimensions of existence. Paul in his argument develops our understandings of the body. When we try to understand what a resurrected body might be like he starts by reminding us of seeds, how a seed has to die and then something quite different in form comes into existence. He applies this metaphor to resurrection (vss. 36-38). He then talks about different kinds of ‘flesh’, the different kinds of embodied flesh for humans, animals, birds and fish (vs. 39). He then really cuts loose and contrasts heavenly and earthly bodies and the differences in glory between them, even the gradations of ‘glory’ between sun and moon and stars. The whole point is about radical difference between seed and plant, between different kinds of physical ‘flesh’ and between earthly bodies and the radiant heavenly bodies than shine in the sky.
He then applies all of to the resurrection of the dead and dramatically contrasts what is ‘sown’ in death and what is brought into being in Resurrection: what is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable (vs. 42). It is sown in dishonor: it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness: it is raised in power (vs 43). He is describing quite different realities! Then in vs 44 he makes the distinction crystal clear: it is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a physical body there is also a spiritual body. There is a clear contrast between two separate realms of existence – the physical and the spiritual, both having an embodied form. He then develops his thinking about the sequential relationship of these two orders of reality – first the physical, then the spiritual, first the body of dust, then the body of heaven.
Now in case his readers have missed it, in verse 50 he spells out the truth: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable!
What then can Resurrection mean? It means something far more than just the endless extension of life. It means that transformation of life is possible, that the life we know is not the whole life that there is to be had. It means that present suffering and limitation can be transcended, because whatever the raising of Jesus from the dead means, it means that something new is afoot, a new power is at work in the world.
That power, that reality cannot be glibly fixed on the physical form of Jesus: it is far greater than that. Jesus was somehow mysteriously present in a real way with those early disciples. What resurrection means began to be worked out in the church as they shared their wealth and property, as they loved and served one another, as they stood up to the power of the Roman empire and refused to worship the gods of their day - as they stood against the political realities as defined by Caesar, whom they were meant to worship. A whole new way of living had started to emerge, and part of that was a whole new way of dying. They weren’t frightened of death anymore because Jesus had somehow gone through it and it hadn’t annihilated him. In some marvelous and inexplicable way he had come through it and was with them still although they couldn’t quite see him, only sometimes. But they KNEW he was alive and was present with them through the Spirit and there was nothing that could ever separate them from his love. Although it made no sense in the categories of human existence, they knew that Jesus lives and preached that and experienced it in their worship together. Several important things flow from this:
I preached on this theme last week in Melbourne. I wandered the streets of the city for some hours before preaching. I saw mums and dads out walking with the children, old people shuffling along, homeless men sitting by the way, kids out for an afternoon’s fun. Very few of them smiled or looked happy. I thought about the mystery of Resurrection and what it means. If I could offer them their present life, infinitely extended, would they really want it? The promise of resurrection is far more than this: it is the promise of new life, of mysterious and transformed realities, of finding, in the twinkling of an eye, that everything has changed!
Jesus said to Martha: I am the Resurrection and the Life….: Do you believe this? However we believe it, this affirmation is the foundation of faith in Jesus and the beginning of the story we must tell about him.