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I am so excited that we have chosen to use the Revised Common Lectionary at St. Thomas, because today, for the first time in 32 years of preaching, I get to talk about the earliest account of the resurrection!! Naturally, you think I am referring to the Gospel of St. Mark, which is the earliest Gospel, written perhaps in 70 AD, about 40 years after the resurrection but I am not. I am referring to our epistle, Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, which was written in 54 AD, making it 16 years earlier than the Gospel of St. Mark. It is fascinating to put these two account together, because the story St. Paul tells, picks up just at the end of the story St. Mark tells. St. Mark describes how the three women came to the tomb with their oils and spices on the third day, how alarmed they were that the rock had been rolled away, and how terrified they were by the angel, who announced that Jesus had been raised from the dead, and gone back to Gailiee. Did you notice the contradiction at the end of the reading? In the next to last sentence, (verse 8) it says the women were so afraid, that they said nothing to anyone. In the next sentence (the 9th verse) it says "all that had been commanded them they told briefly to those around Peter". That 9th verse only began to appear in 4th century manuscripts, and was probably written to bring St. Mark's account into harmony with the other Gospels. So St. Mark does not tell us about any of the times when people met the resurrected Christ. St. Paul does not seem to know these details about the women coming with spices, and the empty tomb. He was not a follower of Jesus when Jesus was alive, and he may not have heard a detailed account of Jesus' last days. What St. Paul does know, is that Jesus died, was buried, and was raised on the third day. That is the message "of first importanceÓ that he proclaimed, and it is apparently half of the good news that he brought to the Corinthians. The other half is that Christ died for our sins, that he death and resurrection were according to the Scriptures, and that He appeared to the disciples and to many others, including Paul. And St. Paul is very precise in claiming that he has handed on to the Corinthian Christians, EXACTLY what he received. So here we have the earliest Easter story, which the eyewitnesses announced to all who would hear. The focus of this story is not the empty tomb, nor the events leading up to the empty tomb. The focus is the appearance of Christ, on a number of occasions, to Peter, to the twelve, to the 500 brethren, to James, to all the apostles, and finally to Paul himself. The purpose of this list is to make it clear that even if Peter and the twelve (notice that number -- not the eleven, but the twelve), even if these disciples who deserted Jesus, might have seen what they desperately wanted to see, a large number of other people also saw the Risen Christ. And they saw Christ at different times, and presumably in different places. St. Paul is saying, you can be sure this really happened, because so many people witnessed it. And then St. Paul realized that the Corinthians would want to know exactly what he meant: "Someone will ask", he says, "How are the dead raised?" St. Paul does his best to answer that question in the rest of Chapter 15, which I hope you will go home and read for yourself. But here is his explanation in a nutshell. Jesus was NOT resuscitated. Despite the story of Thomas asking to touch the wounds of Jesus, despite the story of Jesus eating a fish, it was not a physical body. St. Paul begins his explanation with that same seed falling into the earth, which we have heard about in our readings for three weeks. The seed that is sown, looks nothing like the plant that will grow up from it. "So it is with the resurrection of the dead" St. Paul says, "What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. (15:42). It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body" (15:44). My friends, this is the earliest claim in the New Testament about the resurrection of Jesus. In my opinion, it helps to make sense of many other claims: that wherever 2 or 3 are gathered in His name, He will be in the midst of them, but that He is also at the right hand of God, that several years after the resurrection, He appeared to Paul on the road to Damascus, that in baptism a person is joined to Christ, not physically but spiritually, and most of all, that Christ gives us eternal life. For us who were raised in the 20th century, this explanation will be accepted or rejected depending on our assumptions about reality. If we assume that reality only includes that which can be measured or located in time and space, the idea of a spiritual body would be a contradiction in terms. What we believe, and most religious people believe, is that there IS a spiritual dimension to reality, which cannot be measured or located, but is, nonethless, REAL! This is the reason St. Paul used the verb to appear. The Risen Christ appeared, that is, He became present in his glorious spiritual body, to Peter, and to the Twelve, and to Paul. Or to say it yet another way, the human spirit in each of them, came into direct contact with the divine spirit of Jesus. When the disciples talked with one another about these events, they discovered that they had experienced the same things, AND that there was significant continuity between the Risen Christ, and Jesus of Nazareth. It WAS the same person, in a different body. The other claim that St. Paul makes, and the evangelists affirm, is that these events happened Òaccording to the ScripturesÓ. As a Jew who had received his higher education from the Rabbi Gamaliel, St. Paul had some very specific passages of Scripture in mind, but in his letters, he rarely says what they are. He knew that most Jews expected there to be a general resurrection of all the dead, which would occur 3 days after the end of the world. The importance of the 3 days goes back to a series of Biblical events:
In most of these events, a critical change happened on the 3rd day or after 3 days. And usually that critical change was God's saving grace. In addition, the Jews believe that the soul or the life force of a person remained near their corpse for 3 days, before going down to Sheol. That belief is the context for some verses from Psalm 16 being applied to Jesus from an early time: ÒYou will not abandon me to to grave; you will not let your Holy One see the Pit. You will show me the path of lifeÓ (16:8-11). Finally, the most specific verse in the Hebrew scriptures which predicts the resurrection , is in the prophet Hosea: "Come let us return to the Lord . . .after 2 days he will revive us, on the 3rd day he will raise us up, that we may live before Him" (6:1-2). So what St. Paul has really done, is to call TWO sets of witnesses: both the 530 people to whom the Risen Christ appeared, and also the many verses in the Hebrew Scriptures which pointed toward his resurrection on the 3rd day. Why should these two sets of witnesses be important to us? My sense is that the scripture verses are important in that they do connect the resurrection to the pattern of God's actions in the past. But I doubt that they are convincing in themselves. On the other hand, the 530 people are quite important, because some of them didn't know Jesus before he died. St. Paul is telling us that it is possible for us to meet the Risen Christ. Because Jesus now has a spiritual body, outside of time and space, and because he appeared to Paul, who had been persecuting the church, he is in a real sense AVAILABLE to those who seek him. I have met Him, and I know a number of people at St. Thomas have met Him. Jesus himself gave us some hints of how to do this: "ask, seek, knock" he said. Become like a child, if you wish to enter the kingdom. Meet with others in His name, because He will be in the midst of them. Feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit those who are sick and in prison, for as much as you have given to the least of humanity, you have given to Him. Quiet your mind, so you can listen for His presence, and His spirit will speak to your spirit.
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