Roger Ray, pastor
April 24, 2011 Easter
Matthew 28:1-10
After the Sabbath, as the first day of the week was dawning, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to see the tomb. 2And suddenly there was a great earthquake; for an angel of the Lord, descending from heaven, came and rolled back the stone and sat on it. 3His appearance was like lightning and his clothing white as snow. 4For fear of him the guards shook and became like dead men. 5But the angel said to the women, 'Do not be afraid; I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. 6He is not here; for he has been raised, as he said. Come; see the place where he lay. 7Then go quickly and tell his disciples, "He has been raised from the dead, and indeed he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him." This is my message for you.' 8So they left the tomb quickly with fear and great joy, and ran to tell his disciples. 9Suddenly Jesus met them and said, 'Greetings!' And they came to him, took hold of his feet, and worshipped him. 10Then Jesus said to them, 'Do not be afraid; go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me.'
A great deal of my professional life has been lived out on the Opinion page of the Springfield NewsLeader. As a columnist, I find it irresistible to read everyone else's column and the opinion pages in other newspapers. A few years ago I realized that one of the most tedious aspects of opinion columnists is how often we bring up Hitler and the Nazis to compare such venial things as a failure to fill the potholes in the city streets with the Holocaust.
I have vowed never to bring up the Nazis unless I am talking about something on the scale of genocide. Unfortunately, that still gives you a lot of opportunities to talk about the holocaust.
Genocide has been sadly common in history, even in Biblical history. As much as Jews have a right to decry the 20th century holocaust against their people, we know from Deuteronomy and I Samuel that the Jews carried out genocide against the Canaanites and the Amalekites.
The Roman Empire always tried to conquer and then simply annex nations to make the land and the people a part of the empire, but when a nation would not assimilate, Rome would kill everyone they could find. Julius Cesar did that in what is now modern day Switzerland and in France, killing millions and enslaving the survivors.
In the next century, when the Jews proved to be too unruly to govern, Emperor Titus had Jerusalem leveled and all the inhabitants killed. In fact, even when the city was rebuilt a hundred years later, Jews were only allowed to enter the city on one day of the year to go and mourn at the only place where one stone had been left on another, the western retaining wall of the Temple mount.... Now euphemistically called the "wailing wall" for the two thousand years of mournful prayers said there.
Jesus was born and died during the Roman occupation but the gospels were not written until two generations had passed and the nation of Judah had been destroyed. Paul wrote about the resurrection of Jesus in the decades after the first Easter but Paul did not speak of an empty tomb and he did not give any details of the events of Passion Week.
It is not until the eyewitnesses were either dead or quite elderly that Mark wrote the first account of the passion narrative. Mark was not from Judah and was probably not a Jewish convert. But clearly, Mark was heavily influenced by the suffering servant songs of Isaiah and by the substitutionary death described in Psalm 22.
Jesus Seminar scholar, John Shelby Spong, says that the passion narrative in the gospels does not attempt to describe what historically happened but they are an artful and loving account of who these things happened to.
It is often upsetting to church folks the first time they hear that the gospels are a combination of historical events, biblical imagery and metaphorical interpretation but let me invite you to think of that famous painting of George Washington crossing the Delaware River.
It is a historical fact that Washington and his men crossed the Delaware on Christmas day of 1776. But the German born artist, Emanuel Leutze, who produced the famous painting, not only wasn't there but he wasn't even born yet. Seventy-five years after the Christmas Day crossing of the Delaware, Leutze combined his knowledge of history with his immigrant's enthusiasm for his adopted nation and its political father to produce the huge mural that now hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Leutze wasn't a liar. He wasn't making up a myth. He simply took what little he could know about an event that happened before he was born and produced an image that captured both the event and how the artist felt about the subject. That is what we have in the gospels.
Mark took his passionate faith in Jesus and combined that with what he knew of the Hebrew scriptures which had been taken as messianic images and he combined that with a metaphorical use of the historical fact of the crucifixion of Jesus. What I'm telling you today about the context of that writing, that it was written on the heels of a holocaust.
In fact, it may well be that Mark began to write as the holocaust was taking place.... Possibly even writing because any surviving eyewitnesses were being systematically slaughtered.
Mark, then Matthew and Luke and John, painstakingly recount the betrayal, judgment and murder of Jesus. Mark declares that even though he was certainly dead for several days that on Easter morning his tomb was found to be empty... which is simply a poetic way of saying that Jesus is not really dead.
Mark does not go so far as to say that Jesus could be seen physically but he introduces a young man at the tomb who tells the women who had come there that Sunday morning that they should go and tell his disciples to go back to the Galilee and that they will see him there.
The Galilee is where they had seen Jesus healing people. That was where he spoke a word of good news to the poor. The Galilee was where he had lived and traveled with his disciples but what I want you to realize is that when Mark first wrote these words there was still blood on the grass in Galilee that was not yet dry.
Jesus was a distant memory, but the holocaust was fresh. The account of the resurrection of Jesus was not a historical claim; it was a defiant word of hope. Matthew takes Mark's account and edits it. He adds some additional quotes from the Hebrew bible and he feels the need to have Jesus physically visible on Easter but the fundamental message does not change. In fact, he says the same thing the young man in Mark says to the women at the tomb.... Tell the disciples to go to the Galilee and they will see me there.
When I first went to the Galilee, I went as a seminary student. I was studying biblical archaeology. I honestly wasn't interested in even the ancient Byzantine churches or the Crusader castles. I wanted to visit sights of biblical importance. But along the way my tour bus stopped at the Holocaust museum.
I was not a student of modern history. I knew a little about the Holocaust but my awareness exploded that day. We then visited the Children's Holocaust memorial and it was several years after that before I was able to stand to read anymore about it.
Since that time I have twice had occasion to meet Elie Wiesel from whom we take the quote on our worship banner. After the Holocaust, the mantra among the survivors was "Never again." But what Elie Wiesel wanted to say to the world was that it never would have happened if persons of good will had not been willing to stand back and let it happen in the first place. He says that the ethical message of the whole of the Bible is just this, "Thou shalt not stand idly by."
Wiesel's account of the Holocaust in his book, Night, was the memory of a teenaged survivor of the death camps. It is so graphic and so horrible that for many years publishers refused to print it because they simply did not believe that the holocaust could have been so bad. After a decade had passed and photographs and messages from the camps were distributed, the awful truth became undeniable.
But the writer whose experiences as a prisoner in the Nazi death camps who really brought meaning to the event for me, and by association, a deeper meaning to the New Testament's Easter accounts, was Viktor Frankl.
Frankl was a Jewish psychiatrist when he and his family were arrested and taken to the camp. He was separated from his wife, who went to another camp, and his children, who went to another, all never to be seen again. As he was taken into the camp, they took away his clothes, his hat, his shoes but he was trying to hold onto a manuscript of his life's work, his research which he was preparing to publish.
A soldier took the papers from him and destroyed them in while Frankl looked on. The point, of course, was to break any spirit remaining in the captives.... To fill them with despair, to remove any resistance or will to escape.... To make them slaves or simply to make them compliant as they were being murdered by the hundreds of thousands.
Frankl was forced to do slave labor and to endure starvation, bitter cold, and he had to endure the dawning awareness that his wife and children would not survive the camps. What he said about that was, that they can take everything away from you.... Your home, your possessions, your family, your life's work, they can take your freedom, they can take your health but what they cannot take is your ability to decide who you are and how you will react to the mistreatment.
Through the eyes of a psychiatrist, he made note of the differences between his peers in the camp who gave up hope and who became ill and died and those who appeared weak and had no chance of survival but they did manage to live through the torture to eventually be liberated. He concluded that those who have a reason to live, those who believed that there were people waiting for them, who depended on them..... those who believed that they had something important to accomplish in life....
Those people survived. He concluded that if you have a sufficient "why" to live, that you can live with any "how."
I believe that the basic historical facts of the Passion narrative are true. I believe that Jesus was not a part of organized religion and that as a spiritual teacher who was outside of the salary and donation structure of religion that he was a threat to the temple priesthood.
And I believe that Jesus taught and lived a life totally free of ownership of property or obligation to employers and that as such he was a threat to the whole banking, marketplace system.
And I believe that Jesus taught and lived a life of total liberation, refusing enslavement and servitude and as such he was a threat to the government. I do not find it hard to believe that the priests, the governor and his own family members and friends conspired together to kill him.
But written against the backdrop of one of history's worst genocides, what do we make of the resurrection story? One of the great things about being in a progressive church is that there is no one to say what you are supposed to believe about that.
I will, however, tell you what I believe. I believe that even though they could kill Jesus they could not kill his message. They could strike the teacher and even destroy the city where the church was first born but the faith community continued to be reborn, in spite of dungeon, fire and sword, because the church had a why to live that was bigger than circumstances ..... even when their circumstances involved trying to survive genocide.
I believe that the church has survived as a sign of the resurrection of Jesus. I believe that we survive because the world has a reason to expect something of us in the future. We have a reason to live. There is a need for us to be witnesses to that same message of liberation for which Jesus died.... That same message of social and economic justice, for which Jesus died, that same message of spiritual wholeness apart from any denomination or bishop or pope giving our franchise legitimacy.
You are the resurrection community. Don't play dead. Don't accept life as a victim. You are not slaves and you need not stand idly by. We are the resurrection of Jesus..... as long as we keep the message alive, he will never be found in a tomb.
