Meaning and Meaninglessness in the Resurrection

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Meaning and Meaninglessness in the Resurrection

Acts 2:14a, 22-32
May 1, 2011

But Peter, standing with the eleven, raised his voice and addressed them…
“You that are Israelites, listen to what I have to say: Jesus of Nazareth, a
man attested to you by God with deeds of power, wonders, and signs that
God did through him among you, as you yourselves know—this man,
handed over to you according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of
God, you crucified and killed by the hands of those outside the law. But
God raised him up, having freed him from death, because it was impossible
for him to be held in its power. For David says concerning him, ‘I saw the
Lord always before me, for he is at my right hand so that I will not be
shaken; therefore my heart was glad, and my tongue rejoiced; moreover
my flesh will live in hope. For you will not abandon my soul to Hades, or let
your Holy One experience corruption. You have made known to me the
ways of life; you will make me full of gladness with your presence. ’“Fellow
Israelites, I may say to you confidently of our ancestor David that he both
died and was buried, and his tomb is with us to this day. Since he was a
prophet, he knew that God had sworn with an oath to him that he would put
one of his descendants on his throne. Foreseeing this, David spoke of the
resurrection of the Messiah, saying, ‘He was not abandoned to Hades, nor
did his flesh experience corruption. ’This Jesus God raised up, and of that
all of us are witnesses.

Years ago, I have a good friend whom I once had a pretty heated discussion—
it wasn’t an argument, really—about the meaning of the resurrection, the
meaning of Jesus’ resurrection. I was essentially a religion major in college,
and my friend was a biology major, at that time, and we began talking about
the nature of Jesus’ resurrection, a moment occasioned primarily because of
one of Bishop John Shelby Spong’s book, which were all the rage at that
time. As I’ve said in different contexts, I’ve never been a fan of Spong, but
not because of the content of his books, which is material that you find in
most mainline Christian seminaries, but the tone of his works, the way he
would needle those he deemed to be less reasonable and academic than
himself. Nonetheless, the point was that my friend was saying that there
had to be a physical resurrection in order for Christianity to be true and that
the resurrection actually proved that Christianity was true, was correct,
whatever way you want to put it. Now, the irony here is that I was actually
arguing the opposite point—that, in fact, Jesus resurrection really proves
nothing about the truth of Christianity, that in the ancient world stories
about resurrection, bodies being revived from death were fairly common,
though they were probably not all that factual. My point was that for
someone in the ancient world, hearing that your Messiah, you leader, your
prophet, whatever, rose from the dead really didn’t mean as much as we
think it does, in our day and age. Bodies being alive, then dead, and then
being brought back to life again—this was not so uncommon, at least in the
stories being passed around the ancient Mediterranean as they would be
today.

Now, having said that, I actually do believe in a physical resurrection, that
Jesus did physically rise from that grave, but that event really is a
meaningless event when we rip it out of its context, out of an understanding
of what kind of death this Jesus endured, the scandal of that particular kind
of death, and, most importantly, the resurrection is meaningless if we forget
about the kind of body he presented to those earliest witnesses, the
disciples and others. We forget that the meaning of that resurrection is far
more important than whether or not Jesus’ actual body rose from the dead,
and that is why I don’t fret much when people are skeptical about the
literalness of the resurrection—the point of the resurrection of Jesus is not
whether or not Jesus’ corpse got up and went somewhere else, but the
meaning, the importance, the earliest Christians placed on it, and why it
mattered like no other event before it ever did, no other past “resurrection”
ever did.

And our text today puts that particular resurrection, Jesus’ resurrection,
front and center of Peter’s speech, his sermon to the folks at Jerusalem not
longer after the death and resurrection of this one from Nazareth. Peter is a
Jew speaking to his fellow Jews and yet the tone of his polemic is troubling,
mostly because it is so accusatory, so wanting to seemingly blame his fellow
Jews for the machinations that brought Jesus before the forces of Rome,
before Pilate, forces which eventually killed him. It should go without saying
that we need to be careful with these kinds of texts, where the writers are
expressing a viewpoint that has been used to justify all sorts of anti-
Semitism, including the idea of a blood libel, suffering supposedly brought
upon Jews over the centuries because of their hand in the execution of
Jesus. I wish I didn’t have to continue to caution us against using these
kinds of texts to justify our bigotry against the very people of Jesus and Paul
and Peter, and almost all the earliest disciples of Jesus, but history has
shown we often forget this, and then the pogroms, the Holocausts, the
subtle and not so subtle language of anti-Semitism shows up again, and we
are reminded that we need to keep saying it until we get this awful and toxic
disease of anti-Semitism out of the Christian bloodstream.

But, of course, that is not really Peter’s point here, who to blame for Jesus’
death, nor is it my point this morning. I want us to go to what Peter says
here, and to his point about Jesus’ resurrection, about the meaning behind
such an event, to verse 24 where Peter begins to speak of God having raised
up Jesus, freeing him from the power of death. Now, these words about
being freed from the power of death are so radically important and we often
miss them, because in the ancient world, death was often experienced as a
kind of all-encompassing reality, its tentacles everywhere, its power
seemingly unstoppable. I was reading a new book by Marcus Borg and John
Dominic Crossan called The First Paul, and they reminded me of the fact that
in the ancient world even if you survived childbirth, there was at least a 1/3
chance you wouldn’t make it out your teens, and a 2/3 chance you probably
wouldn’t make it past 27 years old. All sorts of factors played into that
horrifying statistic—certainly war, but more likely disease was the primary
factor, especially in cities where the poor were stacked in tenement houses
with no sanitation, no running water. It has been estimated that a major city
like Antioch was far more crowded than a modern city are like Manhattan, but
without the luxury of high rise apartment buildings, without the ability to
stack people up beyond five simple stories, which was the highest building
you would probably find in the ancient world.   Death was in the air, in ways
we can scarcely imagine, and so when Peter tells those listeners in Jerusalem
that Jesus had been freed from death, from its tentacles, it meant
something, it really meant something, to those who heard those words.

And when we look at our scripture today, it’s important to look at the proof
texts that Peter uses to make his argument about death’s inability to hold
this Jesus in his grave. Peter uses Psalm 16 to make his point here, arguing
that this text that was originally understood to speak of King David and his
desire for God’s faithfulness to meet him past the grave is actually meant to
point to Jesus, and his resurrection. As I’ve said in the past, Jewish ideas
about the afterlife, about what happens to us when we die, are never really
clear, frankly, not until the time of Jesus and even then there was substantial
disagreement from one Jewish group with another. The point, though is that
in this text we have Peter saying that Jesus is the actually the recipient of
this promise not to be abandoned to the grave, and thus Jesus is the one
who is rejoicing that God is always right before him, whose heart is glad,
whose tongue rejoices, and whose flesh lives in hope, whose body now lives
in hope.

And even more interesting is this idea that God will not allow this David, this
Jesus, to experience Hades, or Sheol, the place of the dead. I’ve said in the
past that it was understood that Sheol was generally understood to be the
place that EVERYONE went to, good or bad, and that is the reason why the
psalmists often plead with God to rescue them from the possibility of going
to Sheol, since they could not praise God from such a place. Well, recent
studies have supposedly shown me to be wrong all these years, because it is
now understood that Sheol was not actually the place where everyone
actually ended up but was “’almost always the destination of those who die
violently, unjustly, in punishment, or with a broken heart.’” (Feasting on the
Word, Year a, Vol 2, 379). Of course, that describes in many ways the very
death of Jesus, and so Peter argues, through the proof texts from the
Psalms, that God would not let Jesus go into that hopeless place, a place
born out of hopelessness, that place where lost souls went, lost because of
the kind of death they experienced, and his body, Jesus’ body would not be
corrupted, disintegrate as all other bodies before him had done.

And what is this body that Jesus comes to back to life with, this incorruptible
body—it is just a resuscitated body, simply a replay of the one that Jesus
moved in when he was among his disciples before his crucifixion? Well, yes
and no—it was certainly a body that was recognizable to the disciples when
they had their eyes opened to it’s reality—think of the Emmaus story—but it
was different, it wasn’t just a resuscitated corpse. In First Corinthians (15)
Paul makes the case the Jesus was the first of those to be resurrected, and
that his earthly body has been transformed into a heavenly body, a different
kind of body, and Jesus was the first of those to be transformed, and we will
all share in this new and different kind of body—we will have a body like that
of this now transformed Christ.

Now, I know some of you have probably glazed over with boredom at this
point, and I have no excuse for lulling you to sleep with these thoughts, but
there is a point it all, a big point to sharing this information with you,
information I wanted to share so that I could elaborate on something I said
in last week’s sermon. Of course, if you were here, you heard me speak of
Christ’s resurrection, about how even Jesus comes from the grave with
wounds, and that we shouldn’t expect anything less ourselves—that when
we get through crucifixion, the difficult times in our lives, and find ourselves
resurrected, find ourselves beyond those difficult times, in better times, it
shouldn’t surprise us that we still carry the wounds of that crucifixion, that
experience, just as Jesus did with his own transformed and heavenly body.
And what I meant by that is when we go through this difficult times in our
lives, moments when we think the grave will claim us, literally or figuratively,
when all hope seems lost, we shouldn’t expect to come out of those
experiences unscarred, unchanged.   Jesus himself didn’t, even in this new
and transformed—and, as I said last week, that is why this resurrection rings
true for me, whether it was it literal one or not. It tells us the truth about
the way life really is—that, sure, we may come from that grave, and sure,
sheol, Hades, that place that seems reserved for those unjustly hurt, unjust
and violently killed, and those with a broken heart, it may not hold us, death
may not have the last word, death literally or metaphorically, but that doesn’t
mean it doesn’t leaves its scars on us, on our bodies,on our souls, the pain
of those experiences.

You see, the reality is that when we go through crucifixion, and when we get
to resurrection, when we get through hard and painful times, and get to the
other side of those times, when we arise from those graves, we find
ourselves both being the same people and yet, so often, being so different,
forever changed by the difficult time, that crucifixion.   When my father died
in the late nineties, I remember thinking and knowing that my life would never
be the same, and it felt as if my heart would just melt and drain away.   And
as I slowly moved out of my pain and sorrow from that event, I also knew
that I wasn’t the same person that I had been—there was a before and after
now in my life. For me, one of the changes has been that I have become a
big crybaby—I cry at a drop of a hat nowadays—Douglas just looks at me in
these moments, and shakes his head. Now, I know that experience of losing
a parent is a common one, and there are many in this room who have been
through far greater crucifixion, greater losses than something so ordinary as
losing a parent, but I chose that example because it was something that
most of you have already experienced—and, I suspect you found yourself
being transformed out of that experience, different. Again, that doesn’t
mean everything was perfect afterwards—you and I, we likely still carry the
scars of that experience…and yet, scars are healed wounds, and they remind
us that we have been resurrected

To conclude this sermon, I want to go back to my conversation with my
friend who was arguing with me about the meaning of Christ’s resurrection.
One of the reasons I said that a resurrection from the dead didn’t
automatically mean anything, that it didn’t automatically sort of prove the
truth of Christianity, is because, again, stories of resurrections were plentiful
in the ancient first century world. What I was trying to get at in that
discussion with him was that resurrection in and of itself means nothing, but
what was really important, what really meant something, was the “who” that
got resurrected in the Christian story of resurrection. Remember a few
months ago I spoke of the scandal of Jesus’ death, especially the means of
that death, about how embarrassed the Corinthians were about HOW this
Christ died? He died a violent death, an unjust death, seemingly in
punishment for something he did not do, and he seemed to die of a broken
heart—“my God, my God, why have you abandoned me?!,” Jesus cried out
on that cross. He died a death that surely would have destined him to a
place like Sheol, Hades, a place for unsettled souls, a place for those who
seemingly had no peace in their deaths. I think of the way some people talk
about ghosts who haunt particular places, often because of the particular
way they died, violent deaths, as something similar to the idea of Sheol that
the ancients had. What my friend, I think, forgot, and what we so often
forget, is that the fact of resurrection in and of itself really proves nothing,
but the fact that God resurrected this One, this Jesus from Nazareth, this
one whose life was a scandal, who death was even more of a scandal, whose
death would seem to tag him for the dustbin of eternity, Hades, Sheol, NOW
that really does make all the difference when one speaks of resurrection. If
Jesus had simply died in his sleep in Nazareth, what real difference would it
have made if Jesus had been resurrected in that instance, I mean really? But
the fact that resurrection occurred to this Jesus, the biggest loser of them
all, according to the facts on the ground, so to speak, well, that does make a
difference. And the difference it makes for us, in the right here, and the right
now, is that it means that no matter the hell we go through on this side of
eternity, the difficulties, the heartbreaks, the disappointment, the shattered
dreams, no matter any of these things, resurrection can happen, life can
happen when all seemed lost—if it happened to the Christ, with all that he
went through in his crucifixion, it can happen to us. Sure, we may come out
of that grave with some scars, even some big scars, but, folks, we will come
out of that tomb, we will come out it transformed, and we will be old and yet
new, we will be the same but different, because Christ already has, and so
shall we. Amen.