"To walk with God is a most profound act of resistance."

Many years ago, while I was pastor of a church in Iowa, one of my parishioners came up to me and very sheepishly asked me what I thought about the resurrection. She had great difficulty, as do most of us, accepting it as a literal, physical, historical event. I told her that I thought of it more as a spiritual event or process in which the early followers of Jesus came to sense his presence with them, empowering them to continue the teaching and healing he had begun. I did not think that Jesus came back to life as a resuscitated corpse.

She was very relieved to hear me say that, since she had been given the impression that one could not be a Christian if you did not believe in a literal bodily resurrection. Apparently that was what the previous minister had told her.

I find this conflict to be very troubling and unnecessary. Especially when one studies how the resurrection tradition developed and was first interpreted, I simply see no reason why a modern misappropriation of the tradition should become the ultimate litmus test upon which one's faith hangs in the balance. Perhaps Paul bears some responsibility here, he did say that without the resurrection of the dead our faith is in vain (I Cor 15:12-19). But what Paul meant by that is not at all what the literalistic interpreters of scripture think.

The earliest gospel in our canon is Mark. The way Mark tells the story of Jesus' life and ministry it all ends with the only people who have seen the empty tomb and heard the young man's commission running away in fear and telling no one what they witnessed. Despite the fact that this is not the upbeat way one usually ends a story, I love its open-ended and tantalizing effect. It practically screams out for us to complete the story ourselves. That is, I think, exactly what Mark intended.

While Mark is the earliest of our four canonical gospels, it was not the first gospel to be written. That honor belongs to the text known as the Q Gospel. And we all know what Q says about the resurrection, don't we? Absolutely nothing. Q is composed entirely of the teachings of Jesus and is apparently unconcerned about his death and resurrection.

This begs the question that if the resurrection was such a foundational event for Christian faith, why weren't the first followers of Jesus interested in it when they wrote down his teachings? Surely the stories were circulating in the oral tradition at that time. In fact, the concept of resurrection is well documented in Jewish thinking of the time. Perhaps it was because they considered the foundation of their faith and practice to be the Kindom of God that Jesus had taught and lived. And now that he was gone, they continued to sense his spiritual presence with them as confirmation and empowerment of their faith, not as the basis for it.

It seems that as it was originally conceived, the resurrection was thought to be God's vindication and exaltation of Jesus in the face of Roman brutality and the ignoble way in which he died. Resurrection wasn't a radically new idea, it's been in the literature for centuries at this point, it is radical now because it's being said about some upstart Jewish peasant sage from the rural backwaters of Galilee!

We do have a Biblical author who wrote about the resurrection and interpreted its meaning at a relatively early stage in its development. He writes at about the same time the Q gospel is being written, and he is the only person in the New Testament canon who claims to have personally seen the risen Christ. I'm referring of course to Paul.

Paul talks about the resurrection several times. He deals with it most directly and thoroughly in I Corinthians 15 where he goes to great lengths to persuade people that the resurrected body is not like the physical body. Paul writes;

Paul does not seem to believe that Jesus' physical body was magically resuscitated and went walking around Palestine again. That idea would have been appalling to him. He does believe in a spiritually alive, risen existence that is imperishable which is just as possible for us as it was for Jesus.

One of the really interesting facts that critical study of the Bible brings to light is that the story of the empty tomb won't be written until approximately twenty years after Paul's letter to the Corinthians was written. And the first written account of the empty tomb, which is Mark 16:1-8, makes no mention of an appearance of the risen Christ to anyone. (*Explain the original end vs. the later radactional addition . . . .) So the empty tomb tradition enters relatively late into early Christian thinking; at least forty years after Jesus' death.

Paul either doesn't know about the empty tomb story or he doesn't deem it to be very important It seems that for the first generation or two of Jesus' followers what mattered to them was simply that God had gotten the last word in by vindicating Jesus and exalting him at his death, therefore all that Jesus had taught about the Kindom of God and all that Jesus had done in healing and sharing table fellowship was still valid.

Roy Hoover, Professor of Biblical Literature and Professor of Religion Emeritus at Whitman College, wrote a marvelous and insightful essay in a recently published book, "The Resurrection of Jesus." In his essay, after exploring all the various discontinuities between our modern world view and the first century understandings of resurrection, Hoover lists two continuities he finds between Christian faith today and in the first century.

One is the quest for social justice and moral virtue and how this is a good unto itself and worth the struggle regardless of its perceived success or failure. Hoover writes;

Secondly, the hope and the possibility for transformation, both personal and societal, stirs our imagination and evokes our courage and strength as we seek to make the Kindom of God a reality in our world. I see this today in the peace and civil rights movements. Jesus' teachings and spirit were resurrected in Gandhi, whose life and teachings inspired Martin Luther King Jr., whose life and teachings and untimely death inspired a generation to boldly work for social justice and transformation that eventually led to the election of the first African American president of the United States. Hope is a powerful ally.

Today I believe that we are standing at a crossroads, a time of great change, renewal, transformation and rebirth, not just for ourselves or our society, but for Christian faith itself. And some of us, like the women in Mark's story, may feel a bit terrified. So let me end with a modern parable, one that Roy Hoover cites at the end of his essay. Hoover writes about a PBS series that Ken Burns produced on the "Corps of Discovery" journey that was led by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Hoover says;

Just like the view from atop the Continental Divide, the hope of resurrection does not lie in the past, in the doctrines and formulas of those before us, but in the new and unexplored territory of the future. That is where we still find the Risen One, calling us to new life.

And when the Sabbath day was over, Mary of Magdala and Mary the mother of James and Salome brought spices so they could go and embalm him. And very early on Sunday they got to the tomb just as the sun was coming up. And they had been asking themselves, "Who will help us roll the stone away from the opening of the tomb?" Then they look up and discover that the stone has been rolled away! (For in fact the stone was very large.)

And when they went into the tomb, they saw a young man sitting on the right, wearing a white robe, and they grew apprehensive. He says to them, "Don't be alarmed! You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene who was crucified. He was raised, he is not here! Look at the spot where they put him! But go and tell his disciples, including Peter, he is going ahead of you to Galilee! There you will see him, just as he told you."

And once they got outside, they ran away from the tomb, because great fear and excitement got the better of them. And they didn't breathe a word of it to anyone: talk about terrified. . . .