|
You have a summer opportunity...
Resurrection: interpreting the Easter Gospel |
 |
|
|
|
Introduction The Judgement of Judgement: Easter in Jerusalem Memory and Hope: Easter in Galilee The Risen Body |
|
|
The Risen Body session 6
‘I am risen and I am with you’ is the message of the Easter Jesus. The apparitions are not fleeting manifestations of a normally absent being, but events which establish Jesus’ presence, the interweaving of his life with the life of his community. The risen Jesus in the Gnostic gospels of the early Christian era is the Saviour, who having secured his own liberation from the corrupt world, returns in glorified, discarnate shape to give to his apostles detailed instructions for their own escape. His apparitions are indeed private and exceptional visitations whose purpose is to give saving information; whereas the New Testament apparitions – if our reading of them in this book so far is correct – aim both to restore and to enlarge a relationship of gift and trust among human beings, which is itself God’s gift, through Jesus, to the whole human world. Page 92
The good news of the resurrection involves the affirmation that grace does not become abstract with the event of Jesus’ physical death. … This means, at least, that the resurrection faith is inseparable from the existence of an historical human community character by certain styles of relation. … This is the dividing line between New Testament accounts of resurrection and – on the one hand – Gnostic fantasies of esoteric instruction by a discarnate Redeemer, and – on the other – an antiquarian interest in the fate of a particular corpse. Page 93
It is and is not true to see the Church as ‘identified’ with the risen Jesus: the Church is where Jesus is met, where bodily, historical grace and reconciliation are now shown, it is the ‘body’ of Jesus’ presence; but the Church still meets Jesus as an other, a stranger, it never absorbs him into itself so that he ceases to be its lover and its judge. The Church may be the body, the fleshly reality, in which Jesus’ grace is apprehended. But what was the ‘body’ in which the first believers apprehended it? Page 95
It is not simply Jesus’ bare presence that is ‘gracious’, but Jesus present as he most characteristically is – in words and deeds that make grace concrete, that create healing, forgiveness and fellowship. Page 99
The breaking and sharing of bread signify, have weight and resource, because they belong to the breaking and sharing of Jesus’ selfhood. So the grace which is ‘embodied’ in the events of Good Friday is ‘embodied’ likewise in this act. Jesus’ hospitality changes the status of men and women, brings them into the world of gift; and that it does so depends upon Jesus’ entire identity being gift, even to the point of death. Calvary is the cost of his hospitality, Calvary most radically and finally changes the status of the lost and the guilty: so there is one focal act of ‘hospitality’ where the symbolic connection is made. We are invited to grasp the truth that to eat at Jesus’ table is to benefit from his total self‑offering – in historical terms, from his death on the cross. Our redemption, our transformation, experienced as we find ourselves his guests, depends on nothing less. Page 99f.
Jesus is indeed wholly given over to living and dying as ‘gift’, nothing but their own hardness of heart and lack of trust can disqualify them from receiving the grace he has to give. Thus, to welcome or be welcomed by him at a meal on the further side of Calvary is the ultimate assurance of mercy and acceptance, of mercy and acceptance, of indestrucible love. And the meal of the Christian community becomes the fullest available embodiment and effective sign of the grace of the crucified for the whole world. Since it is after Calvary that it assumes its richest significance, the community’s meal with Jesus is invariably an ‘Easter’ event. Page 100
Almost all Christian traditions (with the possible exception of the Eastern churches) have at times in their history settled for celebrating the Eucharist as if Easter had nothing to do with it, as if, indeed, Easter had never happened. And if it is so celebrated, it is hardly surprising if men and women fail to see it as a focal identifying symbol of the life of the resurrection community. Page 100f.
If the risen Jesus is present where men and women turn to their victims and receive back their lost hearts, then he is ‘materially’ present where this process involves a specific material transformation – where the effective significance of material things is changed. Page 102
The moment of relinquishing what is ours is crucial in the eucharistic process. But this transaction does not occur exclusively in the Eucharist – and indeed its ‘occurrence’ in the Eucharist in isolation from its occurrence in the Christian community’s life is … a gross offense against the true significance of the sacrament. Page 102f.
Thus eschatology leads us back – as it did the earliest Christian writers – to ‘protology’, the doctrine of the beginning of things, and Christ as Lord and Judge points us back to Christ as creative Word and Wisdom. If we make Eucharist in full awareness of what we are doing, celebrating the Lordship of the risen Jesus, we confess him as God’s Word, Alpha no less than Omega. And our attempt to live eucharistically, to transform our world into a community of gift, is more than merely obedience to a command, more than the imitation of a remembered historical pattern of life: it is the uncovering of the eternal sapientia of God. Page 105
The resurrection of Jesus is also to speak of one’s own humanity as healed, renewed and restored, recentred in God; and the problems of talking about this are thus the problems of describing where one stands and who one is. You cannot see your own face, except in a mirror; you cannot describe with satisfactory completeness and objectivity the new life of grace except by looking at the resurrection of Jesus. But ‘the risen Jesus’ only has clear content in relation to the life of grace as experienced now (as we have seen, there is no mileage in speculating about the Easter event in abstraction). Jesus’ risenness and our risen‑ness are visible only obliquely, in relation to each other. Page 111 |
 |
|
