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A Shaft of Sunlight from Heaven

Easter 3, Year B : 22 April 2012 : Acts 3: 13-15, 17-19, Luke 24: 35-48

On a recent day off I had a religiously uncomfortable experience. Sitting in the barber’s waiting room I noticed a framed certificate proudly announcing that my hair cutter had a bachelor in theology from the university of Otago. Within minutes of being in the chair I enquired which were his favourite theologians. He then proceeded to reel off a list of apostates, atheists, and fashionable unbelievers, headed of course by one of Dunedin’s most famous sons, Lloyd Geering. As my heart sank I imagined in a longing way that I could cancel out my parent’s conditioning to never behave badly in public, and would rise from the chair, fling away the cloth, make the sign against the evil eye, and then stalk rapidly and in a dignified manner out of those accursed premises. Then of course he would have dismissed me as another of those fanatical fundamentalists.

What Geeringites and fundamentalists have in common is that they have managed to tame the resurrection, the most stupendous miracle of the New Testament, into just another fact amongst all the other facts in the world. If you are a Geeringite you say, "as we all know dead bodies don’t come back to life - the enlightenment and modern science tells us so, this life is all there is, the resurrection is a charming mythological story that tells us to live this life as well as possible according to the lights of individualised western liberal bourgeoisie society."

Just how equally weird the conservative view of the resurrection can be came home to me a few years ago as I contemplated the prime site advertising space of the Presbyterian Church’s noticeboard in Hanmer. Advertising the sermon for Easter day, it had as its title, "the resurrection, the best proved fact in history." Unable to resist my curiosity I went and knocked on the front door of the manse, and enquired of the Minister where he had got this quote. It was from the book "Who moved the stone," he informed me, a tome I remembered from being on my Father’s bookshelves, a popular pot boiler of the post war era.

What is so reductive about this approach is that it seems to suppose that you could sort out the veracity of the resurrection by surrounding the tomb with infra red cameras, electronic trip wires, and a variety of other super spook electronic surveillance devices. And if this surveillance gear gave you the read out you wanted you could then complacently think to yourself, "Well that settles that then, just as I suspected there is eternal life, I am going to heaven along with my friends and family, now that I have got that sorted out I can get on with the next lot of problem solving in my affairs of daily living." Or as a Pentecostal preacher memorably put it at the funeral of one of my Father’s acquaintances, "As we all know, Dereck bought his ticket on Jesus Christ airlines some years ago."

Rowan Williams has a different take on all this. He insists on the bodily resurrection of Jesus in a somewhat similar manner to the poem "Seven stanzas for Easter" by John Updike on the front cover of this morning’s Pebble, and rather unfashionably is keen on the empty tomb as a key part of Easter faith. He believes this is essential because God takes our embodied status seriously. But he then goes on to point out what a strange and disturbing reality the resurrection is. It is not something you can comfortably fit in with all the other facts in the world.

For a start the inhabitants of Jerusalem have to cope with the startling, anxiety making, and guilt inducing announcement of Peter in today’s Acts passage, "It was you who accused the Holy One, the Just One, you who demanded the reprieve of a murderer while you killed the Prince of life. God however raised him from the dead." As Rowan Williams pointed out in an Easter sermon in Canterbury Cathedral in recent years, if someone in power in the ancient world heard that one of their victims had risen from the dead their first thought would be, "how can I get him back in the ground again." People didn’t get into power then by being nice to other people. Often they had murdered associates, rivals, and even family members, to get into the top slot. If one of their victims returned by resurrection their likely agenda was revenge and regime change.

But Jesus returns to confront his accusers, through the message of his close associate, with an invitation to reconciliation based on his forgiveness of them. Revenge is the last thing on his mind - he wants to draw them into close association, into a new depth of union with the God of Israel as revealed by his messenger Jesus Christ, who is in himself the link point with this startling, surprising and scary God. This is the first of the overcoming of the divisions in the human family proposed by the risen Jesus.

The next is the overcoming of the division between Jew and Gentile, the first flash point issue in the early church, and in a sense the major life work of the apostle Paul. "Blessed be God who breaks down the wall that divides," as we say at the Peace in the 10.30 am Liturgy, quoting from the New Testament. The Church is a unique community, which aims to overcome all human divisions within its own life, and to extend this reuniting agenda beyond its own borders. It does this because at the resurrection Jesus translates himself into the medium of this new community called the Church; he changes his mode of being into this fragile enterprise in community building.

Human beings have a natural tendency to exclude some parts of reality, and some parts of the human family disagreeable to themselves. They cope by ignoring and removing what is not congenial or understandable to them. This is not the way God looks at reality or at us. We see that in the teaching of Jesus, who, for instance in the parable of the Good Samaritan tells us that the neighbour who is in need of our compassion is not someone like us, but is often someone radically different. The church then can never be a matter of birds of a feather flocking together.

We see the developing divisions overcoming agenda of the church as it proceeds through time and space by the reality that the majority of the world’s Christians are now located in Africa and Asia, and that often the most vital churches are there also. This is the success side of the resurrection agenda of the risen Jesus.

But there is sadness, misunderstanding, failure and tragedy that have walked alongside the endeavours of God’s fragile pilot project in the world called the Church. We see that in the continuing splits and divisions in the Church, which many Christians regard as utterly normative and routine. We see it also in churches that accept dividing believers up into separate ethnic and cultural silos as the best way of ordering their lives. We might like to think about the wisdom of our recent move to the three-tikanga constitution in that regard. The church also loses the plot when it becomes completely absorbed in its own life, and forgets about being a pathfinder in overcoming divisions around it.

The resurrection life of Jesus as it unfolds in his beloved community is not one glorious success after another. He accepts the fragile and tragic dimension to human existence as it plays itself out in the life of his community. But through the operation of Divine providence and the restoring work of the Holy Spirit he can reweave the tapestry of human folly and failure into surprising new patterns of grace and opportunity.

The resurrection is a shaft of sunlight from the realms of heavenly glory, a glimpse into God’s life giving, utterly original, and rather startling plans for putting things right with the human family. He has decided to give us a part to play in this bold enterprise. He expects a lot of us, and will give even more in return to equip us as his co-workers. More about that at Pentecost.