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Check Your Energy Levels

Easter 4: 21 April 2013  : Acts 13: 14, 43-52 , Revelation 7: 9, 14-17

There is a theory that has been going the rounds amongst sceptical New Testament scholars for quite some time now to explain away the resurrection. Jesus didn’t rise from the dead; instead he rose into the hearts and minds of the disciples. In other words, the resurrection appearances weren’t an encounter with the risen spiritual body of Jesus – they were in fact an aha moment in which his close followers finally cottoned on to what he had been on about, and fully internalised his message. So the inspiring teacher they had known was indeed definitively dead, but his message and his quality of living had now been exported into the cadre who had followed him around. They were now so on fire with the message, and were finally so on message, that they in turn exported the good news around the Mediterranean world.

Personally I find this point of view to be one that simply beggars belief. It is certainly true that the disciples hadn’t fully grasped who they were dealing with in his earthly life, but why would they get it now in the depths of their depression and heart ache over the brutal death of their beloved, and also rather scary leader. Euphoria and exhilaration aren’t the characteristic way human beings respond to tragedy and loss. What in heaven’s name would motivate them to behave like that if nothing had objectively changed in their or Jesus’ situation? And even if a few of them had come to this extraordinary conclusion, how did they manage to persuade all the others to think and feel the same way? Or are we to believe that they all simultaneously had this cognitive breakthrough and change of heart?

The other major problem with this reductionist view of the resurrection is that the content of Jesus’ mission and ministry wasn’t about a message; it was about a person. He is the Kingdom – He is the Messiah who renews the covenant with God’s people – He is the disclosure point, the window through which we peer, into the inner life of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. It was very much the case then that the medium was the message, and since the medium was the Son of God it was this astounding reality that the banjaxed disciples were dealing with in the great 50 days from Easter to Ascension.

Furthermore, the death of Jesus had been neither an accidental tragedy, nor a show and tell demonstration of God’s unchanging benevolent intentions towards the human race. It had made something happen, it had brought something new into the world, which is why it had happened by the deliberate will and foreknowledge of God the Father. He had driven his Son to this appointment with destiny on the hill of Golgotha because through this event he would pour a powerful new reality into the human situation.

The teaching and miracle working ministry of Jesus in Galilee had only limited results, and had fallen far short of its original intentions. If all the disciples were doing in the post Easter period was downloading the sum total of that, then it wouldn’t be enough to build a major world religion on. More was required, and had been supplied by, the staggering events from Good Friday to Easter Sunday.

This is how we can make sense of Paul and Barnabas being unfazed by being booted out of Antioch, after being heckled and contradicted by a hostile mob. "So we only won over some Jews and devout converts - Fine, we will lift our sights, and raise the stakes by going after the outsiders and the pagan unbelievers."

And it backgrounds the situation described in the book of Revelation a generation or two on. The huge number impossible to count are the martyrs who had their eyes so fixed on the prize that they were prepared to let the Imperial persecution machine do its worst. Something had motivated them that amounted to more than a good idea, or the membership of a satisfying religious club.

What had reframed the horizons of those who had come into contact with the aftermath of Golgotha was a new energy source that they had been connected up to as a result of what had happened there. When he spoke the words, "It is finished," in fact something then began. The heavens, as it were, were ripped open, and something of the power and the glory of God’s future, fulfilled world streamed into our drab little world. A first instalment of end time shimmering radiant being came looking for that small group of distressed and depressed disciples, and as they encountered him in a new way in that brief season of startling appearances, it entered them and changed them. On the day of Pentecost the wattage of this electrifying apostle making energy was turned up even higher.

So what we are talking about here is not just some kind of psychological illumination following on from a series brief encounters with the risen Jesus. A remarkable new kind of Divine grace began to create interior change so that they would become determined and dynamic people, with very high energy levels, and a remarkable resilience that could take setbacks in their stride.

What happened to them can happen to us. For if we are open to the full significance of what is on offer in the Easter season then the pattern of death and resurrection can be repeated in each one of us. There are times then when a kind of psychic depletion can strike us, when we are drained of vitalistic energy because we are working hard in God centred ways. At such times we are often on line with, and congruent with, the death of self which is a pattern of his death on the cross. This is then followed by a surge of energy, hope and optimism, as his resurrection life widens and deepens our capacity to get things done, and the horizons along which we pursue our paths of endeavour.

It is not just raw energy that the Easter season and the grace of Holy Week makes available to us. When misfortune and setbacks and disappointments come our way they are reframed into the cross shaped perspective that sees them as part of his redemptive suffering for the sake of the world. There is a wisdom and patience available here that sees what formerly disheartened us in a fresh light.

Yet also there are times of experienced inner dynamism when we are like the first apostles rearing to go, and full of life. That is certainly the way I have been feeling since I returned, despite something of a wash out of a holiday.

The dynamism of the early Christian community, which produced such outstanding results, didn’t come about through motivational gymnastics and intuitive insight. A door opened up between the worlds, and Divine oomph came looking for them on behalf of the Author of life, the Son of Man. Meeting him again in a new modality, he infused them with something even more dynamic than the product of Mighty River Power. What he did for them he can do to us also.