Easter Day
4th April 2010
Preacher: The Very Rev'd Dr Peter Catt, Dean of Brisbane

Theme: We are the rest of them. Living the Easter life

Only one?

What do you mean there is just one?

Where are the rest?

It can’t be true, because there is only one.

Such would have been a first century Jewish response to the news that Jesus had been raised from the dead.

Every generation that has encountered the story of Easter has found the good news challenging some aspect or other of its world view.

Many of us moderns battle with all sorts of questions about the nature of this event:

Was the resurrected body spiritual or material?
Was the event itself an objective reality or a subjective psychological experience?
Are the bones of Jesus still in the dust of Jerusalem somewhere?
And if they are does it matter?

Asking and working through these questions enlightens us, allowing us to gain deeper insights into what and who we understand God to be, what and who we understand ourselves to be, how our sense of self relates to our bodies, and how we are to live our lives.

We can gain similar insights by entering into the conceptual dilemmas of our forebears who raised issues that are not necessarily at the centre of our agenda. The first century Jewish response to the resurrection provides a case in point.

Because we live in an individualistic age and have come to see ourselves as more or less independent and separate, it is not an issue for us that just one person, Jesus by himself, was raised at Easter. We want to ask other questions. But as I stated in my introduction, for first century Jews, particularly those known as the Pharisees, the fact that just one person was raised would have been the bit of the story they would have found most difficult to accept.

Gerard Sloyan points out that ‘If you had the faith of the Pharisees, [Jesus’] appearance would have startled you, but it would not have surprised you. You would have been stunned chiefly [by the fact] that he was alone.’ These folk believed in and expected the resurrection of the dead. But their understanding was that the resurrection would be an all-in event; that everyone would be raised together, that all the graves from all of history would be opened and that the dead would be raised en masse. And that following the mass rising folk would be sorted into the goodies and the baddies, or into believers and non-believers, the orthodox and non-orthodox, the clean or the unclean. The basis of the post-resurrection division was debated, but the idea of the general resurrection was not in doubt. So the problem for the Pharisees is that Jesus is by himself.

As I say, that is not something we would see as problematic, certainly not as problematic as some of the issues that we tend to think about; and because we don’t see it as an issue to work through, we also don’t gain the blessing that can come as one works through a problem.

As the early church worked through this unexpected one-person-only manifestation of being raised from the dead it came up with a new understanding of the resurrection of all that we might find helpful. Paul expresses this understanding in his letter to the Colossians. In that letter Paul talks about living the risen life now. He says, ‘So if you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. ….. Get rid of anger, wrath, malice, slander, and abusive language. Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have stripped off the old self with its practices and have clothed yourselves with the new self.’ A new self manifested through the exercising of ‘compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience’. For the believer, the risen life is to be lived now.

To my view, this understanding breaks through much of what people of our time struggle with. It breaks through the idea of a then and a now, of what the body is to be like, of the risen life being lived in another place. It suggests that the only thing we need to attend to is the here and now, and that by living the risen life in the present we can let heaven look after itself. Christ was the first fruits, and we are the already the subsequent fruits. We are raised with him and in him. We are invited to discover a solidarity with Christ that opens us to the here and now. To understand that the future life is ours to live now. As the author of one of the hymns we will sing at Evensong tonight puts it, 'Now is eternal life, if risen with Christ we stand.....'

As baptized folk we live the risen life now. And so our present life becomes the guarantee of eternal life; for they are one and the same life. So as we celebrate baptism for Lachlan and Dylan (7.30am), Kylie and Chelsea (9.30am), we acknowledge that they are becoming members of the body of Christ along with us; folk who live the risen life in the here and now.

As the early church processed the Pharisee’s confusion over the resurrection they came to see that even though there appeared to be just one risen there were in fact many. We are the many and so are called to be agents of the transforming kingdom of God.

+Amen

© Peter Catt

Gerard S Sloyan, Jesus in Focus: A Life in Its Setting, XXIII Publications, 1993

Colossians 3:1-15