A reader wrote this Question: I left the church because I cannot reconcile that a man, beaten to within an inch of his life, and then hung on a cross for six hours, could come back to life in 36 hours (From Friday at 7:00PM to Sunday at 7:00AM). The human body just could not endure that and function in any sort of normal fashion as the gospels indicate. You are not the only one who has ever raised that point. We are called, as followers of Jesus of Nazareth, to accept that Jesus is fully human and fully divine. Does that mean he could shift the fully divine part into overdrive and thereby overcome the horrendous damage done to his body on Good Friday? I doubt that! It has always seemed to me that God’s laws of science are set and not open to change or override, despite what the Old Testament asserts. In other words, you cannot repeal the laws of science. Only Walt Disney could reverse the law of gravity as he did in one of his movies. Perhaps there are two options available to us to ponder on Easter morning. Let me begin by saying that something incredible came from that time and place. For something that profound to have carried on for 1993 years is remarkable. The tomb of Joseph of Arimathea, where the scriptures say Jesus was interred after the crucifixion, had the stone rolled away when Mary of Magdalene came to prepare the body for permanent burial. The Gospels give an account of what happened early in the morning. Mary Magdalene was first at the tomb. In fact, Mary gave the first Christian sermon that first Sunday telling the world that Jesus was alive. But alive in what way? In my view there are only two interpretations of the resurrection available to us. The first option is that the dead body came alive and walked around. There are two accounts in the New Testament which support this action, both from Luke’s gospel, verse 24 and the gospel of John, verse 20. The first is Jesus eating a fish meal with the disciples and second is the story of Thomas seeing Jesus hands and feet. These are two strong reasons for supporting the dead man walking. On the other hand, there are additional accounts of a more ghost-like appearance of Jesus. In Luke, two unnamed disciples are walking to Emmaus (we are not sure today where that was) and suddenly Jesus appears to them and walks with them. He then suddenly disappears. The question we need to ask ourselves: were these disciples seeing an apparition or a flesh-and-blood human being? The scriptures present both options. My take is that what the disciples knew on Good Friday evening (and please recognize that there were both male and female disciples) is that Jesus was dead. If we cannot accept the bodily resurrection, our second option is to recognize that the life example and teachings of Jesus came off the cross and into history. What was resurrected may not have been the body but rather the spirit of what he taught. The lessons of loving, forgiving, sharing, community and so on, which were not present in mainstream Judaism of the first century, should become present for us in the future. I think if today’s public, including our Protestant alumni, believe in God but are not willing to go the distance our parents and grandparents did by accepting the bodily resurrection as suggested by the scriptures, then we need to look for a new interpretation. This generation generally finds more faith in science, and scientific understanding does not include the after-three-days literal resuscitated life.
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AuthorI'm Rev. Dr. Pirie Mitchell and I live in Ontario, Canada. Archives
May 2023
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