We preachers get a fair amount of mileage out
of poor old Thomas—we call him “doubting” for one thing—and we find it
inherently funny, somehow, that he felt he had to have proof. We say “maybe he was from Missouri” or “maybe
it needed to stand up in court” or any number of smarmy sayings that malign
Thomas the Twin—for that’s what he’s called in the Bible—that malign him
unreasonably. It should be noted that in
the end, he doesn’t have to actually touch Jesus’ hands and his side,
just seeing him turns out to be enough to make him confess “My Lord and my
God!” But still: Jesus uses the poor guy
for an object lesson: “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to
believe.”
And there’s another thing that I think needs
to be said, or needs to be questioned, and it’s this: “Is he really so
different from the rest of us?” How many
times have we refused to believe something because we haven’t seen it with our
own eyes? Even though Paul Simon wrote
that these are the days of miracles and wonderment, it goes only as far as our
puny special effects departments and computer graphics can set it up. Of course, humans are a superstitious lot, by
and large, but we pick and choose which things to put stock in. People who would put no credence whatsoever
in “step on a crack, break your mother’s back” have no trouble believing in
space aliens or spirit children or angels watching over us from on high.
Pastor and theologian Michael Hardin reports
seeing a bumper sticker which reads “Only in America could God be dead and
Elvis alive.” And that’s true, though
it’s not just in America: we pick and
choose what kind of supernatural stuff to believe in. Certainly the opposite is true as well: a lot of us believe in God—who by definition
is super (above) natural—but pooh-pooh the thought of demons, or miracles. Bishop John Shelby Spong—who somebody once
called “Howard Stern in a collar”—made a tidy extra-curricular living by making
fun of people who believe in demons, and who take the miracles in the Bible
literally. He apparently does not see
the irony in the fact that he believes in one supernatural thing and denies the
existence of another.
Most humans believe in the supernatural to one
extent or another, they just like to pick and choose what things to believe in
and which to call pure-D poppycock. Kind
of like the Romans—who were hardly Pagans: they believed in Gods, all right,
that wasn’t the problem. And one of the
cardinal rules in their Empire was to let the locals worship whatever they
liked, and then to incorporate those local gods into the Roman pantheon—pan
meaning “all” and “theon” means “god,” all gods. The only thing that bothered the Romans was
putting one god over and above others and, especially, pledging allegiance to
that God over the Emperor.
But one thing that they didn’t believe in was
this resurrection thing-a-ma-bob.
Neither did any of the authorities that Paul dubbed the powers
that be, that complex of spiritual, governmental and religious systems that ran
the life of the average Judean. In fact,
they didn’t give the murder of Jesus much thought, other than that killing one
man would save a whole peoples from Rome having to come down on them, it would
quell the building unrest via the well-known mechanism of the scapegoat,
wherein an innocent person or thing or group is sacrificed to mollify a
riled-up people, and so the danger of and uprising would subside. So the powers thought “Cool! the danger is
over, kaput, done-with. The man is dead,
in the ground, over and out, we can go home to our sausage and beer.”
And the disciples—former disciples, or so they
thought—were no better, and actually they were worse: they’d been told by Jesus
himself that he was going to be killed and rise again, and they’d even heard
this incoherent story from Mary about Jesus appearing to her in the form of a
gardener—as if he’d ever take that lowly a position—and they knew that Mary and
Jesus were close, and so they thought she might have been just a little, uh,
how shall we say it? distraught and
it hadn’t even occurred to them that he might actually have risen, it
hadn’t sunk into their pointy little heads, and so they thought it was
over, too, when behold! There he was,
amongst them, and the door had been locked, for goodness sake, but there
he stood, big as life, risen from the grave.
Do you believe in the resurrection? The literal, gods-honest-truth
resurrection? A lot of modern
theologians and religious studies types don’t.
Bart Ehrman at the UNC Chapel Hill doesn’t, he argues that Jesus passed
out and woke up later, and stumbled out of the cave where he’d been
buried. Marcus Borg—who unlike Ehrman is
a believer—puts a slightly more moderate spin on it. He argues that whether or not the
resurrection really happened doesn’t matter, in the end, because the important
thing is that Christ is alive today. He
also asserts—like John Dominic Crossan—that it would hardly be fair for God to
raise only one guy up. What about all
the rest of us?
All of these beliefs represent—to me, at any
rate, your mileage may of course vary—they represent to me a rather amazing
lack of imagination, a critical lack of spark, of curiosity and it plagues
academic theology and biblical studies today.
It can be traced back to the enlightenment, which began our march toward
reason as the only barometer of truth.
The rise of scientific investigation—using a collection of techniques
designed to produce new knowledge through rigorous testing—has led to the
widespread notion that unless something is observable and repeatable, it must not
be true.
Even many of those who believe in God,
especially in theological circles, lean toward the Deist end of things—they
believe in a clockwork world that God has wound up and set a-spinning, they
argue that God—for the sake of justice or something—won’t violate God’s own
rules of the physical universe that God’s own self created, that once God set
them up, it would be somehow unfair or un-God-like to do so. Sort of like changing the rules in the middle
of the game or something. But this—as
well as other arguments—misses the entire point: the resurrection is a
beginning, as scholar Tom Wright puts it, it is “a seed being sown, a tune
being composed which everyone now gets to sing.” God is doing something completely new in the
resurrection of God’s only son, something that is already here, already working
itself out.
Denying the resurrection—as well as other
miracles—denies God’s ongoing work in the world, it in many respects negates
the doctrine of creation, which holds that God creative activity is ever green,
ever new, ever happening. It limits God
to our puny way of understanding, which says that unless we can see it, unless
we can repeat it, it must not ever have happened. And with historical criticism—which I use
daily in my studies of scripture—with historical criticism, we have applied
that limited way of imagining our world to more than just helping us understand
the people who wrote our scriptures, we’ve expunged the God out of them, the
supernatural out of them. They might
just as well be treatises on dog-shows in America as documents about the
wondrous actions of an ineffable Divine.
And here’s another way to look at it. Ask yourself: where would Christianity be
without the resurrection? An itinerant
preacher, the son of a working-class carpenter, a man on the outside of all the
structures of power, is killed to help prevent rioting and possible revolution,
and that is it. The disciples are broken
up, the movement is dead, he’s just one more victim of the powers that be, one
more dead, would-be revolutionary. They
were a dime a dozen in those decades leading up to the Jewish revolt. But something happened in the days following
the cross, something happened that was multiply-attested and witnessed by many
people, and it propelled Christianity eventually onto the world stage. Without the resurrection there would be no
Christianity, no world-wide movement. It
is one big pointer to Jesus’ life, it’s a marker, it calls attention to the
life and death of Jesus Christ. Without
it, he’s just another dead Judean . . . with it, he is savior, prophet, and
king, all rolled into one.
Although in orthodox theology it’s the
crucifixion that atones, the sacrifice that saves, it is the resurrection that
gives it meaning, and points to the changed reality that is upon us. And just what is that changed reality? Why nothing more—or less—than what Paul says,
that death has lost its sting, the grave its victory. The new reality is that human societies are
no longer under the thumb of death and destruction, or at least need not
be. Out of winter comes spring, out of
despair comes hope, out of pain comes comfort.
Or as Jesus put it there in the upper room “Peace be
with you.” That sums it all up nicely:
Christ’s peace is not only a refusal to retaliate with violence, but it
announces the beginning of the end of death’s hold on us all. Out of Christ’s death comes not war, not what
the Powers and principalities would have, retaliation and consolidation of
power, but peace, for peace is life, and violence, war, retribution is
death. Out of Christ’s death comes
victory, out of Christ’s death comes renewal, out of Christ’s death comes
life. Christ is risen. He is risen indeed! Amen.
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