Resurrection from Our Crucifixions

Dateline Monday, March 13th, 1978 
Reed Springs, Missouri 

After praying and chanting for two hours over the freezer that held his mother’s body, evangelist Daniel Rogers admitted Sunday that he had failed to raise his mother from the dead. Many of the congregation wept, moaned, prayed and sang gospel songs as they waited. When he emerged, the evangelist said: “We have tried everything Jesus told us to do, and we don’t know what is wrong. When asked why he tried he said: “Jesus commanded us to preach the gospel, heal the sick and raise the dead.”

I could not help but ask: “What would have been accomplished if the praying had been effective if his 80-year old mother had been raised?” At best she would have lived a few more years, perhaps, and her body wracked with disease and aging would only go through the trauma of dying all over again. 

This to me has no real relation to the Easter story. Indeed, his resurrection was different from the raising of Lazarus, and all the other repeated resurrections, for at least in the witness of the early church. The last thing they could ever imagine was that their Lord would ever die again. As the Apostle Paul would declare in perhaps the first written witness to the resurrection: “He removed the death-dealing sting from death, and now all Christians can shout triumphantly, Death where is thy sting? Grave where is the victory?”

The Easter message most certainly speaks to us as humans, who live all our lives in the expectation of our own death. As I mentioned last week, this Holy Week has had some trauma and special memories for me, as this is the first Easter when I am without my mother. Today as I think of the passing of my mother, I have become aware that because Christ has risen, we have hope beyond death. I have a deeper faith today that my mother is alive with God and with the church triumphant, and my faith reaches to the reality of life beyond the grave has never before. 

In his book, “The Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth,” Willie Marxey tells of the death of Heinrich Rentorff and how he asked his wife to quietly listen to what he had to say. “These last nights I had been thinking over and testing everything we can know and everything we have been told will happen to us when we die. And I am certain of one thing: I shall be safe!”

But this is not really the main thrust of the resurrection. This is a kind of serendipity bonus. The resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth is a here-now resurrection. In our Thursday morning class, we have been studying the gospels, comparatively. When we looked at the resurrection story, it was most exciting to see how the gospel writers each had a different message to proclaim. Matthew sees Jesus coming into a world where religious men had built a cage for God and themselves. They had crowded into the cage, with the hope of seducing God to crawl into the cage with them. 

In fact, they built a temple, which was a super-cage where they could keep God, for all their very own. In fact, they thought they had him caged and Holy of Holies. Once a year on the day of atonement, the high priest would go into the cage and talk with God, the God they had incarcerated. They kept themselves in the cage with pacts and laws that squeezed the spontaneity out of the religion. 

When Jesus began to preach and to teach, they tried to get him into the cage, too. They tried to tease him into being the great Messiah who would throw the Romans out and make them the “in people” in the world. When they saw they could not get him into the cage, they decided they had to kill him. Jesus knew when he went to Jerusalem that he was signing his own death warrant. 

He also knew that if the new community of faith was to be born, he must go to Jerusalem and break the cage open and let religious men out. He did not leave anything to chance. He went right to the Super cage, the temple, to board the lion in his own den. He took a weapon and broke up the perennially crooked Bazaar. Then, he began preaching inflammatory sermons against the leaders of Jerusalem. He made it so hot for them they could not avoid confrontation. 

So, they did what they had to do. They crucified him, then they put him in his ultimate cage, the cage of all cages, the tomb. Matthew even has his temple guard guarding the cage, when the miracle of resurrection took place. There are four very symbolic things that happened during that last week.  

First, at the moment of crucifixion, there is an earthquake and the veil of the temple is torn from top to bottom. That tear began at the top, to show it was God’s doing. God was really breaking out of his cage. God takes away this separation. He is back on the street with his people.

The second big event is resurrection. In resurrection, God blows the lid off the tomb, the cage in which Christ is incarcerated, and Christ is set free to be with the people. 

The third thrilling event told by Matthew is that there were other people raised from the dead at the same time as Jesus. These are symbolically, the resurrection community, the community of the son of the human one, the community of freedom. Add that resurrection day, the community of true humanity is born. Humankind is set free by resurrection to be human. 

Finally, in Matthew, the risen Christ takes the new community, the resurrection community, to a mountain in Galilee. This is the ultimate exodus from Jerusalem, the super-cage. On the mountain in Galilee, Jesus commissions his resurrection people to go into all the world and make disciples of all the people. The cage is broken once-and-for all. All the world can hear the good news of resurrection.  

So, once-and-for all humankind is set free by resurrection to be human. Paul can exclaim: If one be in Christ, he-she is a new creation, the old has passed away, and behold all has become new. 

The gospel writer Luke tells us the story in a different way. Two disciples are going away from Jerusalem in total disillusionment. Their Lord’s been crucified. To make it worse, the grave was found empty on the day after the Sabbath. As they walk and talk, a stranger falls in step with them. For a while he remained silent. Then, he asked questions that seemed to show astounding ignorance. Finally, he begins to show an astonishing knowledge of everything, so much so that when they come to their house, they invite him in. 

Then he takes the bread and blesses it and breaks it. Suddenly, they recognized him in the breaking of the bread. Jesus is sacramentally present with them. They to go back to Jerusalem to tell the good news to all the rest. 

John the gospel writer tells that Jesus appeared by the lake where the disciples are fishing. Christ calls them as he did before, from their nets. He restores Peter at the meal, a sort of sacramental restoration. Then, he suggests Peter too will be crucified. In other words, The Church is now his body. He is Resurrected in the church. They now will be the resurrection people in the world. 

Now, what does the Easter story have to say to us? Perhaps, first-of-all, it has a personal message to all of us who are caught in the cage. The cage is the place where we are dead ended, where crucifixions take place. Perhaps we’re all encased in this casket of life that has become sheer boredom. The resurrected Christ wants to come into our lives and blow the lid of our tomb and set us free to be resurrection people. 

Martin Luther King exemplified this king of freedom in his last speech in Memphis the night before he was shot. He said 

“Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. And I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”

He was now a resurrection person. No cage could hold him any longer. No grave had any fear for him. Symbolically, the day after his burial, his followers led the poor people’s March on Washington. And in the grass and mud on the front of the Capital, they built their city of tarpaper houses and tents. And they invited the world to join them in what they called Resurrection City. 

Many people laughed. There was dissension in the group, and it looked like a fiasco. But with the television cameras trained on them, they did spell out to the world that they were resurrection people, and no crucifixion by an assassin’s bullet what could kill their dream. They were shouting out to the world for all to hear, there was hope in the ghettos of the world, for Christ is alive—our Martin is alive—and his dreams—Christ’s dreams for the world—can never be thwarted. 

So, this is the resurrection day for us. Behind me is a white shroud on a cross that says, “Cross, the crucifixion has been undone by resurrection.” From this setting, Christ calls you and me to follow him out of our tombs and out of cages. He takes us to the mountaintop as in the days of old and he says: “You are my resurrection people. Go out into the world and proclaim resurrection hope in the ghettos of our cities, where there is hunger and there are naked and imprisoned people. 

Christ is risen, he is alive. We can be alive today. Come breathe in the fresh air of the resurrection life, and may we be set free to be resurrection people in the world.