I donÂ’t know if it happened this way, but I know this Easter story is true Â….
Fr Martin Low, ofm
I remember as a child, Easter was second only to Christmas among the magic days of the year where I received Easter eggs and chocolates. I heard the Easter stories as literally true, by which I mean historically factual. I assumed that, if I had been with the women at the tomb, I would have seen that it was empty. I took for granted that whatever the significant authorities in my life tell me to be true is indeed true. Thus I heard the Easter stories as reporting publicly observable events which anybody who was there would have seen. I did not require faith for I had no reason to think otherwise.
Then came my teenage years, Easter stories were just an event like any other event. Jesus died on Good Friday and resurrected on Easter Sunday. ThatÂ’s it. Attend Mass and service in Church. Not much of a significance at all.
But over the course of my life, this has changed, especially as I entered Religious Life, studying theology. I am more critical in my thinking at hearing the Easter stories. I hear them once again as true stories, but I do not think their truth depends on their historical factuality. More specifically, I see Easter as true, even though I am skeptical that the tomb was empty. An empty tomb does not mean that Jesus is resurrected. I discovered that the story of the empty tomb is relatively late, found for the first time in MarkÂ’s gospel around the year 70.
In contrast, the earliest references to appearances of the risen Christ treated them as visions. “I have seen the Lord, “ Paul writes in 1 Cor 9:1, referring to his vision on the Damascus Road which happened at least a few years after the death of Jesus. Moreover, in 1 Cor 15, Paul includes himself in the list of people to whom the risen Christ appeared, suggesting that he saw their experience as similar to his visionary experience. And in the 2nd half of that chapter, he explicitly denies that the resurrected body is a physical body. Consistent with this is the important distinction between resuscitation and resurrection. Resuscitation means resumption of physical existence and resurrection means entry into a different kind of existence. Resurrection is not resuscitation.
Being critical can destroy a literal understanding of the Easter stories. It suggests that Easter is not about the image of a watery fluid body of Jesus appearing to his followers for forty days after his death and then ascending into heaven, as the chronology in the first chapter of Acts put it. For me, this stage lasted a long time, from my mid teens to mid twenties. During that time, I was aware that there was a stage beyond. I had no idea what to make of the Easter stories.
But now, I see the Easter stories as true stories, even as I am convinced that they are not factually, accurate reports. I donÂ’t know if it happened this way, but I know this story is true. The Emmaus Road story in Lk 24 is a classic illustration. Two followers of Jesus journey and converse with the risen Christ for several hours without recognising him, then realise who he is in the breaking of the bread, and then he vanishes from their sight. One needs only to think about these details to realise that the story does not report the kinds of events that could have been videotaped. Rather, the story affirms that the risen Christ journeys with us whether we know it or not.
So what is the truth of Easter? Two claims seem central to me. First, Jesus is a figure of the present, not just the past. Jesus continued to be experienced by his followers after his death, though in a radically new way. Sometimes he was experienced in visions, sometimes as an abiding presence. The truth of Easter is grounded in the continuing experience of Jesus, not in what did or didnÂ’t happen on a particular day in the past.
The second claim is that Easter affirms that Jesus is Lord. Easter is God’s yes to Jesus - the affirmation that he is the decisive disclosure of what God is like, and of the life which is full of God. He is, in the words of Colossians 1:15, “the image of the invisible God.”
Happy Easter!
Bulletin of 29th/30th April 06