“What are we waiting for? And what are we going to do about it in the meantime?”
These two questions ground N.T. Wright’s powerful book “Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church.” He goes on to write that most people, including many Christians, don’t know what the ultimate Christian hope really is.
“As long as we see Christian hope in terms of ‘going to heaven,’ of a salvation that is essentially away from this world, the two questions are bound to appear as unrelated … But if Christian hope is for God’s new creation, for ‘new heavens and new earth,’ and if that hope has already come to life in Jesus of Nazareth, then there is every reason to join the two questions together” (pp. vii, 5).
The Scriptures appointed for Easter Day provide a classic formulation of the basis of Christian hope. Peter’s preaching in the house of the centurion Cornelius (Acts 10:34-43) recounted in the first reading powerfully illustrates one of the ways in which the early Church professed its faith and hope in the resurrection, the so-called “kerygma.” Taken from the Greek verb for “to cry or proclaim as a herald,” kerygma has come to mean the irreducible essence of Christian belief: that the Age of Fulfillment (i.e., the Kingdom/Reign of God) has dawned in the life, ministry, deeds, death and resurrection of Jesus, that we are living in the period of the unfolding of this Age, and that we are to be witnesses-in-action to this Age until Christ brings an end to history (understood not only as concluding time but revealing time’s purpose).
The Gospel appointed for Easter Day (Jn 20:1-9) illustrates another way in which the New Testament presents Jesus’ resurrection, a so-called “empty tomb” narrative. In such a story, people visit Jesus’ gravesite expecting to find his decomposing corpse, but do not find any bodily remains. Notice that such a story does not compel belief in the resurrection (e.g., people may have identified the wrong gravesite; Jesus’ followers might have moved his body in order to honor it; Jesus may have been drugged, giving the appearance of having died, but revived and left the tomb under his own power, etc.) but provides a “pre-condition” for belief in the resurrection of Jesus. Today’s Gospel recounts three witnesses — Mary of Magdala first and then Simon Peter and the Beloved Disciple, John, upon her urging — finding no bodily presence of Jesus in the tomb, but only burial cloths.
The third way in which the New Testament narrates Jesus’ resurrection is by means of “appearance stories” in which witnesses encounter Jesus alive after his crucifixion. It is significant that all three of the witnesses to the empty tomb in John’s Gospel also have direct encounters with the risen Lord in which they report being with the same Jesus they had known in bodily form throughout his ministry, but with that bodily form transformed “into glory” (e.g., one still bearing the wounds of the crucifixion but alive and able to eat earthly food; one whose body could pass through walls, etc.).
Each of the suggested second readings (Col 3:1-4 or 1 Cor 5:6b-8) derive their authority from the “appearance story” recounted by Paul (Acts 9, 22; 1 Cor 15; 2 Cor 12; Gal 1) and exhort those believing in Christ to live in the “between times” through worship and mission.
The challenge of Eastertide is to spend the Fifty Days of Unbounded Rejoicing reveling in the implications of the Resurrection for our lives. Rather than thinking of Easter as a purely past event (the vindication of a dead martyr), or a purely present event (the joy of being undeservedly and radically forgiven), we might want to consider how the resurrection of Jesus presents God’s intention for our future, revealed in the present, so that we might revise our understanding of the past.
As Gerhard Lohfink writes in “Is This All There Is? On Resurrection and Eternal Life”: “(I)n Jesus, God began something that affects everything … (P)recisely because the Easter event in Jesus … was experienced not as rapture nor as the reception of a martyr into heaven nor as exaltation but as resurrection from the dead, it is clear that the resurrection of all the dead, the return home and transformation of the world, God’s new creation that is the goal of all history — all that has ‘already’ begun in Jesus’ resurrection.” (p. 123)
Though retired as an artist in residence at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Father Joncas continues to celebrate the sacraments in various worshiping communities in the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, teaches in person or online, and continues to write articles and music.
Sunday, April 9
Easter Sunday
The Resurrection of the Lord
