Easter – When We Most Need a Resurrection

Easter – When We Most Need a Resurrection!

This year in North America, Easter feels different. This year, there will no sunrise services, trumpets, lilies, bonnets, new suits and dresses. There will no joyful hugs and triumphant hymns in our sanctuary. We have been shaken out of our North American complacency. Our assumptions and illusions have been dashed by the realities of the Coronavirus. No willful pastor can defeat Coronavirus by holding Easter services. We don’t expect the virus to go away miraculously. The stone of the virus is in our way, and it appears that it will roll away on its own terms and not ours. All the bloviations of political leaders and defiant pastors cannot dislodge the stone or produce the miracle we might hope for.

We need a miracle and a resurrection, but it will not come from the outside. It will come from the Easter event surfacing in our own lives and congregations, shaped the realities of history and nature.
Still, there is no getting around the Easter miracles if you belong to the Jesus movement. Jesus’ first followers were transformed by their encounters with the Risen Christ. Once fearful, they became courageous; once uncertain, they became confident that Jesus was unique, the savior of humankind, victorious over sickness, sin, and death. The power of the resurrection to transform the lives of Jesus’ first followers can’t be denied by any honest observer. For two thousand years, the amazing power of Jesus’ resurrection has continued to bring healing and wholeness – indeed new birth – to peoples’ lives. Stones have been rolled away, and way has been made where we perceived no path forward.

Moreover, within span of some of their lifetimes or the lifetimes of their closest confidants, the written gospels emerged and with them the clear but amazing affirmation that Christ is alive and that both cross and resurrection are central to the good news of our healing and salvation. Something dramatic happened that cannot be reduced to a tall tale, repetition of myths of death and rebirth, or a rotting corpse. Something mysterious and amazing occurred that can’t be confined by a literalist understanding of the biblical stories. As the gospel of John proclaims, there is always more to Jesus than our own fabrications or the written text: his life, death, and resurrection will always transcend and sometimes transform the rational mind, opening the mind to a deeper rationalism in which all is wonder and miracle. “Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written so that you may come to that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.”(John 20:30)

The resurrection will always remain a mystery, hidden from rationalists, Enlightenment-thinkers, and literalists. It is always more than we can ask or imagine. Some try to domesticate the Easter message by positing the creation of fanciful stories, recycled death-rebirth myths, trying to locate Jesus’ tomb and the corpse buried within, or suggesting that dogs ate the bones. The gospels even suggest that a rumor arose that Jesus’ corpse had been stolen by his followers. But the gospels make plain that a stolen body can’t inspire a spiritual revolution. Others try to control the story by literalizing flesh and bone and questioning the piety of those who provide imaginative visions of the resurrection or seek to discern the events beneath the texts. The quest for the resurrected Jesus is often an act of faith.

Still, we can’t separate the pre-Easter or post-Easter Christ, or the Christ of history and the Christ of faith: they are one holistic reality that transformed cells and souls in the first century and continues to do so today. The power of each energizes the power of the other.
We can never fully encompass Jesus’ resurrection, but we can find a clue in C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia. As the tale goes, in order to save Edmund, the lion-savior Aslan must sacrifice his own life. The White Witch, however, is unaware of the laws of Deeper Magic, which promise resurrection to the innocent victim. Aslan rises and the White Witch and her minions are defeated. The Deeper Magic embedded in the creation of the universe is mysterious, but it is part of the larger causal interdependence of the universe; in fact, it may be its animating energy. The resurrection of Aslan does not circumvent the laws of nature but occurs as a result of deeper laws of nature. This opens the door to seeing resurrection as part of God’s amazing universe and affirming that certain moments can be so closely aligned to God’s vision that unexpected and transformative energies can be released, radically changing cells and souls.

In observing a recent rendition of “Cosmos,” featuring Neil DeGrasse Tyson, with my grandchildren, I am left not only with a sense of the randomness but also a sense of wonder that continues to give birth and energize our universe. In the evolution of galaxies, solar systems, planets, and earth species, amazing things occur that go far beyond – while including -randomness and accident. To quote Abraham Joshua Heschel, “radical amazement” is the appropriate response to the universe and our own microcosmic lives.

I will not try to explain resurrection, nor will try to explain it. However, it is clear to me that throughout his ministry Jesus tapped into deeper energies to promote the transformation of bodies, minds, and spirits. The energy of the universe flowed through Jesus, in response to a woman’s faith, immediately curing her of a hemorrhage. A Samaritan woman’s child is healed from a distance of a mysterious disease through the interplay of her faith and Jesus’ intentionality. Waves are calmed as a result of Jesus’ spiritual powers. All these amazing events can be understood in terms of the interdependent and energetic nature of the universe, described by cosmology, physics, and biology. The congruence of faith and science hardly minimizes our wonder but places our wonder in the context of an entirely wonderful universe, of which we are mostly oblivious.

For those of us who need a miracle, the miracle is always with us. There is a deeper naturalism, dynamic, open-ended, many-faceted, and containing random events. But even random events are touched by a gentle providence that moves through the universe, giving direction and life to personal, communal, planetary, and cosmic evolutions. Resurrection does not defy the causal relatedness of life or the dynamic laws of nature but reflects the deeper energetic nature of reality which is always amazing and revelatory of more than we can ask or imagine.

Today, our prayers and hymn may not eradicate the Coronavirus, but they give us power and courage to “yes” to life, to reach out to the vulnerable, to plan for a new future – with radical changes in our national and global priorities – beyond the pandemic. And, this very action may enhance our immune systems, give strength to help others in their anxieties, and nurture hope in a time of pandemic. That may be miracle enough. More a miracle than those faithless pastors who restrict God’s resurrection to their places of worship.

What, then, happened on Easter morning? While we may never know for sure and should never domesticate such amazing moments, let me suggest that Jesus’ resurrected body incarnated the deeper laws of the universe that were already manifest in his ministry of healing and hospitality. Perhaps, Jesus’ resurrection body became a highly charged quantum body, able to move from one place to another in a blink of an eye and move through dense material bodies, such as walls, as if they were air. While we can’t literalize the gospel stories, the recognition that Jesus was recognized by his followers and known by his wounds points to a continuity of his post- resurrection body with his pre-resurrection body. Such events are possible in a lively, dynamic universe, and are surely no more marvelous than invoking the big bang as the first moment of our universe. How can one not be amazed to recognize that from a microcosmic energy event a universe of a trillion, and counting, galaxies emerged? All is natural, yet all amazing, mysterious, and beyond our imaginations.

This Easter, open to possibility, awaken to wonder, and look for hints of Jesus’ resurrection in your own cells, your spirit, and the world around. Look for miracles and as Wendell Berry counsels practice resurrection in pandemic. Beyond the fanfare of megachurch preachers, fearful prognostications, and bloviating of political leaders, you will discover that Christ is Risen in your life – today!

+++
Bruce Epperly is a Cape Cod pastor, professor, and author of over fifty books, including FAITH IN A TIME OF PANDEMIC and GOD ON LINE: A MYSTIC’S GUIDE TO THE INTERNET