NewCreation

Homily for Easter Day 2022 C

Happy Easter, and welcome, my sisters and brothers, to this the homily for Easter Sunday. I'm going to be preaching to you today on Saint Luke's account of the resurrection. There were various choices that one could have taken — that I could have taken today — but I thought to myself, this is the year in which we are going through Luke's Gospel, so this seems the appropriate year to look at Luke's account of this. And also in the second, third, fourth Sunday of Easter we deal with John's account, so we'll have plenty of time to be looking at John's account as we go through the Easter season. So this year I wanted to concentrate on Luke. But before I do that, I'd like to make a simple point which I first learned at theology school, because it makes, I think, a huge amount of difference to talking about the resurrection. And that is this: that any account of talking about Jesus's resurrection from the dead comes up with a singular problem. And that is that it is a unique event in the history of the world. Nothing before it or after it can be compared to it. It's something for which there are no clear analogies. Accounts of ghosts, accounts of appearances of heroes — none of those are what this is about. This is clearly something — what is being described, and it's described apparently diffidently, but I'm going to suggest not so differently in the different Gospels — something completely unique. And here's the thing: as humans we're lateral thinkers. We pick up context from other things. It's because we know about different sorts of events that we can fill in the details on this particular event and see what makes it different from and the same as others. But Jesus's resurrection is not an event within the world of meaning that we can piece together in any direct way. To give a silly example: here is a fact — the Titanic sank. Now that makes sense to us because we inhabit a world in which we know that the sea is potentially dangerous. We know that since the beginning of human creativity there have been coracles, kayaks, boats, eventually big ships and eventually huge and powerful ocean liners, that icebergs are a threat to shipping, and that this sinking happened. Even if we hadn't been able to find the remains of the Titanic, we would believe that the Titanic had sunk. It fits in within a series of narratives that we know about. We can piece together the story from other things that we know about. What I'd like to suggest is that the resurrection would be much more like — talking about the resurrection would be much more like talking about the Titanic if we had no notion of ships, if there was simply nothing in our mental world, our imagination, our cultural history, that could give us a sense of what a ship might be about. The news "the Titanic has sunk" would be true, but we wouldn't have any access to it. I want to suggest that the Gospel writers are well aware of this. They are well aware that they are describing something that cannot, properly speaking, be described straightforwardly. We have no obvious access to describing it, which is why they are much more subtle than we might think in attempting to bring out what happened — precisely because it was so strange, it was so disconcerting, it was so utterly unlike anything that any of them had ever seen, or indeed could have ever seen before. So having said that, having tried to bring out, if you like, what it is that these people are trying to get their head round, what it is that the Gospel accounts are trying to point out to us, point up to us — let's have a look at how subtly Luke begins his. I'm going to use the first twelve verses of Luke 24, but I'm also going to make reference to the two other moments in which he deals with the risen Lord: which is the Emmaus story, which happens immediately after this, and then after that Jesus's appearance in their midst and the eating of fish. So let's go through this almost word by word. "But on the first day of the week at early dawn" — "deep dawn" is the Greek word, deep dawn is the Greek translation. I can't find any other instance in the Bible of "deep" being referred to dawn. In other words, this is clearly a very special word. Throughout the ways, there are ways of saying "early in the morning" in Greek, but "deep dawn" — "the first day of the week" — suggests the beginning of creation in a rather quick but striking way. And they come to the tomb. Now the tomb in Greek is literally "memorial," because it's from the same verb as "to remember." It's to do with remembering; it's where we get "mnemonic" from. We're going to see how important that is, because an awful lot here is going to do with changing our memories. So they've come to the tomb, to the memorial, bringing the spices that they had prepared. Okay, so they knew what they were coming to. They were coming to a memorial. They were coming to a memorial to anoint someone, to prevent corruption happening. They found the stone rolled away from the memorial, from the grave. Okay, not the first time in Jewish history that a stone has been rolled away before women needing something. That happens in the book of Genesis when the women come and find a well that has a stone over it, and eventually they get Jacob to roll the stone away. So here — The stone is rolled away even without Jacob. Something greater than Jacob doing something helpful for them is here. But when they went in, they did not find a body – or they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus, according to some texts. And while they were perplexed about this, while they were at a loss – quite literally, from which we get "aporia" – when they were completely baffled by this, behold, two men stood amongst them, or stood beside them, in dazzling clothes, in apparel astraptouse. Now these two men are very, very important. You will remember that Jesus was seen at his Transfiguration with two men: that was Moses and Elijah. He was seen at the cross – immediately before this, there were three days before, in between – between two men, one of whom was promised that he would be in paradise that day. Paradise: the garden. In other words, the hint that these were the two seraphim at the holy place, but the holy place was about to become alive as the new creation comes alive. So here we have them, and they are in dazzling clothes. Now it's interesting that at the Transfiguration, Jesus's visage was described as exastraptōn – so the lightning went out from him, that was the Most High – and here it's the one who received the dazzling; the dazzling is reflected. So the dazzlingly reflected seraphim are here in the not-yet-understood-to-be a holy place. And the women were terrified, and they bowed their faces to the ground. So the first reaction to not being able to see the Lord in a tomb, a memorial, is to look to the ground. This is very important that we remember this, because not too long later, at the Ascension, the disciples will see Jesus being taken to heaven, and they look up. And there the two men in white – the same two who are standing beside them, the angels, the seraphim – say: "Don't look up there; he will come to you in the same way as you saw him go," meaning between two criminals. That's where you will see the one who's coming in, breaking through the holy place, breaking through. So the first reaction is to look down; later they will have looked up. And both of those are wrong. Looking down to the ground – the memorial, the grave, the tomb – not the right place to be looking. Just looking up to heaven – not the right place to be looking. "Men said to them: 'Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen.'" So: "Why do you look for the living amongst the dead? Remember how he told you." Now remember this verb, mnēsthēnai, from the same root as the tomb, to remember. In other words, the key thing that you have to be taught is to look elsewhere. He is not dead. You will not find him here. He has been raised. You mustn't look for him amongst the dead. The only place you're going to… "find him" is amongst the living. "Remember what he told you while he was in Galilee, that the Son of man must be handed over to sinners and be crucified and on the third day rise again." In other words, they're being asked to re-signify the tomb as a place where he is not. He can only be found amongst the living. One of the things that cannot be remembered about him is the tomb. It makes no sense. That's part of what this eruption of meaning — that we can't compare with anything else — that's what's going on. And then they remembered his words. In other words, they began the process of resignification. They're still completely baffled by it. Their memories are being altered so as to be able to begin to take on board what this might mean. All of this, I'm suggesting, Luke is very subtly, very deliberately doing. First of all, there's a shift of memory. A little bit later we'll see the Emmaus story. We have a shift in narrative where we have another account of them remembering things and having their memory altered by Jesus interpreting them and giving them the interpretative key for what has happened, and then being recognized just at the last moment. And then the next day we'll have Jesus turning up again, initially unrecognized, and then gradually becoming physically present to them, although he didn't appear as he had appeared to them before, because they weren't able to recognize him instantly. And then he was able to show them physicality. So a huge process has been going on, and Luke shows the steps of it: shifting of memory away from the tomb to the living as part of a narrative, then the narrative getting more filled out so words start to come into play leading to recognition, and then finally physical presence and recognition. In other words, St. Luke is absolutely aware that the construction of a witness to the resurrection is a slow, difficult process in which people have to work through things before they are actually able to see. This is something which confirmation bias studies show. We cannot see things that are not within our ken to know about. It's only much, much later, after a good deal of working out, that we start to see things that were not expected, that are not part of anything we can understand. This is what is understood. The resurrection produced a huge shift of where to look, of how to remember, of ability to talk and ability to perceive presence. All of this was something completely new beginning. And this, I think, is the real shock of the resurrection. It's not, and never was, the happy ending to a story whose outlines we know. It is, on the contrary, the astounding beginning to a story which we can only just begin to imagine and tell, as we enter into the process of becoming the witnesses to what has been from the beginning, and was only deliberately, slowly, with great anguish and suffering, brought into our world by what Jesus went through. Part of what he was doing with his life and his passion was revealing the resurrection, revealing the effervescent deathless creativity of God as something beyond our ken, but as something which we can, with enormous subtlety, difficulty, and through a process of learning, be pressed into becoming witnesses of. I hope that as the Easter season develops we'll be able to look at some more of how this works, this eruption of the beginning into the midst of an enfeebled storytelling capacity that shifts understanding, memory, and storytelling completely. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.