We Are The Resurrection
Resurrection Sunday 2024
Easter Blessing by David Whyte, written in response to John O’donohue’s easter reading
The blessing of the morning light to you,
may it find you even in your invisible
appearances, may you be seen to have risen
from some other place you know and have known
in the darkness and that that carries all you need.
May you see what is hidden in you
as a place of hospitality and shadowed shelter,
may that hidden darkness be your gift to give,
may you hold that shadow to the light
and the silence of that shelter to the word of the light,
may you join all of your previous disappearances
with this new appearance, this new morning,
this being seen again, new and newly alive.
On this Easter morning, let us look again at the lives we have been so generously given and let us let fall away the useless baggage that we carry -- old pains, old habits, old ways of seeing and feeling -- and let us have the courage to begin again. Life is very short, and we are no sooner here than it is time to depart again, and we should use to the full the time that we still have. We don't realize all the good we can do. A kind, encouraging word or helping hand can bring many a person through dark valleys in their lives. We weren't put here to make money or to acquire status or reputation. We were sent here to search for the light of Easter in our hearts, and when we find it we are meant to give it away generously. The dawn that is rising this Easter morning is a gift to our hearts and we are meant to celebrate it and to carry away from this holy, ancient place the gifts of healing and light and the courage of a new beginning.
—John O’Donohue
Easter Reflection, Ryan Pryor
Where we've been...
During the season of Lent, our conversations have revolved around John Dominic Crossan’s perspectives on the significance of Jesus within his religious and cultural context of Roman occupation and its "peace by violent victory.” By contrast, we’ve come to grapple with Jesus’ notion of announcing "good news" of God's "peace by distributive justice” as nonviolent opposition to Roman rule. In this, Jesus’ life and ministry were dedicated to the collective nonviolent liberation of the poor and oppressed. So, how are we to find our lives today in relation to this call? As Christians, we live by participation in this vision, which is the liberating movement of God through human and cosmic evolution, challenging violence and injustice everywhere. It’s within this framework that we can ask, “What is the significance of Resurrection?” and “What is the hope of Easter?” As we’ll explore, most contemporary Christianity displaces resurrection for ascension and hope for wishful thinking. Resurrection has nothing to do with springtime, renewal, or cheap religious validation but with God's defiant participation with us in the mysterious cosmic and human evolution of nonviolence for lasting peace.
What Easter isn't...or what the West gets wrong.
It may surprise us, as Crossan points out, that there is no direct account of the resurrection in the Gospels. It's not there. Not just in Mark, who leaves us with only an empty tomb and fear. The moment is not in any of the gospels. All we have are consequences or accounts of what happened post-resurrection, full of mysterious appearances and an unrecognizable Jesus. So, why don’t any of the Gospels describe the moment of resurrection, like the depictions of Jesus' baptism or transfiguration? Like parables, what the gospels and earliest communities of Christians are pointing toward is the radical significance of the resurrection as a metaphor because metaphors have the power to reform reality. Christian history had to fill in the blanks by imagining scenes of resurrection through art, and in these, we're able to witness the theological evolution and divergence between Eastern and Western Christianity's traditions of the meaning of Christ’s resurrection. Since there's no direct account of what happened during the resurrection moment, artists render theological meaning using images and symbols that first emerged in the 5th century of depictions of Jesus’ symbolic body, then an awakened body, then an emerging body, and finally an ascending body around the 15th century. Where Western Christianity’s renderings problematically impact the theological assumptions most of us inherited is that the resurrection is an individual act. Crossan points out in his final lecture that the word used for resurrection simply means "to go up." This ascension is a familiar sentiment because, in the historical context, the gods would also ascend into heaven as a sign of their ultimate power and victory. Ascending is typical for the gods. Ok, you might be asking, Ryan, so what’s the big deal with a floating Jesus? Why should we even care? As you know, most churches today will celebrate Easter as Jesus' victory over death, a singular (and often literal) event by an individual, as proof for certain theological claims around salvation, divinity, sin, death, and faith in an effort to verify what it means to be a Christian as an exclusive category. This view is connected to the ascension narrative of singular power and victory and hope as wish fulfillment. Our Western Christian view overlooks the context of Jesus' radical life and social teachings and his non-violent call for distributive justice for which he was crucified. The West’s images and often our theologies, as a result, lack continuity with Jesus of the Gospels and Paul’s proclamation of resurrection hope in favor of an individual ascension, symbolic of supremacy and divinity for an individual who committed his life not to power or religious exclusivity but to collective human freedom.
What Easter is...or what the East gets right.
As I’ve mentioned in years past, contemporary Christians celebrate their Super Bowl Jesus with a kind of optimistic wishful thinking in which God does the saving. However, as Crossan points out, Jesus’ life, death, and vision for a “divine rule of distributive justice” are not about a God doing the saving for us but God doing the saving with us. This theological shift is key to not only a better understanding of the Gospels and Paul’s notions of the resurrection but also the Eastern Church’s metaphor for the resurrection. Here, we confront the divergence between the individual resurrection tradition and the universal resurrection tradition, which actually used imagery from Roman coins of Ceasar trampling down, raising up, and leading out the people. The Eastern Church adopts this imagery and doesn’t depict an emerging or ascended individual Christ, but a crucified Jesus trampling down death and with both hands raising up and leading out Adam and Eve from the grave. This metaphor symbolizes that the resurrection is cosmic and universal, not individual. The Eastern metaphor causes us to grapple with the fact that the unjust tombs are to be emptied and that God is raising up all of humanity into the fullness of life. We still live in a world of unjust death at the hands of Empires and Corporations legally engaging in violence against humanity and the planet. However, the theological significance of the resurrection is that Christ is still cosmically engaged in the trampling down and raising us up from unjust violence through nonviolent cosmic liberation. As a species, we have to choose what metaphors and images are going to shape our lives and the future of our planet. We are all choosing to live by metaphors. Do they lead us to become a more loving and peaceful people? Do they allow us to continue to exploit the people and planet for profit?
Where we're going...
Crossan says, “Metaphors become reality if we live them." To believe in the resurrection is to participate in it. To participate in the resurrection is to embody Christ's love and liberation through confronting systems of violence that create unjust tombs. Like the crucified Christ, we are invited to participate in the divine proclamation of the liberating act of emptying the tombs. Resurrection hope is the participation in justice for a world free from the violence that necessitates unjust tombs. Hope is the catalyst for social change. Hope is not optimism, wishful thinking, or waiting on God to do the saving. Hope is transformative action in communities of mutual care and solidarity where we envision an alternative future of peace and justice.
I’ve always been intrigued by the image of the empty tomb as an unlikely symbol of hope—freedom into the boundless mystery of what’s on the other side and beyond. As we’ve explored, there’s no mention of a moment, especially in Mark and Q, only the aftermath of death and resurrection. In the emptiness of a tomb, there is a dreadfully hopeful reverberation of life. Hope against hope, as John Caputo would say. Life—defiant in the face of violence and the unknown. From the empty tomb, there is the possibility for a newness in the embrace of heartache and tragedy.
Here, on Resurrection Sunday, God is as immanent as ever amid the suffering and violence of our times. Everything is theological because the types of stories we tell about ourselves, each other, and the world will either create a future that continues to be marked by Empires inflicting environmental and human catastrophe or one characterized by a boundless inclusion vision of peace through justice, which is another way of saying that everything matters. Everything matters because we are mysteriously called by love to be engaged with the ongoing injustice, violence, and grief by actively participating in peace work for God's vision of peace and reconciliation. This is something like hope over wishful thinking, life over death. This is resurrection. We are the resurrection.
Questions:
What are your impressions of the diverging metaphors of resurrection? What images or notions were given to you?
How might understanding the historical Jesus cause us to “believe” in the resurrection even more? What does “we are the resurrection” mean to you?
What does the image of the empty tomb mean to you?
What is the hope of resurrection for you? How is it different than optimism?
Quote:
“We are not optimists; we do not present a lovely vision of the world which everyone is expected to fall in love with.
We simply have, wherever we are, some small local task to do on the side of justice for the poor.” —Hebert McCabe
Practice:
Watch:
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