Identities that no longer hold us in the way they once did

Here's the sermon that I shared at St Andrew's Wickford this morning:

When Jesus appeared to his disciples following his resurrection, he was both like he was before his death and different. On the day of his resurrection itself, Jesus appeared to the disciples at various times and places when it was physical impossible to be at so many different places in one day. His glorified body didn’t seem to have the same limitations his earthly body possessed before his resurrection. We are told that he was able to appear and disappear, travel great distances, and pass through the wall or the locked door of a house. As a result, St Paul writes about an earthly body and a resurrection body with continuities and differences between the two.

Resurrection, it seems, is not simply a continuation of our current experience but a new dimension of living. Jurgen Moltmann reflects this idea when he says, the “resurrection of Christ does not mean a new possibility within the world and its history, but a new possibility altogether for the world, for existence, and for history.” Jesus gave us a hint of this, too, is his response to the Sadducees that we read about in today’s Gospel reading (Mark 12.18-27). Those who are resurrected, Jesus says, neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven.

We don’t know what it is like to inhabit a resurrected body or live a resurrected life, as the Bible just gives the sense that there are similarities and differences, continuities and changes. As a result, it is unhelpful to speculate about that future. So, what can we say about the nature of relationship in eternity on the basis of Jesus’ response to the Sadducees?

In following Jesus, we follow someone who posed some very significant challenges to our understanding of the place of family. "The obligation to bury one’s father was regarded by many Jews of Jesus’ time as the most holy and binding duty of a son; but Jesus says that that is secondary to the call to follow him and announce God’s kingdom" (Luke 9. 51 - 62). This call cuts across family life and our traditional understandings of family.

In Matthew 12, when Jesus was told that his mother and brothers were nearby, we read that he said: "Who is my mother? Who are my brothers? … Whoever does what my Father in heaven wants is my brother, my sister, and my mother." Then in Matthew 10 we read of Jesus saying: "Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the world. No, I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. I came to set sons against their fathers, daughters against their mothers, daughters-in-law against their mothers-in-law; your worst enemies will be the members of your own family."

Tom Wright notes in his commentary on this passage that Jesus is quoting from the prophet Micah (Micah 7.6) who predicts the terrible divisions that will always occur when God does a new thing. "Jesus came to bring and establish the new way of being God’s people, and not surprisingly those who were quite happy with the old one, thank you very much, didn’t like it being disturbed." "He didn’t want to bring division within households for the sake of it," Wright says, but "he knew that, if people followed his way, division was bound to follow."

Jesus, himself, did not marry and had no physical offspring. As we have seen, his emphasis was on his followers as his family, rather than his blood and adoptive relatives. His death was for the entire family of God - all people everywhere – and, as we are noting today, he taught that after the resurrection people will neither marry or be given in marriage.

Through his resurrection, Jesus has gone ahead of us in signing and establishing the Kingdom of God and he does so as the forerunner for ourselves. He was experiencing what we will later experience ourselves. The Kingdom of God, of which the resurrection is the first fruits, will be a place of equality and inclusion. In Jesus’ ministry, as Peter Rollins has pointed out, "we find a multitude of references to one who challenged the divisions that were seen as sacred, divisions between Jew and Gentile, male and female, and slave and free. Jesus spoke to tax collectors, engaged with Samaritans and treated women as equals in a world where these were outrageous acts." Jesus, for example, refused to perpetuate the divisions between Jews and Samaritans when his own disciples want to see revenge enacted on a Samaritan village for rejecting them.

More than this, though, in his incarnation we are presented with a picture of God, in Jesus, being progressively stripped of all his prior identity as God’s Son. Rollins writes that, "This is called kenosis and describes the act of self-emptying. This is most vividly expressed in the crucifixion, where we see Christ occupying the place of the complete outsider, embracing the life of one who is excluded from the political system, the religious community, and the cultural network."

To do this is to cut through the divisions which exist in society because of our different identities. This is what Jesus meant when he said he brought a sword into the world. He cut into "the very heart of all tribal allegiances, bringing unity to what was previously divided":

"There is no change biologically (male or female), religiously (Jew or Greek) or politically (slave or free). Yet nothing remains the same, for these identities are now drained of their operative power and no longer hold us in the way that they once did. These identities no longer need to separate us from each other."

Our "concrete identity continues to exist, but it is now held differently and does not dictate the scope and limitations of one’s being.” As a result, St Paul suggests “We are no longer to act as though we are defined by the things we own, the things that happen to us, or the relationships we have. While these continue to be important, we must hold them in a way that ensures they do not have an inescapable grasp upon us.” “Paul understands this radical cut as emanating directly from one’s identity with Christ, for Paul understands participation in the life of Christ as involving the loss of power that our various tribal identities once held for us."

At the Eucharist we commemorate the act in which Jesus let go of every identity by which he was known, becoming nothing, in order that we might come into a new life within the family or kingdom of God where all are one and where there is no Jew or Greek, no slave or free, no male or female.

Jesus’ resurrection is the first fruits of a new way of being human – a way of being human that ultimately knows no death, no grief, no crying, no pain, no inequality and no exclusion. Jesus’ resurrection is the first fruits of the healing and renewal of human beings, human society and the entire world. That is the meaning of the resurrection. That is where we, and our world, can be heading, if we follow in the footsteps of Jesus. That is what Jesus is indicating to us when he taught that after the resurrection people will neither marry or be given in marriage.

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Anawim - Give Us The Peace.

A changing understanding of God’s revelation

Here's the reflection that I shared this morning at St Andrew's Wickford:

This is a story (Mark 12.18-27) about interpretation of scripture, which is possibly as important for our understanding for what it reveals about ways of interpreting scripture, as for what it says about resurrection.

The Biblical scholar Tom Wright has noted that: ‘Resurrection was a late arrival on the scene in classic biblical writing … Much of the Hebrew Bible assumes that the dead are in Sheol …“The dead do not praise the Lord, nor do any that go down into silence” (Psalm 115:17). Clear statements of resurrection are extremely rare. Daniel 12 is the most blatant, and remembered as such for centuries afterwards: “Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt” (Daniel 12:2). Daniel is, however, the latest book of the Hebrew Bible.’

In Jesus’ day: ‘There was within Judaism a considerable spectrum of belief and speculation about what happened to dead people in general, and to dead Jews in particular. At one end were the Sadducees, who seem to have denied any doctrine of post-mortem existence (Mark 12:18; Josephus, War 2:165). At the other were the Pharisees, who affirmed a future embodied existence, and who seem to have at least begun to develop theories about how people continued to exist in the timelag between physical death and physical resurrection. And there are further options. Some writings speak of souls in disembodied bliss, some speculate about souls as angelic or astral beings, and so forth.‘

‘The Sadducees rejected the Oral Law as proposed by the Pharisees’ and ‘saw the written Torah as the sole source of divine authority.’ They insisted that the traditions did not contain this newfangled doctrine and that resurrection was not taught in the Torah itself. Their question to Jesus was based on the literal application of a commandment from the Torah and was ‘designed to make belief in a resurrection look foolish by proposing a dilemma it might entail.’ (Timothy J. Geddert, Mark, Herald Press)

In his reply to the Sadducees’ question Jesus goes back to the Torah itself (the five books of Moses) which were the only ones the very conservative Sadducees regarded as really authoritative, and stated that ‘God defines himself there in terms of his relationship to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.’ The underlying point was that ‘God would not define himself in relationship to people who were now non-existent.’ Therefore, Jesus implies or leaves unstated the remaining move in the argument that ‘if they are alive this must be because God will in fact raise them from the dead.’

Jesus therefore disagrees with a literal argument about scripture based on the earliest texts and affirms an emerging doctrine which only appears clearly in the last book of the Hebrew Bible. What he is affirming is an evolving revelation from God in scripture which develops or adds to or changes earlier interpretations and understandings.

The extent to which God’s revelation is fixed or emerging is one which continues to be debated within the Church and is a key ground on which debates about women’s ordination and human sexuality take place. What rarely seems to feature in these debates are the approaches to interpretation of scripture used by Jesus, the disciples and the Early Church, which are often very different from standard ways of interpreting scripture used today, particularly those which attempt to fix understandings of scripture for all time through literal interpretations. Here Jesus clearly teaches a later, newer doctrine which does not appear in the Torah and was not part of early Judaism. This emerging understanding, however, becomes central to Jesus’ mission and to Christian belief as Jesus’ resurrection and the teachings of the Early Church based on it are entirely new in the history of Judaism.

Tom Wright says: ‘The early Christian hope for bodily resurrection is clearly Jewish in origin, there being no possible pagan antecedent. Here, however, there is no spectrum of opinion: Earliest Christianity simply believed in resurrection, that is, the overcoming of death by the justice bringing power of the creator God … This is a radical mutation from within Jewish belief.’

Our core hope as Christians derives from a changing understanding of God’s revelation which Jesus taught and experienced. The literal interpretations of the Sadducees meant that they could not see or receive the new thing that God was doing in their midst. May God keep us open to receive the new things he is doing in our world through his Holy Spirit and prevent us from rejecting the unexpected moves of his Spirit because our rigidity in our own understandings of scripture. Amen.

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Paul Simon - Seven Psalms.

A developing understanding of resurrection

Here is my sermon from Wednesday's Eucharist at St Martin-in-the-Fields:

This is a story about interpretation of scripture (Mark 12. 18-27), which is possibly as important for our understanding for what it reveals about ways of interpreting scripture, as for what it says about resurrection.

The Biblical scholar Tom Wright has noted that: ‘Resurrection was a late arrival on the scene in classic biblical writing … Much of the Hebrew Bible assumes that the dead are in Sheol …“The dead do not praise the Lord, nor do any that go down into silence” (Psalm 115:17). Clear statements of resurrection are extremely rare. Daniel 12 is the most blatant, and remembered as such for centuries afterwards: “Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt” (Daniel 12:2). Daniel is, however, the latest book of the Hebrew Bible.’

In Jesus’ day: ‘There was within Judaism a considerable spectrum of belief and speculation about what happened to dead people in general, and to dead Jews in particular. At one end were the Sadducees, who seem to have denied any doctrine of post-mortem existence (Mark 12:18; Josephus, War 2:165). At the other were the Pharisees, who affirmed a future embodied existence, and who seem to have at least begun to develop theories about how people continued to exist in the timelag between physical death and physical resurrection. And there are further options. Some writings speak of souls in disembodied bliss, some speculate about souls as angelic or astral beings, and so forth.‘

‘The Sadducees rejected the Oral Law as proposed by the Pharisees’ and ‘saw the written Torah as the sole source of divine authority.’ They insisted that the traditions did not contain this newfangled doctrine and that resurrection was not taught in the Torah itself. Their question to Jesus was based on the literal application of a commandment from the Torah and was ‘designed to make belief in a resurrection look foolish by proposing a dilemma it might entail.’ (Timothy J. Geddert, Mark, Herald Press)

In his reply to the Sadducees’ question Jesus goes back to the Torah itself (the five books of Moses) which were the only ones the very conservative Sadducees regarded as really authoritative, and stated that ‘God defines himself there in terms of his relationship to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.’ The underlying point was that ‘God would not define himself in relationship to people who were now non-existent.’ Therefore, Jesus implies or leaves unstated the remaining move in the argument that ‘if they are alive this must be because God will in fact raise them from the dead.’

Jesus therefore disagrees with a literal argument about scripture based on the earliest texts and affirms an emerging doctrine which only appears clearly in the last book of the Hebrew Bible. What he is affirming is an evolving revelation from God in scripture which develops or adds to or changes earlier interpretations and understandings.

The extent to which God’s revelation is fixed or emerging is one which continues to be debated within the Church and is a key ground on which debates about women’s ordination and human sexuality take place. What rarely seems to feature in these debates are the approaches to interpretation of scripture used by Jesus, the disciples and the Early Church, which are often very different from standard ways of interpreting scripture used today, particularly those which attempt to fix understandings of scripture for all time through literal interpretations. Here Jesus clearly teaches a later, newer doctrine which does not appear in the Torah and was not part of early Judaism. This emerging understanding, however, becomes central to Jesus’ mission and to Christian belief as Jesus’ resurrection and the teachings of the Early Church based on it are entirely new in the history of Judaism.

Tom Wright says: ‘The early Christian hope for bodily resurrection is clearly Jewish in origin, there being no possible pagan antecedent. Here, however, there is no spectrum of opinion: Earliest Christianity simply believed in resurrection, that is, the overcoming of death by the justice bringing power of the creator God … This is a radical mutation from within Jewish belief.’

Our core hope as Christians derives from a changing understanding of God’s revelation which Jesus taught and experienced. The literal interpretations of the Sadducees meant that they could not see or receive the new thing that God was doing in their midst. May God keep us open to receive the new things he is doing in our world through his Holy Spirit and prevent us from rejecting the unexpected moves of his Spirit because our rigidity in our own understandings of scripture.

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Resurrection Band - Colours.

Resurrection: First fruits of the kingdom of God

“They entered the tomb, where they saw a young man sitting on the right, wearing a white robe - and they were alarmed. “Don’t be alarmed,” he said. “I know you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He is not here – he has been raised! Look, here is the place where they put him. Now go and give this message to his disciples, including Peter: ‘He is going to Galilee ahead of you; there you will see him, just as he told you.’” So they went out and ran from the tomb, distressed and terrified. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid.” (Mark 15. 5 - 8)

To us, the resurrection is a wonderful event. One that we have been celebrating since Easter Sunday in hymns such as Jesus lives! and Thine be the glory risen, conquering Son. But to the women who first encountered the resurrection it was anything but wonderful. Instead, it was a shocking, unexpected, fearful experience.

We are often surprised to read that that was their reaction because we are so familiar with the resurrection stories and the idea of resurrection itself. And we wonder why they weren’t instantly grateful to know that their teacher and Lord was alive again. But those people who were there at the time were on unfamiliar and disturbing ground and they were unable initially to see the wonder and glory of what had occurred.

And many people today who are not Christians would react in ways that are similar to the reactions of those women. Many would struggle with the whole idea that someone can rise again from the dead and would view this central Christian belief as a reason for rejecting, rather than accepting, Christianity.

So, what I would like to share with you this evening then are two things from this passage that suggest that Jesus did rise from the dead and two things that suggest why his rising is important for us today.

First, the reaction of the women suggests to us that there was nothing in the Judaism of their day that had prepared them for the idea that one person could rise from the dead. They were distressed and fearful, in part, because they had no way of understanding or comprehending what had happened. It was totally outside of any frame of reference that they had.

Most Palestinian Jews at the time believed that God would resurrect the bodies of the dead at the end of the age. When Jesus had spoken to the disciples about his own resurrection, it is probable that they would have understood him to have been meaning that he would rise again as part of this general resurrection at the end of the age. This belief in a general resurrection was not accepted by all Jews. The Sadducees, in particular, argued that there was no resurrection at all. But even where this belief in a general resurrection was held, there was never any thought that one person would rise ahead of everyone else.

The reaction of these women - bewilderment and fear – is entirely consistent with situations where we are confronted by things that are totally outside our way of understanding the world and life itself and which radically challenge beliefs which we had thought were unchallengeable. The idea that one person could rise from the dead was so far outside their understanding of life, death and God that they could not have invented it. And, if they had, then they would not have responded with astonishment and fear because they would have known where the idea had come from and would have wanted to have appeared confident in their claim. You don’t convince anyone by being confused and in hiding.

So, instead the reaction of these women suggests that something significant had occurred and that that significant something could only have been the bodily resurrection of Jesus.

The second factor in this story which suggests that Jesus did rise from the dead is the idea that it was women who first discovered his resurrection. The Judaism of their day, like most cultures at that time, was patriarchal. The testimony of women, particularly in a court of law, was either inadmissible or regarded as of lesser value than the testimony of men. If the disciples had wanted to make up a story about Jesus rising from the dead then they certainly wouldn’t have said that it was the women in their group that had discovered his resurrection.

It is interesting, in this context, that the first known pagan written critique of Christianity builds on the Gospels’ report of women as the first witnesses and proclaimers of Jesus’ resurrection. It is called The True Word and was written by the middle Platonist Celsus in A.D. 175. Celsus claims that a ‘hysterical’ female was the witness to Jesus’ resurrection. To Celcus’ patriarchal mind all women were unreliable witnesses because they were hysterical and as a result, he then discounts the claims of the Gospels about the resurrection.

Both these factors then can give us confidence that the resurrection stories are telling us about actual events because if they weren’t then the Gospel writers would not have written them as they have. If the stories about the resurrection had been made up, then in order to be convincing they would have had men as the first people to discover that the resurrection had occurred and those people discovering the resurrection would be portrayed as entirely confident and clear about what they had seen and heard instead of the portrayal that we actually have, one of confusion and fear.

These are not the only factors which give us confidence that these stories have the ring of truth but they are two that emerge clearly from this account of the resurrection in Mark’s Gospel. What of the meaning of the resurrection though? Why is it so important and how can it affect us today if we believe that it occurred?

Again, two ideas drawn from this account. First, the message of the young man to the women (verse 7) – “He is going … ahead of you”. Literally, this means that Jesus had gone to Galilee where he would show himself to the disciples when they followed him there. But, at another level, it indicates what Jesus’ resurrection means. We read in 1 Corinthians 15 that Jesus has been raised from death as the guarantee that we will also be raised from death. He is described as being the first fruits of those who have died. In rising from the dead, he has gone ahead of us into the new risen body and existence that we shall experience in future when Jesus returns to this earth to fully bring God’s Kingdom into existence here.

When Jesus walked the earth he looked ahead to that future time when the Kingdom of God will be made perfect, and all suffering will come to an end. But he also announced that, because of him, there is a sense in which that Kingdom has already begun. When he healed sick people and brought good news to the poor it was a sign that the Kingdom had come. In the same way, when he overcame death by rising from the dead he became the first fruits of the Kingdom, an example of what we will all become in future.

Jesus wants us to be signs of God’s Kingdom in the same way that he was. He commanded us, his followers, to love in the way that he did. He wanted people to see us practically demonstrating love, so that we will clearly be recognised as men and women who belong to God. When Christians take action on behalf of the world’s poorest communities, as we will be doing shortly by collecting for Christian Aid, we not only put into practice the values of the Kingdom of God here and now but also become signs of what the Kingdom will be like when it is made perfect in eternity. That is what it means to pray, ‘Your Kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.’          

So, by the resurrection, Jesus has gone ahead of us in signing and establishing the Kingdom of God and calls us to follow where he leads. In this way, as the theologian Jurgen Moltmann says, the “resurrection of Christ does not mean a new possibility within the world and its history, but a new possibility altogether for the world, for existence, and for history.” That’s the first indication of what resurrection means in this passage.

The second, takes us back to the women and their position in a patriarchal society. God deliberately chooses women to discover Jesus' resurrection because the Kingdom of God, of which the resurrection is the first fruits, is to be a place of equality and inclusion. In his ministry, Jesus consistently included in God’s Kingdom those people in Jewish society that were excluded – he included women in his followers, he brought lepers and possessed people back into the community by healing them, he ate and drank with tax collectors, sinners and prostitutes.

Therefore, it is significant that it is people who were thought of as being second class in the society of his day who become the first witnesses to his resurrection. In the Kingdom of God which Jesus’ resurrection inaugurates, no one is second class and this is why the Apostle Paul writes in his letters, “there is no difference between Jews and Gentiles, between slaves and free men, between men and women; you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

Just as we are called to be signs of God’s Kingdom in the way that we love, so we are also called to be signs of God’s Kingdom by the way in which we include those who are excluded in our day. In our churches we need to be able to demonstrate that we are all one in Christ Jesus by there being no difference in the way that we accept men and women, white and black, rich and poor, straight and gay, non-disabled and disabled, the settled and the migrant, people of faith and people of no faith. We are called to be a people of liberation who cross the divides erected by our society. Who, as Jurgen Moltmann has said, in solidarity enter “the brotherhood of those who, in their society, are visibly living in the shadow of the cross: the poor, the handicapped, the people society has rejected, the prisoners and the persecuted.”

Jesus’ resurrection is the first fruits of a new way of being human – a way of being human that ultimately knows no death, no grief, no crying, no pain, no inequality and no exclusion. Jesus’ resurrection is the first fruits of the healing and renewal of human beings, human society and the entire world. This is the meaning of the resurrection. This is where we, and our world, can be heading, if we get on board with God.

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Switchfoot - Love Alone Is Worth The Fight.