Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church--Unitarian Universalist

“Resurrections”

Rev. David Takahashi Morris

Sunday, March 23, 2008 

      Each of the four Gospels that tell the story of Jesus has a scene like the one we’ve just heard from the Gospel of Mark.   Jesus died just before the Sabbath, and his body had to be put in a temporary tomb, because to handle a dead person on the Sabbath, God’s holy day, would have been against Jewish law and tradition.   So the women who were Jesus’ friends, family, and companions went to care for his body after the Sabbath ended—on Sunday morning.  When they arrive there’s no body there; the tomb is empty, and they are given the news that he has been raised from the dead.  They leave, not understanding at all, and afraid.

      From that moment on, the four Gospel stories say that Jesus’ followers began to experience Jesus as real and present and still alive after his death.  This experience is the resurrection.  But what was it, really?  There’s not just one description of resurrection in the Gospels; all four are very different.  Jesus appears and disappears in sudden and startling ways in one; in another they meet him walking on the road but they don’t recognize him until he does something very familiar, sharing a meal with them.  One account has exalted visions of Jesus in the company of heavenly beings; one has the followers touching him and shows him eating a piece of fish to prove he’s not a ghost. 

      If there are different resurrections in the Gospels that were chosen for the Bible by the ancient church authorities—let alone all the other writings they decided not to include—then it’s no wonder that it has been so hard ever since for people to decide what resurrection might mean.  Something clearly happened, something important enough to change the disciples forever and to give them the energy and imagination to begin a religious movement that changed the course of much human history.  But what was it?

      Is it possible that Jesus actually conquered death in some literal way, returned to life in a form really enough to see, touch, and share a meal with?  Was it all a mass hallucination, the power of wishful thinking raised to such a degree that peoples’ delusions were somehow passed on from one to the other?  Maybe people so loved and honored Jesus that they found him in their own hearts, a real companion even if not literally there in some material, physical sense.  Or maybe it was all a big lie, a set of stories very carefully calculated to connect with ancient Jewish teachings about the resurrection of the dead and the coming of God’s kingdom on earth, so the followers could say that Jesus had been proved by the Resurrection to be the Messiah, the Christ.

      The contemporary Christian theologian Walter Wink, in an essay written for Rabbi Michael Lerner’s online “Network of Spiritual Progressives,” suggests that something very real happened in the resurrection, but that the reality was in the minds and hearts of Jesus’ followers—a new understanding of God, Jesus, and themselves that changed everything for them.  Something they thought was gone forever, something they thought had died with Jesus, was suddenly alive and real among them.  As Wink says, “The disciples . . . saw that the spirit that had worked within Jesus continued to work in and through them. In their preaching they extended his critique of domination. They continued his life by advancing his mission.” 

      The question about the resurrection, as Walter Wink describes it, isn’t so much “What happened to Jesus?” as it is, “What happened to the disciples, and what happens to us?”

      Perhaps resurrection is not a single event in history to be explained, an event that either did or didn’t happen in a particular way to one historic figure. Perhaps it is something to be experienced:  an experience of hope renewed, an experience of life restored, an experience that each of us can have at any time.

      What might your resurrections be?  I’ve talked about this with a number of people recently, and the range of responses has been fascinating.  Maybe for you the idea of resurrection speaks of the cycles of nature and of life, like the flowers of our Flower Communion today:  The barren winter field that suddenly bursts with wildflowers and new grasses; the small dry bulb that somehow becomes a foot and a half of luxuriant long leaves and a beautiful flower like these.

      Maybe resurrection is a story of your own life, a story of a time when hope was gone and then somehow it wasn’t.  Maybe your life came to the point of utter ruin in a long losing battle with addiction, or illness, or some behavior you couldn’t quite let go of—and then one day a path toward new life was there in front of you, a path that yesterday you could not possibly have seen. Maybe you have lived in a time of unbearable grief after the death of a loved one, in the valley of the shadow of death, sure that you could not survive such a loss; but then you did, and then somehow you found in yourself a capacity for new joy, new love, new compassion and care for others who were suffering.

      Maybe resurrection is a story of our world, so desperately in need of a new life.  Here we stand, seemingly on the brink of catastrophe in so many ways, and as a people somehow we cannot seem to imagine a new way of being that will not carry us over the brink to the destruction of war, the destruction of global poverty and starvation, the destruction of environmental disaster.  Will this be the day when we suddenly understand that we have never needed to live this way—and begin to live a new life that we and our planet can sustain?

      Which resurrection might be yours, on this day of days?  What hope have you lost sight of; what dream lies waiting to be reborn in you?