2025-04-30
Brooke Strong
Sermon Text...
“Some Thoughts on Resurrection”
John 20:19-29
Rev Judith Bagley-Bonner
19 When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors were locked where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” 20 After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. 21 Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” 22 When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. 23 If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”
Jesus and Thomas
24 But Thomas (who was called the Twin[d]), one of the twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. 25 So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord.” But he said to them, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.”
26 A week later his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were shut, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” 27 Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.” 28 Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!” 29 Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe."
This morning, using Jesus’ Easter night appearance to the disciples minus Thomas, then his follow up appearance a week later to the disciples including Thomas, I want to try to understand, in some paltry and fractured manner, no doubt- something about Jesus’ resurrection. Because it occurs to me that Thomas is the perfect personification of our current way of thinking. We live in an empirical era. It is the spirit of the age, the zeitgeist, to believe only in that which can be verified by our five senses. Along with Thomas, many of us would say, “unless I put my fingers in the mark of the nails in his hands and side, I will not believe.” Thomas gets a bad rap. I, for one, am glad he had the guts to come out with it. So what about Jesus’ resurrection? Was it literal? Was it metaphorical? Was it something in between?
First of all, I might as well go ahead and tell you that I’m more than a little uneasy about giving this sermon. You see, like most of us, I prefer affection to rejection, and I’d rather be liked than not liked. And if I say Jesus resurrection was symbolic and metaphorical, not literal, I’m going to trouble and disappoint some of you. And If I say it was a literal, bodily resurrection, I’m going to disappoint even more of you who have been so relieved to know that a literal, historical interpretation of such things is not required to count one’s self a Christian. So what’s a girl to do? I guess all that’s left to me is to tell the truth as I understand it and let the chips fall where they may. So here we go.
First, I’d like to paint a picture of a theological continuum with those two definitive ends. On the one extreme, we have the Classical, orthodox interpretations of Jesus' resurrection which emphasizes its significance as a historical event where Jesus' earthly, physical body was restored to life. In this understanding, it was not just a spiritual or symbolic event. On the extreme other end of the continuum lies a symbolic or metaphorical Interpretation of Jesus resurrection emphasizing not so much its significance as a historical event, but its symbolic power in asserting that love and life always eventually hold sway over hate and death. We see the power of resurrection as life comes out of death each Spring. We see it in the power of the faith of Jesus’ followers who went forth to preach love, the way of Jesus, even at great risk to their own safety. We see it in the triumph of love over hate and life over death anywhere and everywhere that these occur.
As you can imagine, amongst theologians and even everyday believers, there has been, over the years, a fair amount of animosity between these two positions. When the liberal, mainline church first started gaining traction and put forth the symbolic, metaphorical view in seminaries and theological texts, (not so much in pulpits or there would have been hell to pay,) there arose a cacophony of objection. This can perhaps best be represented by the powerful poem entitled “Seven Stanzas at Easter” by John Updike, part of which goes like this:
“Make no mistake: if he rose at all
It was as His body;
If the cell’s dissolution did not reverse, the molecules reknit,
The amino acids rekindle,
The Church will fall.
It was not as the flowers,
Each soft spring recurrent;
It was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the
Eleven apostles;
It was as His flesh; ours.
Let us not mock God with metaphor,
Analogy, sidestepping transcendence,
Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded
Credulity of earlier ages:
Let us walk through the door!”
Well, now seems like as good a time as any to tell you that I have, at different times of my life, believed strongly in both of these positions. During my ten years as an Evangelical Christian, I believed Jesus resurrection was literal and physical, a re-knitting of earthly cells for a return to a pre-crucifixion body. Later, in seminary, when the aforementioned evangelical narrative all came crashing down around me, the best I could posit was very much resurrection as metaphor and symbol. And I want to say, first of all, clearly and unequivocally that there is room for you here if you find yourself solidly in either of those camps. The UCC and Federated in particular is a broad tent. We welcome the richness of theological diversity. But I must also tell you that I have not remained on the extreme symbolic end of the continuum. You see, Updike’s poem always haunted me- taunted me, actually, and left me with a deep, gut conviction that something larger than metaphor happened on that Easter morning. Indeed I have moved back part way, toward the center, somewhere in between the two clear ends of the spectrum. And I have done so largely because of my New Testament professor in seminary and the influence he had on me during my theological training.
He was a brilliant, humble and kind person. His name was Dr. Henry Gustafson. He, too, was a former evangelical, turned progressive theologian who never the less retained bits of his early formation. And he was always gentle and respectful of all of those on the full theological spectrum of all the theological questions. As I struggled with this sermon last week, I vividly remembered part of his lecture on Jesus’ resurrection where he emphatically stated, “I have come to understand Jesus’ resurrection not so much as a reviving of his earthly body, but as a…” And I realized I couldn’t remember the rest of his sentence. Except that I remembered it had transformed me and made sense of the resurrection for me for the first time since abandoning both aforementioned extremes on the spectrum. So I did what any modern preacher might do, I posted the memory of Henry’s half sentence on facebook and tagged a dozen or so former seminary colleagues with whom I am still in touch, asking if anybody could remember how he had finished the sentence. Sadly, nobody had a clue. And Henry, along with most of my other theological mentors, is now long dead and isn’t talking. But then I received a gift from chat GPT. It would seem that Mirian Huebscer-Scott, who, from Florida, watches us weekly on youtube, saw my Facebook post and used chat GPT to research Dr. Gustafson, and she hit pay dirt. Soon, in my facebook comments, I had, via Cindy, Chat GPT telling me, “”I located references to Dr. Henry Gustafson’s lectures on resurrection, specifically entitled “The Resurrection: What Can We Believe and Hope” The lectures, it would seem, emphasize a distinction between a mere reviving of Jesus’ historical body and a metaphysical entry into a new, glorified, empowered existence… And then, with this rich, heavy-handed hint all but knocking me in the face, it came to me! I remembered what Henry had said in his lecture back in 1985- That Jesus’ resurrection was maybe not so much a reviving of an earthly body but a bursting forth of a whole new humanity! The long and short of it is that I believe something powerful happened, something more than the return of spring flowers, miraculous as that is every year. Was it the standing up of the historical dead body? Here’s the bottom line: I don’t know. And I’m sorry but that’s the best I can do on that specific question. And I take great comfort from the fact that the earliest Gospel writer, Mark, didn’t know either. Despite the fact that, centuries later, longer endings of Mark’s Gospel were added to his relatively terse first version, Mark’s original gospel ends not with sightings of the resurrected Jesus, but simply with the empty tomb, and with the disciples befuddled and confused about what had actually happened. So I would argue that I am not copping out by landing somewhere in the middle. If Mark, the earliest and most historically reliable of the Gospels, ends with confusion and utter befuddlement, then I’d ask you to excuse me for my lack of clarity. But what I can and will say with complete conviction is that Christ came alive in some sort of a new, transformed, spiritual body. At the very least, I believe it was a metaphysical occurrence rendering Christ a new, resurrection body!
So do I believe in the resurrection? Absolutely. Do I understand the details of it? Not al all. And whether they were seeing an apparition or a revived body that night in the upper room doesn’t really matter to me. What matters is that they saw something! And here is the real kicker- What really matters is that resurrection didn’t just happen for Jesus back in the year thirty-three, but continues to happen for every person who leaves this earthly life, and will happen for us when it is our turn. Indeed, I believe that his triumph over death was so decisive that it broke death’s chains and ushers us all through. Frederick Beuchner said it this way, “The proclamation of Easter Day is that all is well. . . . Love is the victor. Death is not the end. The end is life.” And I believe we will rise again too! For me it comes back to the Law of Conservation of Mass, which says that matter is constant but just changes form. Well consciousness is energy, which at a sub-atomic level is mass, so why wouldn’t it make sense that consciousness is constant but just changes form too? I very clearly remember being about five years old and first learning of death, and having a crystal clear certainty wash over me that that would never happen to me, or at the very least, that it wouldn’t last! You can call that denial if you want, but what if my five year old self was onto something? What if I was seeing through a glass darkly and realizing the truth of what the poet William Wordsworth stated so eloquently, “Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The soul that rises with us, our life's Star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar: Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home: Heaven lies about us in our infancy!” Well, I believe heaven lies about us in our dying as well, and the soul that rose with us and was part of us throughout our life will go on to its next existence in a new, resurrected body just as Jesus bore! I believe that Jesus, the firstborn of a new evolutionary stage, in embodying life and love with such wholeness, defeated death and that the end, indeed, is life.
In the meantime, take heart if you are a doubter. As I have said before, ultimately it matters less what we believe about Jesus than whether we follow his teachings. The sermon on the mount from the first century had not one word about what to believe, only words about what to do and how to live. The creeds from the councils four centuries later had only words about what to believe, not a single word about how to live. I believe the Sermon on the Mount had it right. And if you seek to follow the teachings of Jesus you belong here no matter what you believe about Jesus.
Former Bishop James Pila, in an address to young men about to become priests, said it this way: “Christ is not just for those who are convinced, but for those who, like Peter, wonder why they lose heart and begin to sink. Christ is for those who, like Thomas, know what they are capable of, and who try mightily to salvage a few sacred moments in a life of so many ambiguous years.”
So if you tend to be a Thomas, take heart. Even though Jesus blessed those who didn’t need proof, let’s not overlook the fact that he also came to Thomas on Thomas’s own terms. It was but a moment in a life of ambiguity, but it was a moment none the less. I believe there is a moment for each of us, or if not a moment, then a slow, less dramatic, gradual process, wherein the scales can gradually be tipped, and one finds oneself more often on the side of faith than of doubt. And as the character says in the magnificient, closing scene of the movie, “Hannah and Her Sisters” where he finally comes to a tenuous faith himself, “It’s a pretty slender reed to hang your whole life on, but maybe it’s all we get.” … And what that character may or may not have known is that the book of Isaiah says, “a slender reed, our God will not break, and a flickering candle, our God will not extinguish.”