This morning's St. Paul Pioneer Press carried the following article on their op-ed page. It is a very well written explication of Easter's significance for the non-believer.
The only point I would struggle with is that the command to love which forms the heart of Easter can only be actualized when Jesus ceases to be simply a great moral example and becomes our Savior in deed and truth.
That is the 18 inch journey of a lifetime, from our brains to our hearts. Contrast this wonderul though cerebral observation with the journey of Corrine Tiffany Dow in Part II. both are vaild, but Part I is incomplete without Part II
What will future visitors see when they roll away the stone?
JOHN FARMER JR. TwinCities.com-Pioneer Press
Article Last Updated:04/07/2007 03:15:21 AM CDT
As someone raised in the Roman Catholic tradition, I was intrigued, to say the least, when I learned a month ago about claims that a construction crew in south Jerusalem had found Jesus' remains in a limestone box, alongside those of Mary Magdalene, his wife, and Judah, their son.
The story of how Israeli developers building an apartment complex had purportedly come across the ossuary of Jesus Christ reminded me of nothing so much as one of my grandfather's favorite Clancy Brothers tunes, "They're Moving Father's Grave to Build a Sewer."
Well, they're moving father's grave to build a sewer
They're moving it regardless of expense
They dug up his remains
To put in 5-inch drains
And irrigate some posh bloke's residence.
Well, I thought, so much for the claim in "The DaVinci Code" that Jesus and Mary Magdalene had absconded to southern France after the crucifixion and started their long-suppressed lineage. All those centuries of spiritual skullduggery for naught! So much for other recent claims that Jesus had wandered east to India. And so much, of course, for the central belief of Christianity that Jesus had died on the cross, only to rise again.
So much for Easter.
Before we dismiss the central celebration of Christianity, it's worth noting that the alternative explanations of Jesus' fate are themselves implausible. How, for instance, could Jesus have retired to a normal life making cabinets in south Jerusalem when his followers were going around preaching that he had ascended into heaven? The awkwardness in the synagogue each week - "What are you doing here?" - would have been palpable.
Still, it's hard not to wonder why there has been so much speculation, so many versions of what might have happened to Jesus.
The simple answer, of course, is that the story of Jesus' resurrection itself is hard to accept as a literal fact. It is, on its face, supernatural. It requires belief, the gift of faith. For those who possess such a gift, Easter celebrates the joy and promise of eternal life.
For those of us who come up short, however, and for those who may not consider themselves Christian at all, there is much to learn from and celebrate in the Easter story. It has little to do with idle speculation about what actually happened to Jesus of Nazareth.
It has to do with what the Easter story signifies: the transformative power of love.
Love was, after all, the central teaching of Jesus, what he added to the Ten Commandments: "A new instruction I have given you: Love one another. As I have loved you, you must also love one another. All will know that you are my followers by this sign alone, that you have love for one another." (John 13:34-35) He didn't stop there, with loving one another. He requires of his followers that they love those who hate them:
"I say to all you who can hear me: Love your enemies, help those who hate you, praise those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. To one who punches your cheek, offer the other cheek. To one seizing your cloak, do not refuse the tunic under it. Whoever asks, give to him. Whoever seizes, do not resist. Exactly as you wish to be treated, in that way treat others. ... Be not a judge, then, and you will not be judged. Be no executioner, and you will not be executed. Pardon, and you will be pardoned" (Luke 6:27-38).
As the historian Garry Wills points out in his book "What Jesus Meant": "(T)remendous ingenuity has been expended to compromise these uncompromising words. ... The churches' later treatment of the gospels is one long effort to rescue Jesus from his 'extremism.' Jesus consistently opposed violence ... yet thousands, in the Crusades, would take up the sword to protect the site of the Lord's death."
The world has, in fact, never tried to practice what Jesus preached; indeed, those who have come closest, like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi, have tended to meet a fate similar to Jesus: murder. Perhaps humankind is not yet ready, in an evolutionary sense, to be capable of what Wills calls "self-emptying love." Perhaps we never will be.
Nothing could be clearer, however, than that the development of the capacity for this kind of love may be the only salvation for the world. The stakes in each confrontation are so much higher, and a very few people can potentially kill millions. In Darwinian terms, the next adaptation essential to our survival will not be physical, but moral.
The Easter story, even read as merely myth, speaks to the transformative potential of love in its purest form. God so loved the world that he sent his son to show the way to a humankind plagued with internecine hatred; Jesus so loved humankind that he took upon himself the burden of all of our suffering and showed himself willing to die in the name of that love.
Just as Jesus' teachings regarding love and nonviolence have been compromised over the years, so has the message of Easter. God's act of self-emptying love was transformed into rage against Jesus's own people - the Jews - who were held responsible for his execution. The Holocaust, and the episodes of ethnic cleansing that continue to this day, are the best evidence that, in many respects, we are still not ready for Jesus's message of selfless love.
What would happen to our world if we developed the capability for such a pure form of love? We may never know. But the Easter story feels essentially right. If we achieve it, when fu-ture visitors roll away the stone, they will see nothing in the shaft of light but bodiless shrouds and vacant ossuaries: the tomb of our murderous hatreds, left empty in a world reborn.
John Farmer Jr. wrote this article for the Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J. He can be contacted at news@newhouse.com.
Sunday, April 08, 2007
Easter: in the quiet tomb
This morning at the 10:00 a.m. Mass at the Cathedral of St Paul, Archbishop Flynn urged his hearers to consider Easter as a place, the empty tomb. There, God invites us to enter the quiet emptiness out of the nothingness of our own lives,... despair, struggle, defeat, hopelessness.
Once we look in and enter the tomb we become the object of a new creation, which God brings into new life out of nothingness.
How true!
"Faith in the Resurrection of Jesus says that there is a future for every human being; the cry for unending life which is a part of the person is indeed answered. Through Jesus we do know 'the room where exiled love lays down its victory.'
He himself is this place, and he calls us to be with him and in dependence on him. He calls us to keep this place open witrhin the world so that he, the exiled love mat reappear over and over in the world...
God exists: that is the real message of Easter. anyone who even begins to grasp what this means also knows what it means to be redeemed."
Benedict XVI
Once we look in and enter the tomb we become the object of a new creation, which God brings into new life out of nothingness.
How true!
"Faith in the Resurrection of Jesus says that there is a future for every human being; the cry for unending life which is a part of the person is indeed answered. Through Jesus we do know 'the room where exiled love lays down its victory.'
He himself is this place, and he calls us to be with him and in dependence on him. He calls us to keep this place open witrhin the world so that he, the exiled love mat reappear over and over in the world...
God exists: that is the real message of Easter. anyone who even begins to grasp what this means also knows what it means to be redeemed."
Benedict XVI
Why Easter makes a Difference
There's been some bantering back and forth recently among priests in our local Catholic press about the significance of and reaction to the recent "discovery" of Jesus' "family tomb," as heralded by that great bastion of academic inquiry, cable television.
Here is a wonderful piece by the Pontifical Household preacher Capuchin Father Raniero Cantalamessa on the basics of tradition in regard to the resurrection and a little on why it's important. His remarks illustrate to me the beauty of Roman Catholic theology: firmly grounded in rational discourse, but also able to soar the heights of mystical contemplation.
"There are men -- we see this in the phenomenon of suicide bombers -- who die for a misguided or even evil cause, mistakenly retaining, but in good faith, that the cause is a worthy one.
Even Christ's death does not testify to the truth of his cause, but only the fact that he believed in its truth. Christ's death is the supreme witness of his charity, but not of his truth. This truth is adequately testified to only by the Resurrection. "The faith of Christians," says St. Augustine, "is the resurrection of Christ. It is no great thing to believe that Jesus died; even the pagans believe this, everyone believes it. The truly great thing is to believe that he is risen."Keeping to the purpose that has guided us up to this point, we must leave faith aside for the moment and attend to history.
We would like to try to respond to the following question: Can Christ's resurrection be defined as a historical event, in the common sense of the term, that is, did it "really happen"?There are two facts that offer themselves for the historian's consideration and permit him to speak of the Resurrection: First, the sudden and inexplicable faith of the disciples, a faith so tenacious as to withstand even the trial of martyrdom; second, the explanation of this faith that has been left by those who had it, that is, the disciples.
Here is a wonderful piece by the Pontifical Household preacher Capuchin Father Raniero Cantalamessa on the basics of tradition in regard to the resurrection and a little on why it's important. His remarks illustrate to me the beauty of Roman Catholic theology: firmly grounded in rational discourse, but also able to soar the heights of mystical contemplation.
"There are men -- we see this in the phenomenon of suicide bombers -- who die for a misguided or even evil cause, mistakenly retaining, but in good faith, that the cause is a worthy one.
Even Christ's death does not testify to the truth of his cause, but only the fact that he believed in its truth. Christ's death is the supreme witness of his charity, but not of his truth. This truth is adequately testified to only by the Resurrection. "The faith of Christians," says St. Augustine, "is the resurrection of Christ. It is no great thing to believe that Jesus died; even the pagans believe this, everyone believes it. The truly great thing is to believe that he is risen."Keeping to the purpose that has guided us up to this point, we must leave faith aside for the moment and attend to history.
We would like to try to respond to the following question: Can Christ's resurrection be defined as a historical event, in the common sense of the term, that is, did it "really happen"?There are two facts that offer themselves for the historian's consideration and permit him to speak of the Resurrection: First, the sudden and inexplicable faith of the disciples, a faith so tenacious as to withstand even the trial of martyrdom; second, the explanation of this faith that has been left by those who had it, that is, the disciples.
In the decisive moment, when Jesus was captured and executed, the disciples did not entertain any thoughts about the resurrection. They fled and took Jesus' case to be closed.In the meantime something had to intervene that in a short time not only provoked a radical change of their state of soul, but that led them to an entirely different activity and to the founding of the Church. This "something" is the historical nucleus of Easter faith.
The oldest testimony to the Resurrection is Paul's: "For I delivered to you first of all that which I also received: That Christ died for our sins, according to the Scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he rose again according to the Scriptures; and that he was seen by Cephas, and after that by the eleven."Then he was seen by more than 500 brethren at once, of whom many are still with us and some are fallen asleep. After that, he was seen by James, then by all the apostles. And last of all, he was seen also by me, as by one born out of due time" (1 Corinthians 15:3-8).
These words were written around A.D. 56 or 57. But the core of the text is constituted by an anterior faith that Paul himself says he received from others. Keeping in mind that Paul learned of these things immediately after his conversion, we can date them to about A.D. 35, that is, five or six years after the death of Christ. It is thus a testimony of rare historical value.
The accounts of the Evangelists were written some decades later and reflect a later phase in the Church's reflection. But the core of the testimony remains unchanged: The Lord is risen and was seen alive. To this a new element is added, perhaps determined by an apologetic preoccupation, and so of minor historical value: The insistence on the fact of the empty tomb. Even for the Gospels, the appearances of the Risen Christ are the decisive facts.The appearances, nevertheless, testify to a new dimension of the Risen Christ, his mode of being "according to the Spirit," which is new and different with respect to his previous mode of existing, "according to the flesh." For example, he cannot be recognized by whoever sees him, but only by those to whom he gives the ability to know him. His corporeality is different from what it was before. It is free from physical laws: It enters and exits through closed doors; it appears and disappears.
According to a different explanation of the Resurrection, one advanced by Rudolf Bultmann and still proposed today, what we have here are psychogenetic visions, that is, subjective phenomena similar to hallucinations. But this, if it were true, would constitute in the end a greater miracle than the one that such explanations wish to deny. It supposes that in fact different people, in different situations and locations, had the same impression, the same halucination.
The oldest testimony to the Resurrection is Paul's: "For I delivered to you first of all that which I also received: That Christ died for our sins, according to the Scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he rose again according to the Scriptures; and that he was seen by Cephas, and after that by the eleven."Then he was seen by more than 500 brethren at once, of whom many are still with us and some are fallen asleep. After that, he was seen by James, then by all the apostles. And last of all, he was seen also by me, as by one born out of due time" (1 Corinthians 15:3-8).
These words were written around A.D. 56 or 57. But the core of the text is constituted by an anterior faith that Paul himself says he received from others. Keeping in mind that Paul learned of these things immediately after his conversion, we can date them to about A.D. 35, that is, five or six years after the death of Christ. It is thus a testimony of rare historical value.
The accounts of the Evangelists were written some decades later and reflect a later phase in the Church's reflection. But the core of the testimony remains unchanged: The Lord is risen and was seen alive. To this a new element is added, perhaps determined by an apologetic preoccupation, and so of minor historical value: The insistence on the fact of the empty tomb. Even for the Gospels, the appearances of the Risen Christ are the decisive facts.The appearances, nevertheless, testify to a new dimension of the Risen Christ, his mode of being "according to the Spirit," which is new and different with respect to his previous mode of existing, "according to the flesh." For example, he cannot be recognized by whoever sees him, but only by those to whom he gives the ability to know him. His corporeality is different from what it was before. It is free from physical laws: It enters and exits through closed doors; it appears and disappears.
According to a different explanation of the Resurrection, one advanced by Rudolf Bultmann and still proposed today, what we have here are psychogenetic visions, that is, subjective phenomena similar to hallucinations. But this, if it were true, would constitute in the end a greater miracle than the one that such explanations wish to deny. It supposes that in fact different people, in different situations and locations, had the same impression, the same halucination.
The disciples could not have deceived themselves: They were specific people -- fishermen -- not at all given to visions. They did not believe the first ones; Jesus almost has to overpower their resistance: "O foolish men, and slow of heart to believe!" They could not even want to deceive others. All of their interests opposed this; they would have been the first to feel themselves deceived by Jesus.
If he were not risen, to what purpose would it have been to face persecution and death for him? What material benefit would they have drawn from it?If the historical character of the Resurrection -- that is, its objective, and not only subjective, character -- is denied, the birth of the Church and of the faith become an even more inexplicable mystery than the Resurrection itself.
If he were not risen, to what purpose would it have been to face persecution and death for him? What material benefit would they have drawn from it?If the historical character of the Resurrection -- that is, its objective, and not only subjective, character -- is denied, the birth of the Church and of the faith become an even more inexplicable mystery than the Resurrection itself.
It has been justly observed that "the idea that the imposing edifice of the history of Christianity is like an enormous pyramid balanced upon an insignificant fact is certainly less credible than the assertion that the entire event -- and that also means the most significant fact within this -- really did occupy a place in history comparable to the one that the New Testament attributes to it."
Where does the historical research on the Resurrection arrive? We can see it in the words of the disciples of Emmaus: Some disciples went to Jesus' tomb Easter morning and they found that things were as the women had said who had gone their before them, "but they did not see him." History too must take itself to Jesus' tomb and see that things are as the witnesses have said. But it does not see the Risen One.
It is not enough to observe matters historically. It is necessary to see the Risen Christ, and this is something history cannot do; only faith can.The angel who appeared to the women Easter morning said to them: "Why do you seek the living among the dead?" (Luke 24:5). I must confess that at the end of these reflections I feel that this rebuke is also directed at me. It is as if the angel were to say to me: "Why do you waste time seeking among dead human and historical arguments, the one who is alive and at work in the Church and in the world? Go instead and tell his brothers that he is risen."
If it were up to me, that is the only thing I would do. I quit teaching the history of Christian origins 30 years ago to dedicate myself to proclaming the Kingdom of God, but now when I am faced with radical and unfounded denials of the truth of the Gospels, I have felt obliged to take up the tools of my trade again.This is why I have decided to use these commentaries on the Sunday Gospels to oppose a tendency often motivated by commercial interests and help those who may read my observations to form an opinion about Jesus that is less influenced by the clamor of the advertising world.
Where does the historical research on the Resurrection arrive? We can see it in the words of the disciples of Emmaus: Some disciples went to Jesus' tomb Easter morning and they found that things were as the women had said who had gone their before them, "but they did not see him." History too must take itself to Jesus' tomb and see that things are as the witnesses have said. But it does not see the Risen One.
It is not enough to observe matters historically. It is necessary to see the Risen Christ, and this is something history cannot do; only faith can.The angel who appeared to the women Easter morning said to them: "Why do you seek the living among the dead?" (Luke 24:5). I must confess that at the end of these reflections I feel that this rebuke is also directed at me. It is as if the angel were to say to me: "Why do you waste time seeking among dead human and historical arguments, the one who is alive and at work in the Church and in the world? Go instead and tell his brothers that he is risen."
If it were up to me, that is the only thing I would do. I quit teaching the history of Christian origins 30 years ago to dedicate myself to proclaming the Kingdom of God, but now when I am faced with radical and unfounded denials of the truth of the Gospels, I have felt obliged to take up the tools of my trade again.This is why I have decided to use these commentaries on the Sunday Gospels to oppose a tendency often motivated by commercial interests and help those who may read my observations to form an opinion about Jesus that is less influenced by the clamor of the advertising world.
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