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Risen - No
Bones About it!
by the Rev. Rich Smith
Easter - April 8, 2007
Luke 24:1-12
“On the first day of the week, at early dawn, they
(that is, several women who had been close followers of Jesus) came to
the tomb, taking the spices that they had prepared. They found the
stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they went in, they did not
find the body.”
Some years ago, I joined several other ministers for a post-Easter
retreat in the mountains. It was a chance to kick back a bit, have fun
with colleagues, and so on. On the last morning the retreat concluded
with an outdoor communion service. We gathered at a beautiful spot
under some cedar and sycamore trees, where before sharing the bread and
wine, we engaged in some theological discussion, as clergy are disposed
to do. One of the ministers was leading an argument in favor of the
literal resurrection of Jesus' body from the grave. His whole faith,
his salvation, and our's too, he said, hinged on that, and if someday
archaeologists were able to somehow dig up some bones and prove them to
be Jesus', then we would all be lost indeed, he said, and "our faith
would be in vain."
I was reminded of a bumper sticker I saw once -- It said "Easter has
been canceled. They found the body!"
About a month ago, the Discovery Channel aired a special which
suggested that perhaps they had! Produced by none other than James
Cameron of Titanic fame, it’s called The Lost Tomb of Jesus, and tells
of the discovery of an ancient burial site under an apartment building
in a Jerusalem suburb. The tomb contained a number of ossuaries – or
bone boxes – with the names Mary, Joseph, Jesus son of Joseph,
Mariamne, Jose, and Judah inscribed in Aramaic on the sides. The makers
of the film employed DNA testing, statistical analysis, and other
methods to hypothesize that this just could be the family tomb of Jesus
of Nazareth. Further, since there was no genetic relationship shown
between the remains of this Jesus and those in the ossuary labeled
Mariamne, these two could not be brother and sister, or mother and son,
and may well have been husband and wife. What’s more, they point out
that one of the writings that didn’t make it into the New Testament,
the Gospel of Phillip, calls Mary Magdalene “Mariamne.”
Now they are not the first to speculate about the relationship between
Jesus and Mary Magdalene – the Da Vinci Code makes a lot of that, as
did Holy Blood, Holy Grail a couple of decades earlier. And while the
canonical Gospels say nothing specific about that, it is obvious that
Mary was a very close companion of Jesus, not one of the twelve named
disciples, but nevertheless very faithful and loyal and really the one
who was first given the good news of the resurrection, the one charged
with announcing it to the others.
However, she was not called Mariamne during her lifetime, and wasn’t
until at least a century after her death. And the other names found on
the bone boxes – especially Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, were exceedingly
common ones in that era. There are a lot more unanswered questions that
facts in this film, and most archeologists and scholars do not find it
especially plausible. Add to that two things that are historical,
neither one mentioned in the film: one, that Jesus’ family was likely
quite poor, as were the vast majority of oppressed Jewish Palestinian
peasants of the time, and the poor simply did not have family tombs.
The biblical account says he was laid in a borrowed grave belonging to
Joseph of Aramathea. Plus, crucified bodies – or what was left of them
– were simply buried in mass graves, a final humiliation for those who
were viewed by the Roman authorities as political threats.
Still, all this raises a profoundly interesting question: What if – and
given advances in science and technology it’s not an impossible “if” –
what if some bones were discovered and proved to be those of Jesus of
Nazareth? What would that mean? What would happen to our faith,
especially in light of the fact that we gather here every Sunday
morning, remembering Easter, and celebrating our central belief that
Jesus Christ is risen. But I while I wish the film makers had been more
careful and less sensational, I am not much bothered by the premise,
and have a somewhat different take on it. I think that we only
celebrate Easter because in fact, they DID find the body! For without
the body of Christ alive in the world today, there would be no Easter
to celebrate, and no Christian faith. But it all has very little to do
with the actual bones of Jesus of Nazareth.
Of course it is difficult to determine, historically, what did happen
nearly two thousand years ago. There was no "Eyewitness News" to report
it, no video cameras to capture it. We have the Gospels, of course,
four of them, but each was written at least a generation removed from
the events themselves, and offer conflicting accounts, with no way to
harmonize them. That shouldn't surprise us -- just read the accounts in
two different newspapers one day after an event, and you'll wonder what
the truth really is! You know the old story: if one newspaper reports
“President Walks on Water” another one will have the headline,
“President Can’t Swim!” But the Gospels were not written as historical
documents. They were written as faith documents, proclaiming the
significance of the life and death of Jesus to and for the early
church. And what they tell us in fact is not as much about the events
surrounding Jesus' life as they do the faith of that early church --
the faith that whatever may have happened in Galilee in 29 A.D.,
whatever may have become of Jesus' body, his flesh and bones -- he was
alive in them, and they had in fact become his body! Christ was alive
and so were they.
And Christ is risen and alive today because we in the church are still
his body and we are alive with his spirit and his power. To me, that is
the best and final proof of Easter. It has nothing to do with bones, or
the lack of them. The stories about the disciples realizing that Mary’s
words were not an idle tale after all, and turning from hiding and
turning the world upside down are proof of Easter. The stories of those
who carried the flame of faith in the face of persecution and
opposition are proof of Easter. The fact that the church down through
the ages -- crusades and inquisitions and patriarchy not withstanding
-- has held fast to the message of God's love in Christ that is more
than historical fact but something present and on-going is proof of
Easter. The fact that Jesus is still present among us, in that people
still love when it is difficult to love, forgive when it's not easy or
popular to forgive, befriend enemies when it's easier to hate them,
feed the hungry, heal the sick and care for the vulnerable when it is
easier to ignore them and stand up for justice when it’s more appealing
to benefit from injustice, when they try to make peace in the midst of
war -- all this is proof of Easter. I believe in that, because I see
it. Not everywhere, of course; we do plenty to subvert this and we have
more than enough Good Fridays. But ultimately, I trust in a God of
love, and not of vengeance, because this God has been revealed to me in
the life and teachings of Jesus, in way the world and human life work
at their best. That is my faith -- an Easter faith -- and if an
archeologist or historian or DNA expert were able to show conclusively
that a set of bones were those of Jesus of Nazareth, while it might
well impact a lot of traditional church doctrine, my faith would not
change. I don’t worry about what happens to bodies – I leave that to
God. And I would not suddenly lose my faith that spring follows winter,
that morning follows night, that love is stronger than death, that
redemption is possible for all persons and for the earth itself, or
that we are called to care for others in their pain and suffering in
the same way that Jesus cared. And why should I lose my faith? For my
faith is not in the bones of a two-thousand-year-old man, or a
resuscitated corpse, but in God who gives life to all things and renews
all things, and in the Body of Christ as it is alive in the world today
-- in you and in me, in the Church, in those who do God's work and seek
to follow in Christ's way -- a body that is present wherever love is
present.
The Apostle Paul wrote to the church at Corinth: "If the dead are not
raised, then Christ has not been raised and your faith is futile." As I
see it, the dead are raised all the time. Not corpses from the ground,
but people like you and me, people who are living in death, who though
they walk and talk and seem to function, are really lifeless. People
who are so wrapped up in themselves that they have no capacity for
giving or receiving love. People who have lost direction, or the will
to make a difference. People whose big concerns are money, status,
success, pleasure. People who use others for their own ends. People who
become so cynical that they cannot laugh at themselves. People who
dread getting up in the morning. People who build walls around
themselves. People who do not appreciate the beauty of a flowering
tree, or a shoreline, or a sunset, or even a breath. We all know people
like this, and often are people like this. And yet Easter comes to just
these sort of folks -- to us! The spirit of the Risen Christ takes
hold! The forgiving, healing, renewing love of God enters in. New life
takes root and blossoms. We are given the strength and courage to go
on. We are given a new hope. Christ is risen and our faith is not vain.
And his body has been found -- it's you, it's me, it's the gathered
community of his followers called the Church. His body is also a
homeless man, or a bag lady, or a hungry child, or a young person with
AIDS, or an Iraqi citizen caught between the warring factions of his
country, or a soldier at Walter Reed. Christ's body is still being
crucified, and yet, by God's grace, it is still being raised up!
It is sown a physical body, says Paul, and raised a spiritual body;
sown in dishonor, raised in glory; sown in weakness, raised in power.
And Paul is not talking only about Jesus here -- he's talking about all
of us. Resurrection is for everyone, Jesus being merely the first! And
the resurrected body bears about as much resemblance to the physical
body as a full grown plant bears to the seed that produced it. The
resurrected body of Christ takes many forms, and it is for us to
discover and experience that body in our midst.
In a few moments we will gather at the Lord’s Table, as we do every
Easter Sunday, not so much to remember the night on which he was
betrayed as the day on which he rose to new life. We break the bread
and call it, as he did, his body, and it reminds us of his presence
among us, and in us; we know him in the breaking of the bread, in the
sharing and eating, the nourishing among us.
And so you see, they found the body -- but Easter is not cancelled,
make no bones about it! In fact Easter is celebrated every Sunday,
precisely because Christ's body is found among us, alive in the world!
Nikos Kazantzakis told a story about a monk who had hoped all his life
make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem to see the traditional site of Jesus’
burial, known as the Holy Sepulcher. Finally he set out, with money he
had meticulously saved for over forty years. Soon after he left the
monastery, he passed a field where a pale, emaciated man who was
digging roots out of the ground, and he said to the monk, "Good
morning, Father. Where are you going?" The monk replied, "I am going to
Jerusalem to see the Holy Sepulcher, where Christ was buried, and I am
going to march around it three times and pray." The man in the field
said, that trip will cost much money." "Yes," said the monk, "all my
life's savings." Then the man suggested, "Father, why not march around
me three times and give the money to me so that my wife and children
might have food." And the monk did. He never saw where Christ was
buried. But he did see where Christ was risen and alive. Look around
you, and you will, too!
Last updated Wednesday, Februrary 29, 2008
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