This Sunday, Christ Rose and Will Convince the World, If We Tell Them

The long wait is over, and the days of preparation are done. The Big Event is here: Easter, The Resurrection of the Lord, Year A. Easter isn’t a finish line, though: It’s a starting line for a Christians, transformed by Christ, to go and transform the world.

Here are six takeaways drawn from Sunday Readings columns at this site and the Extraordinary Story podcast.

First: Everyone who visited the empty tomb  immediately thought of others.

On Sunday, the day after the Saturday Sabbath, Mary Magdalene set out for Jesus’s tomb before the sun had even risen. When she found the stone rolled away and the tomb empty, the Gospel reading tells us she “ran and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple,” John.

In other words, her first thought was “I have to tell the Church.”

Last we saw Peter, he had just denied Jesus. Luke tells the story in all its dramatic detail. Jesus told Peter that Satan planned to “sift all of you like wheat, but I have prayed that your own faith may not fail, and once you turned back, you must strengthen your brothers.” Peter had no doubt spent the night haunted by those words and the look Jesus gave him when he denied him for the third time. He was eager to be strong for his brothers and make up for what he had done.

Perhaps it was St. Peter who suggested getting St. John to go along, also. The last we saw of John was when he was given to Mary and “From that hour he took her to his own home.” He must have spent intense hours since then with Mary, who was a believer in the Resurrection. After all, Elizabeth had summed up Mary as “Blessed are you who believed that what was spoken to you by the Lord would be fulfilled.” Jesus seconded that opinion in Luke chapter 11, verse 28, when he declared what was really special about the Blessed Mother, saying “Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and keep it!” Then, in his very next words, in verse 29, Jesus promised to give people a sign, the Sign of Jonah, his resurrection.

So when Mary Magdalene saw the empty tomb she thought of Peter; Peter thought of his brothers who needed strengthening, and John thought of the Blessed Mother and the Sign of Jonah.

Second: So off they ran, and found — cloths?

What did they see in the tomb? John reports, “he saw the burial cloths there, and the napkin that had covered his head, not with the burial cloths but rolled up in a separate place … and he saw and believed.”

Why would seeing some cloth convince him of the Resurrection? You can follow the logic this way: Jesus’s body was no longer in the tomb, so something must have happened to it. Perhaps grave robbers, or an enemy, or an over-zealous follower took it.

The Gospel writers told us the cloths had been put on the bloody body of Jesus along with a lot of aloe and myrrh. It would be difficult to peel all of that off a body — and if you could do so, it would only make it more difficult to carry the body away. If someone had taken the body, they would have simply grabbed what was there and run.

But the burial cloths were still there, and something about the way they looked convinced them he had risen. Perhaps they were there on the bed of the tomb just as they were when they were on his corpse, but now with no body in them, leaving them fallen in on themselves, or in a paper-mâché style shell the length and width of his body. And the face cloth was carefully rolled up, by someone.

The fact that John noticed that the cloths were so significant also makes sense of the idea that these cloths would have been collected and saved by Christians. The Shroud of Turin, in Torino, Italy, claims to be those very burial cloths and in our age of advanced scientific analysis they more accepted than ever as an authentic artifact from the time and place of Jesus’s death and burial (see Matt Fradd’s great treatment of the Shroud here).

Fourth: The very last words in the Gospel passage reveal its theme.

“For they did not yet understand the Scripture that he had to rise from the dead,” it says.

This is a callback to something John’s Gospel reported earlier.  Jesus had proclaimed, “Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up,” and John had explained, “He was speaking about the temple of his body,” and added: “Therefore, when he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this, and they came to believe the Scripture and the word Jesus had spoken.” Now is the beginning of that dawning realization.

In the 200s AD, the Christian writer Origen explained, “Both the Body of Jesus and the temple seem to me to be a type of the Church, which with lively stones is built up into a spiritual house, into a holy priesthood.”

What Peter and John came to understand is that the ultimate meaning of the Resurrection was more than the rising of Jesus; it was the launching of the Church.

This is, in fact, the “Sign of Jonah” Jesus promised and Mary believed.

We make a mistake when we think of Jonah as the story of a person staying alive in the belly of a whale. As Brant Pitre points out in his phenomenal book The Case for Jesus, in fact, Scripture “never claims Jonah remained alive for three days and three nights in the fish. … It pretty explicitly says that Jonah died and went to the realm of the dead.”

Scripture says Jonah went to the “belly of Sheol … whose bars closed upon me forever.”  Then, after he was deposited back on shore, God said the same word to Jonah that Jesus said when he raised Jairus’s daughter from the dead: “Koum,” which we translate “Arise.”

So the sign of Jonah is a reference to Jonah rising from the dead. Bud Jesus adds that the point of the story isn’t that Jonah rose, but what happened next: “at the preaching of Jonah they repented, and there is something greater than Jonah here,” Jesus says.

In the Book of Jonah the fickle prophet, in a single day, converted the entirety of the wicked, pagan town of Ninevah simply by repeating one quiet phrase. This is what Jesus’s Sign of Jonah would be also.

Fifth: After Jesus rose, the Church rose, too, and conquered the world.

The other readings for Easter show how Peter, like a new Jonah, steps forward and boldly preaches the Gospel. In the first reading, from Acts, he describes how:

“God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and power. He went about doing good and healing those oppressed by the devil, for God was with him. We are witnesses of all that he did.”

Peter and the early Church knew what their job was: to do precisely what Jesus did. So they did. First of all, they “went about doing good.” Rodney Stark describes how Christian goodness brought astounding growth in the new Church in his book, The Rise of Christianity.

“Christianity did not grow because of miracle-working in the marketplaces … or because Constantine said it should, or even because the martyrs gave it such credibility. It grew because Christians constituted an intense community,” Stark wrote.

N.T. Wright, a Protestant theologian who focuses on the Resurrection and its meaning on earth, says:

“Stark makes a compelling case that the way the Christians behaved in the great plagues of the early centuries was a significant factor in contributing to the spread of the faith.” Their care for the sick meant, “The Christians were being for the world what Jesus had been for Israel. People took notice. Something new was happening.”

Peter in the First Reading continues by saying that Jesus “commissioned us to preach to the people and testify that he is the one appointed by God as judge of the living and the dead.”

Scholar Larry Hurtado, in his book, Destroyer of the gods: Early Christian Distinctiveness in the Roman World, says that this preaching was given great power.

“The growth of Christianity in its first three centuries, the most crucial period, was largely by a combination of the power of persuasion, whether in preaching, intellectual argument, ‘miracles’ exhibiting the power of Jesus’ name, and simply the moral suasion of Christian behavior, including martyrdom.”

In the Second Reading, we see St. Paul preaching his message, telling Christians we “were raised with Christ.” This message changed the world from the ancient world to today. Historian Tom Holland writes in Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World:

“The revolutionary implications of [Paul’s] message, to those who heard it, could not help but raise pressing questions. …. If all were equally redeemed by Christ, if all were equally beloved of God, then what of the hierarchies on which the functioning of even the humblest Roman household depended?”

In a world where women were second-class citizens and slaves were practically sub-human, Christianity suddenly united everyone in Christ, the crucified and risen image of God, and transformed the world.

Sixth: that’s where we come in.

Remember, the Gospels were not just written after the resurrection, they were written because of the resurrection. They were written to make sense of the resurrection. Jesus surprised (nearly) everyone by rising from the dead, so his followers wanted to figure out why. What was expected of them now?

What they came to realize is that Christ’s great project of building his kingdom in the world — re-Edenizing the world in the way he describes in the Our Father — is the reason for the Resurrection. He rose from the dead to convince us that, with him, we really can change the world — and Christians did change it, from the very beginning.

We can do the same thing today.

If our Lenten program was intensive training in repentance through prayer, fasting and almsgiving, Easter is meant to deploy us as ready assets in the field. Jesus wants us each to have a personal encounter with him, like Mary Magdalene, Peter, and John did — and then to go tell a world that is sick of the reign of death and darkness that change is possible now.

You will be surprised how easily people will be convinced, if we try. It can be like Ninevah all over again.

Image: St. Peter preaching in Jerusalem, wikimedia.

By Tom Hoopes