He is Risen

Housesitter · 03-15-2008, 01:37 PM

Most weeks I reproduce the excellent articles by my good friend Dr John Dempster as published in the Highland News Group of Nespapers under the heading Christian Viewpoint.
Here is the article published this week and as always reproduced with the kind permission of the author.

CHRISTIAN VIEWPOINT

HE IS ALIVE

‘Make no mistake,’ urges the American author John Updike in his poem Seven stanzas at Easter. ‘If He rose at all it was as His body.’ And he warns ‘if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules reknit, the amino acids rekindle, the Church will fall.’

For those who aren’t Christians, Easter is a spring festival in which the annual triumph of light over darkness, and the rebirth of nature after the long death of winter is symbolised by lambs and bunnies and daffodils – and the old myth about a man returning to life. But it didn’t really happen, did it?

Well, Christians down the centuries have been convinced that the documents in the Bible containing descriptions of the first Easter draw on authentic eye-witness accounts. Real people saw a tomb, empty, and encountered not a hallucination or a ghost, but the living Jesus.

St Paul’s comments about this risen Christ seem to be level-headed factual reporting: ‘He was seen by Peter, and then by the twelve apostles. After that he was seen by more than five hundred of his followers at one time, many of whom are still alive.’

Year by year, Easter Sunday reminds us, forcibly, that Christians should be the most joyful people on earth, because Jesus is alive.

Some Christians, finding it difficult to believe that the resurrection could actually have happened, suggest that the story was invented to symbolise the early Christians’ deep sense that Jesus was still with them spiritually.

But could Jewish people who, if they believed in a resurrection at all, thought it would happen at the end of time, have invented this extraordinary story of one man’s return to life?

And though they might conceivably have imagined Updike’s resurrected Jesus with the molecules reknitting and the amino acids firing back into life, would they ever have conceived of the resurrected Jesus of the Bible, physical, yet with strange new qualities such as the ability to pass through walls, and finally to pass into God’s dimension?

And would they, shaped by traditional Jewish attitudes to women, really have invented the resurrection stories we find in the Bible, in which women play such a central rôle?

I believe there is more evidence for the resurrection of Jesus than for many other historical events. Yet many of us either actively choose to view life through a lens which excludes the possibility of miracles, or else we unquestioningly adopt this perspective. ‘Dead people do not come back to life,’ we say. ‘Therefore, once dead, Jesus remained dead.’ Easter challenges each of us to ask ‘Have I got it wrong?’

‘Let us not mock God with metaphor, making of the event a parable,’ says Updike of those who see the Easter story as a symbolic myth rather than a historical fact. Now of course the rising of Jesus does indeed work powerfully for us as a metaphor. For instance, I love the words of another poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins who writes, speaking of Christ, ‘Let him easter in us,’ – may he come alive in our hearts, making everything new.

But for me the resurrection of Jesus works as a metaphor precisely because what happened that first Easter was real. The body sown in the hard soil of death on Good Friday gave life on the following Sunday to the first fruit of a great harvest.

It matters that Jesus literally rose from the dead. The message of Christianity is not about a God who transforms us spiritually and will ultimately rescue us from decaying bodies and a decaying physical world. Rather, it concerns a God who not only gives us new spiritual life but will one day renew our bodies so that they become like Christ’s Easter-morning body, a God who will renew this tired universe making it becomes perfect and enduring.

In the rising of Jesus, we catch a glimpse of the future of the whole of creation, and we are challenged to live out from day to day the values of that future, to bring into the present whispers of what is still to come.

This is Christianity’s astonishing vision. And if we have trapped ourselves in the tomb of failure, despair, and lack of faith the Easter message rolls the stone away so that we can step out into the new morning of our destiny, and find the king there to meet us.

But Updike’s poem warns those of us who stubbornly refuse to question the accuracy of the lens through which we view reality. He imagines us ‘awakened in one unthinkable hour’ in which we’re ‘crushed by remonstrance’ and ‘embarrassed by the miracle.’ For we may find, to our infinite loss that we ourselves have held in place the stone which keeps us in darkness.

John A. H. Dempster

Boanerges · 03-15-2008, 05:20 PM

Interesting thanks. It is appointed once for a man to die than the judgment. Jesus's physical body ( his humanity) died and He was judged to be the spotless, Holy Son of God- He now sits at the Father's right hand and will not taste death again.