Imagine, for a moment, yourself in Peter’s sandals. You’ve seen Jesus convicted by a Jewish kangaroo court and brutally executed by Roman soldiers at the order of a politically-vulnerable Roman governor. You’ve seen him alive again, and even eaten with him, proving him neither ghost nor golem. You’ve stood looking up into the sky and watched him vanish from sight. You’ve followed his instructions, waiting with the rest of his disciples in Jerusalem for . . . well, for something to happen, even if you weren’t exactly sure just what. And now, this morning, with all of you together at the Temple to celebrate the Feast of Weeks, that something happened, and you are experiencing the world made strange.
And what’s more, it’s not just you—everyone around you in the Temple is experiencing it, too, as your fellow disciples are all speaking at the same time in all the various languages of the Roman world. You’re surrounded by a crowd now, a crowd of people watching in stunned bewilderment. Some are trying desperately to understand; others have raised shields of self-defensive mockery, accusing you all of being drunk out of your skulls. Suddenly, you feel the Spirit of God pulling you up to speak. What do you do? What do you say?
Well, you can start off by directly addressing the scoffers, quoting the prophet Joel’s vivid oracle of the last days; but then what? Joel provides a framework, but Jesus is the message. How do you start talking about him? What do you say? Do you begin by quoting Jesus’ teachings, or telling everyone how kind and loving he was? Or do you stay with the prophets a little longer, maybe explain to the crowd how Jesus fulfilled the messianic prophecies of Isaiah?
Whatever you might have done, or I might have done, I suspect we wouldn’t have taken Peter’s approach: he starts talking about Jesus’ miracles. To the refined spiritual sensibilities of much of the modern Western church—the middle- and upper-class parts of it, at any rate—it might seem rather crass, but it shouldn’t. After all, our culture just loves credentials—more and more, what matters is not whether you can do the job but whether you have a piece of paper that says you can do the job—and as Peter says, the miracles were Jesus’ credentials issued by God. Remember when we looked at John 9 together a few weeks ago? That was the whole argument, whether the Pharisees had to accept Jesus’ credentials or not.
You know the story, of course: they refused them on that occasion, and kept right on refusing them. Eventually, they managed to manipulate events to have him killed, and to whip the crowds into a frenzy to help them do it. It might seem strange to us—why would you kill the miracle man? Even Prince Humperdinck, louse that he was, didn’t go that far. (Apologies for the mild spoiler to anyone here who hasn’t seen The Princess Bride.) The Jewish leaders did, though, and even further: having crowbarred Pontius Pilate into sending Jesus to the cross, they browbeat him into assigning a squad of Roman soldiers, sixteen armed and dangerous men, to secure the tomb. A Roman squad was supposed to be able to form a square and hold their ground indefinitely against any opposing force, and here they were assigned to stand watch on a three-ton rock. It was like setting Seal Team Six to guard a manhole cover. Why?
They said, of course, they wanted him killed because he was a liar, and they wanted the guard to prevent a hoax; but if you really think about that second statement, the whole thing unravels. As the Presbyterian pastor and author Frederick Buechner pointed out, “in the not so long run religious hoaxes always tend to burn themselves out—as the chief priests and Pharisees had good reason to know, living as they did in an age when would-be Messiahs were a dime a dozen. . . . Even if the disciples were successful in their theft of the body, and even if for a time their claim of resurrection flourished, it could not really flourish long without something more substantial than merely rumor to feed upon.” If Jesus was a liar, killing him would expose him as just one more messianic pretender. The threat of a hoax wouldn’t have been worth their time.
No, their real fear has to be something else—something they aren’t telling Pilate, and probably aren’t really admitting even to themselves. It’s ridiculous, but—Jesus had worked some powerful miracles; what if, somehow, he actually did come back to life? What if even killing him wasn’t enough to stop him? I doubt any of them had the courage to face that fear even for a moment, and I’m sure they would have laughed in the face of anyone who dared suggest it, but that had to be haunting the backs of their minds for them to go to such absurd lengths as this. If you’re afraid of a miracle—how are you going to stop it?
As it turned out, even Roman soldiers weren’t up to the task; but the thing is, defending ourselves against miracle doesn’t require stopping it. The Jewish leaders just didn’t have the advantage of all our centuries to know that. As Buechner framed the matter in his sermon “The End Is Life,” “I suspect that many of us could tell them that all in all there is a lot one can do in defense against miracle, and, unless I badly miss my guess, there are thousands upon thousands of ministers doing precisely that at any given instant—making it as secure as they can, that is, which is really quite secure indeed. . . . The point is not to try to prevent the thing from happening—like trying to stop the wind with a machine gun—but, every time it happens, somehow to explain it away, to deflect it, defuse it, in one way or another to dispose of it. And there are at least as many ways of doing this as there are sermons preached on Easter Sunday.”
He’s right; you can spiritualize the Resurrection away without much effort at all. It’s a metaphor, it’s poetry—it means the wisdom of Jesus is immortal like the works of Shakespeare, or that his example lives on in our hearts, or it symbolizes the rebirth of hope in the despairing soul—all of which which misses the brute fact that if Jesus didn’t rise from the dead, there’s no foundation for any of it. If he’s just one more great leader killed off by the establishment, his story is just one more telling us that really, the sword is mightier than the pen after all.
All too often, people reduce the Resurrection to a “miracle” of symbol and metaphor that leaves the substantial reality of our world untouched; and I’m with Buechner on this one. “If I believed that this or something like this was all that the Resurrection meant, then I would turn in my certificate of ordination and take up some other profession. . . . If I thought that when you strip it right down to the bone, this whole religion business is really just an affirmation of the human spirit, an affirmation of moral values, an affirmation of Jesus of Nazareth as the Great Exemplar of all time and no more, then like Pilate I would wash my hands of it. The human spirit just does not impress me that much, I am afraid. And I have never been able to get very excited one way or the other about moral values. And when I have the feeling that someone is trying to set me a good example, I start edging toward the door.”
If the Resurrection is just a story, it’s just what someone wants us to believe; it has no power to change the way things actually are. That’s the tragedy of modern versions of Christianity: but understand this, it’s also the reason for them. The Jewish leaders may seem foolish to us in their furious efforts to defend themselves against miracle, but we’re not really much different. We feel the same need for defense—we’re just smarter about it, is all. The only question is, why? What drives this?
The answer, I believe, is engraved deeply in the understanding of this church, in a phrase we heard often from Kent in our first days here: it’s about false views of life and false views of death. We want to hold on to what feels like life to us, even though we know it will end when we die. We don’t want to give it up, and we don’t want to trade it for something that might be better. Partly, that’s because the promises of something better might be false; we know broken promises all too well, and trust comes hard for good reason. Partly it’s because even as death-denying as our culture is, we are familiar with the horizons of this world; that is the known, and we know how to prepare for it. The unknown and illimitable is terrifying, because we cannot brace ourselves for what might happen. And if we’re honest, partly it’s because we just don’t want to be wrong. We want the right to decide for ourselves what feels like life to us.
We strive to assert our own views of life and death, but if we let Easter run wild, if we let God be loose in the world like that, our efforts are untenable—indefensible. If Jesus actually physically got up from death by the direct power of God, there’s nothing we can say he can’t do, or won’t do. More terrifyingly, there’s also nothing we can say he can’t or won’t ask of us. All our sense of safety is gone, because this is no self-respecting God who will in turn respect the limits we set. This is no God who will take “this feels like life to me” as a justification for anything at all. Instead, he tells us that what feels like life to us leads only to death, while the path to real life takes us through much that feels like death. We have a God who calls us to trust him and summons us to live by hope—but not the world’s kind of hope. God is in the resurrection business, and for there to be a resurrection, there must first be a death. In one of my favorite movies, The Shawshank Redemption, Andy tells Red, “Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies”; but what do you do with a hope that requires death?
It’s really no wonder so many preachers and writers and theologians try to make Easter safe; `but the first Easter sermon ever preached does the exact opposite. From the first word, Peter is all in. This isn’t “your best life now,” it isn’t “ten Easter principles for a better [whatever],” it isn’t philosophical or poetic or even, in modern terms, spiritual. It is not, in a word, safe. This is head-on, full-throttle, blunt-force preaching at its best as Peter uncompromisingly proclaims cataclysmic hope. He declares that death has been defeated: Jesus was dead as last week’s fish, and then he stopped being dead. He got up, and he walked out of his own tomb under his own power, leaving it free for someone else to use.
Peter understands that God has given him a mighty word to declare to the nations, and he will preach nothing less; and by his example, he calls us to do the same, because we have been given the same word. It’s a word to bring hope to the hopeless and deliverance to the captives, a word to make the blind see and the lame walk, a word even to raise the dead. It’s not dependent on our faith or weakened by our doubt—it lifts our faith and carries us in our doubt—because it’s his word, full of his power. We have been given the word that there is no failure that is final, no grief that cannot be healed, no enemy who cannot be overcome, no shame that cannot be restored, no sinner who cannot be forgiven, because God has overcome every enemy and broken down every obstacle. We have been given the good news that in this world of sorrow and failure and pain and death, sorrow does not have the last word, and failure does not have the last word, and pain does not have the last word, and even death does not have the last word, because God has spoken the last word, and that word is: resurrection.
When our faith is strong, when doubt rocks us, this remains true beyond our power to make or mar: there is a resurrection. If your hopes have failed and your plans gone awry, there is a resurrection. If you’re grieving the death of someone you love, there is a resurrection. If you’re suffering, if you’re in pain, there is a resurrection. If you’re worn down and beaten down by guilt for something you’ve done, there is a resurrection. If you’re alone and lonely, there is a resurrection. If those you love have hurt you and let you down, there is a resurrection. Whatever you have done, whatever this world has done to you, whatever is wrong in your life, and by all that’s holy whatever is wrong in this world, take heart, for there is a resurrection.
Photo taken May 1, 2007 by James Emery. License: Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic.