Resurrection Encounters

‘Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?’ 

Today is the Third Sunday of Easter.  Note that it is of, not after, Easter.  The Easter season continues for fifty days until we reach Pentecost.  The Resurrection of Christ is so core to our faith that it demands more of us than one day in the church year to, you know, have a think about.   And the grace of the Church Year is that in our life of faith, we will come back to ponder again next year as well.  Christian discipleship is not a course we graduate from with a qualification but a life we live, you might say, without the benefit of any qualifications at all.   

So, on Easter Day, last Sunday and today, we hear from the gospels different stories of encounter with the Risen Jesus.  Now, this may sound a little perverse, but I am often as fascinated by what the four gospels don't tell us, as what they do tell us, about Jesus and especially at this time of year, about the Resurrection. For example, there is nowhere in the whole of the gospels a description of Jesus’ physical appearance.  We don’t know if he was tall or short, slim or plump, good looking or plain.  We just don’t know.  In the Western art and cinema Jesus is usually good looking but tells us more about our values than about Jesus.  The earliest Christian communities out of which the canonical gospel texts came didn’t see fit to tell us – did not see any need to tell us.  And thank goodness they didn’t.  Given the Christian Church’s undeniable capacity down the ages for grabbing the wrong end of the stick, imagine what misuse such information could have been put to. What if in General Synod it was argued that priests, for example, have to have physically resemble Christ.  Now, wouldn’t that be ridiculous way to do theology?  If anyone wants signs of the activity of the Holy Spirit in the creation of the Christian scriptures, there, in my opinion, is a good example!  God knows our human capacity for turning what is descriptive into what is prescriptive.

Just as Jesus isn’t physically described in the gospels, the Resurrection isn’t an ‘event’ that is described there either.  That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen but nowhere in the four gospels is it described.  What the gospels do give us are a series of stories of the risen Jesus’ appearances to others after the Resurrection.  We in Britain are supposedly the most watched society in the democratic world but there was no CCTV in the tomb. 

These Resurrection appearances are even better understood as ‘Resurrection encounters’.  The resurrected Christ is only given to us in the gospel texts as he is seen by others, in relationship to others:  challenging them, comforting them, eating with them, opening the scriptures to them – all the things that happen in the famous Road to Emmaus story we heard this morning.   

This is not true of Christ before the crucifixion and resurrection, though he does all those things too.  We are given some quite private moments, the temptation in the wilderness, the agony in the garden.  The risen Christ, however, is presented only as he is relationship to another:  Mary Magdalen, Peter, Thomas, Cleopas in our reading this morning – a disciple so obscure that this is the only reference to him in the New Testament.  Cleopas’ companion, even more obscure, is not even given a name.  Is the other disciple a man or a woman?  We aren’t told.  There are lots of things we simply are not told about the Resurrection in the gospels.

The Resurrection, then, is not something that can be described: the authors of the four gospels didn’t try, I would suggest we adopt their wisdom and don’t try either.  It is not something to be captured on CCTV – you meet the Resurrection in people.  In our reading from Luke this morning, what do the two disciples do after they realize that it is Jesus who has been with them all along?  They go tell others.  This is real life, flesh and blood.  What the four gospels are concerned about is whether people encounter resurrection, engage – are changed.  In the gospels every glimpse of the risen Christ is not an abstraction, but contextual; not passive but active; not directional but interactive.  He comes and walks besides them, interrupts their conversation, listens to their grief, opens the scriptures to them; is finally seen for who he is when he breaks the bread – as the guest he shouldn’t be doing that – but he does because that is the moment these disciples see him for who he is.  Revelation of resurrection happens in the context of real relationships. 

And not perfect or tidy relationships but messy ones.  Remember the story; Maundy Thursday and Good Friday were not very long ago.  The risen Christ is revealed to the very people who have betrayed him, run away, broken trust, messed up, colluded, failed to keep faith – people just like us.  This is not about being a ‘successful’ Christian, whatever that means, but about very vulnerable, imperfect, very human people. Our kinship to the risen Christ connects a disparate group of women and men together, into a community, the church. And this kinship to Christ, with Christ, is one in which barriers are broken, in which people see each other in new ways, with new eyes. 

Preparing this sermon, my thoughts went to a novel that made a great impression on me when I was a student, the American Willa Cather’s Death Comes to the Archbishop.  Published in the 1920s, it is a fictional retelling of the story of two French priests sent in the 1850s to establish a diocese in the vast territory we now know as New Mexico, Father LaTour and Father Vaillant.  (The names Cather gives them are significant and reading the novel again I think she must have been thinking of Mr Valiant-for-Truth in Pilgrim’s Progress.)   Discussing the nature of miracles, Father Vaillant remarks:

The Miracles of the Church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears hear what is there about us always.’

A Church, a people, which is living the gospel of the Resurrection, not as an abstract doctrine but as lived encounter with real people in real places, has nothing to fear from ‘the world’.  For it is in ‘the world’ we will not so much ‘find’ Christ as we will be found by him – for he is always there.  Like the disciples on the Road to Emmaus, ‘our perceptions [are] … made finer’. Resurrection grace, always free, never cheap, means ‘for a moment our eyes can see and our ears hear what is there about us always’.   

‘Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road.’  Alleluia. Amen.

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    Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop (first published 1927, Virago repr 1985), p. 50.