Delivered on Sunday 19 April 2009 in St George's Chapel

Luke 24:1-12

What does it mean to say that Jesus was raised from the dead? What does it mean to believe in the resurrection? Is the resurrection merely something that happened to Jesus? These are the questions I want to look at this morning, this second Sunday of Easter.

Let us begin our investigation by thinking about the very first Christians, people like Mary Madalene, Joanna, and Mary the mother of James - those first witnesses, in the second lesson this morning, of the empty tomb. Those very first Christians didn't have a New Testament but they did have a set of peculiar experiences. And it was these experiences - these things that happened to them - that brought them to the realisation that the significance of Jesus truly began with his resurrection. By contrast there were plenty around who thought that Jesus death was proof that he had been a false Messiah. As St Paul put it Jesus' death was foolishness to the Greeks and a stumbling block to the Jews. The Gentiles looked for the kind of power they typically associated with divine status - all they say was a dead man hanging on a cross. The Jews saw the same cross and remembered the words from the fifth book of Moses: Cursed be everyone who hangs upon a tree. Here was no messiah. His death brought an end to the story. By contrast, though, those first Christians thought otherwise: their experience first defied and then slowly but surely defined their understanding of reality.

But what was this experience? Perhaps it is easier to begin by asking what they thought resurrection was not. It was not the case, as some had suggested that Jesus never really died, as Paul emphatically stated 'Christ died!' Neither was it the case that Jesus had been merely resuscitated. This was not a recovery from a 'clinical death'. This was not another story like that about Lazarus - Lazarus emergence from the tomb was only good news for him and his family and what's more it was only for a short time. No, the resurrection faith that gave birth to Christianity was a complex combination of experience and conviction. The experience was one of a transforming personal power. The symbol for that power was the Holy Spirit. The term 'spirit' gave the sense of power; not a military or political or economic power but a transforming personal power. The term 'holy' gave the sense of coming from the Other, coming from God. And the conviction that accompanied the experience was that 'Jesus is Lord'. Jesus is alive now in a new and more powerful way after his death than before. He shares the very life of God, and makes that life available to us.

This experience of transformation is seen in our second reading this morning. The women get up early so that they can bring spices to the tomb where Jesus body lay. They arrive only to find that the stone that had stood in front of the tomb has been rolled away. As they were trying to make sense of this, two men in dazzling clothes suddenly stood beside them. In Luke's Gospel the women are very attentive to all things divine - so although they were terrified by these two men, they will also have remembered what Peter, James and John had told them about the two men who spoke with Jesus on the day of his transfiguration. They had said that these two men were Moses and Elijah. They had also said that Moses and Elijah spoke to Jesus about the Exodus he would accomplish at Jerusalem. And surely here they were again but this time they gently chided the women - why do you look for the living among the dead? Jesus is the new Moses; he has led an Exodus; he has brought his people into a new land, a land filled with the Holy Spirit.

The women return and tell their story to the other disciples. Peter runs out to see for himself. The two disciples tell the women's story on the road to Emmaus. And gradually a language and narrative comes into being, a way of talking about their sincere conviction that Jesus is Lord. In a mysterious way the resurrection is not so much about Jesus as it is about his disciples. Following the resurrection they understood Jesus to be the Son of God; they experienced a power of transformation within their own communities, a power which they understood to have its origin in the risen Lord.

This was the experience powerful enough to draw the disillusioned followers of Jesus into a restored people.

This was the experience that manifested itself in a variety of gifts that built up and nurtured the people of God.

This is the experience that radiated across the Mediterranean World in an astonishing proliferation of communities.

This was the experience and the conviction that necessitated the preaching of the Good News.

This was the experience that made the writing of the New Testament itself absolutely necessary.

Given the fact that resurrection faith was the starting point for the earliest Christians, it is something of a surprise and disappointment that we moderns and postmoderns have preferred to understand Jesus significance in relation to his life. We have spent much time and a lot of ink in trying to decipher what the Historical Jesus might have been like. We have started, in other words, where those first century Jews and Greeks started. The cross has become a foolishness and a stumbling block. And our accounts of the Historical Jesus are diverse and contradictory and, worse still, offer little or nothing to nurture life before God.

But Easter is the season to recall, to remember that the birth of Christianity in general and the New Testament in particular emerged out of the matrix of an experience of God mediated through the crucified and risen messiah. But it is also a time when we need to search in our lives together in the Church for the presence of the same personal transforming power in communities, that we call the 'Holy Spirit', and perhaps on that basis we may with conviction proclaim that Jesus is Lord![1]