To thine own true self, be
To thine own true self, be
Falling, rising...
Easter Vigil 2013
Cathedral Church of the Holy Trinity
March 30, 2013
The Rt. Rev. Pierre W. Whalon
Why did Jesus have to die?
I have opened two other meditations this week with that question. So one more time, with feeling: Why did Jesus have to die?
Another way at this question is to ask, why did Jesus have to rise again? For a long time I have advocated the idea that even if all we knew was that God in Jesus Christ had come to share our human life and to die among us, it would be enough. I guess I get this idea because of all the existentialist philosophy I studied years ago. In any event, no one seems to agree with me. Gotta have the Resurrection…
So all right, if the Resurrection isn’t the icing on the cake, then it is the heart of the matter. We say that we believe that Jesus is born of the Holy Spirit of God and Mary the Virgin. That line in the Creed seems hard for people today to swallow, but it isn’t a biology lesson, it is the proclamation that Jesus was sent into our world by God for a mission. And that mission is to live and die as one of us, but then, to rise from the dead and destroy death’s power over us. If Jesus did not rise from the dead, would it matter who his mother was? Would we really care that in him, we see God? At best, having only the death of God in Christ would be a mere consolation. Well, yes, we do need more than that.
Paul says to the Romans in the later reading tonight, “… we have been buried with him by baptism into his death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.” In a few minutes, we will baptize Oliver. He will join us in dying with Christ, being buried with Christ, and being raised from the dead with Christ.
So this is why Jesus had to rise again, because we need the Resurrection. So what is that?
All the accounts in the Scriptures of the appearances of the Risen Jesus are fragmentary. He appeared first to women, the Gospels agree, and they tell us that when the women reported to the men disciples what they had experienced, the men didn’t believe them. Just women overcome with grief, you know, they’re hysterical… And then, we are told, Jesus meets the disciples in various occasions. In all of these, others recognize him only when he wants. He passes through locked doors, but has no trouble eating fish. And he basically tells them to wait for the Holy Spirit — then they’ll start to get it.
But obviously, the original witnesses were as clueless as we are as to what actually happened. They knew that he had really died, as we all do, but then had returned not only alive again but transformed. He was Jesus, and he was also More.
Paul tells the Corinthians that when he was a new disciple, say around five years after the Resurrection, he was taught that Jesus died according to the Scriptures and was raised according to the Scriptures. Now these are the Hebrew Scriptures, what we call the Old Testament and the Apocrypha. In other words, the Scriptures that Jesus read. This interpretation of those Scriptures was quite novel then, as any of our Jewish friends will tell us. The first disciples saw in the prophets’ promises that God would create a new heaven and a new earth a basis for understanding what happened to Jesus of Nazareth. A new creation is who the Risen Jesus is. And in another letter to the Corinthians, Paul says that if anyone is in Christ, that one is a “new creation.”
So what happened in the darkness of the tomb was that God created a new Jesus from the old. Yes, he was cold, stiff and dead, as we all will be one day. When we die, there is no immortal part that flits off into the ether. That is a Greek idea. What we are saying when we proclaim, “On the third day, he rose again,” is that God made a new creation come forth from the old. Jesus Christ is the first instance of this New Creation, this new heaven and new earth. And what happens to us when we die is that God’s Spirit does the same. We become a New Creation too. God reverses death, as it were, first resurrecting our selves, our soul or consciousness if you will, and then continues to knit us into a New Human ready to live in the New Creation.
So death no longer has a grip on us. The ones who have preceded us in death are themselves alive. Oliver here will never be destroyed by death. And all the other ills that attend us in this life, the things we have done and left undone, those things others have done to us or left undone for us, all of those also have lost their absolute power to diminish and destroy us.
Jesus had to die in order to rise again, so that we would have an unshakeable hold on the new life. As I said before, the first disciples did not understand what they had experienced. They knew that the dead did not come back. Certainly the old Jesus did not come back either. He was the same and yet now they could see that he is so much More. And that is why they did not understand, could not understand. The Old Creation does not understand the New, cannot grasp it. All we can see is a connection, a kind of extrapolation.
Which leads us to a conclusion, and that is, what Jesus was before his death has a clear relationship to what he became in the Resurrection. Looking backwards we see that he is God with us, Emmanuel, teaching and healing and casting out evil and raising the dead. We can see that there is a connection between the darkness of the Garden Tomb and the darkness of the Virgin’s womb.
And this also applies to us. Jesus’ birth was no accident. Neither was yours. Jesus’ life wasn’t just a meandering trail, going nowhere special, and neither is yours. Death had no power over him other than that which he gave it — on our behalf. We no longer have to give to death ultimate power over us. And we can see that just as God sent Christ from his birth to claiming his ministry to doing the work only he could do, so too God has sent you and me from our births on, to claiming our unique individual ministries within the Body of Christ on Earth, and doing that work only each of you can do.
We have been baptized into Jesus’ death, so we are already beginning to share in his Resurrection. Live into it, my friends! It is yours because it is his, because you are his, and Christ is yours, by the power of God’s Spirit.
Right now we have the opportunity to do the work God has given us to do. Jesus Christ told us to go and baptize.
So — let us go and baptize Oliver. Right now. So that he can join us all in that for which Jesus had to die and rise again, the life that never ends.
1 avril 2013/ F. D. Maurice