Frances Flatman reflects on the Readings for Easter Sunday
As we see in our Gospel (John 20:1-9) in a passage remarkably similar to the ending of Mark, there is no figure of Jesus present. John as it were takes over from Mark and makes more explicit what was there in that first Gospel. Our Gospel begins with loss, that of Mary of Magdala and Peter, and yet this is rapidly transformed through the understanding of John, whose Gospel allows us to ‘see’ that he ‘saw’ the Lord and things surrounding him from a different perspective. Significantly here, ‘Seeing’ - the absence of either corpse or risen body - is what enables John, the Beloved Disciple ‘to believe’. ‘He saw and he believed.’ His love for Jesus was the channel through which he came to understand what had happened to Jesus. It is not thereafter in subsequent meetings with the risen Jesus that everything is back to normal; far from it, for the meetings John will go on to describe (and which we shall read about in the following weeks) will make us too think very differently about Jesus, as Peter the exemplar of this whole period would discover. This time too would be what we describe as ‘The time of the Church’, as many of our Readings will be about the earliest life of the ‘Christian’ community, as it grew and discovered what it is to be the people of the resurrection, the Easter people, those transformed by the risen Christ.
The great majority of Christians, even those of the Early Church, were drawn from those who ‘Did not see’, either an empty tomb or the risen, resurrected body of the Lord. Most of the developing community of believers, originally Jews but increasingly those of pagan background and frequently living far from Palestine, were members of a very different world as we shall see. Like us, they listened to stories about Jesus which over the years were written up as our four Gospel accounts, and they listened to the still living witnesses, and experienced the profound effects of the resurrection on the lifestyles and beliefs of those witnesses. They were men and women who quite literally stepped out into the unknown, people prepared to allow their lives to be transformed by the Jesus event, and we are their heirs.
We meet this in our Reading from Acts (10:37-43). Acts speaks of the early ministry of Peter in a Jewish-Christian setting. But here we are shown the faith reaching out to pagans, shattering hundreds of years of Jewish practice. Here it is a Roman Centurion of the Italian Cohort in Caesarea, so part of the army of occupation - the enemy - here transformed as one of the believers! This great artificial harbour city had been built by Herod the Great from 22 BCE for Augustus the Emperor and Herod’s patron in chief. It was full of Roman gods, temples, and provisions for a pagan lifestyle. Yet clearly within it there were Romans attracted to Judaism, ‘Godfearers’, unable to make the transition to Judaism because of its separatism and rigid rules, but sympathetic to its careful code of life. The Roman sends for Peter, who was meeting believers in Joppa some 30 miles down the coast. At this point Peter had had a dream of a sheet with all kinds of creatures in it, clean and unclean, and was told to eat. What God had declared clean (including Gentiles), a Jew could not contest. This is the moment of breakthrough when the Christian group, still within Judaism at this point, turned radically away from its narrow separatism to embrace the world. This is the spur to Peter’s Gentile mission, as he realises that the faith must now be open to all people. Peter, the group’s leader, speaks as an original witness to the healing ministry of Jesus, a defeating of the devil/demons which blighted lives in the ancient world at every step, and of his passion and death, and then of his resurrection to bodily life, insisting that the Jewish prophets and scriptures had all looked forward to the coming of Jesus, the final act in their salvation history. The upshot of his visit is that this pagan household are all baptised into faith in Jesus, and Peter stays with them, breaking the habits of a lifetime, eating their pagan foods and sleeping there, acts which he would have previously seen as contaminating, and making him unclean.
In the Letter to the Christians of Colossae, (3:1-4), an insignificant wool town up the Meander river inland from Ephesus, and a parallel of medieval Burford in Oxfordshire in its day, Paul speaks of their having ‘Been brought back to true life with Christ.’ This suggests that formerly they had been estranged from something they had previously possessed and had lost as their paganism made clear. Indeed as the passage continues, we discover that this is his message, for Paul tells them that from now on their thoughts must dwell on ‘Heavenly’ things and not on ‘Earthly’, ‘Because you have died, and now the life you have is hidden with Christ in God.’ Having undergone the Easter experience, they in Christ have already passed into a totally different time-space dimension, and where formerly as pagans they had lived the life of the fallen unredeemed world, they are now living in a quite different dimension. As Paul always focussed on the cross and resurrection of Jesus, we can assume that his missionaries did so too. For those very early Christians living in Colossae, this would have been the most epic of events. Formerly pagans, living the hum-drum existence of easy exploitation of and by their fellows, some undoubtedly slaves and at the mercy of their masters, with easy access to the amphitheatres, circus races and brothels, they would have known themselves doomed to brief and unremarkable lives, a prey to illness, death and famine. Then suddenly Paul’s emissary converts them to Christianity, and the entire perspective of their lives changes as their entry into the death and resurrection of Christ lifts their lives on to a quite different plane, one in which they can, here and now be in touch with the one God who cared for them and who in their mortal deaths promised them new life eternally with himself. Indeed, they are promised ‘glory’ with him in the future, so that their lives will have ultimate meaning and not just a crumbling to nothing which was their lot as pagans.
These were a people whose daily lives would have been marked by events on the time–space continuum, in which as pagans they followed the cycles of Greco-Roman festivals with their worship of a plenitude of gods and goddesses which marked their year. This would by then have included the worship of the divine, deceased emperors and their families in the Julio-Claudian line. So when the story of Christ, and especially that of his passion, death and resurrection came to them – still largely at that time in an oral tradition - they would have noted and been much impressed by the time-space references in the Gospel story. Their former gods of course had only a notional day or period of the year set aside for their worship; yet here in the passion accounts they and we have been continually reminded of the reality of Jesus’ real suffering, as the hours were clearly marked from betrayal to cross, and as we followed his shuffling, suffering steps to Golgotha. Events like this would of course have been familiar to them too, and in all their painful and disgusting reality. This would not have been the expected ‘death’ of any Roman deity and would have forced believers to ask really penetrating questions of themselves and of their new faith. Unlike the pagans they/we follow Jesus’ every step, sharing his pain and the events on that journey, a journey which so marked him out as human, one of us and our suffering saviour; and within these time-space references they/we discover precisely the extent of God the Son’s commitment to us, so that we can truly begin to appreciate the joy of his resurrection, his vindication by the Father from the jaws of death. What the Colossian Christians, and we, have been privileged to share in is a reliving of those saving events, the bringing to birth of our new life in Christ. They, we, are intimately involved in our remaking, our ‘re-membering’ as we take on our new and risen life, the salvation which is taking place. We are not passive bystanders, merely onlookers at pagan mythologies, for we like those ancient Colossians are saved, made a new creation by those events, in which we are pitched into the saving passion and resurrection of our Lord. ‘When Christ who is our life is revealed- (made manifest in Greek – blazed out) and he is your life – you too will be revealed (made manifest) in all your glory with him.’ This was an unprecedented promise made by God to all the heirs of Christ; nothing like it has or had ever been promised before or since.
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