April 10, 2016

 John Salmon

Easter 3     The Mouth of the Dragon, p108     John 21:1-8, 14

Video available on YouTube, Facebook

Introduction

It is still the Easter Season. We still say, “Christ is Risen!” And we still answer, “Christ is Risen Indeed!” But what is it we’re saying?

After morning tea this morning, we’ll have an opportunity to explore all this further as Susan and I lead a time of information and discussion – this is a lead-in to that conversation – a bit of a teaching sermon. As we reflect on what this Easter story might means for us, I suggest it’s best to start with Paul – not with a rolled away stone...

• Shaping the Christ Myth

Susan has been speaking quite a bit lately about the “Christ myth”, the important ‘big story’ that defines us as Christians, the story we keep on telling and enacting through our Sunday liturgies.

For Paul – who began shaping this Christ myth – the image of ‘Resurrection’ is an important component. Like much of what Paul does, he borrows this image from the idea held by some parts of the Jewish community that the whole People of God will be resurrected ‘on the last day’.

That’s an affirmation of hope for a people who often experienced conflict, defeat, landlessness, and economic hardship, while still believing they were God’s chosen people.

Paul picks up the image to provide hope for the young communities who looked back to Jesus and his teaching for their identity. They, too, experienced hardship and persecution. Paul is aiming to provide a big strong story that will hold the communities together, give them purpose, and provide hope for their futures. So the Christ myth Paul outlines has at its heart the death and resurrection of Jesus the Christ – as one ‘representative’ figure for the whole people – providing a vision for everyone.

But it’s important to note that Paul, writing 20 years or so before the earliest Gospel writers, doesn’t mention the empty tomb. He speaks of ‘appearances’, of the kind we would probably speak of today as ‘experiences’ – including his own ‘conversion’ experience. He’s not interested in – and presumably knew nothing about – stories of Jesus in bodily form coming out of the tomb. For him it is Christ who is risen, not Jesus. “Christ is Risen” is at the heart of Paul’s powerful myth, portraying significant truth for those early communities that eventually become “Christian” – and providing truth and hope and power for us still today.

• A Continuing Story

However, the subsequent metaphor-laden stories of the various Gospel writers have ended up in centre stage. The image of the empty tomb is certainly a powerful image of life rather than death – but it is just that: an image, a symbol, designed to portray Paul’s resurrection insight in readily-understood story form, against Paul’s philosophical or theological language. Still, however, the myth remains, and we’ve heard it again in various ways this last Easter – including in today’s hymns. Much of what we sing comes from the church’s deep tradition, and uses words and images we wouldn’t readily use today. I suggest it’s useful to glance at the date of the hymns before you start singing – it’s puts their words into perspective. It pays also, I think, to underline that the Gospel stories – all the New Testament stories, in fact – are contributers to the grand myth and its truths: they are not history.

And here is where trouble lies for many of us today.

The trouble began to be stirred up especially around 200-300 years ago, in Western Europe, in the period we call the Enlightenment. This is the time when scientific thinking developed, leading on to technology and new explanations of our past, and to the overall kind of world view many contemporary people hold. Core to this view is that truth requires evidence to support it – if there’s no evidence and no way of getting evidence, if it’s not based on substantiated facts, it cannot be truth. Because myths – the kinds of stories that most communities have used over time to explain their origins and purpose and key values – because myths are not based on evidence, they cannot be true in terms of Today’s common world view. That’s why today the word ‘myth’ has come to mean something that is not true!

What I suggest is important for Christians today, is that we work hard to re-claim the truth-power of myth. Let’s not be shy about that. Let’s identify the deep significance of a strong, relevant myth like our Christ myth, and the deep truth this myth carries for us still. Let’s be clear as we do that that our stories about Jesus and our proclamation of Christ are not history, they cannot be regarded as factual, but they are definitely truthful.

• We are the Resurrected Body of Christ

So, then, how does ‘resurrection’ work for us?

Paul himself identifies this, saying that Christ is alive and active within the communities that carry the Christian name. We are the Resurrected Body of Christ. That’s what it means to speak of the church as “The Body of Christ”. So the challenge for us – individually and as a community – is to live out the priorities and values that display Christness. These priorities and values have their roots in the sayings of Jesus the Wisdom teacher and liberative prophet, and in the subsequent insights of Paul and other writers.

To appreciate the sayings clearly we often have to scrape the influence of later interpreters off our eyeballs – Augustine and Thomas Aquinas with their Greek philosophical influences, Church leaders who ‘spiritualised’ Jesus’ sayings to avoid shifting systems of power, Enlightenment writers with their emphasis on facts – all, of course, shaped by the ideas and priorities of their various contexts.

Now the focus is our context. We appropriately understand, speak about, and act out resurrection life in our own way for our own time. Let’s not be perseverated on the empty tomb, but let’s acknowledge and enact the truth of the Risen Christ, here.

Conclusion

We are the resurrected Body of Christ. That great story of life and hope, of compassion and peace, takes life amongst us.

This is where our focus lies – in our community life, not in some distant past or future or space.

This is the context in which Christ is risen – in our own lives, not in the lives or stories of others.

This is the city, the nation, the world, in which resurrection needs to take place – in the time and place we live in here and now, with our issues, our concerns, fears.

Let’s put our thoughts and our energies into shaping Christ-life in our communities of church and society: for we are the Resurrected Body of Christ...