Reflect on the accounts of the resurrection in the gospels and note anything that surprises, puzzles or disturbs you. How do you relate to the women in Mark who flee from the tomb?For me, the challenge of studying the resurrection stories been in facing up to my own fuzzy thinking and vague understanding of the resurrection.
The resurrection is such an established part of the Jesus story, that I must admit I hadn’t given it much close consideration, and I was a bit taken off guard to have to think carefully about the difference between resurrection and resuscitation, and to acknowledge that while I have always known that the resurrection of Jesus was a specific occurrence of revivification unique to the Christian understanding of Jesus as the Christ, I had no real notion about how the resurrection differed from resuscitation. I suppose I had imagined Jesus being properly dead, but then somehow coming alive again, in the same body, and carrying on as before, only a bit shinier and holier looking than previously, with halo attached. Don’t ask me how I accounted for Jesus’ body not having to obey the laws of nature and begin to decompose and be thoroughly unliveable after those three days, no longer fit-for-purpose. I suppose I must have watched too much TV in my youth: in the Highlander, the Immortals are able to heal their bodies and come alive again a few days after being killed in a swordfight, just as long as their enemies forgot to cut off their heads in order to claim their victim’s essence, their very life-power. It’s embarrassing to have to admit that, on closer scrutiny, my personal image of Jesus turned out to be something quite like Duncan MacLeod! (As the show’s tagline says: There can be only One! In my defence though: my granny is Scots, of the clan MacLeod, and I think it’s fitting that my unconscious self would identify Jesus as my clansman, even though my unconscious self got the rest of it totally wrong.) While I can’t claim to have solved all of my now conscious confusion about the resurrection, it has been most helpful to discover that I am not alone in this: the early Christians struggled to articulate their experience of the resurrection (and they were THERE, they actually had experience of the resurrection, so I don’t feel too badly about not being able to clearly explain my beliefs, which live in my gut and my heart more than in my head!)
I feel a great deal of Lucan compassion and forgiveness for Mark’s fleeing women. I really don’t blame them for running away and being fearfully silent. I’m inclined to be more observant than active myself; I gather information and puzzle over it and try to make sense of it in order to be sure that any action I take will be the right action, and then I worry a bit and have long conversations with myself and with God before I ever get around to acting. So I think I’d probably have behaved exactly as Mark’s fleeing women did: which would put Mark into a right froth, because my response is so not what he was going for! I think it’s really interesting that Mark uses fear as a means of countering fear: he instils fear in his listeners about what will happen and who will be to blame if the story never gets out, and that is supposed to counter their fear of some very real worldly opposition to the message of the resurrection. I don’t respond well to fear as a motivator, so I thank God for Luke’s compassion and merciful forgiveness: that makes it easier for me to crawl out from under my blanket of shame about my lack of faith, and act.
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