The Power and Peril of Easter

First published in The Daily Sentinel, Friday, March 21, 2008

“Jesus, regardless of where his corpse ended up, is dead and remains dead.”

Think that statement is provocative? Absolutely. Spoken by an atheist or irreligious person? Actually, no. Thomas Sheehan, professor at Stanford University’s Department of Religious Studies, said that. Dr. Sheehan has a theory about the story of Jesus’ resurrection: It’s a legend loosely based on obscure memories of what might really have happened when some women discovered that Jesus’ body was missing.

“The original Christian community in Jerusalem was deeply troubled by that deathly silence of the tomb, the utter absence of Jesus,” Sheehan wrote in his book, The First Coming: How the Kingdom of God Became Christianity. “They began to speak into the dark cavity of the tomb and give it a meaning born of their disappointment and their hope. The women had fled into a silence that corresponded to the absence of Jesus; but the Jerusalem community began to fill that silence with words. They invented a story of an angel who appeared inside the empty tomb.”

Sheehan builds his case for that conclusion through something called historical-critical analysis. He assumes that the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were all written as propaganda – documents designed to convince people to think and behave in particular ways. Therefore, to discover the historical accuracy (or inaccuracy) of the gospels, one has to go into speculative theories as to how those documents came to be written, and what sources may have contributed to their creation. Somewhere in the mist of the unknown, Sheehan concludes, there are documents and facts that contradict the historical accuracy of the gospels.

The gospels are dangerous, and religious historians like Sheehan attempt to “disarm” them because of that danger. What is the danger? That people will believe that God actually does something miraculous! In the worldview formed by modern science and empirical study, there can not be something that stands outside the natural order. People don’t suddenly become alive after death anymore than they can turn into werewolves, vampires, or ghosts.

Marcus Borg, a retired priest in the Episcopal Church, agrees with Sheehan. Jesus did not physically return from death – the resurrection was symbolic and theological. “I think the resurrection of Jesus really happened, but I have no idea if it involves anything happening to his corpse, and, therefore, I have no idea whether it involves an empty tomb … so I would have no problem whatsoever with archaeologists finding the corpse of Jesus. For me, that would not be a discrediting of the Christian faith or the Christian tradition.”

Sheehan and Borg are smart men. On an IQ test, they probably would score much, MUCH higher than I. But intelligence can get in the way of believing when it is used to debunk faith and rationalize it away. I am not anti-intellectual. I think God gave us intelligence as a gift that can be used to help us better understand God, ourselves, and one another. But, as I have said before, every good gift can be abused and misused. Borg and Sheehan have used their intelligence to push us away from understanding the Resurrection as something that actually happened. And I think that’s sad.

Historic, orthodox Christianity insists that God broke through time and space to become REAL – someone who could be touched, fed, clothed – and killed. Further, it insists that God’s actions in that physical reality did something that forever changed human destiny. Christianity, therefore, isn’t simply about how to be emotionally balanced or ethically correct. Christianity is about being physically, emotionally and mentally transformed from what we are to what we were created to be – to bring us into a real relationship with God in this life and beyond. That kind of religion isn’t satisfied with a legendary resurrection of Jesus. It’s not just the empty tomb, it’s also the eyewitness testimonies of actual, physical appearances of a living Jesus, and what happens to them after they believe.

The apostle Paul strongly disagrees with Borg, Sheehan, and other modernists. He wrote in 1 Corinthians 15: “Now, my dear friends, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand. By this gospel you are saved, if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you. Otherwise, you have believed in vain.

“For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Peter, and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me also.”

“But if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the dead. But he did not raise him if in fact the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised either. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile.”

Dr. Albert Mohler, another modern scholar, puts Paul’s letter in perspective for us today: “Paul sets himself – and the true Church – against all who deny or deride the empty tomb. Either the tomb is empty, or our faith is in vain. Paul wants nothing to do with the effort to find a spiritual meaning without a historical event, nor with anti-supernaturalism. Against modern skeptics, Paul cared deeply about whether the tomb was empty.”

I also like Dr. Mohler’s conclusions to this controversy of the Resurrection: “Why do so many people hate the very idea of the risen Christ? Because the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead is the vindication of God’s purpose in sending his Son for the redemption of sinners. A world full of degenerate moderns – who do not even see themselves as sinners – wants nothing to do with Jesus Christ as our sinless substitute, who shed his blood for the remission of our sins.”

The liturgy we use during Communion says the mystery of the church is this: “Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.” Science and history cannot explain it nor prove it. It can only deny it. What about you? What do you believe? Go to church Sunday and EXPERIENCE the Resurrection for yourself!

What's the Big Deal About an Early Easter?

First published in The Daily Sentinel, Friday, March 14, 2008

Just in case you have been visiting your family off-planet somewhere, I’d like to officially inform you that Easter is only nine days from now! That’s right, this Sunday is Palm Sunday in the western Christian calendar, and the following Sunday – March 23 – is Easter!

I received several emails – actually the same email from several different people – highlighting the uniqueness of this year’s Easter timing. The email breathlessly announces that “this is the earliest Easter any of us will ever see the rest of our lives!” Furthermore, “the next time Easter will be this early (March 23) will be the year 2228 (220 years from now). The last time it was this early was 1913 (so if you’re 95 or older, you are the only ones that were around for that!).”

Now I am willing to join the hoopla of the earliest Easter I will ever see, but all this made me wonder how setting the date for Easter works in the first place. To find out, I had to go back to some of the earliest history of the Christian church. Back in 325 AD, church leaders gathered in a place called Nicea. They were there to hammer out agreements on quite a number of issues, including the process for determining when to celebrate the most important event in Christianity – the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Leaders from the eastern side of the Roman Empire preferred to schedule Easter with the Jewish Passover. All four gospel accounts – Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John – agree that Jesus was arrested, convicted and crucified during the week of Passover. In fact, John’s gospel makes deliberate parallels between the sacrifice of the Passover Lamb with Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross. Western Roman leaders, however, were more concerned with eradicating pagan festivals than retaining ties to Judaism. Tying the Resurrection celebration to the arrival of Spring seemed the best way to stop the pagan celebrations.

The only thing on which the two sides could agree was that Easter should be celebrated on a Sunday. So for the next 200 or so years, Christians celebrated Easter based on local preference – there were MANY Easters every year! In the meantime, tensions between the East and the West accelerated, both politically within the Roman Empire itself, and in Christianity. The Empire split into two, and from that point on, Christian practices diverged along the same lines.

Finally, in 7^th century, Western Christians adopted a uniform method for determining when to celebrate Easter. And you guessed it – it was based on the arrival of Spring. Easter was to be celebrated on the FIRST Sunday after the FIRST full moon AFTER the spring Equinox. Got that??

If you thought that was confusing, just wait – it gets better! The calendar in use for centuries was the Julian calendar, and it was too long. Each year, the calendar moved ahead of the sun by 11 minutes, 17 and ½ seconds. That adds up to a full three days over 400 years. Easter had to be adjusted accordingly. In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII approved a reform of the calendar that took away TEN ENTIRE DAYS to correct the error. The day after October 4 was declared to be October 15!

Flashing forward to modern times, we still use the combination solar/lunar timetable for determining Easter. So, the Sunday of Easter will vary by as much as five weeks – that’s 35 days. The odds of Easter landing on any ONE particular day in those five weeks is pretty low – hence the tremendous passage of time between one March 23^rd Easter and the next March 23^rd Easter. But when you think about it, that’s true for ANY day within the range of possible days for Easter. It’s no more remarkable to celebrate Easter on March 22 as it is on April 22. We just make a bigger deal out of the early date because it is on the edge rather than in the middle of the range.

And when I stop to think about Easter more deeply, I realize that the REALLY early Easter is the one for which we don’t have a date – that FIRST Easter morning when a group of women went to a tomb, hoping to care for the body of the person they loved, admired, and even dared to worship. Imagine the breathlessness in which Mary Magdelene told John and Peter that the grave was open and she couldn’t find Jesus’ body! Imagine the fear and dread they felt as they went back to the tomb to investigate the strangeness of the situation.

What a surprise to discover no on there – then suddenly someone WAS there! Mary was so upset that she failed to recognize Jesus at first. But then, she realized Jesus was ALIVE!! Now that’s a big deal! Huge!! World-changing, even!!! And ever since, Christians have celebrated that day – the day that death was conquered, sin overturned, and fear turned into joy. If you want to get excited about an Early Easter, then go ahead! I’ll join you, no matter what the date!!!