The resurrection of our lord: April 8, 2007.

Acts 10:34-43 or Isaiah 65:17-25

Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24

1 Corinthians 15:19-26 or Acts 10:34-43

John 20:1-18 or Luke 24:1-12

The great twentieth-century form critic Hermann Gunkel famously asserted, "Urzeit ist Endzeit"--the beginning of all things and the end of all things are one. Gunkel was articulating what readers of the Christian Bible have long perceived, that Genesis and Revelation form the ends of a great arc, at which God the Creator reigns supreme over a perfect cosmos with which God is in perfect harmony and that is itself, in the words of Charles Wesley's great hymn, "lost in wonder, love, and praise."

It is, of course, the rest of the arc, between the termini, that makes up the history of the world and the story of salvation. Today and today's readings focus on the pivotal moment in that history and story. In doing so, they "kick it up a notch," as a popular television chef is wont to say, and thereby go Gunkel one better. The end is indeed one with the beginning, but it subsumes and exceeds it in glory.

The basic story of the day begins this process of linking past and future. The Gospel reading is Luke's account of the first witnesses to the resurrection. Luke's story ends where it began, with angels proclaiming the good news to the least likely of hearers. (Then it was women and shepherds in cc. 1-2; now it's women, whose credibility is well attested by the apostles' reception of their testimony as a literally in-credible "idle tale," v. 11; cf. v. 23.) Only in Luke is the angelic statement of fact ("You seek Jesus [of Nazareth], who was crucified"--Mt 28:5; Mk 16:6) replaced with a question that immediately lets the proverbial cat out of the bag: "Why do you look for the living among the dead?" (v. 5)

In all four of the Gospels "resurrection faith" is not immediate, but Luke seems especially concerned to push the process along. The key to connecting the dots in Luke is the process of remembrance. The angels tell the women, "Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be handed over to sinners, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again" (v. 6f.). "Then," we are told, "they remembered his words, and returning from the tomb, they told all this to the eleven and to all the rest" (v. 8f.). Remembrance leads to witness. Witness takes time to bloom into the full flower of faith (as with the travelers to Emmaus in the following narrative). But with recollection the seed is planted. Perhaps Paul Ricoeur had Luke's Easter narrative at least partially in mind when he coined his magnificent axiom "Hope is the same thing as remembering."

It falls to the Second Reading, taken from Paul's "resurrection chapter" in 1 Cor 15, to spell out the implications of this day's events. In keeping with the typology that he details in Romans 5, Paul reaches back to the near-beginning of history's arc and cites the origin of the human predicament: "death came through a human being ... all die in Adam" (v. 21f.). Death, he goes on to explain, is the "last enemy" (v. 26) and the polar opposite of all that God wants for creation. Although Paul does not explicitly personify death in today's reading (well, maybe in v. 26), it is difficult not to hear overtones of the ravenous monster of Ugaritic (pre-Israelite) mythology, Mot, whose broad throat engorges even the mightiest of gods and heroes--particularly in view of Paul's use of two OT quotations that probably do personify Death in v. 54f.

But the preacher need not reach back to the ancient Near East to make this point. Any hearer who has buried a beloved parent, spouse, sibling, or even--that most unnatural event in all the world--a child, does not need to be persuaded that death is the ultimate threat to all human aspiration and an opponent beyond all hope of human victory.

The point of Easter, says Paul, is that Christ's resurrection is not the proverbial exception that proves the rule. Rather, it is the decisive demonstration that the end of death as end has now begun. Paul alludes to the vision of Daniel, in which, in keeping with the nature of apocalyptic, God personally intervenes in history at the right and decisive moment to establish his reign and vindicate his faithful. God delegates "dominion and glory and kingship" to "one like a human being [Aram., 'son of man']." who subdues all pretenders to ultimate authority (Dan 7:9-18). It is Paul's claim that this right and decisive moment has now arrived with the resurrection of Christ and rightly so, given that Christ is a human, just like the first one, only more so (given God's intent for "human"). Paul states that Christ's destruction of "every ruler and every authority and power" (v. 24) is a process that will culminate in the death of death (v. 25). But Paul is not laying out a chronology here: the "end" (v. 24) that will terminate the process is not so much a point in time as a goal (Gk. telos; cf. Jesus' tetelestai in Jn 19:30, discussed in Good Friday's helps). Christ's "coming" (Gk. parousia, v. 23), like his incarnation and resurrection, is a function of God's right and decisive moment for intervention, in which all people have their proper "order" (Gk. tagma, v. 23; see BDAG, p. 803, for a provocative application to this passage). For now, it is not euphemism but realism to understand literally Paul's description of those who have died as "asleep" (Gk. koimao, v. 20).

It is finally, then, the Isaiah passage (65: 17-25) that, read in the context of the lectionary, takes the Easter event and its meaning for humanity and sublimely projects them on a cosmic screen. The reading begins with the point stated at the outset: God will create a new cosmos (cf. "heavens and earth" as merismus in Gen 1:1) that so transcends the old as to banish it from memory (v. 17). Just as in chapter 43 the prophet had spoken of God the Redeemer as on the verge of effecting a new and incomparably greater exodus (Isa 43:18-21), so now God the Creator will outdo himself the second time around. This is very much in keeping with the church's historic understanding of Easter as the eighth day of creation, i.e., the first day of the new creation.

In fact, the pericope is filled with "You ain't seen nothin' yet" references and allusions to earlier mighty works and promises. Long ago, the gift of the Promised Land had been summarized as the enjoyment of "large cities that you did not build, houses filled with all sorts of goods that you did not fill, hewn cisterns that you did not hew, vineyards and olive groves that you did not plant" (Deut 6:10f.; cf. Josh 24:13), and the consequences of apostasy had been expressed as the reversal of these gifts: "You shall build a house, but not live in it. You shall plant a vineyard, but not enjoy its fruit" (Deut 28:30; cf. Deut 28:39; Amos 5:11; Zeph 1:13). The latter curses had indeed come to pass in the fires that destroyed Jerusalem and in the trauma of exile. But now YHWH will again take delight in his city (v. 18f.), and, rather than either dispossessing others or being dispossessed by them, as in the old blessings and curses, builders and growers will benefit from their own labors (v. 21f.). The immediately following promise of the blessing of offspring recalls a pair of psalms, 127 and 128, in which "house" refers first to one's home and then to one's progeny. These, in turn, call to mind the promise that lay at the foundation of messianic hopes and theology: the dynastic oracle to David in 2 Samuel 7, with its triple play on Heb. bayit, "house."

But there's more. Even better than God's invitation to "call upon me in the day of trouble" (Ps 50:15) is the assurance "Before they call I will answer, while they are yet speaking I will hear" (v. 24). The oracle concludes with a reprise of Isaiah's "peaceable kingdom" from 11:6-9 in v. 25: In the new creation, as in the prelapsarian old one, animals will not kill or eat one another--although there is one holdover from the Fall: snakes will still eat dust! (cf. Gen 3:14)

At the heart of all lies the vision of a new Jerusalem, inhabited by a people who are not merely delivered from premature death but are granted extraordinarily long life (as it was in the beginning; cf. Genesis 5). We shall hear an echo of this vision later in the Easter season, in Rev 21:1-6 (see Easter 5). To be sure, the prophet does not speak explicitly here of the death of death or of life eternal. But "like the days of a tree shall the days of my people be" (v. 22) isn't far from it. GCH