To Bury Caesar, Not to Raise Him .. Easter '06

Texts: Acts 10:34-43; 1 Corinthians 15:1-11; Mark 16:1-8

I come on this Easter Day to bury Caesar, not to raise him. Julius Caesar that is. I’ve never liked him. In fact, I hate him. I know I shouldn’t talk ill of the dead, and I know as a Christian and as a priest I shouldn’t hate anybody. At least, I shouldn’t admit it in public. Not on Easter Day. But I want to make an exception of Caesar for three reasons.

First, he invaded my home country, and that’s not really on. None of us feel kindly towards someone who invades our own country, do we? I’m not all that keen on the Vikings, for that matter, or William the Conqueror. But this is about Julius Caesar – the others will keep for another day. So I don’t like Julius Caesar because he invaded Britain , and we Britons have long memories.

The second reason I don’t like Julius Caesar is that he wrote the world’s most boring war memoirs. I know that because, as a Latin student in my secondary school years, I had to read some of them. It wasn’t that they were written in Latin that was the problem – in fact, that was sort of the point, really – if they were in English we wouldn’t have been expected to read them. Nobody would have bothered. My objection to them was and is that, after the expenditure of all that time and energy required to translate the things into our own fair language, they turned out to be utterly boring. They were all about him, and how many battles he won, and how many people he killed and so on. And even though they were about the Gallic Wars, and therefore they were only the French he was killing so it didn’t really matter, what did matter was the sheer monotony of the thing. They were almost enough to put me off studying Latin for ever. Even music or art started to seem a better option.

And there’s more! The third reason why I don’t like Caesar is that people today let him off too lightly. This includes the otherwise excellent ODT. When did you last read an article or a Letter to the Editor questioning the accuracy of Caesar’s memoirs? Or claiming that Julius Caesar never existed – he was, in fact, a variant of an ancient Roman mythological creature, or some sort of magic mushroom with hallucinagenic properties? Or that after his immensely clever military escapades he was secretly married to Boadicea or Joan the Wad or someone and that their bloodline continues to this very day in Cornwall or Corsica or just outside Eketahuna? [And we know all that because someone has cracked a secret code in a Colin McCahon painting.]

The point is – and you’ll be pleased to hear there is a point – the point is that nobody today wastes time and money and ink on Julius Caesar – they let him rest in peace. But every year about this time – as Easter draws near – we can bet there will be some new nonsense printed in the press, and yet more Letters to the Editor, claiming that everything we have in the Bible about Jesus is untrue, and everything else about him is true.

And the really interesting question such people might want to ask themselves one day is this: why does it matter so much? Of course, Jesus matters to Christians, but why does he matter so much to non-Christians? Why are they content to leave Julius Caesar and all the rest of them to the historians, but not Jesus of Nazareth? If the Bible accounts of Jesus are not true, then what is it about Jesus that is so fascinating 2000 years after his death that people who don’t believe in him don’t believe in him so passionately that they feel the need to write to the Editor and tell the rest of us how passionately they don’t believe in him?

Enough of this nonsense – let’s get back to the Scriptures. And let’s get right back to basics. The Christian faith is based on two puzzling events, which we might call the Easter event and the Pentecost event. They’re the two Biggies, and we need to be absolutely clear that without them there would have been no Christian faith. It wasn’t Jesus’ marvellous human qualities that launched the new faith – nor his miracles – nor the wisdom of his teaching – not his compassion, his extraordinary willingness to forgive, or his love for others that started it all.

It was his Resurrection and the coming of the Spirit at Pentecost. And whether Luke is right in saying that these two events happened 50 days apart, or John is right in saying they happened on the same day doesn’t matter. What matters is that they happened.

And we know this in the same way that we know about most other things – from the accounts of others. And it all starts with St Paul . We sometimes forget that St Paul ’s writings in the New Testament come first. And the other thing we sometimes forget is that he never knew Jesus during Jesus’ life on earth, and he was totally opposed to the Christian faith when it first started. He was a zealous Pharisee on the way up. He was appalled by the stuff he heard coming from the first recruits to the Christian faith. He didn’t just write to the editor of the Tarsus Times rubbishing the whole thing – he set about trying to round up these terrible people and wipe them out.

And then suddenly he did what the press today love to call a complete u-turn. From arch-persecutor he became arch-proponent. How do we know that? Well, firstly we have his own word for it; and secondly, we have the record in the Book of Acts of the extreme caution shown to him by other members of the early Church. He needed someone to vouch for him before he was accepted into the fellowship. But what could have caused him to change so radically and so quickly.

Again, we have his own word for it. He says he met the Risen Christ – and that it was that encounter that transformed him. And in today’s reading from his First Letter to the Corinthians he says a bit more. He says that this encounter of his was not a one-off event. He tells us that it happened to lots of other people, too – not all of them initially supporters of Jesus. Part of the extraordinary honesty of the gospel accounts lies in the fact that they record the hostility towards Jesus within his own family – among his siblings. And yet his brother James became the leader of the Christian Church in Jerusalem . What happened there? Well, he’s included in this list that St Paul gives us today. The Risen Christ appeared to James.

In fact, says St Paul, the Risen Christ appeared to over 500 people, many of them still living at the time St Paul was writing, but let’s just focus on St Paul for a moment. What we have is clear documentation that he was initially totally opposed to the Christian claim; and equally clear documentation that he became the greatest advocate for it. He says it was an encounter with the Risen Christ that caused his complete change of heart and mind. The challenge for those who do not accept this is quite simple: what was it then that caused a deeply religious Jew to change from persecutor to propagator virtually overnight?

And we can ask a similar question in respect of Peter. Again, we can start with the aching honesty of the Scriptural account. It is clear that Peter became one of the early leaders of the Church; so why did the Church make up such a scurrilous story about Peter denying he even knew Jesus? We say, the Church did not make up the story – it happened as it is recorded in the gospel narratives. Peter insisted that he would remain staunch no matter what – he meant to remain staunch no matter what. But under the strain of the threat to his own freedom and life, he cracked.

So why did he become a great and fearless apostle of the faith? Well, here we have his own explanation in our second reading. He says it was because he met the Risen Christ AND because the Holy Spirit came upon him and his companions just as Christ, before and after his Resurrection, had promised. Again, the challenge to those who will not believe his account is simply this; if it wasn’t the way Peter tells it, then how was it? How was it that a craven coward became a fearless apostle?

And finally let me say a word or two about St Mark’s extraordinary account of that first Easter morning. He is so blunt that the Church has long insisted that his gospel could not have finished where it did; so over the years someone tagged on a bit to bring it into line with the other accounts. Or they argue that the real ending of the gospel has been lost along the way. I hope not. I hope that St Mark meant to finish his gospel with today’s reading.

For he leaves us before the tomb that was undoubtedly empty. He leaves us with a few women who are completely freaked out. Nothing is explained – nothing is cut and dried. All we’re told is that Jesus of Nazareth is not in the tomb where he was put three days earlier.

And the rest ,as we say, is history. Real history. Every bit as true as anything recorded of Julius Caesar. But far, far more interesting. That’s why even people who claim it’s all nonsense still care enough to write Letters to the Editor about it after 2000 years.

While Julius Caesar rests in peace.