Even those who know very little about the Christian story today probably know a bit about Christmas and Easter. They know that Christmas is something about the birth of a baby in Bethlehem; and Easter is something about Jesus rising from the dead. For we Christians, today is the day above all other days on which we celebrate the Resurrection of Christ. That won't surprise you much. What may surprise you is that today's gospel passage is not about any of the resurrection appearances that are familiar to us. There's nothing about Jesus suddenly appearing to his disciples in the upper room; or along the road to Emmaus; or on the shoreline of Lake Galilee; and nothing about him inviting Doubting Thomas to look at his wounds and to put his hand in his side.
In fact, Jesus isn't in today's gospel story at all. What is going on – has the Church, or at least those good people who choose the readings for each day – gone mad? Well, I don't think they have. What we're having today, I think, is a page break. Let me explain.
For years in various parishes I have done a weekly pewsheet of the kind you have before you this morning. And if you look at the inside – open it out – you will see that it has a left hand page and a right hand page. Every week I bring up on my computer last week's version of the pewsheet. And in order to do this week's notes on Today's Readings, I have to delete last week's notes. And as I do that, what happens? The text from the right hand page, News & Events, rushes over to the left- hand page and fills the gap. Then as I type in this week's notes, the right-hand page text gets pushed back again.
Not a huge insurmountable problem, but it can be irritating, and not always very clear how much space I have left for the notes. I always knew there was some way of stopping this from happening, but I never took the time to work out what it was. Until this week. Finally, after literally years of muttering about it, I sat down and worked out how to fix it. I inserted a page break. It took perhaps 15 seconds. Well, actually, a wee bit longer, because what I needed to do was insert a column break, rather than a page break – but the point is, it was a simple solution.
And I thought of this during this particular week after preparing the service for Passion Sunday last week. Those of you who were here last week may remember that we read the whole of the Passion Narrative according to St Luke. It was a very long reading – 2 complete chapters, 127 verses. It told the story from the time that Judas agreed to betray Jesus right through to Jesus' burial in the tomb provided by Joseph of Arimathea. If you like, we scrolled through the whole story.
And that's a good thing to do. It is good preparation for entering Holy Week. It gives us the whole story, whereas on every other Sunday we have just short extracts from different parts of the Bible. But scrolling through the whole story like that necessarily means that we can't take in all the details; we are continually moving the story along, and we do not have much time to stop and ponder any particular piece of the story. The story can become contracted – before we know it Jesus is in the tomb.
The same thing could happen if we raced today through the Resurrection stories. We would go from the empty tomb to the Ascension in ten to twelve minutes. Such scrolling at high speed would not be helpful for us. We need a page break. And today we have one, inserted by the Church in its wisdom between the story of the empty tomb, and the Resurrection stories. We are being urged to spend a little time pondering the inescapable fact that the tomb was empty. Next Sunday, and some Sundays following, we will spend time with the Resurrection stories. But not today. Today we stay at the empty tomb.
And in doing so we are in touch with the very earliest of the gospel traditions. If you look at St Mark's gospel – generally accepted as the first one to be written – you will see why most scholars believe that in its original form it finished at 16:8. Here's what that verse says: Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid. Jesus is not there. The women see some sort of quasi-angelic figure, who tells them that Jesus has risen from the dead. But that's all we get from the earliest form of Mark's gospel.
St Matthew's gospel doesn't give us much more to go on. He gives us a hair-raising account of a violent earthquake, caused by an angel of the Lord rolling back the stone from the entrance to the tomb, and again the angel tells the terrified women that Jesus has risen. But then Jesus himself briefly appears to the women, but that encounter is all over in three verses. Finally we get another five verses at the end of the gospel, which is generally understood to be set at the time of Jesus' Ascension. But no real Resurrection stories.
For those we have to turn to St Luke and St John. St Luke gives us two. St John gives us three in the original version of his gospel, and a fourth in a later addition (chapter 21. In short, only two of our four gospels put any real emphasis on the Resurrection experiences. But all four agree about one thing. The tomb was found to be empty.
It's as if they are saying to the doubters and disbelievers, Look, we could argue for ever about the reality of the Resurrection appearances. We know that they were real, because they happened to us; but we can understand how difficult it is for you to believe us when you haven't had similar experiences. And we find them pretty bewildering ourselves. We're sure it was Jesus and yet he was different. We did have trouble recognising him at first. After all, we knew he had died so we weren't expecting to see him again. And while he had a body that we touched – and he ate a meal with us – yet he could appear and re-appear at will. He could enter a room when the doors were bolted shut.
So we have many unanswered questions ourselves. But of one thing we are absolutely certain: the tomb was empty. We have given you our explanation for that: now what's yours?
Of course, the fist thing that might occur to anyone in such circumstances is that someone has taken away the body. After all, it was by no means clear that Joseph intended his tomb to be the permanent resting place of Jesus' body. The burial was hurried because there was only a small period of time between Jesus' death on the cross and the start of the Sabbath. So perhaps Joseph or somebody else had beaten the women to the grave and taken the body for re-burial. In the dark?
Or perhaps the authorities had taken away his body to avoid the area becoming a shrine, a gathering point for these difficult Christians? So why didn't they ever produce the body to refute the Christians' claim of Resurrection?
Well, maybe it was a simple case of grave-robbing – body-snatching – by criminals on the make? They would certainly not have wanted any publicity. They would have kept their mouths shut. What about that explanation?
But that one, like all the rest, face one major problem. The so-called empty tomb was not completely empty. The strips of burial linen were still there. Why, if anyone was stealing the body, or removing the body for whatever reason, would they first unwrap the burial linen and leave it in the tomb? That would have taken much longer, increasing the chances of being caught. That would have been near impossible in the dark. That would have meant that a relatively clean bundle became an exposed bloody mess. Why would someone prefer to carry the blood-stained mutilated body of the victim of crucifixion unwrapped?
Peter was one of those who saw the linen, and went on to become a great apostle of the Christian faith. St Paul did not. He met the Risen Christ on the Road to Damascus, and went on to become another great apostle of the Christian faith. We'll come to all that in the weeks ahead.
But lets not scroll too fast. Let's take a page break outside the almost empty tomb. Let's ponder and believe.
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Louise Booth
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