Our Only Hope

The scriptures referred to 1 Corinthians 15:19-26.

I don't know if this entered into their calculations but just a few days after this Easter, Disney and Marvel Studios will be releasing the second part of their Infinity War saga. In the last film, the villain Thanos got ahold of the magical Infinity stones that control space, time, power, mind, soul and reality. This enabled him to carry out his mission to save the limited resources of the universe by eliminating half of the people in existence. He snapped his fingers and we watched heroes like the Black Panther, Doctor Strange, and even Spiderman turn to dust. And there the movie ended! So we geeks can't wait to see how the remaining heroes like Iron Man, the Hulk, and Captain America reverse this. And we know it gets reversed because that's what happened in the original comic nearly 30 years ago. Plus if they don't, it would be the saddest superhero movie ever.

Why am I bringing up fictional heroes on the day we celebrated Jesus' triumph? Three reasons.

First, the gods of the old pantheons were more like superheroes than what we think of as divine. They were very powerful but they were very human in their faults. They could be petty, deceitful, lustful, recklessly angry, foolish, envious, and even arrogant. And they could die. In fact, in the Norse mythology, they would all die at Ragnarok, the Twilight of the Gods. Neither Odin, nor Loki, nor Thor survive, unlike the Marvel movie version.

Second, contrary to the popular theory that pagan gods died and rose again, they didn't. In Norse mythology, Balder the beautiful dies due to Loki's trickery but he does not come back to life. Quetzalcoatl dies and turns to ashes. Hawaiian and Japanese gods die, never to return. Ishtar and Persephone's deaths are associated with winter but in spring they come back as crops, not as themselves. Osiris stays dead, though his wife cobbles together enough pieces of him just long enough to impregnate herself. He promptly returns to being dead and the god of the underworld. The pagans did not see the gods, these overpowered beings whose fantastic stories they retold, as being immune to death. Death trumps everything and everyone.

In fact, it looks like the only actual dying and rising pagan gods come after Jesus, so if there was any borrowing of ideas, the pagans borrowed resurrection from Christianity, not vice versa. And of course our modern gods, or superheroes, also borrow the same idea and they die and return to life so often it is not a question whether they will come back but when. Their franchises are too valuable for Superman or Iron Man or Captain America to stay dead.

Third, from the perspective of storytelling, for a hero to die at the end is a bummer. The most famous version of the Arthuriad is Sir Thomas Mallory's La Morte d'Arthur, which gives away the ending right in the title: The Death of Arthur. It is essentially a tragedy, as are Beowulf and Ragnarok and Hamlet. And, for now, the first Infinity War movie.

In Jesus we see something new. Jesus is the only God who defeats death. But more than that, he is the only God who exists in history.

Along with the popular misconception that there were dying and rising gods before Jesus, there is an idea popular among less well-read atheists that Jesus was totally made up. In fact this idea that Jesus is fictional is so insidious that New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman, who is himself not a believer, nevertheless felt it necessary to write a book asserting that, whatever else he was, Jesus of Nazareth was a real historical person. For one thing, he is mentioned by non-Christian historians of the time, such as Josephus, Pliny and Tacitus.

I would go even further. In view of how early the documents we have about him arose, it is hard to dismiss the theological claims about him being divine and rising from the dead as being late inventions.

Because of the expectation that Jesus' return would be very soon, the gospels were not the first parts of the New Testament that were written. The apostles were alive to tell Jesus' story. The earliest Christian writings are the letters of Paul. And the earliest of them were his letters to the Thessalonians. His first letter to that church was probably written around 51 AD. We can date this accurately because in Acts 18:12-17, Paul, on his second missionary journey, is brought before Gallio, proconsul of Achaia. We know that Gallio was an historical person and that he had that position in 51 to 52 AD because of an inscription found in Delphi. And according to 1 Thessalonians 3:1-2, Timothy was sent to check on the fledgling church in Thessalonica about that time. Seeing as Jesus was crucified around 30 AD, this means this letter was written only about 20 years afterwards.

How developed were the beliefs about Jesus in just two decades, when plenty of people who knew Jesus were still around? In the first chapter of this letter, Paul mentions “how you turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God, and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead—Jesus, who rescues us from the coming wrath.” (1 Thessalonians 1:9-10) Already, Jesus of Nazareth, an historical person, is considered the Son of God, who was raised from the dead and who saves his followers. That is what Paul means when a few verses earlier he talks of the “hope in our Lord Jesus Christ.” (1 Thessalonians 1:3)

And that is the crux of the matter. As we said when a hero's story ends in death, it is a tragedy. And indeed all of our lives end in death. If that is the real end, if there is no sequel, if there is no life after death, then we are left with grief and sadness. But if Jesus of Nazareth, an historical person, turned over to the Romans by Caiaphas, another historical person, and crucified by Pilate, yet another historical person, rose from the dead, then there is hope. Indeed Jesus is our only hope.

Everything hinges on the resurrection. There were other would-be Messiahs. Simon bar Kokhba led a revolt against Rome in 132 AD and was proclaimed the Messiah by the esteemed Rabbi Akiva. While he did establish a Jewish state for about 3 years, the Romans crushed it, killing 580,000 Jews and razing to the ground 50 fortified towns and 985 villages. Bar Kokhba is said to have died during the final siege or, according to another story, he was killed by the Sanhedrin for being a false messiah. In the 400s, Moses of Crete persuaded the Jews on that island to march to Israel through the sea, expecting it to part. It did not. Menachem Mendel Schneerson was hailed to be the Messiah by some of his followers. When he died in 1994, some still thought he would rise again. He has not.

Wikipedia lists 65 Messiah claimants from Jewish, Christian, Muslim and other backgrounds. Most of them you have never heard of. Jesus would be just another one of them had he not risen from the dead on a Sunday nearly 2000 years ago. The disciples, who in the immediate aftermath were hiding in an upstairs room for fear of suffering the same fate as Jesus, would have just returned to their former lives, disappointed. Some, perhaps those who were initially disciples of John the Baptist, might have moved on to the next messiah-wanna-be. But nobody would still be touting Jesus of Nazareth as Messiah, much less as God Incarnate.

It was the resurrection that validated what Jesus said. How could his claims—“I am the Bread of life,” “I am the Light of the world,” “I am the the Resurrection and the Life,” I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life”—be taken seriously if he had stayed dead? For that matter his ethics—“turn the other cheek,” “love your enemy,” “forgive people who sin against you,” “it is more blessed to give than to receive”—make no sense if there is no afterlife and no final judgment. Why not just lie, cheat, and bully your way to the top if this is the only life you get? Why pay the poor, the sick, the elderly and the unfortunate any mind? As Scrooge says, let them die and decrease the surplus population. That is the ruthless, Darwinian logic of Thanos. There are only so many resources for the living. Kill half and there's more for everyone else. Compassion and social justice be hanged.

When Jesus died, the hopes of the disciples died with him. As the two disciples heading to Emmaus said about Jesus. “He was a prophet, powerful in word and deed before God and all the people. The chief priests and our rulers handed him over to be sentenced to death, and they crucified him; but we had hoped that he was the one who was going to redeem Israel.” (Luke 24:19-21) “We had hoped”: past tense. The dream was over. The reality was that Jesus was dead and so was his movement. They were getting out of town, dejected and despairing. Their hope only revived when they saw Jesus alive.

I think that was why Thomas didn't believe that Jesus had risen at first. Not only did he not have the advantage the others did of seeing Jesus on that first Sunday, but I think it was too hard for him to even think that way. When Jesus decided to go back to Judea to raise his friend Lazarus, the other disciples are concerned that the last time he went there, the religious leaders tried to stone him. But Jesus was adamant about going. And Thomas says, “Let us also go, that we may die with him.” (John 11:16) So Thomas was committed to following Jesus no matter what. And when his fatalistic view of what would happen to Jesus came true, it wasn't that he would not entertain the hope that Jesus was alive again; it was that he could not. Yet when he saw the risen Christ, displaying his wounded wrists and inviting Thomas to touch him, the previously doubting disciple could only stammer out, “My Lord and my God!” (John 20:26-28)

And that was another consequence of the resurrection. How did these monotheistic Jews come to regard Jesus as divine as well? I won't go through all the probable steps here but it began with his resurrection. Jesus raised others from the dead, but so did the prophets Elijah and Elisha. Nobody but Jesus was ever raised without the intervention of a prophet. Without anyone asking, God raised Jesus from the dead, the same God who said to him at his baptism and at the transfiguration, “You are my Son, whom I love...” (Mark 1:11; 9:7) Before the resurrection people may have called Jesus “the son of God,” because it was a title used of King David. But after his resurrection, it did not sound so much like royal hyperbole as it did a factual description of what Jesus was. This was no run-of-the-mill prophet, no ordinary man of God; this man was God to all intents and purposes. Later on people would associate Jesus with the Wisdom of God, personified in Proverbs 8. Later on the church would formulate the working hypothesis of the Trinity, which was not intended to explain how 3 persons could be one God, but to preserve the paradox. I doubt the disciples could explain it to a theologian's satisfaction. They just knew that in addition to experiencing God as creator, and experiencing God's Spirit within them, they saw their time with Jesus as a direct experience of the presence of God. The veil lifted from their eyes the minute he appeared in that locked upstairs room before the cowering lot of them and said, “Peace be with you.”

N.T. Wright points out that all of the quotations of the Old Testament which point out the precedents and prophesies that apply to Jesus drop out of the gospels at the moment we reach his resurrection. It was unprecedented. Aside from the people raised by Elisha and Elijah, the Hebrew Bible only mentions resurrection explicitly twice (Isaiah 26:19; Daniel 12:2) and both of those refer to the general resurrection of all people. There are a few other passages from which it can be inferred. But the resurrection of the Messiah is not spelled out in the Old Testament. In Jesus God was doing something new, something disruptive to the usual order of things. In Jesus God is asserting his dominion over death and his identity as the God of the living. To paraphrase C.S. Lewis, when the one who never deserved to die let himself be killed in the place of the guilty, death itself began work backwards.

As we said, even non-believing historians concede that Jesus once lived but they are at a loss to explain why his movement continued to thrive after his crucifixion. Nobody follows Simon bar Kokhba or Moses of Crete or Ann Lee of the Shakers anymore. Why did a bunch of fishermen and tax collectors proclaim that a crucified construction worker was the Son of God and had come back from the dead? Why did they no longer fear death, even when renouncing their claims would have saved their lives? How did a small Jewish movement manage to grow, despite periodic persecutions by various emperors, to the point where 300 years later an emperor would feel it politically acceptible to become a Christian? How is it that it is now the largest and most widespread religion in the world?

As we said, when a hero dies at the end of his story, it is a tragedy. When a great man or woman dies, it is a tragedy. And everyone of us will die. Within 4 or 5 generations most of us will not be remembered. The works of our hands will not last forever. Though the Cathedral of Notre Dame will be rebuilt, the tower, the construction of which took up nearly half of the life of Eugene Viollet-le-Duc 200 years ago, has been destroyed. How long will my blog last after I am gone? I hope that in 40 years Lutherans and Episcopalians will continue to worship Jesus on this island. It's unlikely any of us will be among them. Death comes for us all. And if that is the end of our story, then it is a tragedy.

As Paul said, “If we have put our hope in Christ for this life only, we should be pitied more than anyone. But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep.” (1 Corinthians 15:19-20) How could Paul be so sure? Because the risen Christ appeared to him. Paul had been trying to wipe out the heresy of Christianity and after his encounter with a very much alive Jesus, he rethought everything. And when he started proclaiming Jesus as the resurrected Christ, his life was never safe again. Besides being threatened by his own people, he was imprisoned on numerous occasions, flogged 5 times, beaten with rods 3 times, once he was stoned and left for dead, and he went through 3 shipwrecks. (2 Corinthians 11:23-26) He ended up being beheaded by the emperor Nero. And yet, facing his death, he said, “For me to live is Christ and to die is to gain.” (Philippians 1:21) Either he was crazy or he knew something. The same could be said for all the apostles. The only reason a rational person would devote one's whole life to such a painful and dangerous mission is if one knew it was worth it. Such as if you knew someone who had died and who came back to life and who could pass on eternal life as well. If you knew death was not permanent, there would be nothing that could stop you from letting others in on the good news.

Retired Bishop Frade's favorite movie quote was, “Everything will be all right in the end. If it's not all right, it's because it is not yet the end.” Death is not the end. Jesus has flipped the script. In John 11:25-26 the one and only God who has ever risen from the dead says, “I am the resurrection and the life. The person who believes in me will live, even though he dies; and whoever believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?”

Well...?