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441 - Recognizing the Risen Lord |
Recognizing the Risen Lord
"Action on behalf of the needy is not an implication of resurrection faith, but a precondition for it. Talk about resurrection is literally meaningless in the absence of such action. This raises the serious question of what it takes to speak correctly today about resurrection, to mean what the tradition has meant by the term."
It is difficult today to teach the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The ministry of the word grinds to a halt as teachers and preachers ponder whether we are talking about an event, or a perception, or a miracle, or a myth when we undertake to communicate the gospel message that Jesus is the Risen Lord. Many who are trained and called to teach the resurrection find themselves daunted by postmodern philosophical criteria for meaningful discourse that have rightfully been proposed within the developing field of foundational theology. But certain New Testament texts themselves convey a working knowledge of the possibilities and limitations of talk about resurrection.
I
The New Testament specifies the conditions under which one can name Jesus Lord. The phrase "Lordship of Jesus" expresses an insight into Jesus' significance for humankind. This insight arises as one identifies that man, in the very particularity of his earthly life and teachings, with the one whom God has raised to a new life compelling all lives and whose Spirit currently is at large in the community. But how is it that the community can connect these two: the one known to it from its historical traditions and "the one standing among you whom you do not know" (John 1:26)? Certain New Testament texts support the effort to discern how Jesus may be recognized and understood to be the Risen Lord and how the Risen Lord may be recognized and understood to be Jesus.
This is not a new problem. It was already at issue in the writing of the Gospels, where the normative or classic programs for recognizing Jesus are still to be discovered. These texts about the past are also texts with a past. The past of the texts bears investigation. How and why did these
Marianne Sawicki is Associate Professor of Religious Education at Lexington Theological Seminary. She has also taught theology at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles and served as General Editor of the Liturgical Conference in Washington, D.C. She is author of The Gospel in History: A Portrait of a Teaching Church to be published in April.
442 - Recognizing the Risen Lord particular words come to be written and revered? These texts specify the: means of access to resurrection experience as the originating communities understood it: the possibility of identifying Jesus and Risen Lord in such a way that one's own destiny also becomes clear. The texts are, quite self-consciously, words. Yet, the New Testament words assert that words are a necessary but not sufficient condition for the possibility of resurrection. Nevertheless, one must work through the words if one hopes to discover what else is necessary.
Christian preaching and teaching, as ministries of the word, are ecclesial activities dependent upon and descended from the New Testament words. Like the scriptural texts themselves, these ministries are necessary but not sufficient to open the possibility of seeing Jesus as Risen Lord. The insufficiency of text must be grasped in order to grasp the necessity of the other conditions. The interdependence of both kinds of conditions is expressed definitively in the New Testament as a distinctive component of Christian understanding. As it is with the foundational texts, so it remains with present-day communities which seek to model themselves after the patterns laid down in the New Testament by communities of resurrection possibility.
What are those other conditions, besides talk or text? According to Luke--Acts, what makes it possible to grasp resurrection is a community whose members can be hungry, recognize hungry persons, and fill their needs. According to Matthew, what is required is to put certain ethical teachings into practice. Both Gospels expressly link these conditions to recognition of the identity and significance of Jesus, while at the same time they discount the efficacy of verbal identifications. This is highly ironic, for a text itself can hardly be anything other than words.
Before beginning a study of the texts themselves, it is helpful to bracket any present associations with the term resurrection, particularly the notion that resurrection is an "event" calling for "belief." We must allow the texts to tell us what it means to witness resurrection, let them set up the referent of this experience. Does resurrection mean finding an empty tomb? ... seeing a dead man alive? ... being able to heal, exorcize, and teach "in Jesus' name" so as to evoke a realtime presence of the power of the living Lord? ... intuiting the significance of Jesus'? ... suddenly recognizing a stranger? ... hearing a voice? ... meeting the Lord in the air? ... finding out after the fact that Jesus was really there in the little one whom you cared for? ... gathering and being sent out as church? All of these options are supported in the New Testament. Narratives present these experiences, which is to say that all are presented as having happened to someone else, not to oneself. Such narratives are necessary to specify and define the experience; however they are insufficient to open its possibility for me. The other conditions are also specified textually; not in narratives of historical events, but in other textual features and details. One can say what resurrection is only after working through both the diverse narrative depictions of it and the non-narratively specified qualifications of those narratives.
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We must also allow the texts to tell us what it means to teach resurrection. Care must be taken not to project back into the first century modern notions about what teaching is. Distinctively Christian kinds of teaching are envisioned and propagated in the New Testament. Christianity spreads as an educational movement, with some similarities to-but also many differences from-its Hellenistic and Hebrew models. To a great extent, the educational process which delivers the possibility of resurrection, as mandated in the New Testament, also carries the specifications for what resurrection itself will be. Process and content are mutually determined. Matthew's Gospel, in particular, has a great deal to say about the specific practices of Christian teaching which occasion the possibility of resurrection, namely, the possibility of recognizing the identity and significance of Jesus and being recognized by him.
II
How do the texts indicate that the Risen Lord may be recognized? It bears noting that in the Gospel narratives, resurrection witnesses are asked to recognize not something dead as living, but rather something living, but unknown, as Jesus who died. Retrojecting resurrection faith back before Calvary, the narratives also depict the disciples as being asked to recognize Jesus as something special. But after the narratives turned resurrection into a past event, subsequent generations were asked to recognize something dead-Jesus-as something living. The third recognition becomes possible only because of the prior two: identification of Risen Lord as Jesus and of Jesus as Risen Lord. But how do these prior identifications become possible? Two kinds of assertions about this possibility are made in Luke-Acts and Matthew: (1) words are not sufficient for it, and (2) sharing of the necessities of life is essential to it.
Luke's story of the empty tomb (24: 1-11) is a story about where Jesus is not to be found, a story about how a story fails to bring people to the Risen Lord. Jesus is obviously not in the tomb, where the women expected him to be. But neither is the Lord in the text, the narrative. The question of 24:5 applies equally well to those who seek Jesus in a tomb and those who seek him in the written word: "Why do you seek the living among the dead?" Tombs are for dead people; texts are for words already spoken in the past. In 24:10-11, the women tell the apostles what happened at the tomb, "but these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them." These first evangelists find that they cannot bring anyone to the possibility of resurrection through the mere telling of a story. The reprise of the empty tomb story in 24:22-24 ends with the same outcome: "him they did not see." This narrative about the futility of narrative gives us Luke's wisdom about the possibility of understanding what has happened to Jesus.
Matthew is more subtle, perhaps because the stakes are higher for him inasmuch as the work of Christian teaching is one of his principal
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concerns. Teaching, for Matthew, entails the present application of reliable past words. Matthew's Gospel presents itself as an authoritative teaching text for the Christian community; moreover, it presupposes that it will be administered by a class of Christian teachers (for whom it carries some terse directives).
Matthew profiles the Christian teacher, or "scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven" (I 3:52), by contrasting him or her to the Pharisee on one hand, and to the Christian prophet on the other. Both of the latter roles probably are distorted for the sake of illustrating what the Christian teacher should avoid. The famous polemic against Pharisees in chapter 23 in effect warns teachers not to "bind heavy burdens, hard to bear ... tithe mint and dill and cummin [while neglecting] the weightier matters of the law... " and so forth. Also, "you are not to be called rabbi, for you have one teacher" (23:8).
More interesting is the polemic against Christian prophets, whom Matthew is seeking to discredit. Prophecy is a ministry older than, and ultimately distinct from, teaching. Christian prophets are those who operate according to the instructions preserved in 10:1-14, and in imitation of Jesus' own way of working as represented in the verses immediately preceding, 9:35-38. They travel, exorcize, heal, and preach, uttering new sayings of Jesus which are accorded authenticity equal to that of sayings remembered from before Calvary. Moreover, prophets do such things "in the name of Jesus." Sociological reconstruction indicates that the prophets proclaimed resurrection as a realtime experience. That is, they were able to evoke the presence, power, and life, of the once-crucified Jesus, and to validate this experience, by wonderworks done through the mention of Jesus' name. In the heyday of the Christian prophets, there was as yet no story of resurrection as an event in someone else's past. Teachers later would narratize resurrection, but the prophetic way was simply to proclaim that one now lives and works among you who is Jesus, who died.
The problem is the long-term viability of such a proclamation as well as its need for continuing dramatic exorcisms and healings to sustain it. The prophets were itinerant; but the resident leaders of the community faced a range of day-to-day difficulties ignored or even exacerbated by the prophets. Matthew's Gospel intends that resident teachers take over from prophets the proclamation of resurrection. (This project in fact succeeded, and today we have a Christianity based on text, not charismatic wonder-working.) Matthew therefore defames the Christian prophets, whom he terms pseudoprophets. Although some deference to prophets may be expressed in 10:40-42-"Whoever receives a prophet because he is a prophet shall receive a prophet's reward"-this saying may be a vestige of older material and in any case is ambiguous. Matthew is worried about damage sprouting from the words of the prophets. Alone among the synoptics, he adds to the Parable of the Seed (13:18-23) the Parable of the Secret Seed (13:24-30, 36-43) in which an enemy sows weeds among good crops, the interpretation being that
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bad words are sown among good by the offspring of the Evil One. In 7:15-23, Jesus confronts the prophets on the day of judgment. They plead with him, "Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty words in your name?" The judge replies with a chilling, "I never knew you." The prophets are called "evildoers" and told to get out. Though they recognize Jesus, he does not recognize them.
After having Jesus disclaim those who speak and work "in the name" the way the prophets do, Matthew goes on to co-opt this magic phrase for his own purposes: "Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me" (18:5) The works to be done "in the name" are no longer wonder-works, but deeds of justice.
Yet, because he wants to establish Christian teaching authoritatively, Matthew cannot dismiss the efficacy of words entirely, as Luke seems ready to do. The words of Jesus must be authoritatively remembered, along with the words of the Jewish Law. In 5:17-19, Jesus says that every dot and iota of the Law must be fulfilled. Moreover, "Whoever then relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others so shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever does them and teaches them shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven." Again, in 12:33-37, "on the day of judgment people will render account for every careless word they utter; for by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned." Yet, surprisingly, orthodox teaching is not among the criteria cited in Matthew's parable of the last judgment (25:31-46). The judge neglects to remark, "I was ignorant and you instructed me, lax and you admonished me."
The irony of Matthew is that teachers (unlike prophets) are supposed to have no authority or power in their own words; nevertheless, their words ultimately come to outweigh all else. Jesus retains authority; it is his words alone which have power. But whose Jesus is it who has authority? It is Matthew's Jesus, the one whose words are recorded for all time in Matthew's text. The Gospel brings closure to what Jesus can say. Once the text is accepted, prophets no longer can come up with new sayings of the Risen Lord. The text controls what teachers can teach. However, teachers control the text inasmuch as they wrote it by narrating resurrection; and, in the days before widespread literacy and inexpensive printed Bibles, access to the text is through teachers alone. You need a teacher to reach and recognize the Risen Lord. But you need more than just a teacher's words.
III
The problem is: How can one have realtime contact with Jesus as Risen Lord once he has been buried in the text? How can Jesus say anything new? Who gets to speak for Jesus? Matthew establishes that speaking "in the name" is insufficient for recognition of Jesus as Risen Lord and of the Risen Lord as Jesus. You need a narrative, and that narrative needs to be taught in specific ways, in specific contexts.
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For Matthew, the way one gets to see the Lord is by following Jesus" instructions, that is, by obedience. Those who wish to see Jesus must go to a mountain in Galilee. Jesus comes to them there. The teacher's role is to lead people "to the mountain," that is, to the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount and to the authority of Jesus. Through the teacher, Christians can see what they literally cannot see: Jesus in the hungry, thirsty, strange, naked, sick, and imprisoned.
Where does the text say this? The program Matthew proposes for seeing the Risen Lord is found in the Easter narrative, 28:1-10, 16-20. The angel at the tomb tells the women: "I know that you seek Jesus who was crucified." This is precisely what the Christian seeks from the teacher. "He is not here; for he has risen, as he said. Come, see the place where he lay." The Christian first must accept the factuality of everything about the real Jesus, including his death. "Then go quickly and tell his disciples that he has risen from the dead, and behold, he is going before you to Galilee; there you will see him." Why Galilee? Because it is the location of "the mountain to which Jesus had directed them." (28:16).
The only Galilean mountain in the narrative is the one mentioned in 5:1, where Matthew has sited the ethical teachings collected in chapters 5 through 7. In effect, the Christian who wants to see the Risen Lord is being directed to the Beatitudes and the Sermon on the Mount-or rather, to obedience to these teachings. (The mountain of the Transfiguration in 17:1 is functionally equivalent with the mountain of 5:1, because the Transfiguration is a vision of Jesus in dialogue with Moses and Elijah, figuratively, with the Law and the Prophets-precisely the content of the Sermon on the Mount.)
The women who dash away from the tomb to fulfill the angel's instructions find their obedience rewarded by a glimpse of Jesus in 28:8-10. The Risen Lord himself promises to be available on the mountain: "Go and tell my brethren to go to Galilee, and there they will see me." The Eleven do indeed see Jesus; the text says that he came to them on the mountain (28:17-18). The chapter then closes with the Great Commission (28:18-20), repeating themes that have been important to Matthew: "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go ..., teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you [teachers] always."
The Great Commission is a third milestone in Matthew's narrative, and it points the reader back toward two others: the Sermon on the Mount of chapters 5-7, and the Parable of the Last Judgment which culminates the eschatological discourse on the Mount of Olives in chapter 25. The ethical teachings of Matt. 5-7 are well known. "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness ... blessed are the merciful ... every one who is angry with brother or sister shall be liable to judgment ... if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also ... give to one who begs from you ... consider the lilies of the field ... judge not." In this Matthean epitome, or summary of the teacher's
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words, there is also mention of a variety of rewards for obedience: the merciful shall obtain mercy, the pure in heart shall see God, those who pray in secret will be heard, sins will be forgiven those who forgive others. Not until the Parable of the Last Judgment, however, do we find out what really is at stake in obedience to these instructions. Anyone who helps needy people has helped the Lord himself. The Lord is available in the needy, although, as the parable indicates, he is never literally "seen" in them.
In short, Matthew's advice to those who want to see the Risen Lord is to follow Jesus' teachings, trusting that the Lord is there in the person of the needy. To find out what Jesus' teachings are, one consults a teacher, such as Matthew. Moreover, teachers themselves are supposed to follow these instructions as well as teach others to do so.
IV
Luke's prescription for recognizing the identity and significance of Jesus as Risen Lord resembles Matthew's in emphasizing ethical action; but the terms are quite different. As we saw above, Luke says that words do not lead anyone to recognize the Risen Lord. In fact, for Luke the ability to recognize a hungry person is the precondition for recognizing the Risen Lord. To see how this is so, let us look at the important texts.
In Acts 10:40-41, Peter's kerygma to Cornelius specifies what it means to be a witness to resurrection: "God raised him on the third day and made him manifest, not to all the people but to us who were chosen by God as witnesses, who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead." Checking back to Luke's Easter appearance narratives, we find that eating was the key to recognition both in Emmaus and in Jerusalem. (The eucharistic overtones usually read into the Emmaus story should not be allowed to hide its other, more direct meaning.) At Emmaus, "he took the bread and blessed, and broke it, and gave it to them. And their eyes were opened and they recognized him; and he vanished" (24:3031). At Jerusalem, those who had the Emmaus experience report that Jesus "was known to them in the breaking of the bread" (v. 35). Then, "as they were saying this" (v. 36), Jesus is there and sets about trying to convince his friends that it is really himself. First he shows them his hands and feet; then he asks them to look at him and touch him, to see that he has flesh and bones. This doesn't work; "they still disbelieved." Finally, Jesus hits upon something that is bound to convince them. " 'Have you anything here to eat?' They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate before them" (vv. 41-43). "Then he opened their minds to understand" (v. 45).
Why would hunger be a sure indication that it must be Jesus? Why should we expect the Risen Lord to be hungry? Because at the Last Supper Jesus had sworn not to eat again until the reign of God. Jesus has said literally, "With desire I desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer, for not no more never will I eat it until it is fulfilled in the reign
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of God" (22:15-18). Neither will he drink wine again (v. 18). Jesus has promised to fast until the kingdom come, and if the Risen Lord is really Jesus he will be hungry.
But Luke links hunger not only to the possibility of recognizing the Risen Lord, but also to numerous teachings about resurrection in general. The little girl whom Jesus raises (8:49-56) comes back from the dead hungry; Jesus "directed that something should be given to her to eat." At a dinner with the Pharisees (14:1-14), Jesus says, "When you give a feast, invite the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you. You will be repaid at the resurrection of the just." In the parable of the prodigal son (15:11-32), it is famine and the resultant hunger which drive the son to resolve, "I will arise and go to my father." The father gives orders for a feast, saying to the servants, "this my son was dead, and is alive again," and to the brother, "this your brother was dead, and is alive." Hunger and resurrection are themes woven through the Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus (16:19-31). The rich man feasts while Lazarus is hungry and wretched. Both die, and their situations are reversed. The rich man asks that Lazarus be sent back from the dead to warn his brothers. (Lazarus also is the name of the man whom Jesus calls back from the dead in John 11.)
The implication seems to be that the possibility of understanding resurrection comes through hunger: either one's own hunger or the hunger of another which one is able to recognize and alleviate. Small wonder that women became resurrection witnesses. In Acts 7:55-56, it is the soup-line worker Stephen (see 6:1-5) who, "full of the Holy Spirit, gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God." No one in the New Testament understands resurrection better, or speaks of it more eloquently, than this man whose daily job was to distribute food to widows.*
For Luke, recognition of the Risen Lord is possible only within a community that knows both how to be hungry and how to feed the hungry. Stories about empty tombs have no efficacy, except within such a community. Luke's point seems consistent with Matthew's, although it is not identical. Matthew asserts that recognition of the Risen Lord is possible only within a community that knows and obeys the official version of Jesus' ethical instructions. Claims to speak "in Jesus' name" have no efficacy, except within such a community.
*There are interesting contrasts to be noted here with the Twelve, who say, in 6:2, that "it is not right for us to leave the word of God to serve tables," and with Paul. In Acts 9:3-9, Saul is stunned by a light and a voice, and asks, "Who are you, Lord?" but receives an answer that leaves him blind. "And for three days he was without sight, and neither ate nor drank." After Ananias visited him, "he rose and was baptized, and took food and was strengthened" (vv. 18-19). An issue which dogged Paul's ministry was whether a preacher could claim to be an apostle, that is, to have seen the Lord, without sharing the sustenance of the community. In I Cor II, Paul says that failure to recognize the hungers of community members is failure to discern the body of Christ.
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V
If we may presume that the communities of Luke and Matthew knew how to recognize the Risen Lord, then it stands to reason that these texts are meant to pass on that practical wisdom to us. The pattern which they establish becomes normative for preachers and teachers who seek to introduce people to the possibility of resurrection. The Gospels do more than provide "material"; they specify process as well. If, as we have seen, the Gospels assert that what they are "about" is not the kind of thing that words can carry or reach, then it is foolhardy for us to try to do all our work with words-assuming, of course, that we really are seeking to understand the same thing that the Gospels want to teach us.
The texts assert that words cannot deliver understanding. Access to the Risen Lord is opened through teaching which transpires within a community sensitive to the needs of the poor, and which indeed forms such a community. This teaching is rooted not only in formal theological reflection on the very possibility of gaining access to the Risen Lord, but also in action on behalf of the poor undertaken because the teacher wants to see Jesus.
The words of our tradition-the New Testament writings-turn out to be words intending to inspire and partner with certain kinds of action. They "refer" to the mutual support of word and deed in their own immediate past at the same time that they intend themselves to achieve their own meaning through deeds that must accompany their hearing. It would be a misconception to regard the Gospel words as referring, after the fact, to some event separate and self-contained which happened independently of these words and subsists apart from them somewhere in the human past. They are, rather, words about the possibility of truth that can open under certain conditions, not all of which are verbal.
Action on behalf of the needy is not an implication of resurrection faith, but a precondition for it. Talk about resurrection is literally meaningless in the absence of such action. This raises the serious question of what it takes to speak correctly today about resurrection, to mean what the tradition has meant by the term. If talk about resurrection is attempted in a classroom, or even in a pulpit, its power for truth depends upon the community's explicit and deliberate efforts to care for the poor. This is not to say that a community which shelters the needy always speaks correctly or intelligibly about the Risen Lord. Criteria of sense and intelligibility must be observed by all Christians who speak and wish to be understood in the late twentieth century. But by the same token, the praxis criteria identified by Luke and Matthew must also be observed by philosophical theologians who intend their speech to be heard within the Christian tradition. Theology, even at its most academic, is resurrection talk. The ministries of the word are necessary, but not sufficient, to the continuing possibility of recognizing the availability of the Risen Lord. Actions of justice not only transform human need into well-being; they also transform words about resurrection into understanding of the identity of Jesus.