I have told you that I believe that the appearances of the Risen Lord after the resurrection are the easiest way to understand the truth of the resurrection of Jesus.
Yet, we are told in the Bible, in Matthew, that even Jesus' personal appearance before his followers after his resurrection was not enough "proof" for some. Matthew says that, even as the Risen Lord appeared to them on the mountain before he gave them the Great Commission, "some doubted."
For some, then, even personally seeing the Risen Lord was not enough to allow them to believe the truth of the resurrection. I believe that would hold true today. Nothing would be enough "proof" to convince some people.
Even as some would not believe their own eyes, many others did believe. And, the clearest and most striking proof of the resurrection for most people was his personal appearance to them, which is precisely why the Gospel accounts make so much of his appearances.
While most of us are skeptical, like doubting Thomas, most, like Thomas, would believe if Jesus were to appear before them. And, as I pointed out before, it is clear that God knows that "seeing is believing" is true for most people - and therefore there are numerous appearances by the Risen Lord to many people which are recorded in the Bible.
These appearances do not provide proof that would satisfy a scientist, but they do provide the testimony of trustworthy eye witnesses, which is proof enough for some skeptics, but certainly nothing like all skeptics.
I also pointed out to you that, not counting the much later appearance to Paul on the road to Damascus, the stories of the appearances are in the Gospels of Matthew, Luke and John.
I do not include Mark, because there are no resurrection appearances in the original manuscript of Mark; although if you look at your Bible you'll note that the later-added "longer ending" of the Gospel does include appearances. But that ending was clearly not written by the "Mark" that wrote the rest of the Gospel.
And, I noted that, if you read all of the stories about the resurrection carefully you will discover that, like the stories of his crucifixion and death, these accounts differ in detail, one from the other. But there are also far more important and overriding similarities. And it is these similarities that we need to focus on.
While we tend to remember the details of the appearances in the Gospel accounts, primarily because we can grasp the mental picture of events easier than we can grasp an intellectual concept like resurrection, we first learn that there were appearances by the Risen Lord from St. Paul, in First Corinthians 15, which contains the basic kerygma, or proclamation, of the faith, but contains no descriptions of the appearances.
But this proclamation is significant for several reasons. It was written in Christ's own generation and shows clearly that belief in the resurrection was based on verbal stories, not yet written down, but authenticated by still living eye-witnesses to the events of the appearances.
Paul also tells us that the belief of the earliest church is based not upon personal experience, but on their trust that the proclamation is true. It is not based on scientific evidence, but on testimony and then proclamation: in other words, on witness and preaching.
Later, as claims and counter-claims about the truth of the resurrection continued to spring up, and as the eye witnesses began to die, these oral testimonies were written down in the Gospels.
Therefore, as time passed and the Gospels were written down, starting with Mark some 25 years after the appearances, and ending with John, 50 or more years after the appearances, they became much more than a simple statement of the faith such as Paul gave to the Corinthians. That is because they also seek to defend the truths upon which the faith is built against attacks from both within the church and from outside of it.
The Gospel narratives are explanations of the truth of the faith proclaimed by Paul and accepted by the earliest Christian communities. They provide for us, and for all later generations of Christians, explanations by what Christians believe are reliable witnesses that we can use to support our own belief in the truth of the resurrection.
We should be clear, however, that no testimony by any witness from 2000 years ago is likely going to be considered "true" unless we first have taken a "leap of faith" and are willing to believe that the stories in the Bible are true.
Biblical truth may in many cases be seen as metaphorical or even as mythical. Some Biblical truth is clearly meant only for the community for which it was written and not intended to be universal dogma for all time. But in other cases, such as the basic proclamation in First Corinthians 15 1-11, the clear intention of St. Paul is that the resurrection be taken as literal truth.
There are not all that many "essentials" of the faith but that passage certainly is, as are two non-Biblical statements, or creeds, of the Church, the Apostle's and Nicene Creeds, both of which rely heavily on St. Paul's testimony in First Corinthians.
This is occasionally, but not often, a controversial area in Biblical theology so I need to be clear where I stand on this issue of Biblical truth. If all of the Bible is simply myth, metaphor and temporally and spatially contained then there is no need for "faith" because nothing about it is relevant to our daily lives nor does it demand anything of us. We might enjoy it like we would other texts but there would be no requirement that we have to believe what it says. Some people are OK with that.
For them Jesus was nothing more than an itinerant preacher in an obscure little country 2000 years ago. I am well aware that some self styled "Bible experts" think that is all that Jesus was, which is certainly their privilege.
A handful of those people teach in Christian seminaries. Mostly they don't actually "teach" much; they write books, controversial books that make them a lot of money and bring a certain notoriety to themselves and their institutions. But they are also forfeiting the right to call themselves orthodox Christians.
So, for the purposes of these discussions, I will continue to assume that the resurrection is true in fact. That assumption comes from first having faith and then studying this event in depth within the Biblical and extra-Biblical witness of the Church.
This way of study is orthodox and traditional and follows the footsteps of Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Kempis, Hus, Luther, Arminius, Kierkegaard, Schleiermacher, Barth, Lewis, and both Niebuhrs. Those are some of my teachers, and if my understanding is wrong, then so is theirs.
Interestingly, the first Gospel written, by Mark, contains no description of the resurrection appearances at all. The Gospel as written by the "Mark" who wrote the rest of Mark's Gospel ends with verse 8, as follows:
Mark 16: 1 When the sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him. 2 And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. 3 They had been saying to one another, "Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?" 4 When they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled back. 5 As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man, dressed in a white robe, sitting on the right side; and they were alarmed. 6 But he said to them, "Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. 7 But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you." 8 So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.
Later writers added first a shorter ending and then a later ending which does have resurrection appearances. Both endings appear in most modern Bibles.
These later redactors likely did this because not only does verse 8 end on a preposition which was possible in Greek writing but not common, but also because it is obvious that eventually the women had to have told someone else Mark would have not been able to write what they heard and did.
But for the purposes of this series I would like to stick with the original writer's words and see why he might have decided to end his Gospel as he did. Some other time we can speculate whether some ending was torn off the original scroll or whether or not we should accept the other endings as "Gospel."
More to the point for our purposes, if Mark does end at verse 8 and therefore has no resurrection appearances, why bother with it in this series? Bothering with this Gospel then may seem strange. But it is one of those cases of the "null curriculum" I mentioned last time. We can, in this case, learn much by what is not said.
Mark's Gospel dealing with the resurrection is little more than a repetition of the earliest kerygma, proclamation, placed within the story of the empty tomb.
Since the empty tomb proves nothing, other than that the body was missing, it is in no way "proof" of the resurrection, in spite of the thousands of well-meaning attempts by preachers to make us think that it is. But it isn't.
And that is why the later Gospel writers, particularly Matthew and John, recognized the weakness of the empty tomb argument, and sought to strengthen it by placing "guards" at the tomb, and, of course, by supplying evidence of the appearances, as did the writer of the longer ending of Mark.
The proclamation of the angel, that Jesus is not in the tomb, that he has been raised, and is going ahead of Peter and the disciples to Galilee, where they will see him, is, of course, a divine explanation of the meaning of the empty tomb. And, for some that is "proof" enough.
Obviously, for the women to whom the angel spoke it was only enough to terrify them, for Mark tells us that they did not obey the angel, but rather fled from the tomb in terror and amazement, and told no one! And, interestingly, on that strange note, Mark ends his Gospel!
But it is not so strange when we think about it. We really need to focus on what the purpose of Mark's entire Gospel was, and how he repeatedly, urgently and consistently pushed this one purpose throughout the entire book.
Mark, much more than any of the other Gospel writers, from the very beginning of his Gospel, insisted on the need for each individual reader to make his or her own decision about who Jesus is. And that decision is to be a decision of faith, not of empirical knowledge.
The very heart of the Gospel of Mark is found in the question Jesus asks, exactly in the middle of his Gospel, in the eighth chapter, "But you, who do you say that I am?" If you recall, Peter gets it right for a brief moment, only to immediately misunderstand Jesus' statement that he must suffer and die, and, after three days, rise again.
And, recalling Mark's Gospel as a whole, we must remember that all of the disciples desert him in his darkest hour. The question for us from Mark is, "Will we have faith without evidence?" Or will we, as constantly pointed out by Mark, be like the Pharisees and Jesus' own disciples, demanding signs and wonders which might lead us to believe?
Mark's Gospel, then, is not for the faint of heart, or for the reader who demands proof of anything in order to have faith. He would have us look at the information that he provides in his Gospel and decide without even the comfort of human testimony about seeing the Risen Christ.
No testimony is allowed by Mark other than the words of Jesus Himself. Even at the end, Mark demands that we have faith based on no more than the word of Jesus before he was crucified and that of an angel after he was risen.
If you think about it even for a moment, perhaps that should be enough, provided we already believe that Jesus is who he has said he is all along. But, obviously, it was and is not enough for many people. And the later writers, Matthew, Luke and John, provide far more "proof" than Mark.
Mark, then, lays the groundwork, via the statement of the angel in the empty tomb, for the later narratives of the other three writers, which will include specific descriptions of and by eye witnesses to the appearances of the Risen Lord.
In particular, the angel's declaration that the Risen Christ is "going ahead of you to Galilee" sets the stage for the later Gospel writers, who will tell us "what happened" after Mark's gospel ends.
I have always found it fascinating to speculate about what might have happened to Christianity if all the Church had to offer to people was Paul's proclamation at the beginning of Chapter 15 of First Corinthians and Mark's original gospel that ends with Chapter 16, Verse 8.
We would not have even the details that later writers gave to the ending of Mark. We would not have the details of the appearances in Mathew, Luke or John. What we would have would be the simple proclamations of Jesus himself and of Paul and Mark.
I think that in the modern cynical world people may well have a much harder time coming to belief, to making that "leap of faith" necessary to then study and learn about God's redemptive love in Jesus, the Christ.
Next week we will look at the resurrection appearances in the Gospel according to St. Matthew.
In the meantime, contemplate your own faith. If you, for instance, were living in Mark's community and had available to you only the statements of Jesus while he was ministering among us on this earth, the proclamation of St. Paul in First Corinthians, and the brief statement of the angel in the empty tomb, what would you believe about the resurrection?
Mark felt that we should believe based upon only that indirect evidence and the statements of Jesus that he provides in his short Gospel. Could you?
May God bless each of you.
Posts
