[Dialogue] Spong on Easter Chapter 2

[KroegerD@aol.com]

May 10, 2006 
Easter Explained  

Last week I shared with my readers the time in my life when I devoted a  
semester at Cambridge University to making sense, at least for me, out of the  
meaning of Easter. I could no longer be bound by the literal texts of the Bible  
for they described the resurrection of Jesus in fanciful and supernatural 
terms.  Matthew has earthquakes announcing the dawn of Easter and angels 
descending out  of the sky to roll away the stone at the tomb. Luke has Jesus appearing 
and  disappearing at will. John portrays him as walking through walls. The 
book of  Acts tells of his ascending into the sky. While these literal details 
offended  my rational sensibilities, I could not doubt that something powerful 
had  happened. The effects were everywhere and they were measurable. Something 
 transformed the disciples, who, when Jesus was arrested, had fled in fear. 
Now  they were reconstituted and constant, held inside the grasp of a new 
dimension  of reality from which they would never waver, even in the face of the 
threat of  martyrdom. The way these disciples understood God had also changed. 
Something  had happened to them to make it impossible any longer to think of 
God without  seeing Jesus as part of who they perceived God to be. They could 
also no longer  think of Jesus without seeing him as part of who God is. That 
life-changing  experience that they came to call ‘resurrection’ even gave birth 
to a new holy  day on which that experience was commemorated. People do not 
change sacred  worship traditions easily. So the first day of the week that 
would come to be  called ‘the Christian Sunday’ was born. On one side of this 
new consciousness, I  faced texts that purported to explain what happened on the 
first Easter that  could not be literalized and on the other side I faced a 
life-changing set of  circumstances that could not be denied. How to make sense 
out of both realities  became the goal of my study that led finally to my 
book, “Resurrection: Myth or  Reality: A Bishop’s Search for the Origins of 
Christianity.”  
In that book I developed the four clues designed to lead me to the heart of  
Easter, which I laid before you in the column last week. Let me repeat them 
once  again since they are crucial to the interpretative task. The clues are: 
(1)  Whatever Easter was it dawned on the disciples in Galilee. In those Easter  
narratives associated with a Jerusalem setting, I now saw a secondary, 
developed  tradition, not a primary one. (2) Peter is the person who stood at the 
center of  that experience. When Luke quoted Jesus as saying of Peter, “Simon, 
Simon,  behold, Satan demanded to have you that he might sift you like wheat 
but I have  prayed for you that your faith may not fail and when you have turned 
again,  strengthen your brethren,” I believe he captured the community’s 
memory of  Peter’s central role in Easter. (3) The time in which the meaning of 
Easter  dawned must be broken out of the symbol of three days. Three days 
expressed  liturgical time not historical time. That was the time between the 
liturgical  observance of the crucifixion on Friday and the liturgical observance 
of the  resurrection on Sunday. It does not measure the time between the event 
of Jesus’  death and the dawning of the Easter experience. That I submit was 
much longer,  six months at a minimum, perhaps a year at a maximum. (4) The 
setting in which  resurrection dawned had something to do with the re-enactment 
of the common  meal. Long before the gospels were written, Paul said the 
purpose of reenacting  the last supper was “to show forth the Lord’s death until he 
comes.” Luke had  the characters in his long Emmaus Road resurrection story 
say to the disciples  that “he was known to us in the breaking of the bread.”  
I then returned to the Bible and sought to judge the authenticity of every  
resurrection narrative by these clues. Narratives consistent with these clues I 
 judged to be more authentic and perhaps earlier than those without them. 
When I  applied that test the results were salutary.  
I started with Paul. By implication he locates the disciples in Galilee and  
affirms the centrality of Peter. “He appeared first to Cephas,” he said.  
Mark was next and though he locates the proclamation of the resurrection  
message to a group of women at the tomb in Jerusalem, he never portrays the  
risen Jesus appearing to them or to anyone else. Instead the messenger directs  
the women to tell the disciples to go to Galilee with the promise that they will 
 meet Jesus there. Since it is a 7-10 day trip from Jerusalem to Galilee that 
 promised appearance to the disciples is well outside the three-day symbol.  
While Matthew contradicts Mark and tells of a Jesus sighting by the women at  
the tomb in Jerusalem, it is a highly suspicious story. We know Matthew has 
Mark  in front of him when he writes, so we have to wonder why he changed what 
was his  primary source. Luke, who also has Mark in front of him when he 
writes, does not  change Mark’s assertion that the women did not see Jesus at the 
tomb. When  Matthew finally does relate a story of the disciples actually 
seeing the risen  Christ, it is in Galilee on top of a mountain. There Jesus 
appears to them out  of the sky, not out of a tomb, and he has been clothed with the 
authority of  heaven and earth. Clearly some time has passed between the 
crucifixion and this  appearance. It could have been days, weeks or months but it 
was without doubt  more than three days. On this occasion Jesus charges them 
to “Go into all the  world” promising his presence with them always.  
Luke moves all of the appearances of Jesus to the Jerusalem area making  
Cleopas, a heretofore unknown figure, the first witness of the resurrection in  
the nearby village of Emmaus. Then he corrects himself by having the disciples  
tell Cleopas that Jesus has already appeared to Peter, thus preserving Peter’s 
 primacy in the story. Luke then stretches out the time of resurrection  
appearances to 40 days. The three-day symbol is fading. Finally Luke concludes  
these appearances with a retelling of an Elijah story about Jesus ascending into 
 the sky and then he marks the Jewish Day of Pentecost, fifty days after  
Passover, with the story of the coming of the Holy Spirit (see Acts 1 and 2).  
Pentecost was the day on which the Jews celebrated the giving of the law to  
Moses on Mount Sinai. Luke suggests that the giving of the Holy Spirit to the  
Christians was comparable. The law came through Moses, he says, but the Spirit  
through Jesus.  
John tells his four resurrection stories, locating three of them in  
Jerusalem: the appearance to Mary Magdalene, the appearance to the disciples  without 
Thomas and the appearance to the disciples with Thomas. In this latter  story, 
Thomas is made to utter the astounding words to Jesus: “My Lord and my  God.”
 Then John appears to close his work, with these words: “Now Jesus did many  
other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this  
book, but these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the  
Son of God and believing that you may have life in his name.” Surely that was 
 John’s original ending.  
However, there is more. Another chapter is added in a quite different setting 
 that harmonizes very poorly with what seems to be the closing chapter. 
Scholars  debate whether it is a genuine Johannine addition or whether someone 
added this  story later to John’s Gospel. All the linguistic tests that scholars 
know how to  apply, however, seem to indicate that it is genuine Johannine 
material. The  assumption is that John added this later when he discovered a 
tradition or  memory that he had not known about before. That is the consensus 
guess today.  What is important to me, however, is the primitive character of this 
addition  and what it reveals about an earlier time in Christian history, 
perhaps a time  before the gospels were written. Only in this chapter are all 
four clues that I  had developed present. We can tick them off quickly. The 
setting for this  chapter is around the Sea of Galilee, where so much of the gospel 
story of Jesus  took place. Peter stands at the center of this episode. 
Indeed, the narrative’s  focus is on the rehabilitation of Peter after his denial. 
When Peter is told  that this shadowy figure on the shore is ‘the Lord,’ he 
is said to have leaped  impulsively into the water to swim to land. Peter is 
then confronted with a  question that comes to him three times, “Simon, do you 
love me?” With each  answer he is told to feed or to tend God’s sheep. Third, 
this episode is well  beyond the three-day limit. The disciples have all 
returned from Jerusalem to  their homes. The shock and trauma of the crucifixion 
has worn off. Picking up  the pieces of their lives they have returned to their 
fishing trade. One senses  that weeks, perhaps even months, have passed before 
the scene occurs. Fourth,  their actions are described inside a symbolic 
Eucharist in which Jesus and his  disciples eat together. Jesus presides over this 
meal as he did at the Last  Supper. The four traditional Eucharistic verbs 
are take, bless, break and give.  In this Johannine story they are reduced from 
four to two. Jesus now takes the  bread and gives the bread to his disciples. 
The actions of blessing and breaking  are omitted. Why is this Eucharistic 
action truncated? I am now convinced that  this gospel writer has already 
identified Jesus with the bread of life and the  bread of life has already been 
blessed and broken in the story of the  crucifixion. That action does not have to 
be repeated now. So this chapter, so  genuinely primitive in character, seems 
to be a lost memory discovered and added  to his already completed story by the 
author of the Fourth Gospel. It is in my  opinion the most authentic memory 
of the Easter moment.  
If we have the clues correct and if this episode is an early memory, as I  
believe it is, then can we reconstruct the moment in which whatever Easter is  
broke into their consciousness? I think we can and to that task, I will return  
next week.  
John Shelby Spong 
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