John 20:1-18

Resources

1. René Girard, Things Hidden, p. 83:

Culture always develops as a tomb. The tomb is nothing but the first human monument to be raised over the surrogate victim, the first most elemental and fundamental matrix of meaning. There is no culture without a tomb and no tomb without a culture.

2. Gil Bailie, "The Gospel of John" audio tape lecture series, tape 8 (my notes / transcript), on John 11; and tape 12 (my notes / transcript), on John 20-21. These two tapes stress the significance of the empty tomb in not letting Jesus' disciples regenerate conventional culture at the site of the shrine. As we discussed just two weeks ago (Lent 5A), Bailie's suggestion regarding the story of the raising of Lazarus is that: John is using this story as a dry run for the passion story. The Johannine Jesus is saying, 'No, we will go to that tomb, and we will meet death there, and I will show you how to meet it. So, when you have to meet it, at the cross, at my death, you will know how to meet it, in the light of the resurrection, which you haven't even experienced yet. So that when you have to meet my death you can meet it in light of the resurrection.' And so Bailie asks in his treatment of John 20: What is being revealed in the NT empty tomb stories? If there is no tomb, then there is no place to go to re-generate conventional culture. If we live in the light of the resurrection, then we must live without the tomb at the center of our cultural lives. Can we do so? Can we live without having to periodically invoke the primitive sacred, an invocation that so often happens at the site of the tomb, literally or symbolically? These tape versions of the discussion are more elaborate and include examples, but they are effectively summarized in the book version:

3. Gil Bailie, Violence Unveiled, pp. 228-233; link to an excerpt on "The Empty Tomb" and "The Resurrection." Related is his take on John 11; see Lent 5A.

4. N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, pp. 662-682 on John 20-21. Also worthwhile is his general introduction to the Gospel stories, ch. 13, "General Issues in the Easter Stories." Not yet arguing for that the Gospel accounts are historically reliable, he does argue against those who see the resurrection stories as constructions of the early church. He elaborates four major surprises in the Gospel stories that speak against their been made up:

The Strange Silence of the Bible in the Stories: in especially Matthew's and John's Gospel, the Hebrew scriptures are referenced all the time, both implicitly and explicitly, but not so in Easter stories. There are mentions of the resurrection "fulfilling scripture," but we are never told where. No scripture is actually ever cited, nor are there any echoes from Hebrew texts -- not Daniel 12:1-3, nor even any of the non-canonical books like Maccabees.

The Strange Absence of Personal Hope in the Stories: Here is one of Wright's most important contributions, one for which he is writing a forthcoming book called Life after Life after Death -- in other words, that the hope of resurrection is for the life of all creation which will come after the life given each person upon death. In the latter book he will presumably talk directly to Easter preachers in a way that he declines here, when he says:

Were this a different sort of book, I would be eager at this point to rub the point into the consciousness of those who organize Easter services, not least those who preach and choose hymns; but that must wait for another occasion. Simply in terms of our attempt to assess, as historians, what these stories think they are about, and where they belong in the early Christian scheme of things, it is extremely strange, and extremely interesting, that at no stage do they mention the future hope of the Christian.

This is, of course, counter-intuitive to most western Christians, Catholic and Protestant, conservative and liberal. A thousand hymns and a million sermons, not to mention poems, icons, liturgies and aids to meditation, have so concentrated on ‘life after death’ as the central problem, the issue which drives everything else, and have so distorted the Easter stories to feed this concentration, that it has long been assumed that the real point of the Easter story is both to show that there is indeed a ‘life after death’ and that those who belong to Jesus will eventually share it. As we have seen in reviewing the future hope of the Christian writers of the first two centuries, this is itself far too vague: the hope was, again and again, for bodily resurrection after ‘life after death’. But the significant thing to notice here is this: neither ‘going to heaven when you die’, ‘life after death’, ‘eternal life’, nor even ‘the resurrection of all Christ’s people’, is so much as mentioned in the four canonical resurrection stories. If Matthew, Mark, Luke and John wanted to tell stories whose import was ‘Jesus is risen, therefore you will be too’, they have done a remarkably bad job of it.

Instead, we find a sense of open-ended commission within the present world: ‘Jesus is risen, therefore you have work ahead of you.’ This is very clear in Matthew, Luke and John; even in Mark the women have an immediate task (though whether they do it or not we must discuss later), and the angel’s message through them to the disciples, especially Peter, implies that they are going to be given things to do as well. This mission coheres closely with the missionary imperative displayed in Paul and Acts.

It does not, however, include any mention of the future resurrection, or of being ‘with Jesus’ in a post-mortem existence. (pp. 602-603)

The Strange Portrait of Jesus in the Stories: This goes along, to some extent, with the first. If the evangelists were constructing a picture of the resurrected Jesus using known sources, it would have made sense to use a picture like in Daniel 12:1-3 where the risen figure is shining -- a picture like one sees in the Transfiguration stories. What's surprising is that we don't get anything like this. Jesus appears a normal human being. There are strange features like apparently not being recognizable as his pre-resurrection self and popping in and out of scenes. But, again, this strangeness is one not really precedented anywhere else: a human person with a body that has somehow nevertheless been transformed into what Wright calls 'transphysicality.'

The Strange Presence of the Women in the Stories: This is a point that is made quite often these days, but it can't be overemphasized. If the evangelists are constructing resurrection stories for apologetic reasons in their settings, they absolutely would not have chosen women as the first witnesses. The only historically compelling reason that Wright can think of is that they were basing their stories of accounts of what happened.

I would add the themes from John 5 and 9 of Jesus representing the "work" of God's creation by healing on the sabbath. He is previewing the new first day by healing on the old seventh. The resurrection heralds that New Day. And he commissions us to carry on that work. On Thursday night, Jesus had told his disciples, "Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father" (John 14:12). He basically tells Mary Magdalene (John 20:17) to stop clinging to him and to get to work.

Reflections and Questions

1. An intriguing connection I've run across is a comparison of this story to that of Lazarus in John 11. Jesus calls Lazarus out of the tomb by name, still bound up, telling others to unbind him. Jesus in John 20 comes out of the tomb unbound, with the grave clothes neatly folded up behind him, and calls Mary by name out of the tomb of her grief.

2. In 1999 I preached a sermon with a heavy Gil Bailie influence entitled "Unbound from Death." Not only did I use themes from his treatments of John 11 and 20, but I also borrowed heavily from a sermon Bailie gave on Lent 1A in 1999. He was at a Catholic parish to speak on the Book of Revelation and wove some thoughts about Revelation in with that Sunday's texts. My Easter 1999 sermon is based primarily on the text of Handel's "Hallelujah Chorus," Rev. 11:15.

3. My 1996 sermon, "Are You Ready to Embrace Life?", is a bit more straightforward use of the John 20 and Acts 10 texts from a decidedly Girardian perspective.  The 2002 version adds a more prominent role for the Colossians 3 text (Year A), as well, by interpreting ascension in terms of learning to set our minds on things above, explained in this way: "This doesn't mean we aren't to think about things of this life or this earth. It means that we need to begin to think about life and this world from a heavenly perspective, from God's perspective. In Jesus, we are able to begin to think of our lives from God's way of thinking." The basic difference that this sermon endeavors to flesh out is that our way of thinking is always shadowed by death, exemplified in our idolatry of gods who wield death. The Living God that we meet in Jesus Christ teaches us to put away our idolatries and finally meet the God who is wholly and completely about life (which is the thesis of James Alison's book Raising Abel, as it takes its start from Col. 3:1-2).

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