A conversation about the Resurrection

Last year, our congregation was exploring theology about the Resurrection of Jesus. Many in the group tacitly assumed the Resurrection was the stuff of legend. Then a scientist boldly called the congregation back to mystery. An Easter sermon emerged that joined two voices in conversation: Andrea Lommen, an astrophysicist and yoga instructor, and Chad Martin, a pastor.

Andrea: I remember talking with my mom, a biologist, when I was 12, about Jesus and about why they killed him. She said he was a powerful man, and people were upset by him. She told me that some people believe that he came back from the dead. She thought he didn’t but that he lived on in the hearts and minds of people, just like we all do.

I realized recently that this is completely unsatisfactory to me, and I dislike the idea that Easter was just a political event that was upsetting to people. I think Easter was magical and mysterious and conveyed to us a critical message about the relationship of humanity to the divine.

My mother knew me well, and she knew that I loved logic and analysis. I later decided that I loved uncovering the mathematical underpinnings of our magical universe and became an astrophysicist. But through very different avenues—yoga and meditation—I also developed a sense that my skin is not a boundary of “me” in any way except the physical and that the physical is only a small part of the world.

I have come to think that making mundane whatever happened that day is exactly not the point of Easter. Easter celebrates the absence of the boundaries between us—between the people in this room, people in other countries, people of different income levels, people you’re mad at, between you and God, you and the universe, you and people throughout time.

Easter begins by dissolving the boundary between God and people. Jesus’ life had already called that boundary into question. He said he was the Son of God. Sometimes he was man, sometimes he was God; sometimes he’s the Son of God, sometimes he’s the same as God. The line got blurry. His death and Resurrection dissolved that line even more.

Sometimes on Easter I asked myself whether any of this actually happened. Did he really die? Was he really resurrected? Was he merely resuscitated? I used to want answers, but now I just want the possibility that it all happened. I invite you to join me here, in this place of not knowing, in this place of holding all the possibilities in your heart and your mind and letting them all exist.

Chad:
The stories surrounding Easter underscore that Jesus embodies the boundary between God and us. In Luke’s version of the Easter scene at the tomb, there are two men in dazzling clothes. In John’s version, the two messengers are called “angels.” In Mark, it’s a “young man dressed in a white robe.” Matthew’s Gospel is the most dramatic: An angel of the Lord descended from heaven and rolled back the stone at the tomb. Who are these figures? Not gods. Not people like us. The boundary between is blurred. As Andrea puts it, suddenly at the Resurrection of Jesus, there was a flurry of activity between heaven and earth. Whatever boundary was there before, seems to have disappeared in these stories.

And the stories of the resurrected Jesus appearing to the disciples later point in the same direction. Our rational minds want to explain what happened. Maybe Jesus was just a ghost. But the more we try to grab hold of it and explain it, the more it all sounds like nonsense. We do better to observe what Jesus’ followers perceived. They were convicted that Jesus lived on in some way radically different from what they had ever seen. In ways he seemed the same to them, and in other ways he was unrecognizable.
Think of the stories of the disciples seeing Jesus after Easter morning.

In one account, Mary confuses him with the gardener. He was the same as before but different somehow. Or the story of two disciples on the road to Emmaus. They encounter a man there and invite him to their house for dinner. Only after the meal was served do they realize the man is Jesus. How could this be? He was the same but different. Then there’s the story of the disciples sharing a meal in a private, upper room. The story takes time to explain that the door was locked. Then suddenly Jesus was with them. If he was not a ghost, how did he get there? Yet Thomas, when needing to confirm that all these stories really were about their friend Jesus, finds evidence in the fleshy, real scars on the hands of Jesus. He was the same, if different, too.

These Resurrection stories are describing a thin place—or a thin time—a time and place when and where the boundaries between heaven and earth open up.

Easter is a thin place. Life and death are bound up in the same miraculous moment. The familiar and the strange show up in the same body. The Christ of eternity walks around, looks no better than a gardener and bears the scars of brutal suffering. In him, there is no distinction between divinity and humanity.

Andrea:
The fact that not everyone describes seeing Jesus in the same way just adds to this idea that people are trying to describe something that is beyond their understanding, and certainly beyond words.

Whatever happened that day was entirely outside everyone’s experience—outside our five senses. People had never seen anything like it. And then for 30 years people tried to describe the indescribable, and what we got were the Gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John trying their best to record what it’s like to be in the presence of that knowing: the knowing of the divinity of human and the humanity of the divine.

I wonder if God was trying to show us that we are all divine. We talk about Jesus as an example of how to live, but I wonder if we can’t take that farther than we usually do—past the feeding of the poor, the helping of the sick. I wonder if we were meant to recognize that we are all divine. You are God, and God is you.

This may sound incredibly egotistical. In the end I think it’s humbling. It means that you are part of a much larger force. It also means you are God just like the person next to you is God. So you are the same. You’ve got your skin, and they have their skin, and the two of you look different, but maybe this larger force exists in, around and through you and is you at some much deeper level.

God is among us and within us all the time, and on this day 2,000 years ago, whatever keeps that notion obscured from us disappeared. Up until this year, Easter for me has been a celebration that once a long time ago God was among us and flowed easily between the realm of God and human, but I’m asking us to expand our celebration. This year, can we say the curtain never came back in? In other words, could Easter be about reminding us that God is always among us, and perhaps we, you and I, can flow seamlessly between the realm of God and the realm of human.

Whatever happened on the day of Jesus’ Resurrection was apparently not easy to explain. But don’t let people’s inability to describe it prevent you from believing that some marvelous thing happened that perhaps revealed the depth and wonder of the universe. And certainly don’t let it prevent you from believing that revelation can happen to us every day. I don’t see why we shouldn’t expect this sort of blurring of the line between God and human everyday.

For me that’s the point of Easter. It’s a day to notice all these boundaries are at best tenuous but more likely nonexistent. Keep noticing that as long as you can—not just today but this week, this month, this year—until next Easter, when you’re reminded again. You are divine, and God is human. God is in you, but you cannot contain what that is. It spills out of you and flows through you and into the person next to you. It flows effortlessly from here across the world and back in a moment. It flows across the universe and back in a moment. It’s magical and mystical and is beyond understanding, beyond measurement, beyond rationality, beyond explainability. You don’t have to try to understand it but do revel in being a part of it.

Chad Martin is associate pastor at Community Mennonite Church of Lancaster, Pa.

Andrea Lommen is associate professor and chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster.