In Galilee You Will See Him
An Easter Sermon Preached at Hanover Street Presbyterian Church
On Easter, March 27, 2005
By the Rev. Thomas C. Davis
Texts:
1 Corinthians 15: 35-50
But someone will ask, ?How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come? Fool! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. And as for what you sow, you do not sow the body that is to be, but a bare seed, perhaps of wheat or of some other grain. But God gives it a body as he has chosen, and to each kind of seed its own body. Not all flesh is alike, but there is one flesh for human beings, another for animals, another for birds, and another for fish. There are both heavenly bodies and earthly bodies, but the glory of the heavenly is one thing, and that of the earthly is another. There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars; indeed, star differs from star in glory. So it is with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor. It is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body. Thus it is written, ?The first man, Adam, became a living being;' the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. But it is not the spiritual that is first, but the physical, and then the spiritual. The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven. As was the man of dust, so are those who are of the dust; and as is the man of heaven, so are those who are of heaven. Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we will also bear the image of the man of heaven. What I am saying, brothers and sisters, is this: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable.
Matthew 28: 1-10
After the Sabbath, as the first day of the week was dawning, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary sent to see the tomb. And suddenly there was a great earthquake; for an angel of the Lord, descending from heaven, came and rolled back the stone and sat on it. His appearance was like lightning, and his clothing white as snow. For fear of him the guards shook and became like dead men. But the angel said to the women, ?Do not be afraid; I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. He is not here; for he has been raised, as he said. Come, see the place where he lay. Then go quickly and tell his disciples, "He has been raised from the dead, and indeed he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him." This is my message for you.' So they left the tomb quickly with fear and great joy, and ran to tell his disciples. Suddenly Jesus met them and said, ?Greetings!" And they came to him, took hold of his feet, and worshiped him. Then Jesus said to them, ?Do not be afraid; go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me.
Sermon Text
In Matthew's Easter story a radiant angel tells the two frightened Marys: "[Jesus] has been raised from the dead, and he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him." From that verse comes the title of my sermon: "In Galilee you will see him."
Since Easter was approaching, the weekly Bible study group decided last Wednesday to have a look at the Easter story in all four gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The main message in each gospel is the same: Jesus is alive. God has raised him from the dead. However, the details about what transpired on the third day after his burial vary a good deal, such as which women went to embalm him (the names vary from gospel to gospel), who saw him alive first, and whether there was one angel or two by or in the empty tomb.
If you look carefully at all four stories you will notice that the people who went to embalm Jesus, all women, were the first to realize that his body was gone. And three gospels report that women were the first to see Jesus alive. Those women reported their experiences to the male disciples, but the men first dismissed their tales as idle talk. In two gospels the women relayed to the men what the angel (or angels) told them: that Jesus was going ahead of them to Galilee, and that they would see him there. In other words, the message to the men was: Don't hang around Jerusalem. Get back home! One angel by the tomb had said to the women: "Why do you seek the living among the dead?" In other words, why are you hanging around the cemetery? The Lord is alive, and if you want to find him, you'd better get away from this place and back to Galilee.
Why Galilee? Well, that's where Jesus had preached and taught and healed, in Galilee of the Goyim, where people of many faiths, many races, and many nationalities lived cheek by jowl. Jesus had deliberately chosen to minister there, in Galilee, that least Jewish of all Jewish territories. Consequently it had a shabby reputation. "Can anything good come out of Galilee?" the mainstream Jews would say.
Do you remember Jesus' very first sermon (in Luke 4), given at his home synagogue in Nazareth? Everything was fine until he began to point out to his enrapt audience that God had several times shown more favor to foreigners than to Jews. This story forecast what Jesus' ministry would be like. According to Luke, Jesus was aiming to create a big, big tent, a "house of prayer for all people," as old Isaiah had put it. But, his audience wouldn't put up with that message. They hastened to throw him off a cliff. Their knee jerk response showed that they would hear no more of God's love for foreigners! Nevertheless, Jesus chose to bring the matter up in his inaugural public address. That shows how important outsiders were to him. And that's why I think it makes sense that the angel said that Jesus would meet his disciples back in Galilee?not in Jerusalem, the Jewish capital and center for worship, but rather, back among the Goyim. So, an Easter message to us might be: If we want to meet the risen Jesus, then we had better look in unlikely places?not in some church, but rather, out there among the outsiders, among the unchurched, in the Galilee of our day.
Maybe you'll say, what do you mean, preacher? Jesus is sitting on the right hand of God, in heaven. He was with his disciples for a time after his resurrection, and then, he ascended into heaven, and the Holy Spirit was dispatched to accompany us until the end of days. Until then, Jesus will remain with God, and our only contact with him will be through the Holy Spirit, who, one could say, has assumed the watch until Jesus comes again to finally assume command of the ship. Scripture does teach that?well all except for my nautical metaphor.
But that's not all that scripture teaches about the resurrection of Jesus. If we give up the idea that our holy scriptures set forth one unified, harmonious, and unproblematic way of thinking, it's amazing what divergent views pop up.
Certainly you remember the story in the Gospel of John about doubting Thomas: how he wasn't with the other disciples when Jesus appeared to them after Easter, and how Thomas refused to believe that Jesus was alive unless he touched Jesus' wounds; and how Jesus then did appear to Thomas, bidding him touch him and believe; and how Thomas did believe then. The point of that story seems to be that the risen Christ had a physical body. He wasn't just a ghost.
But notice what Paul says about resurrection to the church in Corinth. Incidentally, just like John, Paul wanted to convince people that the story about Jesus' resurrection was true; but he took a completely opposite tack from John. Instead of trying to show that Jesus' resurrected body was physical, Paul argued that it was not physical. In fact, Paul argued?we read this in this morning's reading-- that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God. Paul would find the doubting Thomas story a common but unfortunate clouding of the issue of resurrection. Why? Because according to Paul, Jesus' resurrected body was a spirit-body, not a physical body.
No doubt, Paul's ideas on this subject were informed by his own experience of the risen Jesus on the road to Damascus (Acts 9: 1-9). You remember that story: How he fell off his horse, and heard a voice, and was blinded for a while. Paul counted himself an Apostle, just like the eleven original male disciples of Jesus, because like them he had seen the risen Jesus. That's what he claims in 1 Corinthians 9:1: that he had seen Jesus, and that's why he could rightfully call himself an apostle. Notice though, that Paul's seeing of the risen Jesus happened after all the other sightings reported in the gospels, after Jesus had ascended into heaven, and after Pentecost. We know the timing because Paul was on his way to Damascus to deliver a hit list of persons reported to be followers of Jesus; and the followers of Jesus did not come out of the woodwork until after Pentecost. So, our scriptures indicate that Paul saw the risen Jesus after the church was reporting that Jesus was in heaven at the right hand of God, and that the post-Easter sightings had stopped.
I take two things from Paul's teaching about resurrection: One, that resurrection is not about the resuscitation of a physical body; it's about the transformation of a physical body into another kind of body which may have some physical characteristics but differs greatly from all the physical bodies we know; and secondly, that Jesus is not on furlough. He might very well visit us today just as he did Paul. Therefore, when we speak of the body of Christ, we could rightfully mean by that more than Paul's metaphor that the church is the body of Christ. We could mean?and Paul would seem to agree?that anyone can be blessed to see Jesus. Easter isn't over, despite the church's claim that Jesus has ascended and sits by God's side, far from our world, and will communicate only through intermediaries: the Holy Spirit, or saints, or the Virgin Mary, or even lowly priests. Paul's explanation of resurrection suggests that Easter may very well be a current event.
Now, let me tie together the beginning and the end of this sermon. I began by noting that an Easter angel said Jesus would meet his disciples in Galilee, the land of foreigners; and then I suggested that if Jesus were to appear to us today, he would likely turn up somewhere in our Galilee. I don't mean the Galilee in Palestine, necessarily. I mean anywhere that outsiders hold sway, where different ness is the norm, where cultural snobs of whatever kind find themselves ill at ease. That's where we can most expect Jesus to turn up. And then, in the latter part of my sermon I indicated that I side with Paul in the Bible's notions about resurrection: the resurrection of Jesus is not about the resuscitation of his corpse. It's about the indomitable Spirit that lived in him and keeps on living, by God, in other guises.
To whit: Alice brought me a story from the Wilmington News Journal about a Muslim man in Jerusalem who holds a most unlikely office. His name is Wajeeh Nuseibeh, and he's the key keeper for the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the holiest shrine in Christendom, the place from which Jesus ascended to heaven, according to tradition. How did a Muslim end up with the key to the Christian holiest of holies? Well, because it's such an important place, lots of Christians groups lay claim to it, five very large denominations in particular, and they've been fighting over control of that space for a long, long time. Sometimes the tensions over the right to clean or pray in a certain place in the church have escalated into violence. When the Muslims conquered Jerusalem in the year 638 they took charge of the church, and the key keepers they appointed were the Nuseibeh family. Except for a stretch of 80 years, during the crusades, the Nuseibeh family kept the key, right up to today. The Christians have found it helpful to have a neutral person, a Muslim, holding the key to their church. Nuseibeh says: "Like all brothers, they sometimes have problems. We help them settle their disputes . . . We help preserve peace in this holy place." Amen, Nuseibeh. Amen!
Scripture says that Mary Magdalene had Jesus right before her eyes, but didn't recognize him at first. (John 20: 11ff) She thought he was a gardener. I wonder whether the Jesus she saw was in fact the gardener of that place; and I wonder whether the Jesus in my Galilee might be someone like this Muslim peacemaker who holds the key to sacred space that is fraught with Christian argument?
