postID: 7079; title: The Third Sunday Of Easter
groupKey: secondary
groupKey: other
The Third Sunday Of Easter
O God, whose blessed Son did manifest himself to his disciples in the breaking of bread: Open, we pray thee, the eyes of our faith, that we may behold him in all his redeeming work; through the same thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Array
(
[date] => 2009-04-26 11:00:00
[scope] =>
[year] =>
[month] =>
[post_id] => 563
[series_id] =>
[day_titles_only] =>
[exclusive] => 1
[return] => formatted
[formatted] =>
[show_date] =>
[show_meta] =>
[show_content] => 1
[admin] =>
[debug] => 1
[filter_types] => Array
(
[0] => primary
[1] => secondary
)
[type_labels] => Array
(
[primary] => Primary
[secondary] => Secondary
[other] => Other
)
[the_date] => 2009-04-26 11:00:00
)
1 post(s) found for dateStr : 2009-04-26postID: 7079 (The Third Sunday Of Easter)
--- getDisplayDates ---
litdate post_id: 7079; date_type: variable; year: 2009
Variable date => check date_calculations.
=> check date_assignments.
=> NO date_assignments found for postID: 7079
displayDates for postID: 7079/year: 2009
Array
(
[0] => 2009-04-26
)
postPriority: 3primaryPost found for date: 2009-04-26 with ID: 7079 (The Third Sunday Of Easter)
The Third Sunday Of Easter
Array
(
[date] => 2009-04-26 11:00:00
[scope] =>
[year] =>
[month] =>
[post_id] => 563
[series_id] =>
[day_titles_only] =>
[exclusive] => 1
[return] => simple
[formatted] =>
[show_date] =>
[show_meta] =>
[show_content] => 1
[admin] =>
[debug] => 1
[filter_types] => Array
(
[0] => primary
[1] => secondary
)
[type_labels] => Array
(
[primary] => Primary
[secondary] => Secondary
[other] => Other
)
[the_date] => 2009-04-26 11:00:00
)
1 post(s) found for dateStr : 2009-04-26postID: 7079 (The Third Sunday Of Easter)
--- getDisplayDates ---
litdate post_id: 7079; date_type: variable; year: 2009
Variable date => check date_calculations.
=> check date_assignments.
=> NO date_assignments found for postID: 7079
displayDates for postID: 7079/year: 2009
Array
(
[0] => 2009-04-26
)
postPriority: 3primaryPost found for date: 2009-04-26 with ID: 7079 (The Third Sunday Of Easter)
The reading_id [73522] is already in the array.
No update needed.
Scripture citation(s): Luke 24:36b-48
A Sermon by
Fr. Mead
on
Luke 24:36b-48
✛
For John Updike
Array
(
[0] => 60757
)
book: [Array
(
[0] => 60757
)
] (reading_id: 73522)bbook_id: 60757
The bbook_id [60757] is already in the array.
No update needed for sermon_bbooks.
…Jesus himself stood among them. But they were startled and frightened, and supposed that they saw a spirit. St. Luke 24:36b-48
In the Name of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost. Amen.
I like ghost stories, but the Resurrection of Jesus Christ is not one of them. It’s not that Easter isn’t a good story. It just isn’t a ghost story. And it isn’t that ghost stories are untrue, whereas the Resurrection is. It’s that there’s a lot more to Jesus’ Resurrection than the sighting of a spiritual apparition.
Let’s start with the teaching of the Church on the Resurrection, summarizing the Scriptures. Article IV of the Articles of Religion in the back of the Book of Common Prayer says it with admirable clarity: “Christ did truly rise again from death, and took again his body, with flesh, bones, and all things appertaining to the perfection of Man’s nature; wherewith he ascended into Heaven, and there sitteth, until he return to judge all Men at the last day.” (Book of Common Prayer, p. 868)
The Resurrection of Jesus is not a ghost story, nor is it the mere resuscitation of a corpse. Jesus raised his friend Lazarus from the grave shortly before Palm Sunday. The chief priests and elders plotted not only to destroy Jesus but to kill Lazarus. A resuscitated person can be killed, can die again. But, in the words of the Apostle, “Christ being raised from the dead will never die again; death has no more dominion over him.” The same Apostle Paul, in his lengthy chapter on the Resurrection in I Corinthians 15, says that the Resurrection, the first fruits of which are seen in Jesus’ Resurrection, is a “spiritual body.” The Resurrection is beyond our categories; it is a new world.
It is very difficult, probably impossible, to write a harmony of the Easter Gospels. To my mind this enhances the credibility of the witness as a whole. And a picture does emerge which is but a glimpse of the overwhelming Reality which has broken into this world through the Resurrection of Jesus. For the same risen Lord who shows his wounded hands and side and who eats with his amazed disciples also vanishes from their sight. Nor is his appearance impeded by doors locked for fear of the Jewish authorities. And speaking of the authorities, one of their own young agents, Saul of Tarsus, will shortly be turned from a persecutor into a disciple by the risen Lord on the road to Damascus.
That very disciple, who is Saint Paul himself, teaches that the Resurrection of Jesus is a spiritual body. In the words of biblical scholar Raymond Brown, “Paul thinks of bodily resurrection, but the transformation indicated by his words seems to take the risen body out of the realm of the physical into the spiritual.”¹ Flesh and blood, said Paul, cannot inherit the Kingdom of God. But that flesh and blood has been taken on by God in Christ, nailed to the cross, dead and buried. And on the third day, God raised it up. The Kingdom of God is a New Heaven and a New Earth whose reality is more substantial than anything we have seen or imagine.
The writer John Updike, who died late last year, knew his theology and wrote Seven Stanzas at Easter. Updike, who described the foibles of human life in its incarnate details, understood the importance of the Incarnation of the Word and the Resurrection of the Body for a Life Everlasting:
Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.
It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.
The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that–pierced–died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.
Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.
[The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.
And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.]
Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.²
Mr. Updike frequently found his way to the Episcopal Church’s Altar Rail where he heard these words: “The Body of our Lord Jesus Christ which was given for thee, preserve thy body and soul unto everlasting life…The Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ which was shed for thee, preserve thy body and soul unto everlasting life.” Let us walk through that same door, receive the Body and Blood of our risen Lord, that our own bodies and souls may be cleansed and prepared here and now and for the Day of Resurrection. The “unthinkable hour” approaches each of us, and it will come, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. And we shall be raised incorruptible.
In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
__________
¹Raymond Brown, Responses to 101 Questions on the Bible, p. 75.
²John Updike, Seven Stanzas at Easter, 1964.
