The readings for the Eucharist on Easter Wednesday have a certain dynamic. In the Acts passage we the cripple at the Temple gate is put on the move by healing in the name of the risen Lord. What an image - ‘walking and leaping and praising God’. It captures the dynamic of the resurrection, as does the Gospel passage. There we see a journey to Emmaus accompanied unknowingly by the risen Lord and a fast journey back to Jerusalem after Christ reveals himself, as he is doing this morning in the action of Breaking of Bread. The dynamic of both stories traces back to the movement of the stone from Christ’s tomb by the Holy Spirit on Easter Sunday.
If I was invited to explain the truth of the resurrection in a few sentences I would start with this dynamic, evident in the community founded by the resurrection which had a dynamic and growth inexplicable without it. Josephus, Pliny and Tacitus give independent evidence for the remarkable growth of the church after Christ’s death. I would mention next the credibility of the New Testament witness to the resurrection surviving two centuries of critical scholarship. The New Testament record of how Christ’s sad and defeated disciples were changed into fearless missionaries is hard to explain without a cataclysmic external impact upon their lives.
The evident minor inconsistencies - the geography of appearances of the risen Lord, Jerusalem or Galilee, the number of angels and so on - reflect less their being a fabrication and more their being halting attempts to describe a hereto unimaginable event.
The role of women as witnesses is controversial for those days and would not have been included in any fabricated story.
The abandonment by devout Jews of a weekly tradition of Friday Sabbath to keep Sunday as the day of resurrection has no rival explanation.
Lastly there is no grave venerated for the founder of Christianity compared to founders of other religions, only the empty tomb in Jerusalem. These considerations are brush strokes painting a picture of an event pointing beyond itself to the unique action of God in raising Jesus from the dead, the pledge of an imperishable hope held to by a third of the world’s population today.
Returning to our readings wherever we encounter Christ he lends a dynamic. As the disciples at Emmaus were put on the move and lost the drag of sadness and the cripple was taken off the floor into the joy of leaping and bounding so we, whose hearts burn to hear scripture today, can have our lives animated and moved forward by Jesus Christ ‘who is the same, yesterday and today and for ever’ (Hebrews 13:8)
Picture from Louvre of Emmaus pilgrims by Paul Bril (1617).
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