[stephenkhoo]

DRAWING OUT THE IMPLICATIONS OF THE RESURRECTION

SCRIPTURE READINGS: ACTS 3:11-26; LK 24:35-48
Emmanuel Kant once says: Percept without concept is blind. Indeed, many of us have experiences in life but because we are not aware of them, these experiences are not revelatory of God’s love to us. We are blind to the many ways that God wants to reveal Himself to us and ourselves to ourselves through these experiences. Thus, it is important that we should never go through life without interpreting the experiences of our daily life. This was indeed the case for the early Christians. The fundamental experience of the Christians of course is their encounter with the Risen Jesus. However, it was necessary for the early Christians to draw out the implications of this Jesus who had been crucified but is now seen to be alive. And their conclusion at the end of their reflection is this: Jesus is the Messiah predestined to suffer, die and rise again; and He is our Saviour who takes away the sin of the world. This is the earliest interpretation of Jesus after His resurrection. But how did they come to confess in Jesus as the Messiah, the Saviour?

Firstly, this confession is based on the fact of their encounter with the Risen Lord. The Risen Christ whom they encountered is somehow in continuity with the Jesus of Nazareth. For indeed, the message of the gospel is that they encountered the Risen Christ as essentially identical with the Jesus of Nazareth that they walked with. This is brought out by the deliberate graphic and physical representation of Christ showing His hands and feet and eating the grilled fish. In other words, the Christ that they encountered was not a ghost but truly alive in the fullest sense of the term. This is again brought out in the first reading when the crippled man at the Beautiful Gate of the Temple was cured. Peter said, “Why are you so surprised at this? Why are you staring at us as though we had made this man walk by our own power or holiness?” This miracle was attributed to the work of the Risen Christ by the Apostles who were merely instruments. “It is the name of Jesus which, through our faith in it, has brought back the strength of this man whom you see here and who is well known to you. It is faith in that name that has restored this man to health, as you can all see.”

Now if Jesus is alive, the next question that needs to be asked is, how did Jesus come back to life? The answer of course is that God had raised Jesus from the dead. It is important to note here that it is not Jesus who rose from the dead but rather the work is attributed to the Father. This is important because in claiming that the Father raised Jesus from the dead, it means therefore that God has identified Himself with Jesus, with His cause, His work, His life, passion and death. In raising Jesus from the dead, the Father is giving His signature to all that Jesus did and taught. Hence Jesus is vindicated against all those who saw Him as a criminal. Now if Jesus is vindicated by God as His personal messenger, then necessarily, Jesus must be the Christ because He is the anointed one of God. He represents the Father in person, His unconditional love for humankind.

Now if Jesus is the personal expression of God, who has for all eternity desired that humankind be reconciled to Him, then Jesus must have been for all eternity destined to die for us. Of course, this question of predestination must be understood correctly as God’s overall providence rather than a fatalistic interpretation. “This is what I meant when I said, while I was still with you, that everything written about me, in the Law of Moses, in the Prophets and in the Psalms, has to be fulfilled.” When that is seen, we can understand why Jesus is interpreted as fulfilling the Old Testament scriptures and that His suffering and death were inevitable due to man’s sins.

The third step of their reflection was to claim that in Jesus we find our salvation. He is the one who takes away our sins. “So you see how it is written that the Christ would suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that, in his name, repentance for the forgiveness of sins would be preached to all the nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses to this.” But it is important to ask what they really meant when they said that Jesus takes away our sins.

Firstly, we must not interpret sin primarily in a moral sense but in a theological sense. In other words, sin is not so much the things we do wrong but sin is alienation between God and man; and between man and man. Sin is to be dead to life and to love. Consequently to claim that Jesus is the one who takes away our sins, it is not so much saying that His bloody death saves us. Rather it is what His death symbolizes – His whole life of love, service and self-emptying. This means that for the Christians, the only way to live the resurrected life, now and here after, is to confess His name, which is to live the kind of life that Jesus lived since this same earthly life of Jesus was vindicated as the authentic life-style by the Father’s act of raising Jesus from the dead.

Secondly, to confess the name of Jesus would also imply that we allow the Spirit of Jesus to work in us. His Spirit however becomes ours only when we live a life of intimate relationship with Him. Thus by living His life and sharing in His Spirit, we live the life of God, a life in union with Him and with others. This is how sin, understood as alienation, is overcome. Through living the life of self-emptying love we share in the life of Christ and this is possible only when His Spirit dwells in us, working in us.

Thus, we can understand why the earliest Palestinian Christians came to confess the significance of the Risen Jesus as the Christ destined to suffer for our sins and save us. Of course, we know that this is only the first step in assimilating the full significance of Christ’s resurrection. Two more steps would be necessary in this Christological reflection when Jesus is next confessed as the exalted Lord by the Jewish-Hellenistic Christians; and then finally as Lord and God by the Hellenistic Christians. These last two stages would take the Church almost another 80 years to arrive at the fullness of the confession of Jesus’ divinity. The gradual discovery and declaration of Jesus as the Son of God took a long process as the early Christians meditated on the meaning of the Christ-Event, that is, His life, passion, death and resurrection.

If that is so, then today, we need to ask ourselves in the light of our own experiences, in our struggles and in the ambiguities of life and especially in our faith relationship with Jesus, who Jesus is really to us. We cannot merely repeat the confession of the Palestinian Christians because that was their way of speaking about the significance of the Risen Jesus to them. We need to find our own formulation in confessing who Jesus is for us, what He can do for us and how He can be of relevance to our life. How then would we confess Jesus in our own terms that are truly expressive of our faith in Him?

Perhaps, our faith has not yet come to the full fruition of the reflections of the early Christians; but we need not worry too much. Faith like that of the early Christians needs to grow and mature. What we need to do is to be sincere and at least recognize what level of faith we have in Jesus. Only then can we progress further and hopefully come to understand the full person of Jesus whom we proclaim as the Risen Christ, our Lord and God who comes in human form. For this reason too, the Church has extended Easter into a 50-day season so that we can continue to penetrate into the profundity of this Easter celebration.

Through the celebration of the Eucharist, especially in the reading of the Word of God, preaching of the apostles and the breaking of bread, we will come to understand the significance of the paschal mystery and also encounter Him like the disciples at Emmaus did. Indeed, at every Eucharistic celebration, we have the reading of the Word, proclamation of the gospel and the reception of Holy Communion. These are the means to encounter the Risen Christ both in our minds and in our hearts.
Written by The Most Rev William Goh