1 Corinthians 15:19-26 (NRSV)
If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.
But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died. For since death came through a human being, the resurrection of the dead has also come through a human being; for as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ. But each in his own order: Christ the first fruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ. Then comes the end, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father, after he has destroyed every ruler and every authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death.
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"I have argued [...] that the epistemological starting point for any understanding of Christianity is the presence to the disciples of the crucified-and-risen Lord. That is to say: the only reason there is any Christianity at all is because of the resurrection. Any doctrine that does not, therefore, ultimately flow from the resurrection, as a development of its content and consequences, must properly be questioned as to its starting point and as to its validity. [...]
"The resurrection of Jesus was not a miraculous event within a pre-existing framework of understanding of God, but the event by which God recast the possibility of human understanding of God. For this to happen God simultaneously made use of, and blew apart, the understanding of God that had developed over the centuries among the Jewish people. God did this in the person of Jesus, through his life and teaching, leading up to and including his death.
[...]
"The resurrection of Jesus, at the same time as it showed the unimagined strength of divine love for a particular human being, and therefore revealed the loving proximity of God, also marked a final and definitive sundering of God from any human representational capacity. Whereas before it could be understood that God did not die, nor change, nor have an end, this was always within a dialectical understanding of what does happen to humans. With the resurrection of Jesus from the dead there is suddenly no dialectical understanding of God available, because God has chosen his own terms on which to make himself known quite outside the possibility of human knowledge marked by death. The complete freedom and gratuity of God is learned only from the resurrection, not because it did not exist before, but because we could not know about or understand it while our understanding was shaped by the inevitability of death."
- James Alison, The Joy of Being Wrong: Original Sin Through Easter Eyes, pp 115-116
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Luke 24:1-12 (NRSV)
But on the first day of the week, at early dawn, they came to the tomb, taking the spices that they had prepared. They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they went in, they did not find the body. While they were perplexed about this, suddenly two men in dazzling clothes stood beside them. The women were terrified and bowed their faces to the ground, but the men said to them, “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen. Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be handed over to sinners, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again.” Then they remembered his words, and returning from the tomb, they told all this to the eleven and to all the rest. Now it was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the other women with them who told this to the apostles. But these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them. But Peter got up and ran to the tomb; stooping and looking in, he saw the linen cloths by themselves; then he went home, amazed at what had happened.
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"They're being asked to re-signify the tomb as a place where he is not. He can only be found amongst the living. One of the things that cannot be remembered about him is the tomb. It makes no sense, that's part of this irruption of meaning, that we can't compare with anything else, that's how that's going on. “And then they remembered his words.” In other words, they began the process of re-signification. They are still completely baffled by it. Their memories are being altered so as to be able to begin to take on board what this might mean.
"All of this, I'm suggesting, Luke is very subtly, very deliberately, doing this. First of all there's a shift of memory. A little bit later we'll see in the Emmaus story we have a shift in narrative, where we have another account of them remembering things, and having their memory altered by Jesus interpreting them and giving them the interpretative key for what has happened, and then being recognized just at the last moment.
"And then the next day we'll have Jesus turning up, again initially unrecognized, and then gradually becoming physically present to them, although it didn't appear as he had appeared to them before because they weren't able to recognize him instantly. And then he was able to show him physicality.
"So a huge process has been going on, and Luke shows the steps of it: shifting of memory away from the tomb to the living as part of a narrative, then the narrative getting more filled out so words start to come into play leading to recognition, and then finally physical presence and recognition.
"In other words, St Luke is absolutely aware that the construction of a witness to the resurrection is a slow difficult process, in which people have to work through things before they are actually able to see. This is something which, you know, confirmation bias studies show, we cannot see things that are not within our ken to know about. It's only much much much much much later, after a good deal of working out, that we start to see things that were not expected, that are not part of anything we can understand. This is what is understood by Luke: the resurrection produced a huge shift of where to look, of how to remember, of ability to talk and ability to perceive presence. All of this was something completely new beginning.
"And this I think is the real shock of the resurrection. It's not and never was the happy ending to a story whose outlines we know. It is, on the contrary, the astounding beginning to a story which we can only just begin to imagine and tell, as we enter into the process to becoming the witnesses to what has been from the beginning, and was only deliberately, slowly, with great anguish and suffering, brought into our world by what Jesus went through.
"Part of what he was doing with his life and his passion was revealing the resurrection, revealing the effervescent, deathless creativity of God as something beyond our ken, but as something which we can, with enormous subtlety, difficulty, and through a process of learning, be pressed into becoming witnesses of.
"I hope that as the Easter season develops, we will be able to look at some more of of how this works, this irruption of the beginning into the midst of an enfeebled storytelling capacity that shifts understanding memory and storytelling completely."
- James Alison, from video "Homily for Easter Day 2022 C" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yM8v6w5useI)
[Source of quote from "The Joy of Being Wrong," and for further discussion and reflection: https://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-c/easter_c/]
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