The Wild Reed: The Two Entwined Events of the Easter Experience

Thursday, April 02, 2015

The Two Entwined Events of the Easter Experience

"Jesus is Laid in the Tomb" by Ted De Garzia.

This year for Holy Week I'll be sharing three excerpts from Cletus Wessels, O.P.'s 2003 book Jesus in the New Universe Story.

This first excerpt today focuses on the two events that Wessels reminds us are entwined in the biblical accounts of the Easter experience.

The resurrection of Jesus does not depend on an empty tomb, because the resurrection of Jesus is an act of God, which is neither visible nor tangible in any simple, empirical sense, and because it involves not merely the transformation of Jesus but also the transformation and conversion of the earliest Christians. The two events are entwined in the biblical accounts we now have available. Extricating them by crude means we have at our disposal in historical studies is a task beyond our capacities twenty centuries after the events recounted by the biblical narratives occurred. And yet the story of the empty tomb is a marvelous symbol or icon of the resurrection, one that gives us a visual memory of the transformation of Jesus and our own transformation from death to new life. No one knows just how Jesus was buried, nor exactly how he rose, but we must begin with the assumption of an ordinary burial site and then seek to unfold the likely process that led to the writing of the biblical stories in the middle seventies of the first century.

Jesus has died. Jesus has been buried in a shallow, common grave. The male disciples have seemingly scattered and returned to Galilee. The women of the Jesus community stayed behind to mourn the death of Jesus (all four Gospels testify to this), and their ongoing grief would have been expected in the Jewish and Middle East tradition. Indeed, in many parts of the world, both in the past and today, women keen and publicly mourn the dead.

Before me as I write is The Way of the Cross, a series of oil paintings by Ted De Grazia. The fourteenth station, "Jesus is Laid in the Tomb," depicts a circle of women obviously in deep mourning around a shrouded body. The shrouded body is filmy white and lies on the ground or on a slightly raised platform. When I first saw this painting, I thought it portrayed the history remembered of these women companions of Jesus who gathered, as women always do, at the grave site. But then something happened! In the midst of their mourning, the women became aware of the presence of the living Jesus around them and within them. Was this a trance, that altered state of consciousness, which for them, and is, a common experience among cultures? Was it a dream, or was it a visual appearance of the living Jesus? No one knows! But whatever this experience of the risen Jesus involved, it had a profound impact on these women and on the entire Jesus community.

The fifteenth station by De Grazia, "Jesus Rises from the Dead," shows an upright Jesus still shrouded in white. His head is surrounded by a golden glow, and the women are joyfully dancing around him in a native dance. He has been raised. They must have hurried off to share this joyful news with the Jesus community. To me, this is history remembered, even though it is already history interpreted.