Readings: 1 Corinthians: 1-11; Mark 16:1-8
I have read so much in the last week about Easter day, about the significance of the resurrection of Jesus to our faith. In some ways it stands alone in our tradition as the most important day in the liturgical life of the church. For me personally I felt somewhat hesitant to preach today because what does a person with a more liberal understanding of the bible, a more scientific view of the world, do with the stories about Jesus and the empty tomb? We see the magnificence of the universe and marvel at the incredible complexity of our own DNA that makes up who we are. We are enthralled by programs on evolution on our TV screens and the magnificence of the wide ranging animals and plants all around us. Can we really also have the resuscitation of a corpse as an integral part of our faith story? Many in the secular world would think so, but is this really our understanding?

The reality is that when our modern listeners wonder about the veracity of a physical resurrection they are asking a question not asked in the first century. For many in the ancient world, the idea that a dead person could come back to life was pretty well accepted, in other words it wasn`t something totally out of the ordinary.

As Greg Jenks, a New Testament scholar reports –That the dead could return and interact with the living was a common place of the Greco Roman world, and neither pagans nor Jews would have asserted that it could not happen. That such interaction could generate important processes and events was also common place. You did not expect the dead to return from Hades simply to say hello.

The hard part for them, was to believe that Jesus, a nobody from a nowhere town, had been raised from the dead. The hard part was to understand what it meant to them as his followers and what it said about their God. Here fact and myth blended together for these ancients in a way that is a bit foreign to us, particularly as time passed.

Today we heard from Mark whose account of the resurrection ends much more abruptly than the others, with no appearance stories to follow. Matthew and Luke are more embellished with earthquakes and physical appearances of Jesus, and all of them date more than 40 years after his death. The earliest account is actually from Paul.

Paul has pride of place in these Easter traditions because his writings are the earliest text, twenty years after the crucifixion and after his conversion to Christianity. What he says actually points to something a bit different from the gospel accounts and we heard it today in the Corinthians reading. His resurrection account is less concerned with the empty tomb but rather he sees Jesus as having become a life giving spirit at this resurrection. Not a physical body. For Paul resurrection involved transformation not resuscitation and included all who identified with Jesus.

Clearly there are real differences in the accounts. But between Paul and the Gospels, there was a great war, the Jewish Roman war of 66-73 CE. Here Jerusalem and the temple were destroyed. As Greg Jenks says `both Jews and Christians alike found themselves picking up the pieces among the ruins of a world gone for ever`. The gospels come out of that experience and they reflect a new political and social situation long after the time of Jesus.

So to say the stories are history is to miss the point. The writers were defining not just history, but who they were as human beings and as a society and as a fledging church and this varied.

Complicated I know but as a friend said the other day, there are things that happened in first century Judea that people who saw and heard about them could not understand. But they knew they were significant. In trying to understand these events they told each other stories to encapsulate their meaning in their own time and context. These are the stories we have today.

So where does that leave us in the 21st century, you may ask.
Like the Native American storyteller quoted by Marcus Borg, we may find ourselves saying:

`Now I don`t know if it happened this way or not, but I know this story is true.`

Regardless of what questions we modernists ask about the facts of the story, the truth of the resurrection is not in the details but in what happened afterwards. And what happened is that God became real to people through Jesus in a way he wasn`t before. Jesus became a living presence, symbolising what life lived in God should be like. His early followers believed that `in his words were God`s words and in his action were God`s actions`. The love and compassion and justice and peace of Jesus, his words and actions were not defeated by the worldly powers of hatred, corruption and greed. His vision of a new empire, which he lived out with them long before he died, could not be killed by an executioner or cross. This is the message of Easter.

So for me, Jesus did not go to the cross as some sort of player in a cosmic master plan, or as a supernatural sacrifice to appease an angry God, which has been some of the understandings of our faith. Rather he went defiantly as Mark`s gospel would attest, knowing that God was on his side. The post script, the resurrection is as though God was vindicating him and his life`s mission, saying yes to him in a mysterious way. His followers responded, recognising that the life, love and hope they had experienced with Jesus was not ended but had been affirmed by God in their own lives. They believed this revelation so totally that this experience set their hearts on fire, freed them from fear, superstition, and a dependence on ritual and legalism and motivated them to spread the good news to everyone, Jew or gentile. This created a revolution, a revolution that we are called to be part of today.

Yet it could all have stopped there, remaining as a little subgroup of the Jewish religion. Instead Jesus is remembered as the Son of God and God`s ultimate revelation for us. For in and through him lies the truth about life. Jesus was a particular man in a particular time, but he birthed a universal message of love that has lived on well past his humanity. The particular became the universal.

Today the truth of the resurrection is that God is present here in us, this day and this hour. For Jesus is not different from us in kind, just in degree. The love, spirit and energy that shaped Jesus shapes us. We are to follow his way and his message if we and all people are to live full and complete lives in the presence of God. As Paul said in Ephesians, `There is a power at work within us that is able to accomplish more than we can imagine`. (Ephesians 3:20).
It can lead us to transform both our own lives and the lives of those around us, to help create a new society, a new creation based on love. It can bring life out of death, hope out of suffering and community out of profound alienation. This was Paul`s early interpretation of the resurrection, a transformation rather than a resuscitation. God transformed Jesus and he transforms us.

But this leaves us with a number of challenges.

Our challenge today is to be, in Paul`s terms, the body of Christ. Our challenge is to live as Jesus lived. Our challenge is to see the resurrection as profoundly mystical, but profoundly true. Our challenge is to acknowledge that the revolution Jesus started has stalled. In our greedy, individualist and violent world pain and grief and loss and death are still so prevalent it is hard to turn on the TV at night or read the paper. We have lost our way, and have forgotten what love is and how to live together as brothers and sisters.

Yet God is not missing in action, or only present in a few who believe certain things or only visible 2,000 years ago. We are urged to take up our cross as Jesus did, but we do it with confidence that we are not alone and will never be alone. The God of all creation will always be with us. This I believe is the good news brought by Jesus to the world, for as Nev says if the good news is not for everyone, it is not good news.