Speaking of Faith: The hope of Easter

By: Rev. Caroline B. Edge
Guest Columnist

We Christians all know the secret of why we can’t stay away from church on Easter Sunday. Besides the fabulous music we know we will hear, we anticipate a message of hope. We hope that it will be the same message that we heard last year and the year before that and the year before that all the way back to the time when we were children dressed in new Easter dresses and hats or suits and holding a velveteen bunny close to our chest. We go to church to hear the sacred words, “Christ is risen!” and to respond with joy, “He is risen indeed!”

Every year there seems to be new challenges to that hope, that truth. A few years ago The Davinci Code popularized the idea that Jesus and Mary Magdalene had a child – that there are descendents to this day. The novel was so convincing and life-like that people actually asked if it were true. Another year there was a “documentary” purporting to have found their bones – the bones of Jesus and Mary Magdalene and their son. The secular world keeps trying to hack away at the Christian tradition – to deflate the hope.

The Apostle Paul’s challenge to the Christians in first century Corinth about their beliefs of the resurrection (I Corinthians 15: 19-26) alert us that the resurrection and its nature have been an item for debate since the very beginnings of Christianity. The earliest Gospel Mark simply mentioned the women finding the empty tomb and then ended. Some twenty years later when Matthew and Luke were written, stories of seeing the resurrected Christ were added to the tradition. The last Gospel written that is in the New Testament – the Gospel of John – added even more stories of the risen Christ with his disciples.

Then the first Christians in various communities started discussing what Jesus was like. Some said he was a man – not God. Others said he was all spirit and not flesh. Some said the resurrection was spiritual; not physical. Others proclaimed the bodily resurrection of Christ. Paul was in that camp – the leading teacher of that camp in fact. He was a Jewish Pharisee who believed in resurrection. After his vision of the Resurrected Christ on the road to Damascus, he ardently proclaimed the resurrection. By the 4th century the idea of the bodily resurrection of Christ had become the orthodox – the “right” – story about the resurrection.

One year at Carter Memorial UMC thirteen of us studied some of the documents written by early Christian communities that were excluded from the New Testament. One – The Coptic Gospel of Thomas – talks about a spiritual understanding of the resurrection – a theological understanding. The day we studied that gospel most of the participants in that class confessed that is what they believe today about the resurrection. An understanding that was perhaps untenable in the Second Century of the Common Era seems very contemporary with all we know about the nature of life and death.

Neither of these beliefs destroys hope. Hope is, in fact, the essential ingredient in Easter. It works in spring time in this hemisphere where the date of Easter was originated, because spring brings new life – shoots of green popping up out of the cold earth, buds swelling on trees and shrubs, birds returning from their winter vacations and setting up housekeeping as they prepare to raise a new family. The sun grows stronger and stronger and the days longer, all stimulating hope.

So our Easter secret – which is not so secret – is hope. Hope that God will be the victor over evil! Hope that death – the symbol of finality and silence – will not be the last word. Hope that we are created good and that we can “go on to perfection” as we United Methodists believe. This doctrine of going on to perfection means that in this life we can grow more holy – more sanctified to use an old-fashioned word – that we can live into the potential that God has created us with. We do not strive to go on to perfection so God will love and save us. We have already been justified by faith. It is our belief in God – our commitment to follow Jesus that grants us salvation. Going on to perfection is seeking to become more and more like Jesus. We really can live a life as caring and as justice-filled as Jesus. He was fully human and did it; so can we!

The Rev. Caroline B. Edge is the Senior Pastor at Carter Memorial United Methodist Church, 800 Highland Ave., Needham.