Reflections on the ‘Red Book’: Easter - the inside story
Bernard Coote reflects on Quaker faith & practice 26.56
The resurrection, however literally or otherwise we interpret it, demonstrates the power of God, to bring life out of brokenness; not just to take the hurt out of brokenness but to add something to the world. It helps us to sense the usefulness, the possible meaning in our suffering, and to turn it into a gift. The resurrection affirms me with my pain and my anger at what has happened. It does not take away my pain; it still hurts. But I sense that I am being transfigured; I am being enabled to begin again to love confidently and to remake the spirit of my world.
S Jocelyn Burnell, 1989 – Quaker faith & practice 26.56.
The tomb was empty. The body had gone. A flogged, spear pierced, crucified man bursting out of his grave is a story worth telling. It gave the first witnesses a shock; they were afraid. It has profoundly influenced 2,000 years of history and invites examination, for there is more to it than is generally assumed.
It may be thought that the four gospel accounts add up to give a complete whole. They don’t. One writer borrowed from another, Matthew from Mark. Then he added extra from other sources. Where did these other stories come from? Who was telling them and how many are there? Paul wrote to the people of Corinth of Jesus appearing to a crowd of more than 500. Who told him that? Why did others like Luke ignore it?
The records we have were written forty to eighty years after the event. The writers were not eyewitnesses. There had been earlier writings by Paul but he did not mention an empty tomb. The ‘empty tomb’ stories were not used to produce an authorised case for the resurrection for all time. After all, the writers believed that ‘history’ was soon coming to an end and Jesus would return ‘in glory’.
Early Christians mention a Gospel of Peter and that it was read in the church at Rhossos, near Antioch. In 1886 a copy was found in a monk’s grave in Upper Egypt. It seems to have been written between 150-170 AD and has some ‘extras’. ‘Peter’ writes: ‘And Pilate gave them [scribes and Pharisees] Petronius the centurion, with soldiers, to watch the sepulchre. And with them came elders and scribes to the sepulchre. And all who were there rolled thither a great stone and laid it against the entrance and put on it seven seals, pitched a tent and kept watch.’
This ‘Gospel’, once read at Christian worship, was later banned. Some thought that the words ‘taken up’, which were used of Jesus dying on the cross, suggested that he didn’t actually die! What was going on? The story within the story is important.
The men who for three years were close to Jesus tell us something surprising (John 21). A few weeks after finding the empty tomb some of them were hanging around the boats they had left to follow Jesus. They were discussing whether or not to go back fishing. Their lives seemed to have lost purpose. What had their leader prepared them for? A strange beginning for a world-transforming movement. No one knew what to do!
This is the ‘inside’ story. The resurrection story is not just a ‘happy ending’ story, or an event that puts everybody in his or her deserved place. It is far more. It is forever immediate and personal. It is about personal discovery at deep levels of experience and understanding. Jocelyn Bell Burnell has written of it so clearly.
Resurrection is a life-transforming ‘inside’ story and, forever, an historical mystery.
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