There has been heated debate among biblical scholars about the Gospel According to Mark, the earliest of the Synoptic gospels and a source used by both Luke the Physician and the unknown authors of the Gospel attributed to Matthew. Especially controversial is Secret Mark, a version referenced in an ancient letter, then subsequently lost, that explained the naked youth with Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane.
Don’t remember that part being covered in Sunday School? I’m not surprised. It wasn’t covered in Sunday School.
We do know that the version of Mark’s gospel we have today originally ended with the women running away afraid, no one yet having laid eyes on the resurrected Jesus. Whether this was the author’s intent or part of the text was simply lost, we don’t know. Later copyists and editors were uncomfortable with that ending, so they added text from other sources to give it a cleaner ending.
They needn’t have bothered. The ending they gave us is confusing, and maybe not even original.
Countless sermons will be preached this morning about the fact that it was women who first saw Jesus in three of the gospels, including the longer ending of Mark and the gospel attributed to Matthew, our focus this year. But this is not true in Luke, where Jesus is first seen by the two disciples traveling to Emmaus, a text that always shows up two weeks after Easter and that we will come back to in a moment.
Most of the post-resurrection appearances seem to be in Galilee, though this is apparently not the case in the gospel traditionally attributed to John, where Jesus appears to the disciples in a locked room on Easter evening. He’ll magically appear in that same locked room again a week later for the famous encounter with “Doubting” Thomas, the text always scheduled for the week after Easter, and like the Emmaus story, one we will touch on this morning.
Emmaus and Doubting Thomas present a very specific challenge to the idea of bodily resurrection, though they come from completely different gospel-writing traditions. In Luke’s “road to Emmaus” encounter, two disciples travel with Jesus for seven miles without recognizing him. They only know him when he breaks the bread for supper, and then “poof”… he disappears.
In John, the Jerusalem appearances are in a locked room. Jesus makes a big show of inviting Thomas to touch his wounds, to prove his identity, his fleshiness. Yet he’s just appeared out of thin air.
If you are a geek, and some of us are geeks, think Star Trek, not Star Wars, because this is some straight-up “beam me up, Scotty” sort of stuff going on.
At least with the infancy narratives, we only have two versions to reconcile. Here we have four, and they are not even internally consistent. He’s embodied. He has wounds. He eats fish on the beach. But he’s clearly some sort of shapeshifter at Emmaus, and teleporter in Jerusalem.
A lot of tears and a significant amount of blood would be spilled in the coming centuries. Some would argue that Jesus never had a body. Some would argue that Jesus didn’t have a body after he was resurrected. Christianity would eventually be defined to include belief that Jesus was fully God and fully human at the same time, that he had a physical body both before and after resurrection, a body that floats up into heaven on Ascension Sunday, which is another whole problem because we now know that, as John Lennon sang, there is “no hell below us, above us only sky.”
Any belief that did not include the physical body was considered heresy.
And that is just the physical fleshy body, the one made up of water and bacteria and electricity and wheat and wine and goat flesh and all manner of molecules in the great recycling program we call nature. The body that tradition tells us was resurrected after being viciously tortured and executed by the Romans, the one that should have been in that tomb when the women went to finish preparing the body for burial on the first Easter morning.
Never mind the words he speaks at the Last Supper, “this is my body” and “this is my blood,” the source of yet more blood shed, yet more tears. At some point, people would decide this was literal, that the bread and wine magically became the actual flesh and blood of Jesus while still physically being bread and wine. Wafers became idols in a way that would have appalled the Jewish Jesus.
Our theological ancestors in the Zurich Reform rejected this, rejected the idea that priests recreated the sacrifice of Jesus on an altar during communion, controlled the flow of grace to the people, rejected the claim that the bread became anything other than bread, the wine anything other than what it was, the fermented juice of the grape.
Instead, Reform Christianity focused on his words “do this to remember me,” the act of remembrance being the community breaking bread together, the bread and wine symbolic, the true magic being us, for this is the third form of the body, the idea that Jesus is embodied in us, that we are the body of Christ, both our bodies as we worship and work, as we break bread and feed the hungry, as we are the boots on the ground carrying the prophetic call of the Jewish tradition to justice, kindness, and humility, the demand of Jesus that we love our neighbor, selflessly love our neighbor. And it turns out our neighbor is everyone, not just those in our tribe, and increasingly not just those in our species, but this whole amazing living miracle we call creation.
On Thursday, Jimmy asked me about the siblings of Jesus listed in scripture, and suggested that there could be folks in the world that are genetically related to Jesus through Mary. And the answer is yes, absolutely. Not only is there a very real possibility that holy DNA is floating around out there in the world, there is a very real certainty that Jesus DNA is floating out there in the world whenever we are his body and do all the stuff, the loving and serving and saving, the Good Friday grieving and the Easter Sunday confusion, and the going out into the world proclaiming the good news that God is love and that God is with us. There’s a little bit of Jesus every time we drive an elder to the doctor, every time we send mittens down to Beecher School, every time we reduce our carbon footprint, every time we rage against injustice, then turn that rage into positive action, at the polls and in the streets.
Those who were afraid of losing their economic and religious power could abduct him, turn him over to the occupying forces, call for his execution. A callous and brutal autocracy could break his body and slowly suffocate him. But in the end, they could not kill him. The Lord is risen indeed, and this, this gathered people, this is his body.
Amen.