The meaning of Jesus (The resurrection)

Wright: “The transforming reality of the bodily resurrection” (Chapter 7 )

Borg: “The truth of Easter” (Chapter 8 )

It is important to note at the very outset that both Borg and Wright make the central affirmation that Jesus is Lord. Where they differ is in their estimation of the importance of understanding just what exactly happened in history on that first Easter Sunday. Wright is convinced (p. 122) that a camera could have caught it all; Borg is a little less sure of just what a camera would have seen.

 Borg’s uncertainty is probably best described (p. 134) in the Emmaus story from Luke 24:13-35. Borg asks why if Jesus were resurrected bodily did the two disciples not recognize him. And how then did the body vanish from their sight? Borg wonders whether the events really took place as described or whether the story was told to illustrate how Jesus walks beside each of us and is present at all our tables even today.

 Borg is convinced that the risen Lord did appear to the disciples and to Paul but he is equally convinced that the same risen Lord appears to all of us and is indeed the very foundation of our faith. He uses Paul’s imagery in 1 Cor 15 to suggest that the resurrected “body” is a transformed body like a plant is a transformed seed. He has difficulty in accepting that Jesus was in effect resuscitated. The key in all of this for Borg is not what happened 2000 years ago but what happens today:

 “For me (he says on p. 135), the historical ground of Easter is very simple: the followers of Jesus, both then and now, continued to experience Jesus as a living reality after his death . . . Thus I see the post-Easter Jesus as an experiential reality. I take the phenomenology of Christian religious experience very seriously. Christians throughout the centuries have continued to experience Jesus as a living spiritual reality, a figure of the present, not simply a memory of the past . . . The truth of Easter is grounded in these experiences, not in what happened (or didn’t happen) on a particular Sunday almost two thousand years ago.”

 Wright, on the other hand, goes to pains to demonstrate that a bodily resurrection did occur on that particular Sunday almost two thousand years ago. He sees in that bodily appearance of the risen Lord to the disciples and to Paul, the reason that the church got underway. He acknowledges that the gospels conflict with one another in what exactly happened but, as he says (p. 122) “the surface discrepancies do not mean that nothing happened; rather, the mean that the witnesses have not been in collusion.” The tomb was empty, Wright says, “I have no doubt.”

 But what does it all mean? And here the two authors draw together again. They both note in their own way and Wright, in particular, on p. 125 that the resurrection was not about life after death or about personal salvation, or about entering into a relationship with God through Christ. Instead, both see the resurrection in cosmic terms. Jesus’ resurrection means that “the story of God, Israel, and the world” has “entered its new phase” . . . It is “about history and eschatology, not just about personal futures.” Or in Borg’s words, “Good Friday and Easter are the defeat of the powers (that rule this world.) God in Christ ‘disarmed the principalities and powers and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in the cross.’ (Col. 2:20)”

 To understand Wright’s position here, one must go back to Chapter 3 (p. 33) in which Wright describes Jesus as a Jewish prophet announcing God’s Kingdom and his role in that Kingdom as the Jewish messiah. Borg is not convinced that Jesus thought that he was the messiah but Wright is. Jesus, according to Wright, believed that the kingdom could not be brought in by force (p. 96) but by his suffering. He believed, according to Wright, that the nation of Israel was to be the light of the world and the source of its salvation, but that this would only be realized if Israel were to shoulder the necessary suffering. He, Jesus, elected to shoulder that suffering himself – not so as to create a new religion but so that a new order might come about with Israel at the center. He went to the cross as a Jewish messiah. He was resurrected by God as proof that the old age had indeed come to an end and a new age was born. The resurrection, therefore, is more than a matter of personal salvation. It is the triumph over the forces of evil and the inauguration of a new age.

Wright never spells out just what the resurrected body was like and how it was able to walk through walls. I have suggested in an earlier Sunday School lesson that one way that we might imagine this is in terms of atoms. I pointed out that we were 99% vacuum and that we only see one another because light waves are larger in size than the distance between our molecules that make up our bodies. If we imagine those molecules moving apart then the body would become invisible to the human eye. I am not suggesting that this is how it happened, but I find it a useful way to explain to myself what is otherwise incomprehensible to me. What it does for me is to go beyond the “apparition” that Wright says that Jesus was not. It also coincides a little with Paul’s line about God compressing himself to become man.

However, though, we choose to envisage the resurrection, Wright is insistent that only a bodily resurrection could have been an affirmation to the disciples that Jesus was indeed risen and that he had triumphed over the powers of evil and established his kingship.