The Narrative Tradition - Let us now move on - having considered the most important element of the confessional tradition. Whereas the former authoritatively condenses the shared faith of Christianity in fixed formulae and insists on their binding character, down to the letter, for the whole believing community, the narrative accounts of the Resurrection appearances reflect different traditions.

They are linked to various bearers of tradition, and they can be divided geographically between Jerusalem and Galilee. They are not binding in every detail in the same way as the confessions; but by the virtue of being taken up into the Gospels, they are clearly to be regarded as valid testimony, giving content and shape to the faith. The confessions presuppose the narratives and grew out of them. They express in concentrated form the nucleus of the narrative content, and at the same time they point back toward the narratives.

Every reader will be struck immediately by the differences between the Resurrection accounts of the four Gospels. Matthew, apart from the risen Lord's appearance to the women at the empty tomb, gives only one other appearance - in Galilee to the Eleven. Luke gives only Jerusalem traditions. John tells of  appearances in both Jerusalem and Galilee. None of the evangelists recounts Jesus' Resurrection itself. It is an event taking place within the mystery of God between Jesus and the Father, which for us defies description: by its very nature it lies outside human experience.

The ending of Mark poses a particular problem. According to authoritative manuscripts, the Gospel comes to a close with 16:8 - "and they went out and fled from the tomb; for trembling and astonishment had come upon them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid." The authentic text of the Gospel as it has come to us ends with the fear and trembling of the women. Previously the text had spoken of the discovery of the empty tomb by the women who came to anoint the body and of the appearance of angels who announced Jesus' Resurrection to them and urged them to tell the disciples, "and Peter, that Jesus would go before them to Galilee as he had promised.

It is impossible that the Gospel would have ended with the words that follow concerning the women silence: it takes for granted that the news of their encounter was passed on. And it must obviously have known of the appearance to Peter and the Twelve, described in the essentially older account of the First Letter to the Corinthians. For what reason our text breaks off at this point, we do not know. In the second century, a concluding summary was added, bringing together the most important Resurrection traditions and the mission of the disciples to proclaim the Gospel to the whole world. - Mark 16:9-20 - Whatever the facts of the case, even the short ending of Mark presupposes the discovery of the empty tomb by the women, the message of the Resurrection, and knowledge of the appearances to Peter and to the Twelve. Its enigmatic interruption we must leave unexplained.

The narrative tradition tells of encounters with the risen Lord and the words spoken by him on those occasions; the confessional tradition merely establishes the key facts that serve to confirm the faith: this is another way of describing the essential difference between the two types of tradition. Specific differences ensue from this.

One initial difference is that in the confessional tradition only men are named as witnesses, whereas in the narrative tradition women play a key role, indeed they take precedence over the men. This may be linked to the fact that in the Jewish tradition only men could be admitted as witnesses in court - the testimony of women was considered unreliable. So the "official" tradition, which is, so to speak, addressing the court of Israel and the court of the world, has to observe this norm if it is to prevail in what we might describe as Jesus' ongoing trail.

The narratives, on the other hand, do not feel bound by this juridical structure, but they communicate the whole breadth of the Resurrection experience. Just as there were only women standing by the Cross -  apart from the beloved disciple - so too the first encounter with the risen Lord was destined to be for them. The Church's juridical structure is founded on Peter and the Eleven, but in the day to day life of the Church it is the women who are constantly opening the door to the Lord and accompanying him to the Cross, and so it is they who come to experience the Risen One.

Jesus' Appearances To Paul - A second important difference, by which the narrative tradition completes the creedal formulae, lies in the fact that the risen Lord's appearances are not only confessed but described in a certain amount of detail. How are we to picture to ourselves the appearances of the Risen One, who had not returned to normal human life, but had passed over into a new manner of human existence?

To begin with, there is a marked difference between on the one hand, the appearance of the risen Jesus to Paul, described in the Acts of the Apostles, and, on the other hand, the Gospels narratives concerning the encounters of the Apostles and the women with the living Lord.

According to all three accounts of Saint Paul's conversion in the Acts of the Apostles, there were two elements to his encounter with the risen Christ: a light that shone "brighter than the sun" - 26:13 - together with a voice that spoke to Saul "in the Hebrew language." - 26:14 - Whereas the first account says that the people accompanying Saul could hear the voice but "[saw] no one" - 9:7 - the second account says, conversely, that they "saw the light but did not hear the voice of the one who was speaking to me." 22:9 - The third account says of the people accompanying Saul only that they all fell to the ground with him. - 26:14 -

This much is clear: there was a difference between what was perceived by the people accompanying Saul and what Saul himself perceived. Only he was the direct recipient of a message involving a mission, but the people with him were also in some sense witnesses of an extraordinary event.

For the one who actually received the message, Saul/Paul, the two elements belong together: first, the blinding light that recalls the Tabor story - the Risen One is simply light, and second, the words by which Jesus identifies himself with the persecuted Church and entrusts Paul with a mission. While in the first and second accounts Paul is sent to Damascus, where he will receive more precise instructions for his mission in the third account a detailed and quite specific mission statement is communicated directly: "Rise and stand upon your feet; for I have appeared to you for this purpose, to appoint you to serve and bear witness to the things in which you have seen me and to those in which I will appear to you, delivering you from the people and from the Gentiles - to whom I send you to open their eyes, that they may turn from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me." - acts 26:16-18 -

Despite all the differences between the three accounts, it is still clear that the apparition (light) and the word belong together. The risen Lord, whose essence is light, speaks as a man with Paul in Paul's own language. His words serve, on the one hand, as self-identification, and this includes his identification with the persecuted Church, and, on the other hand, they serve to communicate a mission, whose content will be further explained in what follows.

The Appearances Of Jesus In The Gospels - The appearances that we read of in the Gospels are manifestly different. On the one hand, the Lord appears as a man like other men: he walks alongside the Emmaus disciples; he invited Thomas to touch his wounds, and in Luke's account he even asks for a piece of fish to eat, in order to prove his real bodily presence. And yet these narratives do not present him simply as a man who has come back from death in the same condition as before.

One thing that strikes us straightaway is that the disciples do not recognize him as first. This is true not only of the two in the Emmaus story, but also of Mary Magdalene and then again at the Lake of Gennesaret: "Just  as day was breaking, Jesus stood on the beach; yet the disciples did not know that it was Jesus." - John 21:4 - Only after the Lord has instructed them to set out once again does the beloved disciple recognized him: "That disciple whom Jesus loved said to Peter, 'It is the Lord!'" - 21:7 - It is, as it were, an inward recognition, which nevertheless remains shrouded in mystery. For after the catch of fish, when Jesus invites them to eat, there is still a strange quality about him. "None of the disciples dared ask him, 'Who are you?' They knew it was the Lord." - 21:12 - They knew from within, not from observing the Lord's outward appearance.

This dialectic of recognition and non-recognition corresponds to the manner of the apparitions. Jesus comes through closed doors: he suddenly stands in their midst. And in the same way he suddenly withdraws again, as at the end of the Emmaus encounter. His presence is entirely physical, yet he is not bound by physical laws, by the laws of space and time. In this remarkable dialectic of identity and otherness, of real physically and freedom from the constraints of the body, we see the special mysterious nature of the risen Lord's new existence. Both elements apply here: he is the same embodied man, and he is the new man, having entered upon a different manner of existence.

The dialectic, which pertains to the nature of the Risen One, is presented quite clumsily in the narratives, and it is this that manifests their veracity. Had it been necessary to invent the Resurrection, then all the emphasis would have been placed on full physicality, on immediate recognizability, and perhaps, too, some special power would have been thought up as a distinguishing feature of the risen Lord. But in the internal contradictions characteristic of all the accounts of what the disciples experienced, in the mysterious combination of otherness and identity, we see reflected a new form of encounter, one that from an apologetic standpoint may seem rather awkward but that is all the more credible as a record of the experience.

A help toward understanding the mysterious appearances of the risen Jesus can, I think, be provided by the theophanies of the Old Testament. I would like to mention briefly just three types of such theophanies.

First there is God's appearance to Abraham at the oak of Mamre. - Gen. 18:1-33 - Three men present themselves at Abraham's home. And yet Abraham knows at once, from deep within, that it is "the Lord" who wishes to be his guest. In the Book of Joshua, we are told that, lifting up his eyes, Joshua suddenly sees standing before him a man with a drawn sword in his hand. Not recognizing him, Joshua asks: "Are you for us, or for our adversaries?" He receives this reply: "No, but as commander of the army of the LORD I have now come... Put off your shoes from your feet; for the place where you stand is holy." - Josh. 5:13-15 -

The stories of Gideon and Samson are also significant. - Judg 6:11-24, Judg 13 - In each case the "angel of the Lord" appearing in human form is recognized only at the moment of his mysterious withdrawal. Both times a flame consumes the food-offering as the "angel of the Lord" disappears. The mythological language expresses, on the one hand, the Lord's closeness, as he reveals himself in human form, and, on the other hand, his otherness, as he stands outside the laws of material existence.

Admittedly these are only analogies. What is radically new about the "theophany" of the risen Lord is that Jesus is truly man: he suffered and died as man and now lives anew in the dimension of the living God. He appears now a true man and yet as coming from God - as being God himself.

So two qualifications are important. On the one hand, Jesus has not returned to the empirical existence that is subject to the law of death, but he lives anew in fellowship with God, permanently beyond the reach of death. On the other hand, it is important that the encounter with the risen Lord are not just interior events or mystical experiences - they are real encounters with the living one who is now embodied in a new way and remains embodied. Luke emphasizes this very strongly: Jesus is not, as the disciples initially feared, a "ghost" or a "spirit": he has "flesh and bones." - Luke 24:36-43 -

What a ghost is, what is meant by the apparition of a "spirit" as opposed to the apparition of the risen Lord, can best be seen in the biblical account of the medium at Endor, who at Saul's behest conjures up the spirit of Samuel from the underworld. - 1Sam. 28:7-19 - The "spirit" that she calls forth is a dead man dwelling among the shadows in the underworld, who from time to time can be summoned forth, only to return to the realm of the dead.

Jesus, however, does not come from the realm of the dead, which he has definitely left behind: on the contrary, he comes from the realm of pure life, from God; he comes as the one who is truly alive, who is himself the source of life. Luke underlines quite dramatically how different the risen Lord is from a mere "spirit" by recounting that Jesus asked the still fearful disciples for something to eat and then ate a piece of grilled fish before their eyes.

Most exegetes take the view that Luke is exaggerating here in his apologetic zeal, that a statement of this kind seems to draw Jesus back into the empirical physicality that had been transcended by the Resurrection. Thus Luke ends up contradicting his own narrative, in which Jesus appears suddenly in the midst of the disciples in a physicality that is no longer subject to the laws of space and time.

I think it is helpful here to consider the other three passages in which the risen Jesus is presented participating in a meal.

Immediately before the text just mentioned is the Emmaus story. It ends with Jesus sitting down to table with the disciples, taking the bread, giving thanks and praise, breaking the bread, and giving it to the two of them. At this moment their eyes are opened, "and they recognized him; and he vanished out of their sight." - Luke 24:31 - The Lord sits at table with his disciples as before, with thanks and praise and breaking of bread. Then he vanishes from their outward view, and through this vanishing their inner vision is opened up: they recognize him. It is real table fellowship, and yet it is new. In the breaking of the bread he manifests himself, yet only in vanishing does he become truly recognizable.

In terms of their inner structure, these two meal narratives are quite similar to the one in John 21:1-14 - the disciples have spent a fruitless night, and not a single fish has been caught in their nets. In the morning, Jesus is standing on the shore, but they do not recognize him. He asks them: "Children, have you any fish?" When they respond in the negative, he instructs them to set out once again, and this time they come back with an abundant catch. Yet Jesus, who already has fish cooking on a charcoal fire, himself invites them: "Come and have breakfast." And now "they knew" that it was Jesus.

Particularly important and helpful for an understanding of the risen Jesus' participation in meals is the last account, found in the Acts of the Apostles. In most translations, admittedly, the singular significance of this text is not brought out. The Jerusalem Bible corresponds to the conventional type of translation when it says" "For forty days he had continued to appear to them and tell them about the kingdom of God. When he had been at table with them, he had told them not to leave Jerusalem." - Acts 1:3-4 - Through the period after the word "God" which the sentence construction requires, an inner connection is concealed. Luke speaks of three elements that characterized the time spent by the risen Jesus in the company of his disciples: he appeared to them, he spoke to them, he sat at table with them. Appearing, speaking, and sharing meals: these three self-manifestations of the risen Lord belong together; they were his ways of proving that he was alive.

For a correct understanding of the third element, which like the first two extends over the "forty days" the word used by Luke - synalizomenos - is of great significance. Literally translated, it means "eating salt with them." Luke must have chosen this word quite deliberately. Yet what is it supposed to mean? In the Old Testament the shared enjoyment of bread and salt, or of salt alone, served to establish lasting covenants. - Num. 18:19; 2Chron. 13:5; Hauck, TDNTI, p.228 - Salt is regarded as a guarantee of durability. It is a remedy against putrefaction, against the corruption that pertains to the nature of death. To eat is always to hold death at bay - it is a way of preserving life. The "eating of salt" by Jesus after the Resurrection, which we therefore encounter as a sign of new and everlasting life, points to the risen Lord's new banquet with his followers.

It is a covenant event, and in this sense it has an inner association with the Last Supper, when the Lord established the New Covenant. So the mysterious cipher of eating salt expresses an inner bond between the meal on the eve of Jesus' Passion and the risen Lord's new table fellowship: he gives himself to his followers as food and thus makes them sharers in his life, in life itself.

Finally, it is helpful to recall here a saying of Jesus from Saint Mark's Gospel: "For everyone will be salted with fire. Salt is good; but if the salt has lost its saltiness, how will you season it? Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another." - Mark 9:49-50 - Some manuscripts add, with reference to Leviticus 2:13: "and every sacrifice will be salted with salt." The salting of sacrifices was similarly intended to add spice to the offering and preserve it from putrefaction. So different meaning comes together here: covenant renewal, the gift of life, and purification of one's own being for self-offering to God.

When Luke summarizes the post-Resurrection events at the beginning of the Acts of the Apostles and makes reference to the risen Lord's table fellowship with his followers by means of the expression "eating salt with them" - 1:4 - on the one hand, the mystery of this new table fellowship remains. On the other hand, though, its essential meaning is made clear: the Lord is drawing the disciples into a new covenant-fellowship with him and with the living God; he is giving them a share in real life, making them truly alive and salting their lives through participation in his Passion, in the purifying power of his suffering.

What this table fellowship with the disciples actually looked like is beyond our powers of imagination. But we can recognize its inner nature, and we can see that in the worshipping community, in the celebration of the Eucharist, this table fellowship with the risen Lord continues, albeit in a different form.

3. Summary: The Nature Of Jesus' Resurrection and Its Historical Significance...

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Sunday, May 24, 2009

I have through years of reading, pondering, reflecting and contemplating, the 3 things that last; FAITH . HOPE . LOVE and I would like to made available my sharing from the many thinkers, authors, scholars and theologians whose ideas and thoughts I have borrowed. God be with them always. Amen!

I STILL HAVE MANY THINGS TO SAY TO YOU BUT THEY WOULD BE TOO MUCH FOR YOU NOW. BUT WHEN THE SPIRIT OF TRUTH COMES, HE WILL LEAD YOU TO THE COMPLETE TRUTH, SINCE HE WILL NOT BE SPEAKING AS FROM HIMSELF, BUT WILL SAY ONLY WHAT HE HAS LEARNT; AND HE WILL TELL YOU OF THE THINGS TO COME.

HE WILL GLORIFY ME, SINCE ALL HE TELLS YOU WILL BE TAKEN FROM WHAT IS MINE. EVERYTHING THE FATHER HAS IS MINE; THAT IS WHY I SAID: ALL HE TELLS YOU WILL BE TAKEN FROM WHAT IS MINE. - JOHN 16:12-15 -