So, first then, the apparent disagreement. Of all on Paul's list, that to Cephas or Peter, the five hundred brethren, James, and all the apostles, only the last is specifically described in the Gospels, though in several different versions, depending on whether we follow Matthew, Luke or John. More fundamentally, however, there is not a word about the appearance to the five hundred or to James, the Lord's brother. Indeed, without Paul, or Luke's sequel in the Acts of the Apostles, readers of the gospels might well have assumed that, apart from his mother, the rest of Jesus' family had remained hostile. Then again, in apparent contradiction of Paul's claim that the first appearance was to Peter, John's gospel informs us that the first encounter with the Risen Lord actually belonged to Mary Magdalene. Perhaps the omission is due to the fact that under Jewish law women were not treated as valid witnesses. But, then, why no mention at all in the gospels of an early appearance to Peter? Or is that right? In fact, Luke does actually mention just such an appearance, but only in passing. The disciples who experienced Christ on the road to Emmaus, Luke tells us, reported to the others that he had also appeared to Simon Peter (24.34). But why, then, no detailed account? Of course, a hostile critic might well reply that, inevitably, fifty years later memories had got a bit confused. But that cannot be right. Luke was almost certainly a companion of Paul on his missionary journeys. Indeed, the point at which the Acts of the Apostles starts using the pronoun 'we' at 16.10 is usually taken to indicate the precise point at which Luke joined Paul in his missionary journeys. If so, Luke must have known Paul's own version of events, and indeed have heard him preach along those lines. So why not the same specific details?
The answer lies, I suggest, in the purpose for which a gospel is written. It is not there, I think, to provide straightforward historical data but rather, as the actual Greek words indicates, to give you 'good news,' the underlying significance of what happened. So Luke's selection of incidents he decides to record is determined by what will most convey the meaning of Christ's resurrection for us today. The result is that in his final chapter he confines himself to two detailed stories, one with only two disciples present and focusing on the village of Emmaus just outside Jerusalem, and the other with all the apostles there but now focused on Jerusalem itself. It is through exploring more closely what features those two incidents share, that we will discover what mattered most to Luke about Christ's resurrection, how exactly for him it was good news.
First, note the repeated stress in both accounts on Christ being made known through the readings of the Scriptures and in the breaking of bread. The intention is surely to tell us something not only about Christ's own resurrection but also about how we also might encounter him in the here and now. It was in meditating on the Scriptures and in the sharing in a meal that on both occasions Christ became present to those first disciples. So, similarly, Luke suggests, it will be for us. Not of course that our encounters will be quite so dramatic, but there is, nonetheless, the same promise of encounter, of his presence there to be experienced in the life of the community. So in Paul's language it was as part of Christ's body, the Church, that the disciples actually became first aware of the living Christ as their own centre, and this is what will happen to us also, as we are prepared for a deeper relationship with Christ in the life to come.
But there is another dimension on which Luke is no less insistent, and which in fact he stresses more than any of the other gospels, and that is Jesus' sheer physicality. Although Jesus' appearances are just as sudden as in John, unlike John (20.19) Luke does not draw attention to the doors being locked. Instead, it is the sheer solidity of Jesus' presence that is stressed, for on both occasions Jesus consumes food with the disciples. Certainly at one level the intention here is to stress continuity with the body that had lain in the tomb, but I'm sure that this is only part of the point. Equally important is what it says about the nature of the humanity that God carries beyond death. Throughout his gospel Luke had portrayed Jesus as concerned for every aspect of the human condition, and so it is not surprising that his account should culminate in the totality of Christ now being raised from the dead as a model for our own eventual survival. We are not just immaterial souls, we are being told, but complex realities in which our bodies play an integral part in expressing who we are. So nothing will escape God's action upon us.
But, that said, we must resist going to the opposite extreme, and thinking of such survival in crudely materialistic terms, as though it were just a matter of God in due course reconstituting our present bodies. Not at all good news to those of us who are already frail, but in any case such ideas represent a complete misunderstanding of the kind of language the Bible uses about the next life, much of which is in any case in images and metaphors rather than purely literal. To help you see the point, perhaps I may be allowed for once to step outside our own religion and introduce the issue by means of what the Qur'an says about human survival beyond death: 'When the earth shakes and quivers, and the mountains crumble and scatter abroad into fine dust, you shall be divided. Those on the right hand shall be brought near to their Lord in the gardens of delight ... They shall recline on jewelled couches face to face and there shall wait on them immortal youths with bowls and ewers and a cup of finest wine' - and here comes a nice touch - 'wine that will neither pains their heads nor takes away their reason; (waited on) with fruits of their own choice and flesh of fowls that they relish. And theirs shall be the dark eyed virgins, chaste as hidden pearls, a guerdon for their deeds. They shall recline ... amidst gushing waters and abundant fruits, unforbidden, never-ending.'
The description cannot help but bring a patronising smile to our faces, so conspicuous is the male orientation with its promise of chaste virgins and plenty of wine. Yet those of you who know the rules of Islam will realise that it cannot possibly have been intended literally, since Muslims are actually forbidden to take alcohol. So the point of the image must be to suggest a very different world, not merely a variant on our own. So, similarly, then with the Bible. The Book of Revelation tells us that in the new heaven and new earth there will be no sea, and no sun or moon (21.1 &23; 22.5). So clearly even at the end of time it is quite a different kind of world that is envisaged.
But what of the meantime? The Church has always spoken of the continued existence of the dead in the meantime as the Church 'expectant' or waiting, and you can see anticipations of this idea in the New Testament, with the penitent thief, for instance, promised Paradise with Christ in the here and now (Luke 23.43), or Paul's talk of being caught up into the third heaven (2 Cor.12.2). This is not the place to discuss in any detail how we should think of this intermediate state. Some suggest it might be a case of souls communicating telepathically with each other. Others prefer to use the modern scientific idea of parallel universes and think of a world lying alongside our own in which the dead flourish. There might then be some kind of interim body. All of this of course stretches our imaginations almost to breaking point because, however conceived, we know it will be a world radically different from the one we now inhabit.
Nonetheless, there are, I think, some things that can be said, based on what Paul and Luke tell us. Because Christ's resurrection reveals that every aspect of ourselves matters, in that intermediate state God will be concerned to achieve the redemption of the totality that is our selves, and not just what we see as the nice bits - every ambition however flawed and every relationship however corrupted or broken. But it is emphatically not something that the individual and God work at on their own. As, again Luke reminds us, the work of the resurrected Christ is encountered through the community that is his body, and so our prayers for the departed matter no less than their prayers for us. It is a voyage that we are all on together, even if we only see dimly what lies beyond the parting divide. The failed relationship, the angry exchange, the sheer nastiness that we all at times exhibit, will never be allowed the last word - mediated through Christ, both living and dead can be truly healed.
But that is not the last curtain to the story. The Bible promises one final great culmination in which everything in the universe will be caught up into a new heaven and a new earth, but so utterly different from the world that we now inhabit that even the final book of the New Testament, as we have seen, like the Qur'an teeters into incoherence in its attempts to describe the transformation. Yes, a body, says Paul later in the same chapter that we have been discussing, but a body as different as seed grain is from the eventual corn. Yet, despite such limitations on our knowledge, a wonderful vision nonetheless of our common future. So, no wonder Paul concludes, as we should, 'O death, where is thy sting?'
Sermon by: David Brown