The First Fruits

What does the Resurrection mean to you? The accounts which the Gospel writers give us are full of the wonder, the mystery and the glory of that distant spring morning. It was the first day of the week, Sunday, the day when God began the work of creation. The women who followed Jesus went to his tomb to anoint his body. But the tomb is open, the body gone. And angels appear, bearing the message that he has risen. And then all is excitement, running, telling the eleven disciples, them running, fear, astonishment, awe. And on the same day, amid the excitement, the peace and deep joy of Jesus' presence - his appearance to Mary of Magdala in the garden, to Cleopas and his companion on the road to Emmaus, to Simon, to the women, to the disciples in the room in Jerusalem where they were hiding.

The idea of resurrection meant two things to the people around Jesus. To the Sadducees, rich, influential, prominent in the Temple, the fundamentalists of their day, it was something unscriptural. Because God had not told Abraham, or Moses, or David about it, it was impossible. Most other people - the Pharisees, the ordinary people, the revolutionaries - believed that at the end of the world, God's Messiah would come, and the dead would be raised to life with God in a newly-created Jerusalem.

Jesus changed all this. "I am the resurrection," he tells Martha, the sister of Lazarus. And she replies, "Yes, Lord. I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who was to come into this world." The Resurrection is no longer an event in the infinite future. It is something finite, here and now, something fixed in time and place, in that spring morning in Jerusalem.

John's gospel calls Jesus' miracles "signs" - signs that God's reign has truly begun with Jesus' coming. The healing miracles in the other gospels are also signs - signs that Jesus can bring us wholeness and completeness. Jesus can heal our spiritual dumbness, our lameness, our blindness, our deafness. And what is dumber, lamer, blinder or deafer than a dead body? Jesus can restore even that. He did it with Lazarus. He did it with Jairus' daughter. But curing the sick and raising the dead was not something new in themselves. Elijah had done much the same.

What was new was Jesus. These miracles were signs of the event that took place on that spring morning. Jesus himself was raised. And through faith and sacrament, we are able to share in Jesus' resurrection, just as Jesus shared in our suffering for our sins. By his death and resurrection, Christ can restore us and make us whole.

For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive. So Paul tells the Corinthians (1 Cor 15:22). Jesus is the first-fruits of a new world, offered in heaven, a source of new life. We look for his coming again in glory, his kingdom that has no end. But here and now, too, we can have life in him, for we are his body, his people. Alleluia!