20 20 Vision

Here is a letter from an Irish mother. If you are Irish, don’t be offended. I have an Irish mother.

Dear Son, it begins, just a few lines to let you know I'm still alive, but I'll write slowly because I know you can't read fast.

You wouldn’t know the house now… we've moved.

Your Father has a new job with 700 men under him… he cuts grass at the cemetery.

The new house has a washing machine, which I broke by putting in 12 shirts and pulling the chain.

Congratulations are due, your sister Colleen has had a baby. I haven't found out if it's a boy or girl yet, so I am not sure if you are an uncle or an aunt.

And I’m so sorry to tell you son, but Uncle Mick drowned last week in a vat of Whisky at the distillery in Dublin. His mates tried to save him, but he fought them all off very bravely.

We couldn’t get hold of you for the cremation, but it took us four days to put the fire out.

I was quite ill, so I’ve been to see the doctor. He put a glass tube in my mouth and told me not to talk for five minutes. Your Father is now trying to buy it from him.

It only rained twice this week, firstly for four days, and then for three.

Love as always, Mother.
P.S. I was going to send you some money, but I'd already sealed the envelope.

It’s not an Irish mother in Matthew 20 20, its a Jewish one, the mother of the sons of Zebedee, and she is ambitious for them.

This particular mother makes a dramatic appeal to power, and she’s not the first to do so in the Bible. But it is the wrong power. Bathsheba appeared before King David on behalf of wise Solomon, a faithful Canaanite begged Jesus to heal her sick daughter, but this time, the ambitious Mother of James and John, we are told, wanted them to have special kingdom status, one at either side of Jesus.

If you think about it though, by the time this gospel was written, Jesus had already been crucified. One robber on his right, and another robber on his left.

So people would have had the memory of his crucifixion in mind. It had already destroyed their teacher, their holy man, their leader, and their hope. Jesus’ mother had watched him nailed up like a criminal, losing his bodily functions, crows threatening to peck at him. Military and religious authority had struck fear into his follower’s hearts.

And once his followers had scattered, how did Christianity even begin?

I want to suggest we have first marginalised, and then lost touch with that paradigm-shattering event which put hope and joy back into his followers hearts, despite more torture threats.

Fast-forward to the 19th century, as it might help to consider a paradigm-shattering event a bit closer to our own time-frame, first, and then go back to the resurrection.

When Charles Darwin presented his views on evolution by natural selection, this was a paradigm shattering event. So challenging was it for religious people, the Bishop of Oxford Sam Wilberforce tried to ridicule the idea in public debate, in front of 700 people and reporters.

Like many people, the Bishop just couldn’t accept he was related to monkeys. He was out of his depth.

He ended by inferring that evolutionist Thomas Huxley had an ape for a parent. He resorted to mocking his opponent Huxley by asking him whether he was descended from an ape on his grandfather’s side or on his grandmother’s side. Whereupon Huxley reportedly whispered to his neighbour: “The Lord has delivered him into my hands.”

People actually fainted as Huxley rose up to reply that he would much rather be descended from an ape than from a Bishop.

But this was 150 years ago, and already it is hard for us to imagine just how world changing it was for them. We just take it for granted now. How then could we not take for granted a 2,000 year old event?

The first Jesus movement went to their executions rather than renounce the resurrection. They refused to deny their experience and salute Roman rulers. The hard fact is, a fighter couldn’t even be baptised.

By worldly terms, Christians were powerless. They weren’t just pacifist, but regularly liable to public torture. When Constantine changed all that by adopting the faith for his empire, worldly power became more acceptable. And it was at this point that ascetic Christians like Anthony moved into the desert instead.

Last week I interviewed the Director of Mission and Public Affairs for the Church of England, Malcolm Brown, who himself said Christianity had long over identified with worldly power. Once this happens, I suggest, it is much harder to find and accept that a present spiritual reality could be the cause of Jesus’ dead physical body dematerialising and then re-materialising. The resurrection is a wholly different power.

Because if the primary stuff of life is economic or physical power, or even natural power, we are lost. If you’ve ever seen a dead body, you’ll know how natural processes still go on there, but the real stuff of life is profoundly and startlingly absent.

So I want to try to uncover a different power, by offering us a new exegesis of the resurrection. Twenty years ago, a Christian who studied anthropology and psychology was looking for reports of resurrection experiences outside the Christian tradition.

When he found them, in Bunpo, Buddhist, Daoist and Tamil cultures in China Tibet and India, he despatched a Roman Catholic Canon and Priest, Fr Francis Tiso, to investigate. Ten years ago, three people were interviewed on tape claiming to be eye witnesses to their own monastic masters dying and then dematerialising. These witnesses included Westerners, who said the atoms in the master’s bodies had dissolved after their death, and their bodies had disappeared, and had later re-appeared in the form of light energy. They didn’t call it the resurrection body, but the light body, or the rainbow body.

Now, I know this idea may detract from the uniqueness of Jesus the only Son of God, and if so, remember how in the Bible Enoch and Elijah are also recorded mysteriously leaving the world with their bodies. And no-one found Moses body, but apocryphal literature has him ascending to heaven. Not to mention Mary in the Roman Catholic tradition.

If you prefer scientific over Biblical and religious language, we already know matter can and does behave like energy, and light is a source of energy.

So, if these anthropological resurrection reports are true, could physical matter changing into light and giving off heat also explain some of our archaeological evidence?

It might, for example, explain why a burial cloth, the shroud of Turin, contains a 3D shaped image of a crucified man believed to be Jesus, not etched in paint or pigment like a middle age forgery on linen, but in blood and scorch marks, which create a photographic negative, as if a bleeding body quickly gave off tremendous energy in the tomb.

The one thing all four gospels agree about the resurrection is that a tomb was empty.

Maybe the idea that light is the basis and the source of reality sounds mad, but if so, I suggest that Darwin’s idea that apes are the basis of men also sounded mad. And if true, the light body would be a far more paradigm shattering truth than evolution was.

If it sounds unworldly, remember it is not the kind of power the gospel says was sought by the Mother of James and John. It is the kind of power sought by St Anthony and 4th century ascetic Christians in the Egyptian desert after an empire legalised the faith.

Isaiah once said: “Your dead will come back to life, your corpses will rise again. Wake up and sing, dwellers in the dust.”

Isaiah didn’t call it resurrection, but if the physical is secondary to light, then all our power relations based on force status and wealth are inevitably subverted. And then it makes perfect sense that the scattered disciples who first got the Jesus movement off the ground after his resurrection are joyous, despite their many persecutions.

I leave us words from chapters 1 and 4 the letter of James, the brother of Jesus.

“The rich man will disappear like a wild flower once the sun is up … make no mistake, my dear friends. Every perfect gift comes from above, from the Father who created the lights of heaven. With him, there is no variation, no passing play of shadows. A pure and faultless religion in the sight of God the Father is to keep oneself untarnished by the world ... What is your life after all? You are no more than a mist, seen for a little while and then disappearing.”

In the name of God, Father Son and Holy Spirit, Amen. +