I Have Seen the Lord!

"I have seen the Lord," says Mary Magdalene in John's gospel.

In our day, some have challenged the historicity of the resurrection and this, in turn, has challenged the faith of many Christians. On this beautiful morning, I will not take up the debate about the historical facts. Instead, I want to pose the question, "If the resurrection never really happened, can it still be true?" I believe the answer to this question is an emphatic "Yes!" and I'll try to tell you why.

Today, we are tempted to ask, "What happened on Easter day?" Instead, the English New Testament scholar N. T. Wright suggests that the proper question is, "Why did Christianity arise, and why did it take the shape it did?"

Historians insist that the "real Jesus" must be found in the facts of his life before his death. This view has merit up to a point, but the problem is, as any of you who have taken Professor Gager's course on the New Testament know, we don't know very much about the historical Jesus; there's just not much to go on.

Believers take the opposite approach from that of historians and insist that the "real Jesus" is the one who is now alive and present to us in our lives, who is manifested in an ongoing series of resurrections which we experience. The real Jesus is the one we know in the breaking of the bread and in the wine that we take together in community and who we experience through one another in community.

So, if we believers are persuaded by the arguments of historians - and many believers are not - we might be willing to allow that the resurrection is not historically true, but we would quickly add that for us Jesus' resurrection is existentially and religiously true. We would say this because, as Luke Timothy Johnson of Emory University puts it, "...his resurrection [is] confirmed as real precisely by this community that lives by his power."

The way we come to the ongoing series of resurrections I mentioned is the same way Jesus came to his resurrection - through emptying ourselves and through suffering. In each of the four New Testament gospels Jesus endures the cross. He does not bypass suffering and sacrifice in order to be glorified. Rather, he is glorified because he empties himself and suffers. These gospels are unanimous in this, as they are in few other things apart from their underlying theme of love, that the path to glory passes through a valley of suffering.

As it was for Jesus, so it is for us. We come to know the risen Lord most fully and most completely through our own suffering and through compassion for the suffering of others. It is then that we are most open to the presence of God and to the reality of Christ in the community of faith. As Paul says in Galatians (2:19b-20), "I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me."

We see all this clearly through the eyes of faith. Without faith in Christ, suffering can easily defeat us, make us bitter and hateful. Without faith, there is no resurrection following the suffering. We cannot encounter and be comforted by him in whom we cannot believe. But if we can open ourselves even to the possibility - the possibility - of resurrection and being alive in Christ, then we will be transformed as so many before us have been transformed by the living Christ.

Let me illustrate this by telling you how Erin, a member of Princeton's class of 1997, came to her resurrection. She grew up with no religious training or experience. When she arrived at Princeton she met one of the leaders of The Episcopal Church at Princeton and began attending the Sunday night Eucharist. She began to feel awkward about coming and not being baptized and told one of her friends how she felt. Her friend encouraged her to keep coming and to talk with the Chaplain about being baptized. So she began to prepare for baptism and arranged to be baptized at this very service. Here's what she says about that morning six years ago:

This community of faith, together with Erin's openness to her part in God's project, created a passage out of doubting and emptiness into community and a relationship with the risen Christ that has impelled her to seek ordination as a priest.

I can also tell you about a family - parents and two brothers - I first met sitting in a small cluttered waiting room in a hospital trauma unit, wondering when their daughter and sister would awaken from a coma following a serious accident and agonizing about what her condition would be when she did awaken. They were terrified and overwrought. They were emotionally raw with fatigue, worry, and apprehension. And then each of them began to be aware of how their community of family and friends were rallying around them and of how people they had never met before were reaching out to them offering them compassion and hospitality. Each began to notice how he or she was caring for and receiving care from one another. They told me later that they understood this to be the work of the risen Christ in their lives, but it was the suffering they endured that galvanized them in their faith in God and in their perception of Christ's palpable immediate availability to each one of them. And when their sister and daughter awoke from her coma and smiled and joked with them and later showed signs that she would recover fully, they experienced resurrection in the truest and most exquisite way imaginable. And they gave thanks to one another and to God because they knew that this tragedy had changed them forever. They would never have wished it for themselves, but they knew they had been given a special blessing - the grace to experience the risen Christ as a family of five within a wider community of family and friends.

Finally, I can tell you about Bert, a young man who graduated last year. After years of going to church only out of a sense of duty, with no real feeling of connection to what was going on, Bert began coming to services here in his senior year. He still did not feel particularly connected to anyone or anything related to church, but it was at a convenient hour and was on his way home from Firestone Library. And he liked the music. Then his father died and as soon as he came back from the funeral he got sick and was in McCosh Infirmary for a week. A guy he barely knew, but who usually sat near him in the Chapel when he came, heard about what had happened to him and visited him at McCosh. It was a short visit, but it made a powerful impression on him and it made a connection between the two young men that continued here in the Chapel when Bert began coming again. He later told me that from then on whenever he took communion he felt a rushing sensation within him and an inner peace he had never known before. He said he now knew Christ was alive and present to him wherever he went. And he couldn't, for the life of him, figure out what had changed or why or how, only that he felt a transformation that lifted him out of an empty and lonely place that he had previously accepted as his lot in life. And he knows all this has somehow changed him.

These are not dramatic stories except to the people who lived them. In some ways they are even ordinary. They are nothing like finding an empty tomb and seeing someone alive who you had seen die a violent death three days before. God's project among us is more subtle than that. But these stories, and others which many of you could tell, are testimony that Christ is indeed alive to those who have the eyes to see and the ears to hear. They are stories of death and dying followed by resurrections. They are stories of Christ alive in the lives of ordinary people. So the answer to N. T. Wright's question, "Why did Christianity arise, and why did it take the shape it did?" is in these stories and millions of others like them.

So, my brothers and sisters, it is not history that determines faith. For faith to be valid or justifiable, the historical accounts that gave rise to it do not - I repeat, do not - have to be verifiable. Why not? Because faith is not focused on the past, but on the present. It is not focused on a historical figure, but on a living, present, dynamic person who touches our lives here and now. It is the risen Jesus who we experience, who we know not only as our Lord and Savior, but also as our friend and brother. So, with Mary Magdalene, each of us can say in our own time, "I have seen the Lord!"

Christ is risen! Alleluia, alleluia!