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Dear Parish Faithful & Friends in Christ,
Christ is Risen!
Indeed He is Risen!
"The resurrection is an act of God, and the message of the resurrection must first of all come from him. His angel or messenger tells the women not to be afraid, and then informs them of the resurrection. In St. John's Gospel the two angels do not proclaim it, however. Instead, Jesus in his risen body greets Mary Magdalene outside the tomb and gives her the message for the apostles (Jn. 20:11-18)."
From The First Day of the New Creation by Veselin Kesich, p. 75
For those of you who were able to join us] I hope you enjoyed the class yesterday evening as much as I did. I very much appreciate your presence and willingness to come together for these classes. Fascinating and "exciting" to go through the resurrection accounts in some detail. I believe that our handouts [see the links immediately below] and the prepared questions (my thanks to Kevin Rains who prepared those questions for the class) very much kept the conversation going:
- The Empty Tomb Traditions
- Discussion Questions about the Empty Tomb
- Harmonization of the Resurrection Accounts
The third handout was from Fr. Lawrence Farley and it was an attempt to fully harmonize the seemingly disparate resurrection accounts. I included that so that we have very perspectives at hand to examine and discuss, but we were only able to address that issue as it came up in our look at the various Gospels. However, I am of the opinion that those "harmonizations" do not quite work, well-intentioned though they might be.
Perhaps it is a question that I find interesting while others may not, but I want to share this paragraph from Prof. Veselin Kesich's book The First Day of the New Creation. This book has "nurtured" my study of the resurrection narratives for years, and I still turn back to it to this day.
While various speculations may arise from the discrepancies in the evidence presented to us, we must above all avoid attempts to harmonize the sources. The evangelists did not try to harmonize all their accounts, and neither did the early Church, even though there were apologetic reasons for doing so.
The Church preferred to preserve and transmit diverse testimonies. Any harmonization, in order to be consistent, would inevitably exclude some important elements and would produce out of the divine-human witness that we have a human document, based only on human logic. The complexity of the resurrection experience, only partially understood by the participants, would be reduced to a neatly defined sequence of events in the post-resurrection period that would only hinder us from experiencing all that was happening and participating fully in the joy of the resurrection.
The accounts we have of the post-resurrection appearances points to the doubt and fear of the participants - surely an argument that refutes the theory that they were created later. These narratives include the most primitive traditions, which converge despite their differences and confirm the truth of what they report. And primitive Christian preaching would be incomprehensible without different testimonies that the apostles bear to the many and varied meetings with the risen Christ.
(P. 95; I italicized the parts underlined in my copy of the book)
Again, for what its worth, but I believe that there is something "liberating" in Prof. Kesich's position. We don't have to force every detail into a perfectly harmonious whole.
Next week, we will discuss some of the basic characteristics of the resurrection appearances. This is also quite fascinating!
In Christ,
Fr. Steven
