April 8, 2012                                    David Timbs    (Melbourne)                                       David's previous articles   

One of the earliest and dangerously bizarre notions the early Christians had to deal with was that Jesus was not actually a human being. This error later came to be known as Docetism after the Greek verb dokein, to seem. This school of thought drew its inspiration from Plato who stressed the superiority of the spiritual over the material. For Plato, the body is the prison of the soul.

The Docetist Christians could not handle the idea of the Incarnation, that the perfect, uncreated, all-powerful and purely spiritual God would want to have anything to do with mere created matter except to make it happen originally from afar. For them, God had to be kept at a distance from the groty realities of creation, especially from the greatest imperfection of all, a fallen and distorted humanity.

In order to resolve this problem, the Docetists taught that the Word of God only seemed to take on human flesh: in reality, Jesus did not have the normal needs and wants that go with being human; he had no normal bodily functions, no need of food, no emotions, not even love and certainly no pain of any kind let alone death. How could the person of the divine Word take on flawed human reality? The answer, and the Word was made flesh (sarx – the despised body) and made his home with us (pitched his tent).

The defence of the Incarnation and its implications continued with relentless insistence.

The evangelists affirmed that Jesus experienced real temptations, that he faced down the imaginable possibility of resisting and rejecting God’s plan for him. The Gospel record continually stressed the resistance Jesus encountered in his ministry and the perplexity it caused him. Confrontation and struggle were the daily fare of Jesus as he preached the Rule of God. All of this spiritual struggle and the temptation to escape from it climaxed in the greatest torment of them all, the agony in the garden of Gethsemane.

Mark’s account of Jesus’ struggle is far more terrifying than any other depiction in any medium. He confronted the Docetists head on. The language Mark used is brutal and extreme. It is terminology which in modern medicine is employed to describe a massive nervous break-down or psychiatric personality disintegration. The sheer scope of the mental and spiritual torment of Jesus only highlights to an even greater degree the resolution he arrived at when he freely and sanely refused to escape. His conflict was resolved in a calm acceptance of God’s affirmation of him as Son, the Son who would die.

And die he did, brutally and unambiguously. Mark pointedly says that the body that was taken off the cross was the corpse that was laid in the tomb. All of this is important for the Tradition because right from the very start its adherents were in a desperate debate about something at the very core of their faith. Admission of this struggle and the refusal to write it out of the record indicates historical accuracy.

It was not just the corpse of Jesus that caused problems for his confused and frightened disciples, it was what happened to it two nights later. But their lack of understanding did not begin there. It went all the way back into the earliest days of the Jesus Movement. They never understood anything of central importance in the preaching and healing ministry of their Leader, what, do you still not understand? Above all, they never understood the predictions of his own death or his strange reference to his resurrection, for they did not understand what rising from the dead would mean.

This lack of understanding became a huge embarrassment for the first tellers of the Christian story. The very models of discipleship who were held up to them as models and mentors were in fact classic advertisements for how not to be disciples! Again, historical accuracy and credibility is guaranteed by the Tradition in preserving these uncomfortable and embarrassing memories.

The empty tomb also occasioned scenes of unprecedented confusion, doubt, mixed messages and inadequate faith. It also provided an early and ominous sign that the role of women as disciples would eventually be written out of the early Christian story.

A constant in the early Church’s memory is the significant role of a small group of mainly Galilean women who were integral to the Jesus Movement. Some of them, women of independent means, financed the Gospel ministry (Lk 8: 1-3) and were the only ones who remained loyal to Jesus. They were the public witnesses of his death and burial (Mt 27: 55-56; Mk 15: 40-41; Lk 23: 49; Jn 19: 25). They were the witnesses of the Empty Tomb and were commissioned by the messengers at the sepulchre (Angels?) to proclaim the Resurrection to the Apostles and the other disciples.

The women were the ones whose testimony was not believed by the male disciples. Female witness was not legally trustworthy. Their report was regarded as merely hysteric and delusional, as just women’s talk. Paradoxically, this element in the narrative remains quietly subversive of Jesus’ male disciples and it remains in the written tradition. Again, the early Christians were not prepared to put scorched earth around the embarrassments.

The Gospel narratives of the post Resurrection appearances form a catalogue of embarrassing incomprehension on the part of Jesus’ closest disciples. The unambiguous reality of the empty tomb bewildered and confused them but his transformed physical presence of Jesus tested their imagination and faith to the limit.

It is clear that the members of the Jesus Movement did not understand the connection between the empty tomb and the resurrection until the enlightenment of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. It was then that they understood that, with the death of Jesus, the old age of Grace had come to an end and a completely new history of salvation had begun. At Pentecost, the Age of the Church began and the universal outreach of the Gospel was set in motion.

Central to primitive Church preaching was its faith proclamation – Kerygma – that Jesus of Nazareth and the power of his Gospel were no longer limited to a bracketed period of human history but that now, through his resurrection, he is acknowledged to be both Israel’s Messiah and, more importantly, God’s beloved Son, sent as Lord and Saviour for the whole human race. The Jesus of limited history, in the resurrection, became the Christ of faith for a future of limitless Grace, Redemption and a New Creation.

This Kerygma was not an easy one for the early Christians. In a world which so profoundly relativised the value of human materiality and personhood, the followers of Jesus insisted on the counter logic of their message. The resurrection of Jesus provides the one single ground for a new and lasting human hopefulness and ultimate meaning in life.

Paul of Tarsus insists on the central importance of the Resurrection of Jesus. Without this faith, we are of all people the most to be pitied. (1 Cor 15: 19)

David Timbs writes from Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.

Easter Sunday, 2012.