|
THE SECOND ANNUAL CONSERVATISM EASTER ESSAY
Michael Alison is a member of the Fellowship's Governing Council.
ยท Initial response to the resurrection was muted, because the disciples had expected Jesus to lead them to worldly victory, not heavenly glory.
*****
The resurrection had a muted impact
In an article in Conservatism for Easter last year (see link below), Sir Brian Mawhinney MP wrote a vivid and factual account of the historical basis for believing in the resurrection. In this article I hope to follow on from what Sir Brian wrote, by discussing a curious feature in the gospel accounts of the resurrection - almost a mystery, until examined closely - which might at first sight seem to play down this, the most stupendous event in human history. The mystery is: why did the resurrection at the time it occurred not burst out over the lives and world of the first disciples with the immediacy and impact of a nuclear detonation? For such by implication was the scale of the event. Or, to coin a phrase from Sherlock Holmes, why did the dog apparently not bark in the night?
Like all the best mysteries, the denouement which I hope to suggest adds immeasurably to the beauty, and splendour and glory of the Easter story.
That the immediate impact of the resurrection was, in a curious way, muted can be seen from the contrasting accounts given of two other New Testament miracles, one pre- resurrection, the other post-resurrection, but otherwise near replicas of one another. The first is St Luke's account of a miraculous draft of fishes (5:4-11); the second is St John's account (21:1-11) of a later but matching miraculous draft, the only post-resurrection miracle, incidentally (leaving aside Christ's personal appearances) recorded in the gospels.
The surprising thing is that an air of hope, joy and expectancy pervades the early, Lucan, account of the first miraculous draft, following which, metaphorically, Peter and the other disciples threw their hats in the air, their nets to the ground, beached their boat and abandoned fishing to start campaigning with Christ. In contrast an air of despondency, almost dejection pervades the Johannine account of how the disciples returned to their lives as fishermen in the aftermath of the resurrection.
The air of gloomy resignation is vividly drawn in St John 21:3. "I am going fishing" says Peter a few days after Christ's resurrection appearances, as if there was now nothing better to do with his life. A bunch of his old friends follow his lead. No suggestion here of the launching of some great post-resurrection gospel outreach, or nationalist rally: the only thing to be launched was an old fishing boat. How great can an anticlimax get? One can almost hear the little group of disciples, recalling their first joyous encounter with Christ whilst trying to catch fish, as recorded by St Luke, now muttering to one another: "this is where we came in". And, as St John records that "that night they caught nothing", the sweating Peter and his comrades might be forgiven for grumbling among themselves, "the resurrection? So what!"
Doomed Expectations
A number of clues are provided in the gospels and in Acts, for this apparent post- resurrection depression. Essentially the explanation seems to be one of deeply damaged expectations. So great was the damage that not even the resurrection at first could repair it. But what were these expectations? Canon Tom Wright, in his book The challenge of Jesus, has a passage which helps us to get on track. "What did Jesus mean when he said the Kingdom of God was at hand? What did the average Galilean villager hear, when a young prophet strode into town and announced that Israel's god was now at last becoming King?" Peter, James, John and the others were precisely such "average Galilean villagers". And the "young prophet" whom they met, Jesus, completely galvanised them. He was a miraculous figure. The first miraculous draft of fishes sent them flying from their boats to become full-time campaigners for and with Jesus.
There is also ample New Testament evidence to show that these early followers of Jesus were convinced that, as the long-awaited Messiah, he had a political agenda - nothing less than the overthrow of Roman occupation and dominance in Palestine and the restoration of national sovereignty for Israel. First century Jews, as Tom Wright's work makes vividly clear, viewed their life and circumstances as one of "captivity", echoing their earlier Egyptian bondage at the time of Moses, or one of "exile", echoing their Babylonian exile after the sack of Jerusalem in 586 BC. The appearance of the miracle- working Jesus, therefore, suggested the arrival of a new Moses and a new King David, rolled into one. It was a heady wine for the new circle of young and enthusiastic followers of Jesus, convinced that they had been chosen to spearhead the impending liberation!
Jesus came to overthrow sin, not Rome
The trouble was that Jesus had a different agenda from theirs. And the final discovery of the difference was shattering for the disciples. The showdown occurred in the garden at Gethsemane, when Jesus seemed suddenly to capitulate, and to offer no resistance to his arrest. The prospects of a miraculous seizing of power seemed suddenly to vanish like a mirage for Jesus' disciples. In a parallel drawn from our own day, it was as if, in the historic football match last May in the European Cup, when Manchester United defeated Bayern Munich in the very last minute of the match, the heroic Manchester striker Solskjaer had suddenly decided not to kick the ball into the net at the critical moment! Bayern Munich would have been saved, Manchester humiliated. And the team-mates of Solskjaer, instead of mobbing him ecstatically, would have walked away from him in dumb disillusionment.
And thus it was, in the case of Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane. The heroic striker failed to strike! So the game was lost. The disciples "walked away" from him, totally disillusioned. (Actually, they ran away, but from discretion rather than cowardice. They were evidently all set for a fight with the arresting police squad, if the lead had been given).
Perhaps this example of a football match trivialises the extent of the disciples' disillusionment with Jesus. For their lives and circumstances, their hopes and expectations, far exceeded the scope of a mere game. A closer modern parallel might be to imagine Jesus as appearing in north-west Europe in 1944, and leading a Resistance group in Nazi- occupied France. Imagine Jesus shortly before D-day, "walking on the water" off the Normandy coast and stilling a storm near the Arromanche beaches - and then inexplicably allowing himself to be arrested and shot by the Gestapo. Meanwhile a huge storm blows up, which scatters and destroys the liberating allied invasion fleet, leaving the Nazis still triumphantly in place in mainland Europe. If, after this debacle, Jesus had risen from the dead and rejoined his old Resistance colleagues, they would have been astounded at his reappearance, but still bemused and troubled, and disillusioned by the way things had worked out - resurrection or no resurrection!
The echo of this parallel is found in the gospels, where for example the two disciples on the road to Emmaus explain their pain and disappointment about the life and death of Jesus to the unrecognised stranger who walked with them. "But we had hoped" they said, "that he was the one who was going to redeem (= liberate) Israel." And in the book of Acts, the last recorded exchange between Jesus and his disciples, just before the Ascension, was "Lord, are you at this time going to restore the Kingdom to Israel?" i.e. when is the struggle for national sovereignty going to be launched?
Great Expectations
So in St John 21 we find the gloomy disciples back in their boat, with Israel unliberated, Roman rule securely in place, and the fish as elusive as ever. The way in which Christ rebuilds the disciples' shattered dreams, with the second miraculous draft of fishes, is one of the most beautiful and moving passages in the Bible, with momentous implications.
Christ is standing on the shore of the Sea of Tiberias early on the morning of the disciples' abortive return to a night's fishing. He calls out to them. How natural, and understandable, it would have been for Christ to have called out to them with a note of impatience, even exasperation. "What on earth are you doing back in your boat, fishing? Haven't you heard about the resurrection? How thick can you get? For heaven's sake, pull yourselves together, wake up and sort out your priorities!" But Christ's words from the sea shore to the struggling disciples were utterly different, and utterly unexpected. St John tells the story:
"He called out to them, "Friends, haven't you any fish?"
"No," they answered.
He said, "Throw your net on the right side of the boat and you will find some."
And find some they did. Indeed they were unable to haul the net in because of the quantity of fish, big fish at that, 153 of them when the haul was counted. Christ then invites the fishermen to contribute one or two of the fish to the breakfast he was cooking. "Come and have breakfast," he said to them.
The ensuing scene could hardly be more mundane and everyday. It had the character of one of those domestic "Dutch interior" occasions captured on canvas by a Rembrandt or a Vermeer. No titanic canvas here of a Trafalgar or a Waterloo! The disciples combined breakfast, evidently, with some discussion and planning about marketing the catch, or disposing of it amongst their friends and relatives. The counting of the fish surely makes the point: dead fish are not counted to be thrown back into the water, or left littering the shore!
And yet this prosaic realism was not the only reality which suffused the lakeside breakfast. Underlying it was the earlier miracle of the catch - and more. St John records that:
'None of the disciples dared ask him, "Who are you?" They knew it was the Lord.'
So the universal miracle of the resurrection had suddenly become personalised for the fishermen, in a little local miracle which could hardly have impinged more directly upon them. The disciples found themselves in the presence of - who, or what? They dared not ask! But he was kind, friendly, without recrimination, helpful beyond imagining, and apparently omnipotent! There seemed suddenly to be a ladder from the lakeside - to heaven!
It was this scene, of course, rather than any triumphant overthrow of Roman rule in Palestine, that turns the religion of Christ into a universal religion.
The catching and cooking, the sharing and eating of the 153 fish chimes in with a kind of universal bottom line for human life at all times and in all places - we work in order to eat, we eat in order to work. And as Christ's voice had called out from the lakeside to the struggling disciples in their boat, so across the canyons of time he calls out to us in our own day and circumstances. Having a problem with the bottom line of a dwindling bank balance? Having a problem with a poor membership drive, in a marginal constituency, or in disappointing donations for a struggling charity? Having a problem with your cholesterol count, your pulse-rate, your profit margin, your mortgage liability, your exam marks, your time-span before parole? "Children, haven't you any fish?" comes the call of Christ. "Nowt!" was the only available answer - the only answer that was needed. Then the turnround in the struggle became mind-boggling.
But what of those great expectations, which originally fired the disciples' vision and hopes, and then collapsed in the disarray of Golgotha? Was it all really meant to boil down to the merely mundane, the "daily round, the common task," the catching of fish, the 'measuring out of life with coffee spoons?'
Far from it! The coral starts small and grows slowly, but a vast reef is its conclusion. Jerusalem was not immediately delivered from Roman rule; indeed it was sacked again by the emperor Titus in 7AD. But then Rome itself was sacked, by the Barbarians in 455AD. By then the old Caesars had given way, via the Emperor Constantine, to Christian Byzantium, which lasted twice as long as the old Roman empire. And the Barbarians were slowly converted to Christ, and so began what Hugh Trevor-Roper called "The rise of Christian Europe," i.e. western Europe. Initially there was the monastic kernel; then the Renaissance; then the Reformation; then the Enlightenment, leading to the rise of the Western scientific method and from there to the Industrial Revolution, including capitalism (and communism). There followed the quantum leap in world population in the nineteenth century, and the spreading of Western science, culture and technology as effectively the first world civilization, with the Internet as its latter-day frontier! So, from the fishing net to the Internet. St Peter would have been staggered at what he had helped to launch, besides his boat.
The resurrection - so what next?
"So be it Lord; Thy throne shall never
Like earth's proud empires, pass away;
Thy kingdom stands, and grows for ever,
Till all thy creatures own thy sway."
Related links
Sir Brian Mawhinney's Easter Essay
| |
