"We do not know where they have laid him" ... Jesus said to her, "Do not hold me, for I am about to ascend to my Father." (John 20:2b, 17a)

You may remember the television program "To Tell The Truth." Three people would come out, all claiming to be the same person. After the panel had interviewed all three and everyone had decided who the imposters were, the host would intone dramatically: "Will the real John Doe, please stand up!" Then everyone waited with baited breath as each contestant stirred as if to rise until, finally, the real person did stand up.

In the New York Times Magazine, December 23, 1973, Fr. Andrew Greeley, in an article entitled "What Kind of Man?" made it clear that not everyone agrees when it comes to the question of who is the real Jesus Christ. Some think of him as a pietistic fundamentalist, or superpatriot, or the ultimate "positive thinker." Others have painted him as a revolutionary or anti-establishment hippie - possibly a Zealot or a counterculture Essene who had sought purity in a desert monastery like the one at which the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered. Still others have tried to make him into an ecclesiastical bureaucrat, a member of the temple priesthood.

Greeley himself concludes that Jesus was most probably associated with a left-wing group of liberal Pharisees described in the Talmud as the "Pharisees of Love." Unlike their legalistic counterparts whom Jesus often criticized severely, these Pharisees were religious revolutionaries and poetic visionaries who challenged people to new visions and new understandings of their traditions. Most notably, they believed in the Resurrection of the dead, a belief that had not been common among Jews for most of their history. Greeley is not alone in this view that Christianity might best be understood as an outgrowth of the Pharisaic movement with its radical new belief in Resurrection.

Another recent suggestion is that the real Jesus Christ was not a solemn, sad-eyed ascetic but a fun-loving and joyous person. A famous painting of "the laughing Jesus" has become quite popular, and it may well be a good antidote to the many overly-serious portraits which artists have imagined. Jesus has also been described as a "religious genius," and, as you might guess, this image of Jesus was put forward by an academically-oriented person. We have also seen of late a popular tendency to identify Jesus with Buddha or other great religious figures, as if Jesus and Buddha and Confucius, for example, are all just different manifestations of the same spiritual being. In 1986 the famous church historian at Yale University, Jaroslav Pelikan, published a book titled Jesus Through The Centuries, subtitled "His Place in the History of Culture." The book jacket says that it is about "the changing image of Jesus in Western civilization within cultural, political, social and economic realms." And, certainly no discussion of the search for "the real Jesus Christ" would be complete without also mentioning Albert Schweitzer's classic book, The Quest for the Historical Jesus.

Beginning on this Easter Day we embark upon a series of sermons that ask the fundamental question: "Will the Real Jesus Christ Arise?" What about all these theories concerning the "Real Jesus"? Are we all just raising up our own notions of who Jesus really is or are we honestly listening to history and the Scriptures as they speak to us of this person named Jesus and his association with the title of Christ?

Not long before his untimely death, the gifted theologian and bishop, Kent Knutson, introduced one of his books with these words: "This is a book about Jesus Christ. It is rather presumptuous to write such a book. Suitable books are already available. The one by John in the New Testament, for example ... [But] John himself says [that] no book can do Christ justice." Having said this, Knutson then launches into a discussion of some of the basic doctrines about Jesus Christ, emphasizing above all that "the Jesus of history must remain united with the Christ of faith." Clearly it is an important but difficult task to understand what it means to say that Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah, but it is an ongoing responsibility for those of us who claim the name of Christian!

In telling the story of the resurrection of Jesus, John's Gospel consistently emphasizes the point that Jesus is gone! In our text for today Mary Magdalene discovers at the tomb that Jesus is gone and she tells Peter, "We do not know where they have laid him." This uncertainty about where Jesus has gone must continue to be for us yet today a powerful reminder of the fact that the meaning of the Resurrection of Jesus remains in many respects a great mystery! In many ways, the Christian church is built entirely upon our interpretations of the absence of Jesus. Especially in John the point is made that Jesus has to go away so that we will be forced to do a lot of wondering about his identity, so that we will begin to understand whole new dimensions of his continuing presence with us. When, a little later, Jesus tells Mary not to hold or touch him because he is about to go away, we are reminded of the other places in John's Gospel where Jesus says that it is good for him to go away because if he doesn't go away he cannot send the Spirit or "prepare a place for us." The departure of Jesus - our inability to hold on to him - is not unfortunate. It is the prerequisite for his continuing presence with us in a great variety of forms.

Complementing the thought that we must not try to hold onto Jesus in his physical form, is this earlier observation in verses 8-9 "The other disciple, who reached the tomb first [and this, by the way is John himself] also went in, and he saw and believed; for as yet they did not know the Scripture, that he must rise from the dead." Now, what did this disciple believe if he did not yet fully understand "resurrection"? The answer is clear that the meaning of the resurrection of Jesus unfolded slowly, like a flower. Although through time-lapse photography we can watch a flower suddenly spring into its full glory, the actual development takes longer. In some ways at least, the same has been true with respect to the New Testament faith in the Resurrection. Today, with the advantage of hindsight, we may think of the Resurrection as an event whose meaning sprang suddenly to light, whereas, in fact, even the apostles and writers of the Gospels did not immediately understand "that he must rise from the dead." Bishop Knutson was right in saying that we must not think of ourselves as qualitatively more knowledgeable than the New Testament evangelists. It is still true for us, as it was for them, that much of what we believe only dawns upon us slowly, by degrees. Our understanding - our comprehension - is incomplete. We believe, even though the full ramifications of our faith remain yet to be realized.

In the Gospel of John and elsewhere in the New Testament the resurrection of Jesus is intimately connected with the theme of his absence and the necessity of his reappearance or "second coming" (the parousia.) The Greek word literally means the "being again" of Jesus. Whether we use the terms "second coming," "second presence," "reappearance," or even "reincarnation" of Jesus, the fundamental truth remains the same, namely, that although gone, Jesus is able to be again (parousia) with us (emmanuel)! Just as there is an element of truth in many of the characterizations of "the real Jesus Christ" that Fr. Greeley and others have highlighted for us, so too there are many aspects to the resurrection of Jesus. The Resurrection sets the stage for many kinds of resurrection appearances and second comings of Jesus, the Christ.

Every Advent and Christmas we celebrate the coming of Christ and we could say that we have already enjoyed almost 2000 of these reappearances! In the Gospel of Mark the coming of Jesus is associated not with his birth but with the beginning of his ministry after his baptism in the river Jordan - already a kind of "second" coming. The story of the Transfiguration could be described as "a pre-Easter resurrection appearance." The various accounts of resurrection appearances placed after the death of Jesus make it clear that his reappearance takes a variety of forms. One of those forms is the Holy Spirit who, according to John's Gospel, will take the place of Jesus as our Counselor when Jesus is no longer physically present with us. The Sacraments are another form in which Jesus continues to come again to us ... and, Jesus truly comes to us again and again whenever his Gospel is preached and whenever we behave as "little Christs" toward our neighbors - helping each other and struggling to understand each other as we would like to be understood. Then, of course, there are all the various notions of the second coming of Christ at the end of time. Clearly, having gone away, Jesus continually comes and reappears in our lives.

There is grace enough for thousands of new worlds as great as this; there is room for fresh creations in that upper home of bliss. (Fredrick W. Faber)

There is, however, one way of talking about the resurrection or reappearance of Jesus which needs to be seriously questioned. Given the recent surge of interest in past lives, trance channeling and reincarnation, we need to take note of the reasons why the Christian faith has consistently resisted describing the resurrection, reappearance or second coming of Christ in terms of reincarnation. Christianity has a basically positive attitude toward the material world and toward our physical bodies and puts great stress on the Incarnation of God in the form of Jesus, so why the tendency to shy away from the idea of reincarnation?

First of all, we need to understand that we do not truly foster religious unity by homogenizing the divergent teachings of the world's religions into one composite view and pretending that real differences don't exist. We create more honest unity and understanding by entering into humble dialogue and debate about important and meaningful distinctions than we do by glossing over differences.

The Jewish concept of Sheol, the Greek idea of the immortality of the soul, the Christian belief in the resurrection, and the Hindu/Buddhist doctrine of reincarnation are significantly different! Sheol is the idea that all the dead go to one neutral place and that's it. They are, simply, dead. The typical concept of immortality is that a part of us never dies and lives on after death. Reincarnation is the belief that a single soul takes many forms and enters into many bodies, many forms, throughout its existence.

Resurrection, in contrast to all of these ideas, suggests that when we die we are really dead, but, miraculously, God is able to create new life out of death. One of the main things that distinguishes the Christian belief in the resurrection from both the Greek and Hindu philosophies is that it takes the physical fact of death seriously. It refuses to whitewash death, refuses to belittle the grief that we experience when death comes. The Christian concept of resurrection makes us wary of trite, shallow reassurances in the face of death. Pious platitudes can actually do more harm than good when they are substituted for an honest encounter with grief. It may be partly true to say to a grieving friend, "You'll get over it in time" or "Death is just a transition - it's not the end of the world." But this kind of well-intentioned comfort really is not helpful. We are in effect telling the person that we do not take their pain, their loss, their grief, seriously! We do better to tell them, by words or actions, what they really need and want to hear - that we recognize our inability to even imagine how much they are hurting. In one of his more profound Peanuts comic strips, Charles Schulz shows Lucy offering to do anything to cheer up Charlie Brown. Finally in exasperation Charlie shouts "I don't want to feel better!" When we are in pain the meanest thing a person can do is to belittle our suffering.

The second thing we need to be clear about is that the Hindu/Buddhist doctrine of reincarnation and the Christian notion of resurrection came into being in radically different contexts and for quite different reasons. The world-view behind reincarnation is that life is an endless cycle of death and reincarnation, and that the ultimate goal is to escape from the world of physical bodies into Nirvana - to be absorbed into God and to cease to exist as a separate entity. Reincarnation talks a lot about the physical body, but doesn't really take it seriously!Reincarnation is also tied together with the doctrine of Karma, which is mainly designed to prove that life is fair (in the long run we all get what we deserve and everything happens for a reason.) In stark contrast, the Christian understanding of resurrection and of the grace of God is intended to deal precisely with the fact that life is not fair! While we must work as hard as possible to "establish justice in the earth," never using the apparent unfairness of life as an excuse for not struggling to make life as fair as we can make it, the Christian message is that in the last analysis some things are simply more important than fairness. God's love and grace go far beyond simply seeing that we get what we deserve. Love transcends logic.

Ultimately the fairness of life becomes an academic question. What we really care about is that we not be left alone when the going gets rough. In the movie based on the life of Terry Fox, the young man who ran two-thirds of the way across Canada on an artificial leg, the most poignant scene comes when a resurgence of the cancer stops the marathon and puts Terry back in the hospital. His father finally breaks down and says through his tears "It isn't fair!" Terry responds: "It's fair. There are a lot of people who have this happen to them who don't deserve it. It's not a matter of fair or unfair. It's just the way things are." What really matters to Terry at this point is that he is surrounded by the love and concern of his family and friends, that he is not left alone.

Reincarnation is primarily about fairness. Resurrection is primarily about defeating the power of death. Resurrection is about affirming life in the face of all the reasons not to - including the fact that life is often unfair and capricious. The stories of the resurrection of Jesus show us that life, and love, and the grace and faithfulness of God eclipse all other values. The only thing which would be truly unfair would be not to be loved!

Above all perhaps, the problem with the traditional concept of reincarnation is that it believes both too much and too little! By suggesting that life is just a recycling of what we already know, that past lives and future lives are not that different from this life, reincarnationists claim to know more about life in other dimensions than it is really possible for us to know. They believe "too much." We can also turn this observation around and say that reincarnational logic believes "too little." Most who espouse reincarnation do speak about other "plains" or dimensions of reality, but it seems that they do so too much in terms of our present experience of life. Profoundly challenging paradoxes like Saint Paul's vision of a "spiritual body" rarely come to the fore among reincarnationists. Like some Christians who have the mundane notion that heaven is little more than streets of gold and family reunions, they believe too little, because they are not open enough to the possibility of the new.

Even when reincarnation is translated from its Hindu self-negating context into the language of the human potential movement and presented as the path by which we reach our fullest self-realization, there is not enough openness to the likelihood that the other dimensions of life are far beyond anything we can possibly understand now - even if we did have some kind of spirit guide!

The resurrection of Jesus speaks to us of the exciting new possibilities of life coming from the Creator. While it is not typically associated with Easter, Frederick Faber's hymn "There's a Wideness in God's Mercy" wonderfully catches the spirit of this resurrection newness: "There is grace enough for thousands of new worlds as great as this; there is room for fresh creations In that upper home of bliss." In his famous theological system, Paul Tillich described Jesus as "the New Being." The real Jesus arises when we stop trying to make Jesus into a recycled version of our pet notions about him and allow God to make Jesus, us, and all things, new!