The Easter enigma (14 days and counting…)




It’s that time of (the liturgical) year again…we are two weeks away from Easter.  On April 12th, the world’s 2.1 billion Christians will commemorate the “resurrection” – whatever that means – of Jesus of Nazareth while the rest of us sit at home and eat chocolate (of course, most Christians will also be at home for Easter this year).  So, what is it about this 2,000 year-old story that still reverberates with so many people?  Then again, perhaps there are many Christians who may be a bit bored with the story – or with the way it is presented in church year after year.  What does the Easter story mean anyway?
Google defines “enigma” as “a person or thing that is mysterious, puzzling, or difficult to understand”.  As the New Testament Gospels tell the story, those people who experienced the events of the first Easter morning did indeed find them to be mysterious, puzzling and difficult to understand.  It all began with a bunch of hysterical women (if we are to believe the presumably male authors of the stories) running out of a graveyard to tell a group of “respectable” men hiding in a locked room[1] that they had seen the recently-crucified Jesus alive again.  Not surprisingly, the men didn’t believe what the women said, but dismissed it as an “idle tale” (cf. Gospel of St. Luke 24.11).  If Easter was enigmatic for those who knew Jesus (2,000 years ago), it has remained so for many Christians, not to mention those who don’t believe in the Easter story in any particular way.
But it remains the case that if it wasn’t for the women’s stupendous claim on that first Easter morning, Christianity would never have come to be – and the Gospels would most probably never have been written.  The Gospels according to Matthew, Mark, Luke & John are stories about Jesus as the rightful king (i.e. Messiah) of Israel.  The fact of the matter is, a dead Messiah is a non-Messiah.  The idea of a dead Messiah deconstructs the story the Gospel-writers wanted to tell.  And yet, the Gospel-writers introduce a radically new twist into the genre of Jewish stories of salvation/rescue/resurrection.  The Gospels present a scenario that no one was expecting to happen – within the context of the first-century Jewish hope for rescue from foreign domination, the Gospels are simply not plausible as “news of the arrival of the long-awaited rescue”.  Whatever they are, the Gospels were definitely not “best-sellers”; in the first-century, they could only be perceived as being radical, subversive documents (both within and outside of Jewish circles) which would only be ready sympathetically, one would think, by those who already had personal belief in Jesus.  And yet, all the evidence seems to indicate that the Gospels were written for mass distribution – they were written in Greek (the international language of the day; the mother-tongue of most of Jesus’ followers was Aramaic) and were distributed quickly and widely across the Roman world.  So, when one takes all this into account, the question of the motives of the Gospel-writers (evangelists) becomes intriguing…  Many of us are familiar with works of fiction that purport to subvert powerful institutions by re-telling the story of their origins (e.g. works of Dan Brown).  This kind of book flies off the shelf – this is the cultural climate we live in.  However, the Gospels were not written for the needs of a “target market”.  There was no “market” for this type of book in the first-century.  So, we can eliminate financial gain or personal prestige from the list of possible motives for the evangelists having put ink to papyrus.  So, why were these strange documents written?  We’ll get into this question in more detail as we count down the days to Easter.  Whatever the evangelists’ motives, within three centuries of the publication of these documents, the vast majority of the inhabitants of the Roman Empire had made this story their own, and the emperor Theodosius I decreed Christianity to be the official religion of the Empire (AD 380).
Over the next two weeks, I invite you to join this conversation about the Easter story.  I will be making daily contributions to the discussion.  I propose to approach the Easter story by looking at how one 20th-century author came to make sense of it – C.S. Lewis (1898-1963).  Lewis was a professor of English literature at Oxford University, the author of The Chronicles of Narnia as well as innumerable popular works on Christianity.  We’ll discuss the Easter story in the context of mythology, atheism, literature, history and the question of meaning.  I’m going to attempt to discuss the story “again for the first time”.  I will attempt not to discuss the Easter story as if it “deserves” any allegiance or reverence.  My hope is that the discussion will be beneficial for you, regardless of whether you have a Christian background or not.  Let’s approach this story – as much as possible – as a story and see what effect it may have upon us…

(I’ve attached links below to the Easter narratives in the 4 New Testament Gospels)

Gospel of St. Matthew (chapter 28)

Gospel of St. Mark (chapter 16)

Gospel of St. Luke (chapter 24)

Gospel of St. John (chapter 20)

[1] The apostles, fearing arrest for being accomplices of a recently executed criminal, had confined themselves to a locked room…sound familiar?

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