A late call on Easter Sunday - an entry delayed because Jillian and I have spent much of the four day holiday (Australia for all its secularity closes down for Good Friday to a degree that is matched only by Christmas Day and Anzac Day and we get Monday as a public holiday as well) at the National Folk Festival here in Canberra - of which more later.
Ched Myers in his Closing Meditation on Mark's Gospel in Who will roll away the Stone? Discipleship Queries for First World Christians captures the awe-fulness of the resurrection. Commenting on the message of the young man at the tomb "He's gone on ahead of you" Myers observes:
Here is a possiblity we never considered, a prospect too terrible to contemplate. An invitation fo follow Jesus - again. To resume the Way, the consequences of which we now know all too well. Suddenly, form deep within us, for that unexplored space beneath our profoundest hopes and fears, roas a tidal wave of trauma, ecstasy and terror all at one. We race out of that tomb as if we had just seen a ghost. And so we have: In Jesus' empty tomb there is nothing but the ghost of our discipleship past and our disciplesship future. (p.412)
Myers reminds us that we can encounter Jesus only by following him. Whenever the church imagines that the resurrection introduces a new and different story that replaces the way of the cross it makes a fatal mistake and opens the way to the worship of the idols of economic success, social comfort, compliance with national real politic and the self referenctial comfort of Jesus in our hearts.
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