Was The Tomb Empty?

Was The Tomb Empty?

An Eastertide Service to Countryside Church, Unitarian Universalist

March 31, 2024

The Rev. Dr. C. Scot Giles

Although we Unitarian Universalists came out of the Judeo-Christian tradition and are arguably very much a part of it, our ministers are sometimes unsure what to say about the mainstream Easter stories involving betrayal, torture, suffering and death. So a lot of my colleague will gloss over that by talking about the Springtime themes of flowers, bunny rabbits and the cycles of nature.

I like all of those things too…but I am not a flowers and bunny rabbit sort of person, at least in my sermons. So this morning I will be speaking about the Jesus stories, in my usual heretical way.

Eastertide

It was said that a married couple, who didn’t really like each other, in fact they pretty much hated each other, went on a vacation to the Holy Land. While there, the husband died.

The widow had a choice of shipping his body home or, for considerably less money, having him buried right there in the Holy Land. Despite the extra cost, she had him shipped home even though they had no family to attend a funeral in any case. Her reason? She’d heard that some people who were buried in the Holy Land didn’t stay dead. And she didn’t want to take the chance.

More seriously, for most Christian believers, Easter Morning is the date around which their religion pivots. It is the date when reportedly a lay-rabbi named Yeshua ben Joseph of Nazareth, more commonly known today as Jesus of Nazareth, was said to have risen from the dead, and emerged from his tomb on Easter morning.

His empty tomb was said to have been seen by six women:

Joanna, the wife of Chuza an official in Herod’s court;

Mary Magdalene, a Galilean follower of Jesus, who was from the town of Magdala;

Mary, his mother and the widow of Joseph of Nazareth;

Mary, the mother of James the Younger;

Mary, the wife of Clopas, who some say was a relative of Jesus; and

Salome, the mother of the apostles John and James, a Galilean.

Writers of the time, such as Flavius Josephus, a famous Roman historian, argued that the whole account of the resurrection should be dismissed because it was only witnessed by women. These particular women, he believed were known for “the levity and boldness of their sex.” In other words, he thought they were probably making a joke.

Modern believers reverse this argument, saying that if the resurrection was a fabrication, the plotters behind it would never have allowed only women to be the witnesses. Because, at that time, no one took what women said seriously. If the followers of Jesus were pulling a fast one, they would have used men.

I mean, if one were going to tell a Big Lie, you’d try to do a better job.

To this day, believers in the divinity of Jesus gather on Easter Morning at sunrise to re-enact going to Jesus’s tomb, and finding it empty. This is important because one of the central promises of traditional Christianity is the claim that death could be overcome and that our end is not final.

As it was written in 1 Corinthians 15:14, “If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain.”

Over the many years since the first Easter Morning, believers have formulated argument after argument trying to convince a skeptical public that the resurrection happened and that the promise of their faith is real.

When I was a student there was an amazing and charismatic preacher on the West Coast named the Rev. Gene Scott. He was quite a colorful figure. He built a huge church by doing almost nothing except fundraising on television. I used to watch his late-night broadcasts, which he called “festivals,” where he would angrily demand his follows donate lots and lots of money. He was fond of silly hats and always wore one while fundraising.

He married a porn star forty years his junior, lived a lavish lifestyle complete with classic cars and thoroughbred horses. Clearly, he was a popular nut. But he did preach a sermon on the Resurrection of Jesus that became famous. It listed all the arguments for believing that Jesus rose from the dead at Easter.

Rev. Scott tried to debunk a lot of the claims made by people who didn’t believe that.

One of these was the claim that the women just had a poor sense of direction and went to the wrong tomb.

Another was that Joseph of Arimathea, a follower, stole the body of Jesus to give the early Christian Church a boost.

A third was that Jesus didn’t actually die on the cross but was simply unconscious. In fact, Rev. Scott argued that in any court of law, the testimony contained in the New Testament would be adequate for a fair judge to rule that the Resurrection had happened.

The problem is that serious scholars of religion know that it almost certainly did not.

Why The Story Is Suspect

First, it is simply not the case that Jesus of Nazareth was a unique religious figure who died and was claimed to come back to life. A few years ago in a different sermon I actually listed a number of them, from the Babylonian god Tammuz to the Egyptian Osiris; from the Buddhist Bodhidharma to the Hindu god Ram, who has recently been in the news because the government of India has just put up a huge temple to him.

In the history of religious anthropology there are more than a hundred stories about dying and resurrected gods. It’s actually a common theme. Devoted followers of religious leaders often say such things, because in bereavement the mind wants to put people back where it thinks they belong.

In recent times there are people who claim that Amy Carlson, the leader of a cult called Love Has Won, was resurrected after her death in 2021 and now runs her organization from a hidden fifth dimension.

There were some followers of the modern ultra-orthodox Chabad Rebbe Menchem Schneerson who held that he was the Messiah, and hoped he would defeat death. That didn’t happen, but who knows where that story will be in five hundred years. His grave is already a site of pilgrimage.

Second, there are huge holes in the biblical account of the Crucifixion contained in the New Testament that believers simply gloss over.

We know from abundant historical material that under the laws of the time, people who were crucified were allowed to rot on their crosses as a warning to others. That’s not unique. Dead bodies have been allowed to decompose on stakes, crosses and gallows for centuries, right up to the present day in some places.

If Jesus of Nazareth was crucified (and I suspect he was) his body would not have been taken down from the cross and laid in a tomb. If anyone had tried to do that they would have ended up on crosses of their own, curtesy of the Roman soldiers who were standing right there. If you were crucified you never came down from your cross. If you owned a tomb, it would be empty, because you would not have been allowed to fill it.

If you know someone who claims to believe every word of the bible, and I’ve met many such people, you will also probably discover that they never actually read the bible in any sort of disciplined way. Because it is full of historical contradictions.

The nativity stories in the Gospels of Mathew and Luke cannot be reconciled. As far as the crucifixion goes the Gospel of Mark says he was crucified at the third hour on the day of Passover (Mark 14:12, 15:25). But the Gospel of John says it was the day before Passover at the sixth hour (John 19:14-160. In the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, Jesus is said to have refused to drink while on the cross (Mark 15:23, Matthew 27:48, Luke 23:36) while the Gospel of John says that he does drink (John 19:29-30).

The Apostle Paul, who never met the living Jesus, claims in a New Testament letter (1 Cor 15:6) that the resurrected Jesus was seen by over 500 people, but the Gospels themselves make no such claim, nor is there any historical corroboration for such a phenomena. And on and on.

The Gospels are Literary Creations

It is now generally accepted that the Gospels, as we have them, were written long after the life of Jesus of Nazareth, at a time when women were gaining more rights in society, that that’s probably why the story has women going to the tomb.

As the language of the time kept changing, we know the Gospel of Mark was written first because it is in the oldest version Greek. The Gospels of Matthew and Luke quote it, but were written far later for they are in a more recent version of Greek.

The Gospels were not written at the same time as the life of Jesus.

I Love The Bible

But don’t get me wrong. I love the Bible and know it well. I am inspired by what Jesus taught as I understand it, and despise what the institutional church has done to his ideas. The mistake a lot of people in our time make is that they think what is in the Bible is history, or at least an attempt at it. It’s not.

Actually, the Bible is a collection of books, and the books are of many different sorts.

There are some attempts at history, the Book of Numbers is basically a census. But the Book of Genesis is mythology. The Book of Leviticus is a volume of laws. The Psalms are a hymnal. The Proverbs are wisdom sayings while the Song of Song is erotic poetry.

When we get to the New Testament what we have in the Gospels is spiritual biography, not history.

Spiritual biography is when you tell the story of some person with an editorial slant intending to emphasize a spiritual theme. Sometimes that requires bending the truth a bit, or glossing over embarrassing narrative problems - such as when in the his spiritual biography, Confessions, we read that St. Augustine prayed, “(God) grant me chastity…, but not yet.” Hardly a holy saying, and so no one talks about it. It is seldom mentioned even in Roman Catholic seminaries.

Spiritual biography is written to illustrate something, not to create a historical record. That’s what the Gospels are. It wasn’t important to the writers that some things were left out, or that the storylines do not agree. Because that wasn’t the point. They are attempts at storytelling in order to make clear what Jesus believed and taught. They were intended to be illustrative, not historical.

Sure the stories were elaborated and embellished. What story isn’t over time?

That happens to all stories if they are told enough. Abraham Lincoln didn’t actually grow up in a log cabin. George Washington didn’t chop down a cherry tree and he didn’t stand up in the boat at Valley Forge because if he had it would have capsized. Stories are always elaborated with the telling. That is the nature of stories. As every gossip in High School knows.

The Transient and Permanent in Christianity

In 1841 the person who was probably the greatest American Unitarian minister who has ever lived, the Rev. Theodore Parker, delivered a sermon at the ordination of a colleague in Boston. The sermon was titled,“A Discourse on the Transient and Permanent in Christianity,” and it became famous. Students preparing for the Unitarian Universalist ministry study it to this day.

In this sermon Parker argued that what was temporary in the Christian story was the traditions and legends that had grown up around Jesus of Nazareth.

Stories of a miraculous birth, or a star that moved across the sky in violation of all known laws of physics, and yes, the story of a literal resurrection were not, in Parker’s view, important. They were transient, temporary. Because, tomorrow we could learn of an authentic document hidden away in the secret archives of the Vatican where some lost apostle confesses he’d made the whole thing up. If ideas can be discredited that easily, they are not permanent ideas.

What was important about the prophet Jesus was none of those things. Nor was church doctrine, tradition, creeds or rules important.

The permanent in the Christian movement was the essence of what Jesus taught.

And what Parker believed Jesus taught was the possibility of a direct relationship between the individual and a higher power, whatever a person believed that higher power to be.

That was a radical idea in it’s time and it directly challenged the Roman state religion which said that all transactions with a spiritual power went through the Emperor.

It directly challenged the Hebrew state religion which said that all transactions with a holy power went through a hereditary priesthood.

You did not, in the ancient world, try to relate to what you thought was sacred and special on your own. Instead you were supposed to believe what you were told by authorities. Jesus taught the opposite.

Parker believed the Jesus stories taught the value of fairness, and “government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people,” an idea from Jesus that was later quoted by Abraham Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address.

Parker believed that Jesus spoke of an ethical power that would change society, saying that the arc of fate “bends toward justice.” Words that would later be quoted by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King and former President Barack Obama.

Ideas such as these, Parker believed, were what was permanent in the story of Jesus. And he said he tried to follow the religion of Jesus, not the religion about him - a distinction lost today.

The Work of Marcus J. Borg

In 1994 distinguished professor of religion, Marcus Borg, published a book titled Meeting Jesus Again For The First Time. Professor Borg, who died in 2015, was a New Testament scholar and a Fellow of the Jesus Seminar, one of the foremost groups of religious scholars in modern times.

The thought of Dr. Borg about the life and ministry of Jesus has been both persuasive and influential to me, and if you are finding my reflections today of interest I recommend his book to you.

Basically, using the scholarly apparatus of modern textual analysis, Borg argues that there are two Jesus figures that people have in their minds.

The first he calls the Pre-Easter Jesus. This was the fellow I mentioned at the beginning of this sermon, a lay-rabbi named Yeshua ben Joseph of Nazareth. Very likely this was a historical figure. Very likely he was highly charismatic and created an important following among the Roman-occupied Hebrew people. Very likely he got into trouble because of his radical beliefs which challenged the corrupt government of his people, and they in their turn collided with the Romans to have him silenced.

He could well have been crucified, and if so his tomb, if he had one, was empty on the first Easter morning because people who were crucified stayed on their crosses as warnings to others. The tomb was empty because it had never been occupied.

But then there is the Post-Easter Jesus, commonly called the Christ, which is not actually a name at all. It is a Greek word for the phrase “Chosen One.”

This Jesus, Borg argued, never actually lived at all. This image of a symbolic Christ was actually a literary creation of the early church. Probably loosely based on what was remembered about Jesus of Nazareth, but elaborated to illustrate the ideas his followers had come to hold as they developed and extended the ideas of that deceased lay rabbi.

The followers apparently worked from collections of “The Sayings of Jesus” or a list of remembered precepts, parables and ideas. One such list has survived. It didn’t get into the New Testament but a copy, somewhat misnamed as The Gospel of Thomas, was found in the hidden library of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1945 CE. It’s not a gospel at all. It’s just a list of sayings: “And Jesus said….,” “And Jesus said…..” “And Jesus said…”

Over time the Sayings of Jesus, and the later ideas of his followers were assembled into spiritual biographies intended to make the ideas more memorable. But they were never intended as history. They are teaching tales. No more historical than the story of George Washington and a Cherry Tree or of Johnny Appleseed, or Davy Crocket being “The King of the Wild Frontier."

So, was the tomb empty on Easter morning? Of course it was, if it even existed, because no one was ever placed there. But there was a kind of Resurrection that happened. That was a literary resurrection as the ideas of Jesus were writ large and elaborated by his followers into impressive tales that would be remembered for thousands of years.

I cherish that, because death will come to us all. But perhaps the hidden meaning reflected in the empty tomb of Easter morning is that the good we did during our lives can survive us in our reputation, and in the influence we had on others.

We may not rise from our tomb at the so-called End of Days. But we may have an influence on others if we strive to live our lives as caring and compassionate people, in touch with whatever Higher Power we claim. If so, the space we have come to occupy in time will not be empty. It will be full of the good we have created.

And that’s my sermon.