Experiencing the resurrection

...John's story (remember our self-denying ordinance as regards the appearances) of the risen Jesus breathing on them and saying "receive the Holy Spirit" would then be a dramatization of the experience, by the newly enspirited disciples, of Jesus brought before them by the Spirit as the center and principle of the new life that God was bringing out of death...

...The content of such a supernatural conversion experience would be '' We know that Jesus has forgiven us our failure of him...

...The disciple to whom Jesus makes himself known puts far more into the experience than does the experiencer of a common event...

...One might move on from Schillebeeckx's position to the one I am groping for by saying that while the disciples did "leave Jesus in the lurch," much more importantly he left them in the lurch, where God alone could pick them up, where what picked them up could only be God, his Spirit filling their hearts with the joyous certainty that he who had failed them was now the new and eternal human being with whom they were "seated in the heavenly places...

...On the one hand, the scripture scholars have come to understand that the appearance stories are not circumstantial accounts but stories devised to illustrate faith in the risen one...

...The resurrection Kerygma says that he is now where all this-the teaching, the doing, the living, the total Jesus-intentionality-was headed: with the infinite Godhead...

...Jesus, the "new man" free of the captivity of sin, knew desire in its liberated state where it hungers, singly and all-consumingly, for God...

...The two most important facts about us are that we desire and that we die...

...I'm going to explain that...

...I recalled, and reread, a story that had moved me profoundly, A Separate Peace by John Knowles...

...The great Pauline Spirit-resurrection texts take on the kind of sense I am groping for, once it is understood that the Holy Spirit, for Paul, is never a merely believed-in divine agent, but an experienced reality, a felt total newness of life...

...This phenomenon is present with all charismatic leaders: how much more so must it have been present in the case of Jesus...

...A bereaved husband may well receive a supernatural assurance that his wife has forgiven him an injury...

...Hold on...

...He or she is being invited into faith, solicited at that deep level where consent may be given or withheld...

...Schillebeeckx tries to get from this to "Jesus is the Judge of the living and the dead": "It is the individual's experience of new being that imparts to faith the assurance that Jesus is alive or is the coming judge of the world...

...Gene's action came from a moment of sudden uncontrollable resentment...

...On the other hand, a better theological understanding had led to a far greater emphasis on the spiritual experience involved in encountering the risen one...

...And everything, it seems to me, points to the necessity of just such a presence of Jesus to ground the resurrection Kerygma...

...That, it seems to me, is the resurrection question for the contemporary theologian...

...Now suppose that, by some extraordinary means, someone were to cross that threshold while still alive...

...So the question becomes most urgent: how could their conversion experience have for its content "that Jesus, having died, is now taken into the Godhead...

...Eventually he finds it-very ordinary-looking, and only distinguished from the neighboring trees by climbing-irons up one side...

...But this creates a problem...

...We then flash back down the years, to Gene as a youth at the academy, coming completely under the influence of Finney, his opposite in every respect, daredevil athlete whereas Gene was bookish...

...But the content of her prayer experience was "the reconciliation of my brother...

...It was not "that he is the Lord of all...

...SEBASTIAN MOORE, O.S.B., a member of the Marquette University campus ministry, is the author of The Crucified Jesus Is No Stranger and The Fire and the Rose Are One, both Seabury Press...

...Jesus: An Experiment in Christology, p. 391, Crossroad, $27.50, 736 pp...

...is a question that has to be asked, with the utmost realism, by the disciple whom he has led beyond the horizons of this world but has nevertheless seen him disappear over the world's horizon...

...Our desire knows no limit, and our natural "psychic picture" of death is of the falling-away of all connections, all bonds - in fact, of all limits...

...What was the experience...

...But how does Jesus figure as content to that experience...

...Yes it is...

...Now this will mean that the catastrophic and horrible end of Jesus, the container, the vessel of their desire ("Heart of Jesus, desire of the eternal hills" I remember from a distant Catholic past) would bring their desire into that total crisis of desire that death will be for us, into that total emptying of the soul which only the infinite can succeed...

...The shift is necessary, for two reasons...

...My fantasy was, that if, on that later visit, Finney had appeared to Gene, whole and laughing, and embraced him, that would be an image of the way Jesus came to the disciples -who, as Schillebeeckx frequently repeats, had "left him in the lurch...

...they can't be taken at face value as can the account of the crucifixion...

...Supposing that he is right, and that therefore we may not invoke any appearance, and "coming before them," of Jesus to ground the resurrection Kerygma, then all we have as ground is their conversion experience...

...Could it be known from such a recollection-with-conversion that Jesus is the Judge of all humankind...

...The most formal statement he makes of his extremely nuanced position is: "May it not be that Simon Peter-and indeed the Twelve-arrived via their concrete experience of forgiveness after Jesus' death, encountered as grace and discussed among themselves (as they remembered Jesus' sayings about, among other things, the gracious God) at the 'evidence for belief: the Lord is alive...

...The question really is: how must Jesus be thematic to that conversion experience-as "he whom we left in the lurch but whose whole life proclaimed forgiveness...

...I believe that the disciples of Jesus did cross that threshold and there experience the all-transforming power...

...It seems to me that Schillebeeckx is still held, as I was last year, in the reconciliation-with-the-past model...

...A cousin of mine, a holy though eccentric person, received while she was praying a deep, quiet, and absolute assurance ("It was exactly as though I'd been there") that my brother, a submarine captain drowned in World War II, had made his peace with God...

...I think we intuit a connection between these two facts-vaguely and very inattentively...

...THE LIVING JESUS & THE DISCIPLES' CONVERSION Experiencing the Resurrection SEBASTIAN MOORE FOR some YEARS now it has seemed to me that the most important question for soteriology is "What were the experiences of the disciples of Jesus that climaxed in the realization that he was risen from the dead, and what was the climactic experience itself...

...Where the disciples were was ' 'dead, in a manner that broke out of the category of 'symbolic death' because their radical desire had met death in Jesus its awakener and focus, and where our radical desire meets death, that is real death, our death...

...This time Finney went first...

...But we have no experience of death as the delimiting of desire...

...IF the SPIRIT enlivened them, converted them, in that condition, if they experienced superabundant divine life as coming out of the death to which they had been reduced, then the center, the focus, of this life-out-of-death would have to be Jesus alive-out-of-death, his mission God-approved, his death God-intended, his final state God-outpouring, spirit-giving...

...This consisted in climbing the tree together, the first one up inching along a branch that hung out over the river, and jumping off into the water...

...The story begins with "Gene," the author, visiting his old military academy on a dank November day, seeking out "the tree...

...What the disciples "have going for them" after Golgotha, in this view, is: the recollection of Jesus, and the enormous intensification of this through a conversion experience produced-and Schillebeeckx would insist on this-by the Holy Spirit...

...All that the Master has said and done and been is still subject to the huge question mark of death, still "under death," still under judgment...

...And the whole Pauline idea of the believer as spiritually concorporatewith the risen one would have this same referent: of those original men and women coming out of death in the Spirit around the Master...

...With the knowing of the resurrection now deemed to be a spiritual experience of the disciples, and not like Columbus sighting the new land, what could have been the spiritual experience that demanded the amazing total utterance...

...Schillebeeckx tries to answer this question, and so do I. Now here is the answer I came up with last year...

...The more we understand the Holy Spirit as raising the disciples from the dead, the more we understand this new Spirit-life as concentrating for them in the crucified one whose death brought them beyond our limits into the "waste and void'' where only the Spirit of God creates and has for his primary creation the new Jesus, focus of the new faith...

...And as he was inching along the branch, Gene, just behind him on the branch, bounced, so that Finney lost balance and fell to the ground shattering both legs...

...Conversion takes many forms, because it takes you where you are...

...We do not know anyone who had died...

...I still think it's a good image, but-rather obviously, I now see-such a beautiful and haunting experience of reconciliation with the dead is hardly enough to make of the lost one the Alpha and Omega...

...This means that we live short of that total fulfillment which religious faith leads us to hope for: short, that is, of its indispensable threshold...

...Jesus, p. 392) That 'or' is quite something...

...More specifically, the inadequacy of the image lies in this, that the only resources on which the experience draws is the capacity of the psyche to dream up the beautiful reconciling image of Finney...

...My approach is the same as his...

...That's a tough one...

...Now desire experienced in this total and life-transcending form would be so new for the disciples that they would be quite unable to handle it by themselves: it would be wholly vested in Jesus: the awakener of the desire becomes its symbol...

...Everything demands it: principally that even the Master looks to be "perfected" in death-if there be such a perfecting...

...So they would know that if they did then experience fullness and joy and peace, that could only be the presence of this power...

...One evening, when Gene was coming to realize that through following Finney he was losing study-time and was in danger of flunking, Finney banged on his door as usual and said it was time for their evening "dare...

...The image of Hades or of Sheol witnesses to this psychic picture, this "soul in space" (the title of a short poem of Rilke's on death...

...And no psychic experience, of the reconciliation-with-the-past kind, is sufficient to ground it...

...Both of us have found necessary a shift from the old approach, in which the risen state of Jesus is clearly established-for the disciples of course, even in that approach their experience was a necessary element-by the appearing of Jesus, who eats fish and blesses bread, and by the empty tomb...

...Jesus is Lord of living and dead, at the right hand of the Power, etc...

...It was out of this climactic experience that the Good News was proclaimed...

...I would absolutely agree that a conversion experience, produced by the Holy Spirit, is the sufficient and only "receiver" for the resurrection encounter...

...Their conversion, the conversion of the dead, would be uniquely revelatory of that power...

...They would know what the dead know: that total emptiness which only the absolute world-creating power could fill...

...It is not required that Finney himself be present, made whole in and through death...

...Still, the conversion of the disciple is the point: Schillebeeckx has seen this, and we must never forget it...

...In short, the scholars say the appearance stories are stories of newborn faith, and the more interesting theologians are happy to have it that way...

...This condition was what James P. Mackey calls a "contagion" which the disciples caught from Jesus...

...What has happened to him...

...And when he says that, dead as we were, "God brought us to life with Christ," he could be referring to the post-Golgotha conversion, of which God is the agent, Spirit is the heart's felt moving, and Jesus is the radiant center...

...People to whom I explain my approach to the resurrection say "Your approach is like that of Schillebeeckx, isn't it...

...IN his long exegetical sifting of the texts, where he and I are dependent on the experts, Schillebeeckx reaches the conclusion that "the resurrection was believed in before there was any question of appearances" (Jesus, p. 354...

...Certainly, but is this enough, is that the nub of the matter...

...It was the experience itself that was proclaimed, as the new condition of freedom, peace and joy that God was creating on this earth...

...The resurrection has, from the beginning, been believed to establish Jesus as the Christ, Alpha and Omega, Judge of the living and the dead, bearer of the name that is above every other name...

...We've all had enough of a "resurrection" that was as empirically grounded as it was spiritually arid...

...And it is a statement of where death brought Jesus...

...is, then, the soteriological question...

...It is a statement about Jesus now, about the present and enduring state of Jesus...

...My reason for this belief is as follows...

...For both of us the center of gravity, so to speak, of the resurrection is the experience of the disciples...

...Soon after, resistant to all treatment, Finney died...

...And when Paul speaks of' 'the Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead," he could mean "the Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead for you, that brought you to life with Jesus as your luminous center...