Mennonite Weekly Review

What a change from last week’s lesson! The story of Ruth takes place at least a thousand years before Jesus. It’s a long journey from a view of no conscious life after death to the hope of resurrection.

Halteman Finger

Up until the second century B.C. there are only hints in biblical writings about life after death, and they are usually metaphorical — Ezekiel’s dry-bones vision, for example. Not until Dan. 12:2-3, where “many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake,” do we hear of a more literal rising from death. Most scholars believe Daniel 7-12 was composed during the Maccabbean Revolt (168-165 B.C.), when many Jewish warriors were killed in their efforts to protect biblical law and practices. Some first-century Jews were also influenced by dualistic Platonic beliefs, where the body dies but the soul is immortal.

Since both Pharisees and Essenes in Palestine believed in resurrection at the end of the age (though Sadducees did not), it can be assumed that Jesus’ disciples also held that view. But all four Gospels portray them as utterly unprepared for bodily resurrection in the present. Though Jesus had recently raised Lazarus from his tomb, that was resuscitation; he would eventually die again.

They just don’t get it

Our printed texts both discuss Jesus’ bodily resurrection, one beforehand and one afterward. John 16:16-24 sounds enigmatic. Why all this discourse about “seeing me,” then “not seeing me,” then “seeing me again, because I’m going to the Father”? Jesus admits he uses figures of speech (verse 25), including childbirth (verse 21), to describe the desolation his disciples will feel while he is gone, and their joy when he returns. With hindsight we readers understand, but the disciples remain bewildered. When Jesus says he is leaving the world and going to the Father (verse 28), they announce that now he is finally speaking plainly! But they really have no clue.

In John 20 the figures of speech take on flesh. How many of us, especially women, have identified with the grieving Mary Magdalene as she hangs around the tomb, apparently robbed of its body. The one man in her life who had healed her and treated her as a person equal to the rest of his disciples was gone forever. The idea that “the Father” might raise him back to life is so far from her imagination that when Jesus approaches her, she does not recognize him until he speaks her name. The drama of that meeting — the utter amazement and wild joy — always brings tears to my eyes.

The apostle and the ‘gardener’

Several years ago, after teaching John’s Gospel in a college class, one student gave me a reproduction of an oil painting from the late 16th century of this scene, now in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy. Jesus is dressed as a gardener, with dirty bare feet, short tunic and gardener’s hat, carrying a shovel. Clutching funeral ointment, Mary struggles to recognize this earthy person as her beloved Teacher.

Though the resurrection accounts in the Gospels differ in various ways, all four place Mary Magdalene at the tomb. She becomes “an apostle to the apostles.” She and the other women, whose testimony would not hold up in court at that time, become the earliest witnesses to Jesus’ bodily resurrection. Women understood bodies. They gave birth and changed diapers. They washed and prepared the dead for burial. Can we trust the witness of these women? Our own hope of bodily resurrection depends on it.

We need more such women preachers, pastors and evangelists today.

Reta Halteman Finger retired in 2009 from teaching biblical studies at Messiah College and lives in Harrisonburg, Va.