Kathleen Rushton's interpretation of the section in John 20 reveals resurrection as a living in a new time or re-creation.

The story of John 20 is shaped around giving a theological answer to the spiritual question: “Where is the Lord?” Although this question is posed by Mary Magdalene, it is not presented as a personal problem but a community one for she answers in the plural “we do not know where they have laid him.” (John 20:2). 

Mary represents those who have not understood the meaning of “the hour” of Jesus. She is seeking Jesus whom she associates with his corpse. Equating the person with the body and body with flesh is precisely what Easter faith must transcend. Personified, in Mary, is the theological problem of how the earthly Jesus (the Word made flesh) relates to the glorified and risen Jesus. Later, the scene with Thomas suggests this is precisely the problem for the disciples of Jesus for all time. Scripture scholar Sandra Schneiders sums up this concern as: “The historical experience (of the disciples) of the nonhistorical reality (the glorified Jesus) somehow mediated by the body (which is what we mean by the risen Jesus).” What is the significance of the body? What does body mean?

Body as a symbol of the self

In our materiality, the body is a symbol of the self in four ways. 

First, the body grounds identity through change — every cell is replaced every seven years. The same person, the same individual is revealed through photos at aged ten, twenty and sixty. The body holds both change and identity.
Second, the body makes a person one in her/himself and distinct from all others. The embodied self is marked off inwardly and outwardly from everyone else.
Third, the body is the ground of interaction with others, allowing one to be present, to speak and hear, to touch and be touched, to interact with others physically and spiritually.
Fourth, the body enables each person to be part of a network of relations among others. This means that all of the people who relate to an individual in some way relate to one another.

Let us consider the post-Easter Jesus. All the differing biblical accounts of Jesus’ resurrection attest to the fact and significance of how Jesus is present among his disciples.

First, the risen Jesus was recognised as being identically the same person whom the disciples knew pre-Easter in his earthly life.
Second, in the appearances of the risen Jesus, his disciples encountered someone who was really present, able to be seen as a distinct person.
Third, the disciples could interact with Jesus — they could see him, talk to him and touch him.
Fourth, the disciples found themselves sharing in common their relationship with Jesus in the present. As they talked about their experience with one another, they knew they were talking about the same person.

“Saw and believed”

Gaze at the photo of the family tomb of Herod the Great (37-4 BCE). Jesus may well have been laid in a similar tomb by the well-to-do Joseph of Arimathea. Imagine Mary Magdalene as she discovers the sealing stone had been removed. For Jews of Jesus’ time, the tomb, with its sealing stone, was the final sign of being cut off from life. A sign that Jesus was not in the power of death and was alive with God is that the tomb was open and empty.

Imagine Mary running to Simon Peter and the other disciple. Run with them to the tomb. The other disciple waited for Peter to enter. The evangelist tells us: “the cloth that had been on Jesus' head, [was] not lying with the linen wrappings but rolled up in a place by itself” (John 20:7). We are told the other disciple “saw and believed.” What is going on here? What did he believe? The next verse relates that “as yet they did not understand the scripture that he must rise from the dead” (John 20:9). Possibly, not the empty tomb or the linen cloths led the other disciple to believe but the face veil. This was not a normal burial cloth because the word used for face veil is related linguistically to the face veil worn by Moses to protect the people of Israel from the glorification of his face when he encountered God on Mount Sinai (Exodus 34:27-35). In John, Jesus’ death is the victorious culmination of his life. “Exalt” or “lift up” speaks of the lifting up of Jesus on the cross (eg, John 3:14; 8:24; 12:32). The word “glorify” describes the effect on Jesus of his “lifting up” in crucifixion (eg, John 7:39; 12:16; 12:23; 13:31-34).

Re-creation

The narrative enters its second phase, John 20:19-29, not at the garden tomb, not with the first disciple but on the evening of the first day of the week “where the disciples were gathered” as a community. The focus now is a new question: “How can the Risen Jesus be experienced?” The centrepiece of John 20 is the verses 19-23 when Jesus “stood in the midst” of the community. 

Two actions, initiated by Jesus, unfold. His “Peace be with you” fulfills his promise to give a peace the world cannot give (cf. John 14:27; 16:33). He shows them his hands and his side. Even though glorified, his bodyself wears the marks of his paschal mystery, continuity and discontinuity with his pre-Easter body, his taking on the flesh of all living creatures.

Repeating the gift of peace, Jesus commissions the new People of God as God had commissioned him. He “breathed on them” saying: “Receive the Holy Spirit” (John 20:22). The verb “breathed on” is found only here in the New Testament and three times in the Greek Bible (of the early Church) referring directly to creation. Jesus’ action, for example, evokes God giving life to the Earth creature (adam) who was formed from the Earth (ha’adam) with God’s breath (Gen 2:7). As the Holy Spirit is poured into the hearts of the disciples, the Church is founded. We are not told that Jesus leaves or departs. He has returned to his own. He never leaves, he will come and come again. He is present and knows what happens in his community as is seen in what follows.

Where does the final scene, John 20:24-29, with Thomas, and the concluding John 20:30-31 fit? Nothing suggests anyone was missing on Easter night. Thomas, however, was “not with” the gathered disciples and is one of generations who will know the Resurrection not through the experience of Easter but through the testimony of the Church: “We have seen the Lord.” Thomas refuses this new structure of faith. He does not doubt. At that point, he refuses: “I will not believe." (Jn 20:25). Believing or not believing and their implications are always a choice in this gospel.

Implications? The background comes into the foreground. As I am piecing this together, Radio NZ’s Kim Hill is interviewing Chris Clarke, World Vision NZ’s CEO, who visited Iraqi Kurdistan and Lebanon recently before the launch of the Syrian refugee appeal on 7 March. Some 3,500,000 refugees have left Iraq in the biggest movement of people since World War II. About 2,000,000 refugees are in Lebanon, a country about the size of Northland, where one in three people are refugees. He quotes a woman refugee who looked him in eye and said: 

“Go back and tell our story, make sure we are not forgotten.”

Published in Tui Motu InterIslands April 2015.