Easter Dawn over the Mount of Olives

[Editor's Note: These reflections started from an Easter sermon from John 20, and travelled unexpected routes along the way.]

The remarkable thing about the accounts of Jesus’ resurrection is how low-key they are. A Hollywood producer would no doubt prefer major earthquakes, fireworks of some sort, an angelic host of SAS/Navy Seals abseiling from heaven, armed to the teeth, riddling the guards with bullets and blasting the rock from the tomb with plastic explosives. Or, at the least, there would be eerie ethereal music playing against bright backlighting as the stone magically rises and Jesus steps out, stretching his muscles after his long nap.

In the Gospels, however, the central action takes place off-screen. At one point we are told that Jesus was put into a tomb, dead. At the next point, the tomb is found empty.

At this point we must depend on the witnesses for what details there are. Their initial reactions are not particularly helpful. For one thing, it is the word of women that we have to take. I personally have no problem with this, it was the first century world that excluded the testimony of women as incredible (I am just reporting the facts, not endorsing them). It is notable that the Gospel writers include them as credible witnesses.

Not that Mary Magdalene is particularly helpful. In the Gospel of John she reports the empty grave, but assumes Jesus’ body has been stolen in a horrible act of desecration by his enemies. Simon Peter’s response is ambivalent at best. He takes in the burial cloths lying empty, and notes that the head cover was neatly folded, but we are given no indication of what he thinks of it. It is not surprising, given his shameful behaviour in the high priest’s courtyard, if he no longer believes in himself, let alone anyone else.

It is only an unnamed disciple who ‘sees and believes’.

The witnesses suggest the same variety of responses any one of us might have in that situation. Even Jesus’ followers were slow to believe anything other than that he was dead.

After this the accounts of Jesus appearing to people come from a variety of witnesses. The four Gospels offer different slants, and different people involved. Paul lists other witnesses over the following ten days: Mary Magdalene is the first; two men from Emmaus next; then, the eleven disciples with others huddling in the room where they had last eaten with Jesus; James, the brother of Jesus is name by Paul; then a crowd on the Mount of Olives who watched him depart (Paul numbers them at 500).

This is the witness of the New Testament. Indeed, the Gospel writers specifically relate the eye-witness accounts so that disciples not there may believe. We who hear the story today either believe, or do not believe.

The focus of these reflections is not on the rational evidence for the resurrection of Jesus (which is impressive for ancient documents), but on the ‘truth’ of the story. As Jesus said to Pilate, ‘Everyone who is stands for truth hears my voice’ (John 18:37).


This week a documentary about the Minoan civilisation was shown on English TV, by the luscious historian Bettany Hughes. She first relates the ancient myth of the Minotaur, the half man/half bull of King Minos who was offered the virgin daughters of mainland Greeks each year. Then she illustrated the story of the discovery of Knossos, in Crete. The uncovering of this palace that pre-dates Homer by a thousand years (so, about 2000 BC) unveils the basic materials of the myth. The walls are dominated by frescoes of bulls. As Hughes describes it, one can walk the myth, room by room, and feel it to be alive.

Behind the ‘myth’ was a true story. The creature with the body of a man and the head of a bull is a story related—in some way—to a ‘real’ story. That is, to real time.

J R R Tolkien, in his little known academic essay, ‘On Fairy Stories’, describes fantasy (or myth) as images that are not, or believed not to be found in our primary world (our ‘real world’). In fantasy, the three ‘primary colours’ of a story are recovery, escape, and consolation. Recovery is the regaining of a clear view of life; fantasy begins with the common, simple things of life, and places them in a fresh setting that allows one to regain perspective on the world.

Escape is not escape from ‘real life’ (a term Tolkien disparages effectively). Tolkien contrasts the escape of the prisoner from the flight of the deserter with the example of Nazism (the essay was written in 1938). A Party spokesman, he says, may have labelled those who fled Nazi Germany as traitors and deserters, and those who remained as patriots. Contrary to desertion, the companions of Escape are often ‘Disgust, Anger, Condemnation, and Revolt’. Fantasy in Tolkien’s mode is not desertion of the ‘real world’, but seeing reality more clearly, which leads to conflict with the ‘real world’. Which leads to catastrophe’.

In Drama this is called Tragedy. Fantasy, however, offers consolation, or the ‘happy ending’. Tolkien calls this ‘the good catastrophe’ (coining a term from Greek, eucatastrophe). This is not to deny the existence of sorrow and failure, but, ‘it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will), universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.’ In the fairy tale, the happy ending is ‘a sudden and miraculous grace; never to be counted on to recur’.

The use of the word ‘evangelium’ is pertinent here—the gospel is ‘good news’. And Tolkien approaches the Christian Story from this perspective. Here is what he wrote:

The Gospels contain a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories. They contain many marvels—peculiarly artistic, beautiful, and moving; ‘mythical’ in their perfect, self-contained significance; and among the marvels is the greatest and most complete conceivable eucatastrophe. But this story has entered History and the primary world…The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy…There is no tale ever told that men would rather find true, and none which so many sceptical men have accepted as true on its own merits…To reject it leads either to sadness or to wrath…But this story is supreme; and it is true…Legend and History have met and fused.

It is this truest story of the unique event of history—one particular man raised to life—that has become the lens through which ‘reality’ is discerned. This is the primary world of the Christian. The invitation to belief is not a call to abandon reason in favour of a Disney World fantasy. It is, rather, the compelling glimpse of the central truth of life.

Jesus is risen.

Jesus is risen, indeed.