Redemption and resurrection

Sometime in October last year, I joined a pilgrimage that traced the steps of St Paul when he preached the Gospel among the Gentiles in key ancient Mediterranean cities. It was a follow up to a pilgrimage I took the year before in Israel, similar to the one that made news this year because Sen. Bong Revilla and family participated in it.

Organized by Pastor Peter Tanchi of the Christ’s Commission Fellowship (CCF), the pilgrimage sparked in me some thinking and fascination about the historical moorings of my faith.

I like history… I like learning about historical figures and how they influence us today. But Biblical history is something different. It touches on the foundation of my faith. It either supports or questions the basis of what I have been taught to believe about my faith.

I have been intrigued enough by the pilgrimage experiences to finally join my wife in attending the weekly service of CCF. Most times, the CCF Sunday service had something new that broadens my knowledge of my Christian faith. But as I have often told Pastor Peter every time he asks me about my “prayer life” that I am still trying to digest it all.

I know where you are coming from, Pastor Peter told me. Having been in UP at about the same time I was there, he said he can understand why I can’t resist being instinctively tentative.

Pastor Peter takes his mission seriously. The Sunday “sermon” is a lot longer than the ones I am used to in a Catholic Mass. But to their credit at CCF, they try to make the Bible as relevant today as it was in the early days of Christianity. 

Even then, there have been enough times when I felt the pastors disappointed me… Like some Catholic priests, there is this tendency to assume they are under no real obligation to explain the whys. I do not understand why priests and pastors underestimate the ability of people to deepen their faith through an increased knowledge of Christian Theology.

They said maybe I should be in a “D-Group”, something like the early Christian small groups, a “cell” strategy also used effectively by the left leaning groups at UP during my college days. In CCF, you graduate from being a “D-Group” member to being a leader and even a pastor. In UP during our time, you ended up leading the NPA or the NDF.

 I am not sure I will fit in a CCF “D-Group” full of confirmed believers. I don’t want to infect them with my disbelief. 

I believe in God but I have had a lifetime as an unbeliever of a journalist, trained to question much of everything. I also grew up with a great regard for the rigors of science, thanks to a father who did double blind tests to prove the efficacy of new drugs in the field of medicine. None of those prepared me to take too many things on faith alone.

One thing I learned from my CCF pilgrimages is that my faith has historical and thus, factual basis too. Archeological findings seem compelling.

I am eternally curious. The two pilgrimages and I suppose the weekly exposure to CCF have stirred enough within me to want to find out more. For example, last year’s tracing the steps of St Paul introduced to me a St Paul who is apparently a lot more important than he seems to have been given credit for.

 For someone who started as a vicious persecutor of early Christians, his conversion on the road to Damascus seemed to have made him one very driven and very committed disciple of Christ. Maybe all I need is my own road to Damascus… EDSA perhaps in rush hour?

We visited the places where he preached: ancient Corinth, a few hours away from Athens, Ephesus in what is now Turkey and Thessaloniki in northern Greece. Those were not easy places to go to during his time. 

We used an air conditioned tourist bus, a cruise ship and even a regular airliner to reach those places. St. Paul, on the other hand, walked most of the time. We even saw the ancient “highway” he took. He had to settle disputes among believers, suffer detention and persecution from the Romans and local officials and even work as a manual laborer in between to earn his keep.

Last week, as I was browsing at Fully Booked, I came upon a book by a religious historian on St Paul. “Paul and Jesus” by James Tabor was a fascinating read.

Paul never met Jesus… That’s how the book opened. But the influence of Paul on the emerging Christian religion was overwhelming. Tabor thinks Paul is the “founder” of Christianity that we know today.

Apparently, in the early days of Christianity, there was one group under the original apostles based in Jerusalem charged with sharing the Good News with the Jews. Then, there was Paul whose mandate is to convert the Gentiles.

The Jewish branch was very concerned about Jewish customs. St Paul was not. For example, the Jewish Christians insisted on circumcision while Paul, a Pharisee himself, didn’t think it mattered for salvation.  

Eventually, Tabor says the “Jewish version of the Christian faith faded away and was forgotten due to the total triumph of Paul’s version of Christianity.”

St Paul’s letters contain the intellectual substance of our faith that our modern religions don’t really explain enough. The Acts of the Apostles may as well be renamed the Acts of Paul, Tabor observed.

As I was thinking of a Holy Week column, there it was in Chapter 2, Rethinking the Resurrection of the Dead. It is a perfect topic because the resurrection is the bedrock of Christianity.

This is Tabor’s take: “When Paul says Jesus was ‘buried’ he is indicating that he knows the tradition of Jesus’ body being put in a tomb (1 Corinthians 15:4). His point is to emphasize that Jesus truly was dead and buried.

“What was then ‘raised on the third day,’ was not the perishable mortal body but a new spiritual body, no longer ‘flesh and blood, the old body having been shed like discarded clothing (1 Corinthians 15:42-50; 52-54).’”

Indeed, the empty tomb is a visual symbol of our faith. I saw that tomb when we were touring Jerusalem. Or at least, that was what they said was the tomb where the body of Jesus was laid after the crucifixion.

What happened to the body of Jesus?

The historians are debating it. One theory is that Joseph of Arimathea, took the body from its temporary tomb to a permanent one right after the Sabbath ended on Saturday evening. So when the women went to look for it on Sunday morning, it was no longer there.

Here is how the Tabor book handled it: “One recent historian wrote, after comprehensively surveying the historical and archeological evidence: ‘The reality is that there is no historical explanation for the empty tomb, other than if we adopt a theological one, i.e., the resurrection…’”

Tabor wrote that after all those years of analyzing New Testament gospel accounts, “the answer to this insoluble problem was found in the letters of Paul… Paul is the essential missing piece for understanding historically this most important cornerstone of the Christian faith.”

In 1 Corinthians 15:17 “If Christ has not been raised,” the apostle Paul preached, ‘your faith is futile; you are still in your sins.” Paul’s entire understanding of salvation, Tabor explained, hinged on what he understood to be a singular cosmic event, namely Jesus’ resurrection from the dead.

“Paul’s understanding of the resurrection of Jesus, however, is not what is commonly understood today. It had nothing to do with the resuscitation of a corpse…

“Paul understood Jesus’ resurrection as the transformation --- or to use his words --- the metamorphosis, of a flesh and blood human being into what he calls a ‘life-giving spirit’ (1 Corinthians 15:45).

“Such a change involved ‘putting off’ the body like clothing… ‘putting on’ a new spiritual body with the old one left behind (2 Corinthians 5:1-5).”

That is why the best announcement ever made to humanity was the one made to the devoted but astonished women looking for Jesus outside a tomb carved out of a rock in Jerusalem: “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here; he has risen!” (Luke 24:5-6).

 Indeed, this is the Good News we await as we go through Good Friday. Some things we do have to take on faith. This is one of those that makes us feel it is right to do so.

On Easter Sunday, let us think of Resurrection as Jesus Christ’s triumph over death… and our key to redemption. Now, because Christ lives, we too, will have that chance to live. 

Happy Easter everyone!

Boo Chanco’s e-mail address is bchanco@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @boochanco