The Gospel is a story about a missing body.
The Christ, which many Jews associated with a renewed Hasmonean polity (under a supernaturally aided Davidic king), was not in Jerusalem. When Herod sought to slaughter the insolent Babe, he was not in Bethlehem. When Mary and Joseph searched for their Son, traveling back from the Passover feast, he was not with them. When Christ began his Ministry, he disappeared into the wilderness to combat the devil. When the mob sought to make him king, or stone him for impiety, he slipped away. The Christ was never in the place that the many thought he was.
Of course this leads to the more dramatic grasping. Christ was seized in Gethsemane. He was dragged before the trials of Caiaphas, Herod, and Pilate. He was presented before the crowd. He was beaten, mocked, and strapped to a cross. He was forced along a piligrimage to the Place of the Skull, that hard bone that is the locus of our spirit's most glorious faculties. He was nailed to a piece of wood before the many and the few. He was handed over to his enemies.
But such only led to the great miracle of vanishment. The cross lay empty as his flesh was entombed, only to disappear before the terrified myrrh-bearers. Mary came across an empty tomb. Peter and John discovered a barren grave and empty burial clothes. When Mary sought to grasp the Risen Lord, Jesus rebuked her. Do not touch me! Even Christ's indulgence to enflamed Thomas was not taken up. Didymus did not poke his finger, but fell on his knees. An empty cross and an empty tomb are essential to the heart of the Christian faith. But so too is the empty Christ. As a Stranger joined disciples on their way to Emmaus, they did not know who was amongst them, but as soon as he took broke bread, they saw, and...gone! Did not our hearts burn, they asked, as he taught us the Scriptures concerning the Christ? Yet he was no more! Then, of course, Christ ascended to his Father, vanishing behind a cloud.
But the Christification of man continued apace. The persecutor Saul heard the Resurrected Christ, but the Lord vanished from blinded eyes. The apostle Philip instructed the Ethiopian, but was taken up and transported at the completion of his task. Peter was jailed for preaching Jesus as Lord, but he slipped out of the hands of his jailers, appearing as a ghost to his friends. The fist epistle from John exclaims that the Beloved Disciple teaches what had been seen and touched, yet it was a faith that was no longer seeable or touchable. Thus he admonishes to love the brethren, whom we have seen, to demonstrate the love of God, whom we have not see. The same was raptured up to the Heavenlies on Patmos, only to be thrown back to Earth, living out his days in Ephesus. Paul also claimed to ascend to the Third Heaven. How does one go back to *this* empirical world, after witnessing such beauty that vanished before mind's eye?
Thus goes on two-thousand years of what some may consider a confusing saga or idiot's tale. It is wrong, but understandable, why Higher Critics interpreted Christianity as the failed remnant of an apocalyptic messianic movement of immanence. The Church was cope for the delay of the Kingdom, so they say. But the theologians often conspired to prove the critics true. Time flattened out into an endless succession of victory-by-defeat. The christianized Social Democracy, across Europe and the globe, is the default sense of divine providence. Things will get better, more rights made available, the endless uplifting of the third-world and migrants. The Church (which has metamorphosed from throne&altar to NGO) is the mechanism to lubricate this mission through parliamentary statute and humanitarian outreach. Christ will come back when we finish "repairing the world", the parousia as the social justice that we've confected along the way, the endless streaming effort to supply health care, women's rights, sexual minority rights, racial rights in congruence with Black Lives Matter, the dignity of the infirm, medical rights to vaccination and reproductive care, surgery and medication that fully aligns man with his preferred identity, to fully establish the image of every I until it is entirely consonant with the popular will. A break,
be-cause
if the theologians and the critics are right, Christianity is doomed and damned. But it's a matter of perspective. When Christ ascended, was that a divine failure? A rejection of the loftiest dreams of "love ye one another"? Should we - must we - build upon the abandoned cornerstone and complete what God failed to do? As the Psalms complain: is God asleep? But perhaps that may be a summons to join him in dreamland. Is divine absence an embarrassment, or is it the very means of presence? As Paul admonished, through Scripture, the Word is not in Heaven or in Hades, but in our Hearts. It is neither above nor below, realms beyond Human access (as much as we seek to control death and immortality). It is in our mouths. To speak "Christ Jesus is Lord" and believe in your heart that God rose him from the dead is the very means of salvation. It is in the swift nothing of the wind, the endless azure of the skies, it is in the insuperable gap between two people (no matter how intimate) that one recognizes the Kingdom at hand.
Whatever disagreements one may have with Huldrych Zwingli, it was something of this truth that he recognized. He was a heart-felt gospeler in the tradition of Erasmus. It was not only in the perfunctory rites of ecclesiastical discipline, as both Erasmus and Luther noted, that God may be replaced with a disciplinarian devil. It was also in the aesthetics of worship that one may lose the Beautiful for the aesthetic. The threat of idolatry is not simply to worship another God, or to worship God wrongly. It is also in failing to recognize the absence of divine presence. Grossmunster remained a gothic chapel, that forced the Christian to contemplate the Space. Statues, rood-screens, images of all kinds, even elaborate words and instrumentation, may take away from the very peculiar sovereignty of God. The dead gods we find decorated with garlands are swept away. For the Living God is not contained or bound to our various ornaments, as if we must construct an elaborate labyrinth to hide the body.
But the threat runs even deeper into the written word, which may also be confused with the Living Voice. A systematics text may accidentally fall into an idea of itself as the very Word of God, but such has already wandered off. Even the devil may quote Scripture, though to ill effect, though the noble Bereans never ceased to search the Scripture to verify the Truth.
It is in the midst of what seems empty that Presence is eternally at hand. On the sixth day God rested, but where? Christ has sat down, but upon what throne? He is King even now, but
He is not *here*!