“Joe Hill ain’t dead,” he says to me,
“Joe Hill ain’t never died.
Where working folk are out on strike
Joe Hill is at their side.”
I grew up in one of those concrete suburban Methodist churches, built at the end of the 1960s. I was going to describe the architecture as “brutalist”, but apparently the correct term is “ecclesiastical minimalist”. The minister was youngish and veered towards the trendy. He ran youth groups with names like “Sunday Session” and “Questers” and made the drama group stage an impenetrable play called Christ in the Concrete City.
Sunday Session used a hymn book that may have been called Youth Praise and was already looking quite dated. Some of the songs had verses to be sung by “girls” and other verses to be sung by “fellows”. It included a pop lyric that went.
Hey, crazy mixed up generation
There is only one solution
Jesus is the great sensation….
Oh dear. Two other hymns stick in my memory. One, fairly well known, went thus:
He lives! He lives!
Christ Jesus lives today!
He walks with me!
He talks with me!
Along life’s narrow way!
He lives! He lives!
Salvation to impart!
You ask me how I know he lives?
He lives…
Within…
My heart….
The other, relatively obscure, one went
The stone was rolled away
from where the saviour lay!
that glad and glorious day
when Jesus rose again!
A living saviour he
for all eternity!
From sin to set me free
who died and rose again!
A bit of light googling reveals that “He Lives!” was one of five hundred songs written by an American Presbyterian pastor named Alfred Ackley, who died in 1960. But the only trace of “The Stone Was Rolled Away” that I can find on-line is in a Kenyan Christedelphian service book.
Everyone remembers that in 1984, David Jenkins (soon to become Bishop of Durham) was accused of saying that the resurrection of Jesus was “a conjuring trick with bones”. Nearly everyone knows that he actually said that the resurrection of Jesus was not a conjuring trick with bones. But the misquotation did not entirely misrepresent his intention. His view was that the story about Jesus’ body disappearing from his tomb, if historically true, would only amount to an astonishing and puzzling event, without further religious significance. It follows that the resurrection is not reducible to that story. He didn’t directly say that he disbelieved in the story but he certainly thought that it was inessential.
The National Theatre’s legendary production of the Mysteries (based on the medieval mystery plays) which premièred a year after Jenkins had given his misunderstood interview, literally depicted Jesus’ tomb as a conjurer’s cabinet. The actor playing Jesus was placed inside, it was sealed with chains by the Roman soldiers, and revealed to be empty just as the actor playing Jesus emerged from the other side of the auditorium. Trap-doors and body-doubles may have been involved.
I don’t suppose that the two hymn-writers substantially disagreed about their theology. I imagine that the one who wrote that the stone was rolled away felt that Jesus lived in his heart, and the one who said that Jesus lived in his heart believed that the stone had been rolled away. But as lyricists, they chose to emphasise different things. One says that the entrance to the mausoleum had been unexpectedly unblocked, and therefore they believe that the occupant is still alive. The other doesn’t mention bodies or interment at all, but says that Jesus is alive because they feel that Jesus is alive.
This is not, incidentally, very good theology. Poetry never is. I suppose the writer could be saying that Jesus promised that he would come back to life after his execution, and also promised that he would send the paraclete, the Holy Spirit, to his disciples. Since the hymn writer feels the presence of the Holy Spirit, he trusts that the other promise was fulfilled as well. It is presumably as heretical to say that the Son is present in the heart of the believer as it would be to say that the Holy Spirit was crucified? But as a sensible trainee pastor once remarked to me “Now you are trying to be more sound than the Apostle Paul.”
But the real glitch is the more obvious one. “You ask me how I know he lives? He lives within my heart!” invites the response “You ask me how I know he doesn’t live? He doesn’t live within my heart!”
Some people believe (or speak as if they believe) that the resurrection was a phenomenon: the moving of an immovable stone, the inexplicable vanishing of a corpse, tangible encounters with a being who eats and can be touched and has scars and wounds on his body. Others believe (or speak as if they believe) that the resurrection was and is the subjective or spiritual experience of feeling close to Jesus.
The two views are, in principle, separable. You might think that the followers of Jesus came to believe that he was alive because his tomb was empty; you might think that they started to tell stories of an empty tomb because they felt that he was still alive. Certainly, someone might accept that a corpse came back to life supernaturally without necessarily feeling that the owner was continuously communicating with them personally. Equally, someone could experience a vivid spiritual presence while remaining agnostic on what several women called Mary may or may not have found in a graveyard two millennia ago.
The man we call Saint Paul very much believed that Jesus was alive: we are told that some Athenian philosophers formed the mistaken opinion that he was advocating the worship of two new deities, one named “Jesus” and the other named “Resurrection”. It is open to question whether Paul knew the story of the tomb, the stone, the angels and the female witnesses: if he did, he doesn’t ever refer to them. If you had asked him how he knew Jesus was alive, he would presumably have replied “I know because Peter saw him, James saw him, a big group of Christians saw him, and finally, I saw him.”
It is easy to miss the fact that Paul is our one indubitable eye witness to whatever the resurrection was. At least some of the epistles in our “New Testament” were definitely written by Paul, and in those epistles, he definitely claims to have seen the risen Jesus. But these first hand accounts are rather obscure: Paul says simply that Jesus “appeared” to him, and that “God revealed his son to me”. The second-hand accounts in the Acts of the Apostles describe what seem to be visionary experiences: Paul hears Jesus’ voice but his companions do not. And Paul himself is explicit that he didn’t learn about Jesus from eye-witness testimony or oral tradition, but by direct supernatural revelation. He believes what he believes because God told him so directly. I don’t say he would have taken the tomb tradition to be secondary or inessential or that he would have talked about conjuring tricks, but I think he would have come down on the side of the first hymn-writer: Jesus lived in his heart.
But was he merely using flowery language? When Paul says that he heard Jesus’s voice and that God’s son was revealed to him, perhaps he really only mean that he sat down and had a jolly good think and decided that the evidence about the carpenter being the long awaited Messiah stacked up awfully well, and that it followed that it was more important to have faith than to keep the Torah…? Come to that, when Rev Ackley talks about being in constant dialogue with Jesus, maybe he means nothing more than “I do find some of those stories and parables in the Bible awfully helpful”?
When I was a kid, I thought that people who talked about encountering Jesus literally meant that they had encountered Jesus: a physical form with a beard in a nightie and sandals had walked into their room. Visionary experiences like that do happen, or at any rate, people allege that they happen. How many pious Catholics have seen the virgin Mary? But then, how many distraught relatives have seen Granny sitting in her old rocking chair?
A Sunday School teacher once told me about a good Christian gentleman in our village who had given up a lucrative banking career to work for a charity “because God had told him to”. My immediate response as a child was that I wanted to ask him what God’s voice sounded like, and if he really had a beard. Thank Crom I never did. Obviously I now see that “God told him” meant “He had a really strong conviction that this was the right thing to do”.
People who use this kind of language--whether it is Paul or Alfred Ackley or the old man in my village-- are usually sincere. When they say that Jesus lives in their hearts, that he talks to them directly, or simply that they have been “called” to become preachers or missionaries or nuns, they are not talking about nothing. Like Johnny Cash, they were there when it happened so I guess they ought to know. And it is entirely possible that Paul was talking about something a lot bigger and more world-changing than a strong morally intuition that perhaps he ought to stop stoning Christians to death.
But I am now going to ask a hard, and possibly, offensive question.
What is the necessary connection between those feelings and the phenomenon of a body vanishing from a locked mausoleum?
Do people who don’t believe in the anomalous tomb phenomena ever have spiritual experiences or strong moral intuitions?
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