Why Seek the Living Among the Dead?
Easter Day Year C; Luke 24:1-12
Luke’s account of the resurrection starts with an account parallel to the shorter and possibly fragmentary version in Mark (16:1-8), the coming of the women after the Sabbath on which they (and Jesus) have rested. Luke follows Mark in giving the reason; they are carrying spices to give traditional honor to the body of Jesus.
While in Mark the women are worried about how to move the stone, and Matthew records a miraculous intervention to explain its displacement, in Luke it has simply been rolled away, a fairly incidental matter relative to the really remarkable thing to be revealed, or perhaps its corollary. The cursory treatment suggests something more important than a stone may also be in an unexpected place.
All the synoptic writers depict a figure or figures within the tomb, meeting and instructing the women. Mark has one man in white, and Matthew interprets this figure as an angel, and also as the cause of the stone’s removal. Luke however reports two figures in white, while initially keeping to Mark’s ambiguity or mystery about why one or more white-robed people were hanging about in tombs and who they might have been. Only later, when the story is reported at second hand (24:23), will these two figures be interpreted—not by Luke as narrator, but by characters in the story itself— as angels.
The message of these men as recorded in Luke may be the most remarkable line in the Easter stories: “Why do you seek the living among the dead?” (24:5). Like the stone incidentally mentioned as rolled away, the fact that Jesus has somehow become one of “the living” is now a given rather than something narrated directly. Neither here nor in any Gospel is there a description of the resurrection itself; it is not the sort of event (if indeed “event” encapsulates this) like others to be told. Rather, what they find here is the aftermath; the body, like the stone, has undergone a change that is not explained, but must be reckoned with.
The scene itself and the angelic (?) commentary thus challenge the women to understand that the story of which they are a part is not the one they had assumed. A moment ago they seemed to be the pious bringers of the ointment they had carefully prepared (emphasized by Luke, who reports that they readied the materials before the Sabbath - 23:56). Now they find they are dealing with this quite different reality, where Jesus is alive and (like the stone) gone. They, and soon the other disciples too, must come to terms with a shockingly and joyfully different world, in which such things can take place, and have.
As in Mark, Galilee features prominently in the instruction given at the tomb, but here in a quite different way. The Galilean memory for Luke is not just of the glorious chaos of Jesus’ early popularity, and the former successes of healing and teaching, but of the predictions of the passion and resurrection. In being reminded of these, the women are told why this should not really have been a surprise, and was not actually a new story at all. The point is not a return to Galilee, but the fulfillment of what Jesus had preached and promised there.
What was foretold in Galilee will now take place in and around Judea, and Jesus will be found there, “among the living.” While Mark (and Matthew) had the disciples being sent back to Galilee to meet the risen Christ in the place of his upbringing and the beginning of the movement, Luke (like John) also knows stories of the now-living Jesus in Judea, close by. So the women are looking in the wrong place, but not by much; it is not Jerusalem versus Galilee, but the living over against the dead.
The only direct speech in this whole passage is this message given in the tomb. Michal Beth Dinkler notes that, across the Passion narrative, speech and silence becomes powerful narrative tools. The disciples in particular have become silent since the entry into Jerusalem. The women are, after the gentile centurion (and the mysterious inhabitant of the tomb), the first to tell the story (and in the Greek to “keep on telling” it [24:9-10], as Dinkler points out). The resurrection will gradually change the shape and feel of this narrative, as words and names reemerge among this group of those previously frightened and silenced.1 Note how even the women themselves come into focus as people with, at least in some cases, names (24:10) after the encounter at the tomb, as they take the story back to the others and speak persistently about the changed reality.
Luke like John also presents an awkward memory of initial scepticism among the male disciples, if not as developed as the Thomas story read next week (24:11). And as in John, Peter is the first of the twelve to seek some idea of what had gone on.2 This incomplete experience—he receives no verbal instruction, nor any encounter with Jesus at this point— for the most prominent disciple bookends the last time he appeared, the fateful denial scene (22:54-62).
Peter still comes and goes in silence. His observation of the tomb and the cloths is his own introduction to the changed world that Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the other women with them had already encountered. He receives no exegesis of the scene though, and goes with “amazement” that still suggests incomprehension rather than him joining with the women in the telling of the new story. He has still been seeking the living among the dead, and his reorientation is so far incomplete
So at least when edited as the lectionary does here, the Easter Gospel from Luke leaves us, like the ending of Mark, with a sense of anticipation more than of fulfillment. This is not a bad thing; the story is told as one that forces the characters themselves to reinterpret their own world, and to relearn who they are as well as who Jesus is. Some of this is about the future, but some of it is remembering what he had done and said in that Galilean past. For the reader the Easter message is, by implication, one in which we both view the past differently and also face the future with the possibility that the world is one in which stones may just have moved, and where those once thought dead can be sought among the living.
Silent Statements: Narrative Representations of Speech and Silence in the Gospel of Luke. Berlin/Boston, De Gruyter, 2013, 175-8.
Luke 24:12 is not in all MSS but is in the best ones, and uses characteristically Lukan language. Objections to its authenticity tend to find the verse too convenient or in harmony with John, but the actual textual evidence supports its presence.