Laura has been located. The heavens and the earth rejoice. (We really do miss you Laura!)

In chapel today, there was the discussion of fear and what fears were acceptable (snakes, bugs, touching hot stoves) and that in all other cases, we have been given a spirit of adoption so that when we are afraid, we can cry out, “ABBA!!!” and we will be calmed by our Heavenly Abba. It was a good sermon and thankfully we weren’t sitting in a cold chapel around a fire pit that could have been lit and providing us with heat (not that this happened on Tuesday… noooooo….). The music was also out of This Far by Faith, which is the African-American hymnal, so it was lively.

My Borg/Wright paper will probably be on the sections entitled “God Raised From the Dead” and “Was Jesus God?”, in which Marcus Borg and N.T. Wright square off on the subjects of the resurrection and the divinity of Jesus. (All of this related to a book called The Meaning of Jesus where they pair a chapter by Marcus Borg with a chapter by N.T. Wright. It’s an interesting book and I recommend it for people who want to see what the spectrum of thought is in Christianity.) I’m choosing to write on these two because there is such a dichotomy between the two positions as Borg gives the standard Jesus Seminar responses and N.T. Wright gives the standard orthodox Anglican responses. And yes, I’m using this journal entry to organize my thoughts. (Welcome to Jen’s Mind. Please keep your arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times and do not exit the vehicle without letting the attendants know.) I’m much more pro-Wright than I am pro-Borg (mostly because I am one of those strange people who believes in the resurrection and that Jesus was the Son of God).

I appreciate Wright’s discussion of the theories on resurrection in the first part of the chapter. He talks about the Ezekiel 37 passage where God rebuilds bodies from bones to sinews to flesh to life. He also talks about the various spectrum of beliefs on the resurrection at the time of the Crucifixion from the Pharisaic belief to the Sadducees who did not believe in an afterlife. This is probably really boring to most normal people but it fascinates me, especially since our belief in most Christian churches is the resurrection of the body and it should be understood what that entails. Does this mean that when I die, I will come back a (divinely beautiful) 21st century femina or will it be a more perfect body? Next question, how will God accomplish this? I mean, when Jesus came back to see His disciples, He was walking through walls. The last time anyone tried that, they ended up bruised (and the subject of much ridicule and mirth). The disciples even test Jesus to see if He is a ghost.

Another thing that seems to relate to the resurrection was the Apostle Paul. He will acknowledge that his experience of being knocked off his donkey on the way to Damascus was the last appearance of Jesus Christ, and the fact that he took a 180 degree turn in attitude shows that this had to be something pretty darn significant. The disciples were the same way. They were hiding in a room because they were so afraid of the Jews coming and arresting them or ridiculing them for following someone like Jesus so blindly. There had to be something huge to change their attitude from completely dejected into completely victorious.

Next question: what about that empty tomb? I mean, you’d think if you laid someone in there on a Friday night, they would still be there on Sunday, especially if you rolled a rock in front of the door. The fact that it was WOMEN that first witnessed the empty tomb says something, especially since a woman’s testimony was worthless in those times. (No… Jen is not getting on the feminist Biblical scholar platform. Pipe down!) How did the body disappear and then appear elsewhere? The fact that the women were believed (and that it is noted that THEY found the tomb empty) says something. I’m not in the camp of Adrienne von Speyr who had visions of what happened on Holy Saturday (one of these things that my Systematic Theology Professor has mentioned) but I can accept that something did happen.

OK… lunchtime is here and I should probably eat before Liturgical Choir practice so I’ll add another entry of my “reflections” to this journal later. TTFN…