Imagine then that the body was buried but somehow was taken from its burial place.
The world then (for the imagined story is 2000 years old) was a place where the very air you breathed was laced with religion; it was the accepted world order. It had been so for the young man and for his followers and so it is not surprising that the absence of the body and the whole story of his life was reinterpreted in religious terms. I wonder too whether, when you really want to believe something, it in some way becomes true. The encounter on the road to Emmaus may perhaps be an example.
Could this be the story of Jesus? And if it is, is that it?
At heart there was what some people call the Nazareth Manifesto:
"The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favour."
I just wonder whether the reversal of the world order, of which the young man spoke, is possible? Perhaps now, with the world turned upside down, its time has come for 'imaginative hope' to take the words of the Archbishop of Canterbury in his sermon for Easter, 'we dare to have hope in life before death'.
