Resurrection
What's to be done with the story of the Resurrection?
The Gospels give similar accounts of the fateful week now called Holy Week. Around the time of the festival of Passover, Jesus arrives in Jerusalem on a Sunday, riding a donkey colt (or a donkey with its colt in Matthew). In three of the Gospels, the next day he drives the commercialists out of the Jerusalem temple. On Tuesday, he gives a final message about a coming tumultuous time. Thursday, he has a final supper with his closest disciples — perhaps a Passover seder. Then, early Friday morning, he is arrested, later that day to be tried and executed — only to reappear the following Sunday, in his resurrected body, brought back to life.
The implications of this story — how much of it can be literally true, what it means for anyone living today — have been iterated in countless ways over the two succeeding millennia. Same with the significance of Jesus himself — the Anointed, the Messiah, the Christ. The four canonical stories invite us to consider that the absolute Consciousness that generates and sustains the universe took on human form for the sake of restoring a broken relationship between divinity and humanity. Mystics are quick to see an invitation for each of us to discover a similar Christlike consciousness in ourselves, while others emphasize Jesus’ role as shepherd, guide, and savior — able to protect us, arrange our circumstances, and help mold our lives according to God’s sometimes inscrutable will.
More secular approaches make a distinction between any historical Jesus and the supernatural archetype that grew around him — and can still speak reverently about both. As Reza Aslan puts it in his book, Zealot, in human culture Jesus is nearly infinitely malleable. And this seems appropriate, as anyone who is curious about the archetype is most assuredly invited to their own direct encounter, and surely each of these encounters is likely to be a little bit different.
Also, the iterations tend to converge around some basic qualities: Light, fire, power combined with meekness, gentleness, tenderness; mercy, service, and sacrifice. A lion and a lamb. Above all, love.
Jesus symbolizes divinity both vulnerable and resplendent — triumph through apparent defeat. God’s victory is achieved through submission, suffering, and death, and the implications are not only cosmically profound, they are formally intricate. During the festival of Passover, Jesus’ execution, as the Lamb of God, echoes the lamb’s blood put over the doorways of the Israelites as God fought for their liberation from Egypt in the very first Passover, more than a thousand years prior. So, nested in a religious tradition already full of patterns, fractals, and literary chiasms, during the festival of Passover Jesus, in his own Passover sacrifice, becomes a living chiasm himself. The story becomes compelling not only in multiple thematic directions, but in multiple dimensions of structure, concept, and time.
The most basic theme of death and renewal is easy to connect with. We live in a world where loss and attrition occur. That which has life wears, becomes lifeless. It’s gratifying to imagine that life can return, that restoration is possible. A story of the world re-infused with the divine is particularly resonant in the springtime, when something tangibly miraculous is occurring all around us. Trees flower and sprout. Creeks teem newly, day and night. Life does indeed return to the world — a gift completely apart from our own power to generate. (And we’d do well to remember it.)
Through an archetypal story of resurrection, we can suppose that anything worn and dead within us or around us could be resurrected: our hearts, our minds, our relationships, our various hopes. Forgiveness and resurrection reveal themselves to be intertwined because they are facets of the same principle. This whole living world might be resurrected, if we were to release our hungry, panicked, industrial clutching of it.
But also, the Gospels present a serious challenge, because they do not allow this archetypal story of renewal to exist merely in the abstract, apart from human events. Instead, they try to anchor a truly extraordinary idea firmly in the course of ordinary human history. The Gospels are adamant. It happened. Paul is adamant, too: Faith in the resurrection is a gateway to a program of salvation and restoration. Just believe!
But could such an event, so unlike anything that happens now, have actually happened? And what would it mean if these folks were testifying to something that hadn’t happened?
And what would it mean if they were testifying to something that had? Some people will never let go of their faith, and some people will doubtless never imagine that they could believe such a thing.
Personally, I find the Resurrection story mysterious. Frankly, I do think it’s possible for discarnate souls of certain attainment to manifest bodily in the physical realm — and it’s not a uniquely Christian idea. As with the rest of the Gospels material, and other writings about Jesus and the nature of the Christ archetype — as with the rest of the Bible, in fact — I see the Resurrection to be something that can be contemplated endlessly, to deeper and deeper revelation. And I think that’s worth doing.
There are so many people who carry around with them a comfortable version of the Jesus story — which is itself a testimony itself to its invitation and accessibility — without having really inhabited all there is to explore. And, mind you, you can explore freely, as an intelligent, open-hearted, free-thinking person. Many churches encourage free thinking, in fact — more than you would expect, and certainly more than their media representations would indicate. (Baptists, for instance, defend “absolute liberty of conscience” and explicitly refrain from one person enforcing beliefs on another.) Meanwhile, many of us cart around a few solid, simple answers without having even gotten in through the front door yet. There is much to contemplate, and much mystery.
Recently, I’ve been struck with a particular aspect of the story, which is the highlighted by the scholarly work of the Westar Institute’s Jesus Seminar, as reported in their book, After Jesus, Before Christianity: A Historical Exploration of the First Two Centuries of Jesus Movements. The Jesus Seminar characterizes the early groups of Jesus followers as diverse, but united by common themes of beloved community: sharing, forgiveness, support, and humor.
This good news was not about winning a great battle or gaining a material foothold. Nor was it about gaining assurance of life in the hereafter. What made a difference for these communities was caring for one another, bestowing forgiveness, being fed, finding a future, and being surrounded by companions.
. . . This sharing of experience went on in the midst of the Roman Empire’s systemic violence and domination. So the clubs and schools of the Anointed were an experience of good news and God’s empire in the face of Rome’s violence. Their stories of Jesus’s crucifixion and of others being tortured are featured in their writings, as well as at their meal gatherings. As the wine flowed and conversation unfolded, good news of God’s empire emerged in their everyday experience that challenged and mocked Rome’s empire.
. . . In major and multitudinous ways, the early Jesus movements resisted Roman domination and built alternative lives related directly to the strength of their inventive and multiethnic communities.
So, in contemplating the resurrection, you could begin from an extremely skeptical, secular, materialist perspective. Let’s assume Jesus was real — some people don’t, but let’s. What’s the most materialist, pragmatic way to look at any of this?
Certainly, it’s important to consider that Roman culture circumscribes the scene. All around, there is an imperial society saturated with themes of domination. Daily life in in Rome at the time appears to have been organized in a strictly hierarchical patronage system. Most Roman citizens had slaves. Throughout the empire, a state cult enforced worship of the human emperor as a god, and monuments to national achievements depicted Rome’s domination over other nations with images of rape.
Nestled within the hierarchical, violent empire, then, was the peculiar state of Judea — a feisty, independent province where a local ethnic group bewildered Roman authorities by fiercely adhering to its own monotheistic religion. And this province was beset by its own local troubles. A devout people, called to be a “nation of priests” by their God were themselves presided over by a what appears to have been a corrupt and cynical clerical authority who were apparently more interested in their own lifestyles than the spiritual benefit of those in need.
This is where Jesus launched his countercultural movement. He did not confront the Roman authorities — indeed, he sidestepped the Roman issue altogether, and in some cases he converted Romans. Instead, Jesus aimed his rebuke at the regional clerical leadership — more or less his own people — and then he was executed, by classic Roman method, apparently at the behest of these local leaders.
So, picture it: In Judea, a sea of troubles. Distortions of a true Jewish faith abound, enforced by a corrupt priestly authority, and this oppression is compounded by the presence of Roman police and governors, who server as a very deliberate reminder of the larger system of hierarchy and dominance that haunts the ancient world.
Jesus, one man, takes a stand for something more loving, self-abdicating, and pure. For three years or so, he preaches a message that is simultaneously far more down to earth and far more transcendent. He attracts crowds and grows in popularity. He is beloved. He is exalted as a worker of miracles. And then he’s arrested and brutally executed in one of the most painful and humiliating ways imaginable.
And what’s the result of that shattering execution? What is the impact of Jesus’ followers and devotees? Does the movement dissipate into confusion? Does it turn into a bloody, doomed insurrection — a foolish reflex of anger and grief?
No. Neither. The result is expanding networks of communities committed to sharing, support, forgiveness, good humor, and love. Two thousand years later, the diverse arrangements of believers are the largest religious group in the world, comprising almost one third of the human family. Jesus himself used the metaphor of a mustard seed. The seed is incredibly small, a pencil dot. But the plant spreads far and wide and resiliently.
The suggestion, throughout, the Christians would say, is that God acted deliberately in the world.
Even if you start with the most secular, ordinary, unadorned facts, I think you are still left with a profound story of life overcoming death. And that’s just from a skeptical version of the story.
You could say that it’s just the beginning.
That’s certainly how I see it.
Happy Easter. The Feast of the Resurrection. :)