Happy Easter! Right? So what’s there to be happy about? Let's be honest: Easter for Unitarian Universalists is a little bit uncomfortable. While all of our neighbors are celebrating the resurrection of the Son of God we're standing around with hands in our pockets trying to figure out what the hullabaloo is all about.
So what is the hullabaloo all about? I'm not sure any of us are fully aware of how deep our cultural roots grow into the history and tradition of Christianity. Even those who may deny the essential truths of the Christian Church are influenced by it in ways that are intricate and intangible. If we don't understand where Christianity came from and why, we will never be able to adequately understand our own motives.
A few weeks ago Terry and I celebrated our 30th wedding anniversary by flying to Italy for two weeks. Actually our 30th anniversary was two years ago, but it’s been a busy time for us. We visited Venice, Sienna, and Florence, as well as the Tuscan countryside, all of which was beautiful beyond imagination.
One of my favorite joys was to visit the churches. I toured the grandiose basilicas as well as the small parish churches. By the end of the trip I admit that I yearned to see something other than crucified Christs and angelic Madonnas.
I was particularly moved however by the artwork in some of the churches. During a rainstorm, Terry and I popped into a small church in the Tuscan town of Ratta. There were a couple of older people praying, so we stood at the back. Unlike the basilicas that have colorful frescoes covering every wall and ceiling, this parish had only two faded images on their front wall. To the left was the Madonna tenderly holding the baby Jesus, and to the right was Jesus on the cross.
It was so simple and unadorned. No angels. No haloes. It was so human. A mother giving birth to a child with all the hopes that a mother has. And then that child as a man dying on a cross with his hope as well as the hope of his mother and his friends that his death will mean something. This is what Easter means to me: the hope that our lives and death do mean something, that we can create an essence out of our existence which will continue to transform the world long after we’re gone.
We can better comprehend the story of Jesus if we see it as a metaphor which each one of us can learn from in our own way. And it is an extremely powerful metaphor, not only because it has been central in our culture for these past two millennium but because the person of Jesus and his passionate ministry strike at the core of what it means to be a human being.
I must confess that the man Jesus moves me to my depths. That hasn't always been so. In my younger days, I was both a fundamentalist and then an atheist. But over the past two and a half decades of my ministry I keep coming back to the words and life of Jesus.
My exploration of the historical Jesus has been a attempt to find the real man who has been buried beneath layers of layers of distortion and propaganda. The more I read and study the louder his heartbeat becomes. I do not see a mild mannered Messiah in the Gospels; I see a man of passion who was desperate to grasp hold of the truth and committed to the transformation of humanity.
One man who has helped me to hear the heartbeat of the real Jesus is John Shelby Spong, an Episcopal bishop from North Carolina who defies all the stereotypes. He seems to me to be more of a Unitarian Universalist than an Episcopalian. Ignoring his fundamentalist upbringing, he has dedicated his life to resurrecting the true spirit of Jesus.
Bishop Spong resuscitates the historical Jesus through the use of the "midrash." Midrash is the Jewish way of saying that all sacred events in the present must be connected to sacred events in the past.
For instance, the author of the book of Genesis shows the power of God working through Moses by portraying him as using God's power to part the waters of the Red Sea. When Moses died his successor, Joshua, needed to have his authority validated by showing God was present in his life as well. How could he do that?
The biblical author validated Joshua's authority by showing him parting the waters of the Jordan River. This midrash miracle made it clear to the Hebrews that not only was God present in Joshua, but he was also still at work among God's people.
The midrash tradition continued when Elijah was also said to have parted the waters of the Jordan River. This control over bodies of water became a sign of leadership for the Hebrews, but it also revealed that Israel's history was one continuous sacred story. Midrash stories permeate the Jewish scriptures.
Now, what does this midrash tradition have to do with Jesus? You might remember that the first act of Jesus after he was baptized was to walk into the waters of the Jordan River and then part, not the waters, but the heavens themselves. This midrashic method revealed the Spirit of God coming down to validate Jesus as the new carrier of God's power. What the Gospel writers were saying through this story was that Jesus was even more God-filled than Moses himself.
How else did Jesus show his God power? Well, walking on water wasn't a bad trick, was it? When the authors of the Gospels wrote this story it wasn't meant as a historical fact but as an allegory which would tell the people of their day that Jesus was a leader above all leaders.
Later the Gospels had Jesus proclaim himself as the "living waters" that would nourish people's souls. All of these references to water were based on the midrash tradition which had proclaimed for centuries that those who were God-filled could control the waters.
You might protest that none of these events actually happened, and that those who told and wrote the stories were devious. But then you miss the point. The point is that they did happen in the minds of the Jewish people. These stories were not meant to be historical but to be metaphorical expressions of faith.
When people looked into the face of Jesus they saw God there, and they wanted others to see what they saw. How did they do that? They used the accepted literary device of their day by linking Jesus with the other sacred leaders of the past and by showing God working through him.
The mistake made by the later church was that they took the Gospels literally. We also make a mistake when we take them literally in order to deny their truth. As Christianity pulled away from its Jewish roots, the newly converted gentiles didn't understand the midrash tradition. Not only were the Gospels translated and mistranslated from their original Aramaic into Greek, but they were transplanted from a culture that intrinsically understood the metaphorical nature of midrash into a culture that took words as literally true.
Now how does all this tie into resurrection and Easter? In about the year 70 of the Common Era the first Gospel was written. It's called Mark in our bibles today, but we have no idea who wrote it other than he was a Jew. Why did it take 70 years for anyone to write about the life and teachings of Jesus? Primarily because the early Christians thought that the New Jerusalem would soon descend out of the heavens (take note of that imagery), and so there wasn't a need to write about Jesus. But as time went by and it became evident that the coming of the Kingdom of God would take a little longer than expected, Mark realized that he better do some explaining.
The author of Mark could not have known Jesus or even many of his contemporaries, and he probably only knew the basic outline of his life and some of his stories. Following the accepted practice of his culture, whenever there were blanks in the details of the portrait of Jesus, Mark would simply search the Hebrew Scriptures to find material that could be attached to Jesus' life validating his claim to speak for God. Today we call that cut and paste.
Surprisingly Mark said little about the resurrection. As you heard in the reading, his account of the death of Jesus was brief and did not even include any supernatural agents. His Gospel actually ends without any mention of the disciples' belief that Jesus had been raised from the dead. It's clear from reading Mark that the early Christians did believe in the coming of God's kingdom, but they did not believe in a physical resurrection.
But then history changed, and so did Christianity. By the time the author of the Gospel of Matthew put pen to paper just a decade or so later, in the middle 80s, the city of Jerusalem had fallen to the Roman army and the sacred temple had been destroyed. It was also during this time that the Jews at Masada committed mass suicide to avoid being taken prisoners by the Romans. The loss of Jerusalem and the temple was catastrophic for the Jewish people, and it caused them to pull together and to fervently resist the claims of the upstart Christians.
The Gospel we call Matthew was written by a Jewish Christian who was trained in the art of midrash and eager to defend Christianity against Jewish attacks. This unknown author took the Gospel of Mark and adapted it to the new historical setting by heightening the power of the miraculous.
The young man at the tomb in Mark's gospel became a supernatural "angel of the Lord." His appearance was like lightening. He descended in an earthquake. The guards were struck dumb in fear. The angel removed the large stone from the mouth of the tomb.
Almost all of these ways in which Matthew changed Mark, as well as many more, were midrash rewritings. It's clear that the author of Matthew had borrowed the cave, the guards, and the stone from the Book of Joshua and the Book of Daniel, which had to do with popular heroes who were loved and respected by the Jews.
It was also clear to the author of Matthew that if the Kingdom of God didn't come when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem then it wasn't going to come anytime soon. So instead of emphasizing the apocalypse, Matthew made the physical resurrection his central theme. In the following two Gospels, Luke and John, the resurrection becomes even more essential and grandiose.
As the physical resurrection became a touchstone for Christians there came with it a denial of this world and greater expectations of the next. Everything that kept them attached to this life, including the beauty of nature, the joy of sexuality, and the love for fellow human beings, became associated with the demonic. All that lifted us above earthly concerns, such as solitude and monasticism, were considered to be truly spiritual.
As each one of the Gospels was layered on top of the other it was less connected with the real life and teachings of Jesus and more caught up in the midrash style of adding miraculous events so that he might look more God-like. At first, this midrash style was understood for what it was, simply as a literary device to emphasize the spiritual depth of Jesus. But as Christianity became more gentile and less Jewish those metaphorical images began to solidify as hard and fast facts.
I agree with the words of John Spong when he writes in his book, Resurrection--Myth or Reality: "At its very core the story of Easter has nothing to do with angelic announcements or empty tombs... It has nothing to do with resuscitated bodies that appear and disappear or that finally exit this world in a heavenly ascension. Those are but the human, midrashic vehicles employed to carry the transcendent meaning of Easter by those who must speak of the unspeakable and describe the indescribable because the power of the event was undeniably real."
What then is the meaning of Easter? In Wendell Berry’s poem, “The Mad Farmer Liberation Front,” he writes in the spirit of Jesus:
- ..So, friends, every day do something that won't compute. Love the Lord. Love the world. Work for nothing. Take all that you have and be poor. Love someone who does not deserve it.
- ..Ask the questions that have no answers. Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias. Say that your main crop is the forest that you did not plant, that you will not live to harvest.
...Expect the end of the world. Laugh. Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful though you have considered all the facts....Practice resurrection
I believe Wendell Berry says it well: "Practice resurrection." Our task on earth is not to leave it as quickly as possible and become cosmic couch potatoes. When Jesus taught us to practice resurrection he meant that we are supposed to struggle with the issues of the day, to reach out to those who are hungry, poor, and oppressed, to heal the sick and broken, and to breathe life into every moment.
That's why his crucifixion was so tragic: he didn't want to die; he didn't want to escape this life; he screamed from the cross, “Oh God, why have you forsaken me?”. But he believed that he must die on the cross so that others would have the opportunity to practice resurrection. He hoped that his death would open the hearts of all to the love of humanity and of God.
In a novel called Father Melancholy's Daughter, a man tells a priest what the resurrection means to him. He says, "The Resurrection as it applies to each of us means coming up through what you were born into, then understanding objectively the people your parents were and how they influenced you. Then finding out who you yourself are, in terms of how you carry forward what they put in you, and how your circumstances have shaped you. And then...and then...now here's the hard part! You have to go on to find out what you are in the human drama, or body of God. The what beyond the who, so to speak."
This is how we practice resurrection — not by checking out of life but by diving into the depths and struggling with who we are and who we want to be.
We practice resurrection whenever we uncover the layers of truth about the world and ourselves. We practice resurrection whenever we feel a sense of awe for this life we live, whether for a babies smile, the awe of a falling star flashing across the sky, or the mystery of death itself. We practice resurrection whenever we see the face of God in another human being or in an animal or a mountain or lake.
On this Easter day may we embrace life, not death. May we create, not destroy. And may we be joyful, though we've considered all the facts. Happy Easter!
FOR FURTHER READING:
The Gospel According to Jesus by Stephen Mitchell, Harper Collins Publishers, 1991.
Jesus--An Historian’s Review by Michael Grant, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1977.
A History of God by Karen Armstrong, Ballantine Books, 1993
Resurrection--Myth or Reality? By John Shelby Spong, Harper San Francisco, 1994.
