[Dialogue] Spong: (third article) "Easter: In Need of Reinterpretation!"; Bigger, Stronger, Wiser, Kinder

Thu Apr 13 08:35:52 PDT 2017

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Bigger, Stronger, Wiser, Kinder
By Cassandra Farrin

After a hard winter for many of us, of deep snows and lost loves, in this holy week commemorating death and resurrection, the cherries and pears and plums are blossoming and our thoughts are opening with them. What are we also becoming? In Chapter 4 of the Dhammapada, “Flowers,” the Buddha is said to have offered this teaching:
A monk should dwell and act in the village,
Like a bee extracting honey from the flower
But leaving the flower and fragrance intact.
Pay no attention to the harsh words uttered by others.
Do not be concerned with what others have or have not done.
Observe your own actions and inactions.
Like a beautiful brightly colored flower without fragrance
Is the well-spoken word without action.
Like a beautiful brightly colored flower full of fragrance
Is the well-spoken word and the deed that matches the word.
When the Buddha says pay no attention… he does not conclude pay no attention to others but rather, pay no attention to the harsh words. Likewise, a bee extracting honey is not the same as a drill extracting oil. One action is certainly gentler than the other. When we are attentive to our words and actions, it should be an act of love. It’s the place to begin. Radical changes may be wrought on the world by beginning in this place, the blossoming of conscious words, actions, and inactions.
I think we get truth backwards. Truth is not the root from which we grow but the fragrance from the bloom. In a sense, truth can be acknowledged only after an experience awakens our sense of it. The root is relationship—with others, with the world, with God. This is a difficult but important outcry at a time when we’re all wondering what it means to live in a society suddenly flooded with phrases like “post-truth” and “alt fact.” I feel the need to become grounded, and perhaps you do too, so please allow me to share a story with you that is grounding me through this painful time.
Five years ago my twin sister and I adopted two children, 2 and barely 4 years old, who survived more violence in their most vulnerable years than I have in my entire life. Their birth family, Marshall Islanders who emigrated to the United States for work and lost their children due to neglect, could not have known that the kids would be placed with an abusive foster family. So the children’s suffering escalated from the bare pain of hunger to the acute pain of abuse. At the time we adopted our kids, the abuse had not yet been discovered, and we confronted each horrific revelation as it was unburied.
Perhaps the greatest lesson I learned from our process of transitioning from Stranger/Other to Family was the meaning of our foster parent trainer Erma Brundidge’s mantra: “bigger, stronger, wiser, kinder.” Be the bigger person, be the stronger person, be the wiser person, be the kinder person in every situation—not just one of the four, but all four.
Children who have suffered often relive their suffering because it is what they know, so when the children come into your home, you may find that they intentionally recreate the chaos that drove them through your door. Perhaps you know people like this. We often carry our childhood traumas into our adult lives. I remember lying in bed one night only a couple months into our adoption and suddenly realizing, much to my horror, that I was identifying with the abusive person who hurt my children instead of with my children themselves— Why? In the drama our new family was unwittingly playing out, the children were waiting for the monster to emerge, and we could sense the monster, too. We just didn’t know who or what it was.
Let me circle back for a moment to our foster care and adoption training, because this is just so critical to understanding the rest of my family’s story. My sister and I joined that training with many other couples, of course, including several who had struggled for years to conceive. As these couples in particular shared about all the self-doubt and indignities of infertility treatment, it became clear that they were expecting a lot of their future adoptive child: this child would be the healer of their wounds. What a burden for a child! Yet also, can’t you just feel the ache of the would-be parents, too? Painfully, one couple was not accepted by the department as foster parents because their desire for a perfect, healing child was so overwhelming. How were they going to be “bigger, stronger, wiser, kinder” for a child who had suffered when their own suffering was so raw and intense they could barely see past it?
Rainer Maria Rilke understood God as belonging to the world and often expressed God through the metaphor of roots and soil, as that from which could be drawn sustenance. He believed in the reciprocity of the mundane and the divine; God, too, can wither and fade like a plant without water or like a father forgotten by his son. Rather than saying, “God cannot be one who relies on me,” Rilke inverted darkness into one of relationship:
Whom should I turn to
if not the one whose darkness
is darker than night. The only one
who keeps vigil with no candle
and is not afraid—
Sometimes I imagine God as a foster child on that first night in a new home, wondering who is keeping “vigil with no candle” for her. She is a being capable of infinite love and grace and extraordinary action in the world, and yet in such absolute darkness she doesn’t even know who or what she is. Relationships make security—truth, understanding—possible for her, for us, for God. I sometimes also imagine God as the weave of all those relationships, and yet I think we have to appreciate that God is a living idea. I find it helpful to maintain the tension between God as a candle waiting to be lighted and as the light itself.
Returning to my own family’s story, our breakthrough moment came when our daughter’s counselor encouraged us to believe that our children wanted our love and were not afraid of us. They were afraid of a monster none of us could see, and we—my sister and I—were mistaking ourselves for that monster. We felt the children’s fear; we just didn’t realize it was directed at something else. So we took responsibility for our own household and we set the tone of our family’s relationship as something other than fear. We began to demonstrate brazenly, excessively, wastefully, that here was a space for love, safety, and fun. And it worked. The terror that seemed to pursue us slowly dissipated, and home became a refuge for us all.
Old patterns have a way of resurfacing under strain. Our family confronts these secret terrors whenever we lose our equilibrium, so mindfulness and connection have become critical to our survival. Yet it does work, and we are living proof of it. I hope that you can take some encouragement from this when you are feeling fearful. To speak the truth in power means to speak from one’s relationships first and foremost, by being “bigger, stronger, wiser, kinder,” and to set the tone for one’s own household and community. So let me once again ask, what are we becoming?
~ Cassandra Farrin

Read Online Here
About the Author
Cassandra Farrin is the marketing director of the Westar Institute and the editor of Polebridge Press. Her poetic retelling of the Nag Hammadi text On the Origin of the World is forthcoming in Gender Violence, Rape Culture, and Religion (Palgrave Macmillan). A US-UK Fulbright Scholar with more than ten years’ experience with cross-cultural and interfaith engagement, she has an M.A. in Religious Studies from Lancaster University (England) and a B.A. in Religious Studies from Willamette University.

Question & Answer

Terry R. from the Internet, writes:

Question:
Hi Eric, I enjoy what you have been saying about Jesus, and I am becoming much more progressive than I used to be, but still I have a hard time understanding why someone with your beliefs still remains a Christian? If the Jesus you still “believe” in is not the Jesus that resurrected and was God incarnate, then why do you still call yourself a Christian?

Answer: Answer by Eric Alexander

Thanks Terry. That’s a very honest (and common) question I hear a lot. I would start by saying that I only use the word Christian casually. I call myself a lot of things depending on the context. As it relates to Jesus, I more often call myself a Jesist, which you can see more about here. But with the proper disclaimers, caveats, and addenda I don’t mind the word Christian either.
Additionally, I feel a sense of responsibility to help spare the younger generations from much of the indoctrination and deconstruction that I had to go through. As someone who has become educated I want to keep a foot within Christianity and help guide it toward a more meaningful existence. If everyone who finds some degree of enlightenment bails out, then it only leaves behind the fundamentalist echo chamber, and that is a scary thought to me, both spiritually and politically.
~ Eric Alexander
Read and Share Online Here
About the Author
Eric Alexander is an author, speaker, and activist. He is a board member at ProgressiveChristianity.org, and is the founder of Jesism, Christian Evolution, and the Progressive Christianity and Politics group on Facebook. Eric holds a Master of Theology from Saint Leo University and studied negotiations at Harvard Law School, and authored the popular children's emotional health book Teaching Kids Life IS Good.

Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited
Easter: In Need of Reinterpretation!

The Christian Faith was born in the experience that we have come to call Easter. It was this Easter experience that invested Jesus with a sense of ultimacy. It caused his followers to regard his teaching as worthy of being preserved. It was the reason that Saint Paul could write, “if Christ has not been raised then your faith is in vain.” Clearly without Easter there would be no Christianity. That assertion hardly seems debatable. At this point I discover that I am at one with the most literal fundamentalists.

What is debatable, however, is the question of what the experience of Easter really was. Here the distance between the Christianity of biblical scholarship and the Christianity of the fundamentalists opens and begins to widen. Fundamentalists are quite sure of their truth. On Easter the crucified Jesus, who was laid in the grave as a deceased man on Good Friday, was by the mighty act of God, restored to life on Easter. He had thus broken the power of death for all people. If the body of Jesus was not physically restored to life, the fundamentalists claim, then Easter is fraudulent. There can be no compromise here. Those who waver on this foundational truth of Christianity have, according to this perspective, abandoned the essential core of their faith tradition. Well, my only comment on this would be to borrow the words from an old song and say, “It ain’t necessarily so!”

When one reads the New Testament in the order in which these books were written, a fascinating progression is revealed. Paul, for example, writing between the years 50 and 64 or some 20 to 34 years after the earthly life of Jesus came to an end, never describes the resurrection of Jesus as a physical body resuscitated after death. There is no hint in the Pauline corpus that one, who had died, later walked out of his grave clothes, emerged from the tomb and was seen by his disciples.

What Paul does suggest is that Easter meant that God had acted to reverse the verdict that the world had pronounced on Jesus by raising Jesus from death into God. It was, therefore, out of God in a transforming kind of heavenly vision that this Jesus then appeared to certain chosen witnesses. Paul enumerates these witnesses and, in a telling detail, says that this was the same Jesus that Paul himself had seen. No one suggests that Paul ever saw a resuscitated body. The Pauline corpus later says, “If you then have been raised with Christ, seek the things which are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God.” Please note that the story of the Ascension had not been written when these Pauline words were formed. Paul did not envision the Resurrection as Jesus being restored to life in this world but as Jesus being raised into God. It was not an event in time but a transcendent and transforming truth.

Paul died, according to our best estimates, around the year 64 C.E. The first Gospel was not written until the early 70’s. Paul never had a chance to read the Easter story in any Gospel. The tragedy of later Christian history is that we read Paul through the lens of the Gospels. Thus we have both distorted Paul and also confused theology.

When Mark, the first Gospel, was written the Risen Christ never appears. The last time Jesus is seen comes when his deceased body is taken from the cross and laid in the tomb. Mark’s account of the Resurrection presents us with the narrative of mourning women confronting an empty tomb, meeting a messenger who tells them that Jesus has been raised and asking these women to convey to the disciples that Jesus will meet them in Galilee. Mark then concludes his Gospel with a picture of these women fleeing in fear, saying nothing to anyone (16:1-8). So abrupt was this ending that people began to write new endings to what they thought was Mark’s incomplete story. Two of those endings are actually reproduced in the King James Version of the Bible as verses 9-20. But thankfully, these later creations have been removed from the text of Mark in recent Bibles and placed into footnotes. The sure fact of New Testament scholarship is that Mark’s Gospel ended without the Risen Christ ever being seen by anyone.

Both Matthew, who wrote between 80-85, and Luke, who wrote between 88-92, had Mark to guide their compositions. Both changed, heightened and expanded Mark. It is fascinating to lift those changes into consciousness and to ask what was it that motivated Matthew and Luke to transform Mark’s narrative. Did they have new sources of information? Had the story grown over the years in the retelling?

The first thing to note is that Matthew changes Mark’s story about the women at the tomb. First, the messenger in Mark becomes a supernatural angel in Matthew’s story. Next Matthew says the women do see Jesus in the garden. They grasp him by the feet and worship him. This is the first time in Christian history that the Resurrection is presented as physical resuscitation. It occurs in the 9th decade of the Christian era. It should be noted that it took more than 50 years to begin to interpret the Easter experience as the resuscitated body of the deceased Jesus. When Matthew presents the story of the risen Jesus to the disciples, it is on a mountaintop in Galilee where he appears out of the sky armed with heavenly power. Recall once again that when Matthew wrote this narrative the story of Jesus’ ascension had not yet entered the tradition.

Luke follows Mark’s story line about the women at the tomb, stating that they do not see Jesus in the garden on Easter morning. Luke, however, has turned Mark’s messenger into two angelic beings. He has also transferred the locale of Easter to Jerusalem specifically denying Mark’s words spoken through the messenger that Jesus will meet them in Galilee. Luke has heightened dramatically the physicality of Jesus’ resuscitated body. In Luke, the resuscitated Jesus walks, talks, eats, teaches and interprets. He also appears and disappears at will. He invites the disciples to handle his flesh. He asserts that he is not a ghost. Finally in order to remove this physically resuscitated Jesus from the earth, Luke develops the story of Jesus’ Ascension.

Even in the Ascension narrative, however, Luke is not consistent. In the last chapter of his Gospel the Ascension takes place on Easter Sunday afternoon. In the first chapter of Acts, which Luke also writes, the Ascension takes place 40 days after Easter. Whereas the messenger in Mark, who becomes an angel in Matthew, directs the disciples to Galilee for a meeting with the risen Christ, Luke specifically denies any Galilean resurrection tradition. He orders the disciples to remain in Jerusalem until they are endowed with power from on high. The narrative is clearly growing.

In John, the Fourth Gospel (95-100), the physicality of the Resurrection is even more enhanced. In the 20th chapter of this Gospel Jesus appears first to Mary Magdalene in the garden and says to her, “Mary do not cling to me.” One cannot cling to something that is non-physical. Then John suggests that Jesus ascends immediately into heaven before appearing, presumably out of heaven, that night to the disciples, who are missing Thomas. Though Jesus appears able to enter an upper room in which the windows have been closed and the doors locked, he is once again portrayed as being quite physical. This physical quality is further enhanced a week later when Jesus makes a second appearance to the disciples, this time with Thomas present. It is in this narrative that Thomas is invited to touch the nail prints and to examine the place in his side into which the spear had been hurled. All of these appearances take place in Jerusalem.

Chapter 21 of John’s Gospel portrays a Galilean appearance much later in time after the disciples have actually returned to their fishing trade. Here Jesus directs them to a great catch of fish, 153 of them to be specific. Then he eats with them. Finally he restores Peter after his three-fold denial.

The Easter story appears to have grown rather dramatically over the years. Something happened after the crucifixion of Jesus that convinced the disciples that Jesus shared in the eternal life of God and was thus available to them as a living presence. This experience was so profound that the disciples, who at his arrest had fled in fear, were now reconstituted and empowered even to die for the truth of their vision. This experience had the power to force the Jewish disciples to redefine the God of the Jews so that Jesus could be seen as part of who God is. Finally this experience was so profound that it ultimately created, on the first day of the week, a new holy day that was quite different from the Sabbath, to enable Christians to mark this transforming moment with a liturgical act called “the breaking of bread.”

When these biblical data are assembled and examined closely, two things become clear. First something of enormous power gripped the disciples following the crucifixion that transformed their lives. Second, it was some fifty years before that transforming experience was interpreted as the resuscitation of a three days dead Jesus to the life of the world. Our conversation about the meaning of Easter must begin where these two realities meet.

~John Shelby Spong

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