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Re-Creating Easter VIII
Conclusion – Easter Dawns
Something happened! Lives were changed. God was redefined. Liturgies were reshaped. New holy days were born. Whatever Easter was, it constituted a transformative moment. It is easy to understand, given the enormity of these changes, how legends would develop to explain the power of the experience. People have a need to explain what has re-oriented their lives. The only vehicle we have in which to accomplish that explanation is that of human words. Can such a vehicle be adequate in the task of embracing ultimate reality? Human words can never transcend the limits of time and space, so whenever we are confronted with a reality that seems to do so we always resort to mythology.
So in the Bible we read of a mythical earthquake accompanying the moment that came to be called Easter. In that earthquake, we are told that the great stone covering the entrance to Jesus’ tomb was rolled away. We are told that people previously deceased awakened and walked out of their graves. We are told that angels appeared out of the sky to confirm these realities. There were even stories related about people who claimed that they had actually seen Jesus alive. Whenever human words cannot penetrate a mystery, we do not deny the mystery, we rather retreat into legends as the way to process the experience. The story of Easter is no different. Behind the legends, however, we inevitably move in search of the reality that inspired the legends. Legends do not arise out of nothing. We must, therefore ask: What was the reality that we call Easter that inspired the legends?
Was Easter the result of a supernatural invasion of the natural world? That is certainly the way it has been traditionally presented in the Christian religion. For this explanation to be persuasive, however, requires that all of the confusing and contradictory details be either ignored or repressed. Did a body that was dead on Friday get resuscitated so that this now revived person could emerge from the tomb alive on Sunday morning? Did a heart that had not beaten for at least thirty-six hours suddenly begin to beat again? Did a brain deprived of oxygen long enough to have destroyed its capacity to think reverse the inevitable cell destruction and suddenly begin to function again? Is this what resurrection was originally? No, of course not! That is rather what literal minds did to the story, bound as they were and are by the limits of our humanity. If the meaning of Easter was a revived body, newly alive, capable of eating, drinking, being touched and examined, walking, talking and interpreting the Hebrew Scriptures, then why, we must ask, is there no report of anyone other than believers who actually saw him? If the resurrection of Jesus had been a bodily resuscitation, then why did the biblical narratives attribute to Jesus non-physical capabilities? Luke has him materialize out of thin air to accompany Cleopas and his companion on their journey to the village of Emmaus. Following their sharing of a meal together in a temporary dwelling place in Emmaus, why was he said to have vanished out of their sight in an instant? Can a physically resuscitated body do such things? Or is this language revelatory of the fact that time-bound human words are being used to explain a timeless and transformative moment?
Could the same body that instructed Mary Magdalene in the Fourth Gospel not to “cling” to him later on in the same day appear in a room of a house in which the windows were shut and the doors locked? Could this revived body breathe the Holy Spirit into the disciples in John’s version of both Pentecost and the “the second coming?” Does not the language used by the gospel writers shout out the fact that whatever Easter was, it was beyond the boundaries of the human experience inside which words are designed to function?
If the resurrection of Jesus is to be understood as a physically resuscitated body, how does that restored physical body get out of the world? The way most of us accomplish that task is to die. Jesus tried that, it seems, and it did not work. He came back, vacated his tomb after three days and resumed his life, his habits and his relationships. This exit problem certainly occurred to the gospel writer we call Luke and he addressed it in a very specific way. More than any other gospel writer, Luke had turned the resurrection into a story of a physical resuscitation. So to get the physical Jesus out of the world, Luke introduced the story of Jesus’ bodily ascension into heaven. It probably made sense in the first century when people were unaware of the dimensions of space and believed that the flat earth was the center of a three-tiered universe with heaven being above the sky and hell below the earth. God was in heaven so the way to unite Jesus with God was to have him rise into the sky. It had happened before in the Hebrew Scriptures. Elijah had been transported into heaven in II Kings with the aid of a fiery chariot drawn by magical fiery horses and propelled by a God-sent whirlwind. So Luke simply wrapped that narrative around Jesus. It was also a story designed to meet the apologetic need to show Jesus’ superiority to Elijah. Jesus rose into the sky without the benefit of magic chariots, fiery horses or a supernatural whirlwind. While Elijah was portrayed as giving a double portion of his human spirit, to his single disciple, Jesus, the new and greater Elijah, was portrayed as sending God’s infinite Holy Spirit on all the people of the earth. The book of Acts, Luke’s second volume, says that the recipients of this gift of the Spirit were Parthians, Medes and Elamites as well as residents of Mesopotamia, Judea, Cappadocia, Pontos and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and part of Libya belonging to Cyrene and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes. For first century minds, that was a very broad description of the whole world. That world, however, lived on the far side of Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo. As Carl Sagan once said to me: “If Jesus literally rose into the sky, he did not get to heaven. He either achieved orbit or he sank into the infinity of space.” This clearly cannot be what the story of the resurrection or the ascension was all about. Out of the anxiety of our human insecurity, we have sought in our religious understanding to literalize the biblical legends because we have assumed that if these stories were not literally true; they were not true at all. It is that understanding that our study of these biblical texts regarding the Easter moment has been designed to destabilize. Something happened. Something changed those disciples, who had fled in fear at the time of Jesus’ arrest, into people willing to die for the reality of their vision whatever it was. Something forced these Jewish disciples to redefine God in such a way as to include Jesus within that definition. Can truth be truth and not be literal? Can reality be changed without an event that occurs in time and space? Is truth limited by the limits of our finite minds?
For weeks, perhaps months, Peter processed this Jesus experience, which had called him beyond all of his security boundaries. Peter roamed over the new dimensions of life to which Jesus had called him. That undeniable reality then collided with the other reality, namely that Jesus was dead. The religious traditions of his day viewed the death of Jesus as God speaking a profound “no” to all that he represented. When Peter tried to fit his Jesus experience into the religious categories of his day nothing came together. Traditional religious thinking always hides behind the barrier of “unchanging truth.” It presumes that there actually is something called “orthodoxy” that one can never set aside. Peter had, however, glimpsed in Jesus dimensions of life beyond anything he had ever confronted before. It forced him to lift his eyes beyond every limit and to cross over every human boundary inside which both God and human life had heretofore been forced to live. His mind played with these possibilities. Perhaps, he allowed himself to think that death is neither the punishment of God nor the end of anything but finitude. Perhaps the word God itself reflects a reality that is bound neither by time, by space, nor by any other human limit. Perhaps that also includes every theological definition of the past.
Perhaps, giving one’s life away in love to another, even at the cost of one’s own survival, might well introduce us to a new dimension of “Being,” a new dimension of consciousness. None of this became operative for Peter, however, until by the Sea of Galilee, after a particularly good catch during the night, he sat at dawn with his friends to break the fast. Taking a loaf of bread that they had on their fishing boat and fresh fish from their catch, they cooked it on hot coals by the shore. Peter then offered the ceremonial blessing that began every Jewish meal. He recalled the words of Jesus in this blessing, how it was that on the night before his crucifixion, he took bread, blessed it, broke it and gave it to his disciples, identifying that bread with his body broken for them. Bread and fish had been the symbols used when the multitudes were fed in the wilderness. Now bread and fish would be the symbols of this meal by the Sea of Galilee. This is when Peter’s mind opened to new possibilities; it opened to a new meaning of what God is. Jesus had transcended the limits of survival and had given his life away. Finitude was broken open to reveal a new dimension of life. That I believe was the moment when resurrection dawned. Peter was in Galilee when he saw, then he opened the eyes of the others so that they too could see. He was made known to them “in the breaking of the bread.” Resurrection was a breakthrough in consciousness to a new dimension of humanity. Finally, we understand the words attributed to Jesus: “Peter, when you are converted, strengthen the brethren.” Christians live today inside the new consciousness of Peter. Resurrection is ultimately about the call of God to each of us to live fully, to love wastefully and to be all that we are capable of being.
Our conclusion, therefore, is that Easter is not an event that happened in history, it is about the birth of a new consciousness, a new humanity, a “New Being” into which we are called to step. When we do so we become the “resurrected ones.”
John Shelby Spong
Read the essay online here.
Question & Answer
William Pillow, author of Souls are Real! Death is Not!, writes:
Question:
I admire and respect your work and I accept your skepticism about the metaphysical and paranormal. Reared as a Southern Baptist Christian and trained as a scientist (pharmacist), I was a lifelong skeptic of anything that challenged either my Christianity or any reality I could not physically sense until my beloved wife’s illnesses threatened to take her from me forever. My increasing anxiety while caring for her at home spawned new questions about my Christian faith. What now seems like providential synchronicity attracted my attention to what some scientists now call “the unknown.” I fondly remember your answer to a lady in Bloomington, Indiana, years ago who asked your opinion about near-death experiences. It took me fifteen years and the demise of my wife to find what I wanted, a firm yet incredible reassurance about death and souls.
So I read the Part I introduction to your new series on resurrection with great interest. If I may add to your wonder about Jesus’ appearance to the disciples in the locked upper room and to others, he also “vanished before their eyes after eating with them” in at least one verse. I now believe these claims were possible. In discussion with my Methodist pastor, he said I could assume that Jesus’ resurrection was the return of his soul to heaven. (Could Jesus’ intended message have been that mortal life is not final?)
I recognize that you are flooded with calls for your attention so I offer below a brief anecdote from one of the eminent Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s speeches entitled: There is No Death. It appears in my book Souls are Real! Death is Not! I think you will agree that her integrity is beyond doubt. For anyone willing to consider honestly the increasing multidisciplinary examples of experiential evidence for which scientific materialism has no defensible explanation, perhaps the “transcendent dimension of reality” in your introduction includes the humanly imperceptible “Almighty” and its realm, Heaven, and souls.
“She (Dr. Kubler-Ross) describes an unearthly experience that may illustrate the soul’s unlimited creativity. Kubler-Ross had decided to quit her demanding work with death and dying patients. A woman approached her in the hall and asked to talk with her. Dr. Kubler-Ross, the psychiatrist, had a strange feeling about this visitor. This person resembled a Mrs. Schwartz whom Kubler-Ross had known in her work, but that lady had died ten months earlier.
As they entered the office, the doctor touched the woman’s skin, which seemed tangible enough. The visitor pleaded with Kubler–Ross not to forsake her work. Wisely, Kubler-Ross said: “Do you know that the Reverend Mr. Gaines is in Urbana now? He would just love to have a note from you. Would you mind?” She handed the woman a piece of paper and a pencil. After writing the note, the visitor frowned as if to say: “Are you satisfied now?” as she handed it back to Kubler-Ross. When the woman stood up to leave, she repeated, ‘You promise?’ Kubler-Ross’s book reads, “And the moment I said, ‘I promise.’ She disappeared. We still have the note.”
With utmost respect and best wishes for your marvelous work!!
Answer:
Dear Bill,
I have great appreciation for Dr. Kubler-Ross, but I do not want to spend much time examining the “paranormal.” I do not deny the reality of those experiences, but I also do not want to base my work on anecdotal experiences that cannot be otherwise documented.
When I wrote my book on why I believe in life beyond death (Eternal Life: A New Vision- Beyond Religion-Beyond Theism-Beyond Heaven and Hell), I spent some time on near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences and the work of the world’s best para-psychologists. I even worked with the late Democratic senator from Rhode Island, Claiborne Pell to produce a conference held at Georgetown University on this subject. I have a deep interest in this matter, but it is not compelling enough to cause me to devote the time it would take to make me competent to speak publicly about these topics, so I simply do not do it. I encourage those who do have that interest to do so if this is their desire. My doorway into this subject has been to study the development and the dimensions of human consciousness. Even here, however, there is no time left in my life to develop the necessary expertise to talk or write about this subject beyond what I have done in my book on why I believe in eternal life.
I feel confident that life does not end in death, but always transcends it. I believe that in some manner this was also the insight of Jesus of Nazareth. I walk the Christ path into ever-expanding dimensions of consciousness. I have more questions than I have conclusions, but I nonetheless believe that life is so deeply interdependent that it must participate in eternity.
I salute you for your work in this area and I urge you to press on. I may not be walking beside you but I do applaud your efforts.
John Shelby Spong
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