Saving Christianity from Easter
 Column by Rev. David M. Felten
August 16, 2018
I’ll always remember the day I was kicked out of the Fountain Hills “Ministerial Association.” It was Tuesday of Holy Week and the President of the group (then an ELCA Lutheran, now an LCMC pastor), walked into our staff meeting and informed me that there “wasn’t a part for me” in the upcoming “community” Easter Sunrise service.
I drove over to the then PCUSA Presbyterian church (now ECO) to ask the pastor there (who I wrongly assumed to be sympathetic) what was going on. His response was, “I agree with the rest of the clergy. Frankly, if I believed what you believe, I’d have no reason to get up on Easter morning.”
Having voiced my metaphorical take on Easter the previous year, one thing was clear: these purveyors of the conventional Easter story were worried. Why? Because they know that the woo-woo supernatural conventional take on resurrection is wearing thin – and they’re desperate to keep a lid on it. In the case of both of the above pastors, their solution was to distance themselves from me and my heretical ways and then tack to the right to join more fundamentalist denominations, taking their churches with them.
But for those who aren’t willing to join such folks in circling the wagons and going backward theologically, Bishop Spong’s reflections in Unbelievable offer a clear path forward into the future. One of his most concise theses challenges what many conventional Christians consider the last stand of “true” Christians: unwavering faith in Jesus’ literal and physical resurrection. In short, Spong’s alternative is both gratifying and profound in its transcendence of traditional Christianity’s fixation on the literal.
Spiritual NOT Physical
Spong, ever the whistle-blower, begins his exposé of the Biblical accounts of resurrection with our earliest “witness,” Paul. Predating the Gospel accounts by close to 20 years, Paul’s mentions of Jesus’ “appearances” are sketchy, at best. The word Paul uses to describe the experience of those encounters, opthe (the Greek root of the English word “ophthalmology”), is clearly used to convey something more than a literal, physical event. Paul’s descriptions don’t describe an empty tomb OR a resuscitated body. Paul’s list of witnesses are folks who’ve had a breakthrough of understanding – an “aha” moment that renews their vision of life and the possibilities attendant to living into the purposes that Jesus expressed in his life and death. Like Genesis’ Joseph or Isaiah’s suffering servant, Jesus chose love instead of revenge. Whatever you’d like to say the historical Jesus’ message was about, it was not about winning. It was about absorbing the world’s hostility, draining people of their anger, and returning it to them as love.
Jesus’ life was not an expression of a judging, vengeful vision, but was about manifesting a way of life that wasn’t driven by mere survival. Jesus’ life was grounded in a commitment to freeing people to love beyond their boundaries and their fears – beyond tribe, race, ethnicity, gender. This is the kind of love that enabled him to give his life away.
For those who “got it,” Jesus’ resurrection was shorthand for the transforming realization that Jesus had taken humanity to a new dimension – moving our life’s purpose from self-preservation to a universal interconnectedness – an awareness of the oneness of all things. Those who were “witnesses” to the resurrection had, in effect, “seen the light.”
It shouldn’t surprise us that the gospels then took Paul’s more spiritual concept in a totally different (and literal) direction. Exhibit A can be found in the various endings of Mark. At first, our humble original gospel had absolutely no account of Christ appearing – no physical appearance whatsoever. This “oversight” on Mark’s part so bothered early Christians that they took it upon themselves to add new endings (cf. Mark’s “longer” and “shorter” endings you’ll find in your Bible).
Mark’s original Easter story portrays women coming to the tomb and discovering the stone moved and a young man dressed in white announcing, “He is not here!” and “Go tell the Disciples…”. But instead they run off without saying anything to anyone, “for they were afraid.” That’s the original Jesus-free gospel description of Easter – a story that hinges on the message of the white-robed messenger: return home and go about the business of making what you’ve learned from Jesus a reality in your everyday lives. The message to the original readers is akin to: “Look, somebody’s got to do it. All the disciples ran away and can’t be counted on.”
But that wasn’t good enough. As later “appearance” stories were added to the narrative, it’s as though we can see the earliest signs of the literalization of Easter happening right before our eyes.
Later, Matthew magnifies the miraculous and, as Bishop Spong suggests, “closes the loopholes” Matthew thinks Mark has left open. The young man in white becomes an angel (with a wardrobe upgrade!) and offers a much more supernatural message: “Jesus has risen from the grave! He goes before you to Galilee.” The women are faithful (not afraid) and do indeed tell the Disciples, to whom Jesus then appears. It is helpful to note that this is the first narrative of a resurrected Jesus being seen by anyone in the whole Bible – and it was written 50+ years after the events described.
For Matthew, the resurrected Jesus is not “physical” but appears and disappears in various encounters, culminating in what’s called “the great commission.” Bishop Spong acknowledges that Jesus’ final words in Matthew are traditionally interpreted as an evangelical charge to go forth and “convert the heathen.” But, as there was no church to convert anyone to at the time, it makes much more sense to hear the great commission as Christ reminding the disciples of just what Jesus demonstrated in his life: “to go beyond your boundaries, your fears, your lines of security: learn to give yourselves away and know that you are part of who I am. We cannot now be separated!” What a difference!
Then along comes Luke, upping the ante to TWO angels, an unmistakably physical body for Jesus (eating, drinking, walking, teaching) but still possessing the handy ability to dematerialize into thin air. These alleged physical appearances leverage the need for Luke to pen the story (absent from the other gospels) of what’s come to be called the ascension (a narrative Jack covers in another chapter).
Then John, who is not satisfied with just one resurrection story, generates four!
1. Mary Magdalene discovers the empty tomb and goes to fetch Peter and the beloved disciple. While there’s no body, the beloved disciple “believes” (ushering in the idea that “belief without seeing” is the ultimate litmus test.
2. Mary Magdalene lingers at the tomb and has a chat with the gardener, who (surprise!) turns out to be Jesus. As if to say, “Don’t cling to the physical. That’s not what resurrection is about,” the gardener says, “Don’t hold onto me.”
3. Jesus appears to the disciples and they “believe.” Thomas is absent.
4. Cut to eight days later: Jesus again appears to the disciples – including Thomas, who now confesses his belief. Jesus then disses Thomas with, “You get it now? By the way, it will be better in the future if folks believe without having to see me, OK?”
What are we to make of all these disparate and conflicting stories (besides yet more evidence that followers of Jesus have seldom agreed on anything)? Namely, whatever historical events did or didn’t happen, early efforts to describe and document Jesus’ transformation from 1st century rabbi to cosmic god-man tried to recast a subjective awareness into objective fact. Perhaps the gospel writers and early champions of the faith could have made today’s interpretive challenges less complicated if they’d been familiar with the mantra of our #fakenews generation: “You’re entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts.”
“What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.”(i)
In the final analysis, the Biblical evidence of the Easter experience is clearly not about a physical body walking out of a tomb. “It is far more profound than that,” writes Spong. It is about the Divine being seen and lived out in human experience. Paul and the gospel writers do their very best in trying to describe (with 1st century imagery) what is essentially a change of worldview and purpose in people’s minds and hearts. In Bishop Spong’s words, true resurrection happens only when “we live fully, love wastefully, and become all that we are capable of being.”
Instead, the history of Christianity is the history of apologists interpreting the resurrection stories grounded in a belief in a supernatural, interventionist, theistic God manipulating history and human lives. We have failed to communicate the deeper, poetic, and metaphorical understanding that one can only truly “see” Jesus “resurrected” when we open our eyes to the reality of the Divine in the midst of everyday life, in expressions of love and courage, compassion and barrier-breaking.
Look, Mary Magdalene (in John), the Emmaus disciples (in Luke), and the disciples out fishing (also John) don’t even recognize the “physical” Jesus. Whatever resurrection is, it’s evidently not about a recognizable resuscitated body. Awareness dawns on Mary and the disciples only when Jesus speaks words of compassion and demonstrates his agenda of inclusivity in the breaking of bread. It’s not about believing in a one-off wing-ding event that happened 2000 years ago, but an ongoing and life re-ordering process. We have badly misunderstood Easter and failed to communicate the biblical vision that is so clearly present – and so yearned for in contemporary life.
Saving Christianity from Easter
One might wonder if it’s realistic to think that Christians who are stuck on the literal will ever come around. Maybe, maybe not. But the chances are even less likely if we continue to be coy with people regarding the many and varied interpretations of resurrection within the New Testament itself.
Countless members of what Bishop Spong calls the Church Alumni/ae Association have left the church precisely because they have the spiritual and interpretive integrity to want more from these stories than the institutional expectation of suspended disbelief and unquestioning assent to the irrational and supernatural. These alumni/ae have read the text and see the contradictions. They have a gut feeling that there’s got to be something more, but receiving little to no intellectual satisfaction from clergy and other “authorities,” choose to set off in search of a spiritual path that transcends the felt-board simplicity of their childhoods.
This is our challenge going forward: no less than saving Christianity from Easter (at least the Easter that has driven whole generations of thinking Christians out of the church). We always, of course, have the option to join the pastors of the Fountain Hills Ministerial Association in doubling-down on the miraculous and gloating in our über-piety. OR, we can be encouraged by Bishop Spong’s life-affirming, world-changing, vision of resurrection – a challenge to “live fully, love wastefully, and become all that we are capable of being.” It will be risky – especially for clergy. But the only way we can restore resurrection’s credibility in the minds and hearts of 21st century, thinking people is to remove the dead-weight of literalism and to resurrect our theological imaginations. Bishop Spong is calling us to go beyond our boundaries, our fears, our lines of security and give ourselves away – a call that transcends threadbare beliefs and makes resurrection real in the world, here and now.
— Rev. David M. Felten
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About the Author
Rev. David M. Felten is a full-time pastor at The Fountains, a United Methodist Church in Fountain Hills, Arizona. David and fellow United Methodist Pastor, Jeff Procter-Murphy, are the creators of the DVD-based discussion series for Progressive Christians, “Living the Questions”.
A co-founder of the Arizona Foundation for Contemporary Theology and also a founding member of No Longer Silent: Clergy for Justice, David is an outspoken voice for LGBTQ rights both in the church and in the community at large. David is active in the Desert Southwest Conference of the United Methodist Church and tries to stay connected to his roots as a musician. You’ll find him playing saxophones in a variety of settings, including appearances with the Fountain Hills Saxophone Quartet.
David and his wife Laura, an administrator for a large Arizona public school district, live in Phoenix with their three often adorable children.
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