Saturday, March 22, 2008
Is Jesus Dead?
This is the real question we must wrestle with on the Saturday before Easter Sunday. Most of my faith journey felt like one long confusing Saturday. Brian McLaren wrote a song called “I Am an Atheist”. This song makes the provocative statement “I can’t believe what they believe in you [but] I believe.” I can identify with that song. As an adult, I could no longer believe the things I was taught about Jesus as a child, but I still believe. I kept hoping for Easter to make sense. Most of the stories in the bible were easy to see as symbolic language. Easter was a bit more difficult to reconcile. It remains a stumbling block for many, but we can’t live our whole lives in the shadows of Saturday. We have to find our way to Easter Sunday.
The first time I saw this book by Bishop John Shelby Spong, “Resurrection: Myth or Reality?”, I was so shocked by it that I put the book down after reading the first few pages. Now, I would say this book has been more helpful than any other book on the subject. It is so much more than a philosophical discussion about the reality of resurrection or a dry academic search for the historical Jesus. If you think you know Bishop Spong or could guess his answer to this question, then you might be wrong and you may want to pick up this book and take this journey.
To dismiss these familiar biblical details as legendary does not end our search for the truth of what happened, it only drives us to another level where we ask a different question. What happened that gave birth to the legendary details that gathered around the moment of Easter? Why did they gather? Hundreds of millions of people have lived and died on this earth - some of them famous, powerful people – and no similar legends gathered around them. Why this one man, at this time, in this place?For Bishop Spong, the key to understanding the gospels and the early Christian development of faith is grounded in the tradition of Jewish literature called Midrash. I’ve been blogging about that for the last couple of weeks. Understanding the New Testament as Midrash may save Christianity in the 21st century from dying the slow death of ridicule and irrelevance.
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Our great failing was that we did not know anything about midrash, so we literalized narratives that were not intended to be literalized. The Jerusalem Easter legends are not to be dismissed as untrue. They are meant to be probed for clues, as I trust I have done adequately. Behind the legends that grew up around this moment, there is a reality I can never deny. Jesus lives. I have seen the Lord. By that faith and with that conviction I live my life and proclaim my gospel. - John Shelby Spong
My own wilderness moment, my Saturday, my period of mourning the death of Jesus, ended at some point in my journey. I found Easter Sunday when I found a Jesus I could believe in. The Gospels poetically describe resurrection as symbol for the moment when the mourning ended and the meaning of Jesus’ life sunk in. It was an enlightenment experience. At some point, possibly first in the mind of Simon Peter, the light bulb came on. The reason for Jesus’ life and death finally made sense. His followers couldn't remain silent. All they needed to do was envision it through the lens of their religious ancestors and begin telling this powerful life-changing story. That was the moment of Easter and it became the defining moment in history. It happened the moment that these early Christians knew Jesus’ life could not be silenced by his death. Each community immortalized Jesus with their own specific narrative about his life, baptized it in the allegory of Jewish antiquity, encapsulated the whole story into Jesus’ defining ritual of bread and wine, and then placed their own understanding and words deeply into the dialogue and action.
Is Resurrection a myth or a reality? I believe something real happened in the lives of these real people that lead to these important stories. I also recognize that the Resurrection is a myth about a transcendent reality that could not be described through any other means.
7 comments:
Great post! Midrash...amazing!
So what did happen on the first Easter morning?
cmwoodall,
"what did happen on the first Easter morning?"
There are lots of options to pick from. The gospels give us several different choices and no clear consensus. Which gospel account are you going with?
You tell me. Who discovered the empty tomb? Maybe Mary. Maybe Peter. Maybe Mary and 2 other women. Who/what was in the tomb? A man. An angel. A couple of angels.
Did they run off and tell others or did they keep quiet? Did Jesus appear? Why did the first gospel, Mark, need to be later edited to add appearances. "The most reliable early manuscripts and other ancient witnesses do not have Mark 16:9-20". Look at your bible between Mark 16 verse 8 and 9.
Was the stone rolled away? Why was it rolled away if later the same Jesus can walk through walls and appear at will. Maybe stone is like cryptonite and he can't get through it? When Jesus appeared was he a ghost or a person? Why didn't the people on the road to Emmaus recognize him for many hours? Does a body get mangled or disfigured during a resurrection?
Maybe, just maybe, this isn't a puzzle. Maybe there is a very simple solution. Maybe faith and science don't need to clash. I think the story is a truth-filled myth describing the fact that Jesus is "with us" but we can't see him until we break bread together? Maybe Jesus is alive but he lives within our hearts and we see him in each other when we gather together in his name. Maybe we are the resurrected body of Christ. You can blame Paul for that bit of "unorthodoxy".
I'm not saying all this to "discredit" the stories. I'm simply saying that we don't need to twist them into some kind of modern history book in order to see their profound truths about what Jesus means to us and meant to the authors of the myths.
maybe St. Paul did not write 1 Cor. 15.
Do you believe Jesus taught his disciples after His Mighty resurrection?
maybe something happened, but not what St. Luke records in Acts 1:1-11.
I understand that we are on different paths, so I'll not press further. I simply believe the burden of proof is on you to show that all Christian tradition (scripture included) is more blinded than your 21st Cent. eyes.
I wish you well,
Thanks for the comments CMWoodall. I think we are on the same path. What makes you say we are not?
There is fair consensus on Paul being the author of 1 Cor. We Agree! I don’t dispute that.
What chapter 15 tells us clearly is that there was no consensus within the church on a physical resurrection. If there had been consensus, then Paul would not have felt a need to campaign so hard for it in that chapter. Paul’s writing proves what Paul believes. However, his encounter with Jesus is not physical. His encounter is 100% consistent with countless experiences we all label as a “vision” or hallucination, not a physical experience with a physical body. These experiences are common both then and now. But that is still missing the point.
Acts is no history book. It is a midrash. What is the point of Paul’s encounter? We don’t ask of a midrash, “did it happen?”. We ask, “What did the story mean?” The story/parable means that Paul was transformed when he encountered the message of Jesus. He lost sight of his old ways of thinking and took on a new “vision” after talking to Christians and receiving the knowledge of Jesus through their teaching. Jesus opened his eyes. If you mistake the book of Acts for a history book, you will miss the metaphorical meanings.
Midrash conveys meaning but not historical facts per se, though they often reference facts and historical things. The ascension is another perfect example of how we can tell this is midrash. We all know ascensions don’t literally happen (the proof is on you to explain how that could work), but we see this as a valuable story that sets the story of Jesus in line the story of Elijah. It is perfect midrash form of connecting the present to the past. Many other famous spiritual leaders have ascension stories. Jesus needs one too. He deserves it!
Who has the burden of proof? Good question! That would fall on the people claiming things that defy current understandings of the universe. It would fall on those claiming mythical midrash texts to be something other than mythical midrash. If you claim the existence of aliens, we do not assume you are correct until someone proves otherwise. No, the proof is on you to make a case that a body can rise from the dead physically. The proof is on you to make a case that this story is not like the thousands of other mythical midrash stories that read just like these. The burden of proof is on you to show the author intends us to single out these stories from all other myths and take these literally.
I am in the process of reading Spong's "Liberating the Gospels". It is quite a read. He makes an excellent case for midrash. I believe he does an great job of rescuing the gospels from fundamentalism's literal interpretation. My question is, why it has taken so long to see the connection to midrashic interpretation? I know he attempts to explain why, but it seems that it is a recent phenomena.
I'm not sure. It seems so obvious. My only guess is that religions have long had the tendency to "compete" for truth and it is hard for modern minds to imagine that your truth is a parable rather than literal history.
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