It was a frightening thing to discover that Jesus' body was missing from the tomb on the first Easter morning. Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome went to the tomb in deep grief to anoint Jesus' body with oil and spices. They were surprised and amazed to find that the stone had been rolled away and the body was gone. A young man who sat in the tomb spoke with them and instructed them to tell the disciples that Jesus had been raised. They were so afraid that they said nothing to anyone about what they had witnessed.
At least that's how Mark tells the story. In Matthew's version, only the two Mary's were present, and they immediately ran to tell the disciples. Luke says there were several women present and they returned from the tomb to remind the disciples that Jesus had said he would rise again and to report that he was indeed gone from the tomb. In John's version, there was only one eyewitness, Mary Magdalene. She saw the risen Jesus and he spoke to her, after which she announced to the disciples that she had seen him.
Mark's gospel predates the others. Scholars think that Matthew, Mark, and Luke drew from a hypothetical common source, which has not been found. All of them wrote decades after the crucifixion and death of Jesus, and probably had no first hand eyewitness accounts available to them.
Mark's account of the empty tomb is the first time the resurrection story appears in the known literature. He likely reported that the women said nothing about the empty tomb to account for the sudden appearance of the story, which had not been in the culture until then.
The other authors embellished the story with visions of the risen Jesus and figures who explained why the tomb was empty and who offered reassurance to the women. In each of them the women are quick to report what they have seen and heard.
My preference is for the first version of the story. I can more easily imagine them running in fear and not saying anything than I can imagine them making what seems to be a reconnaissance report. The few times someone has told me about her or his personal encounter with a powerful mystical experience they have been cautious and clearly wanted assurance that their experience would be honored and respected, that it would be treated with tenderness and care. Encounters with the spirit world can be frightening and we expect them to be met with skepticism. So coming from my own cultural context and experience, I can understand them fleeing in fear and keeping this mystery a secret.
Those of you who heard Scott Simon's interview with Forrester Church yesterday on Weekend Edition know that Thomas Jefferson was interested in drawing a distinction between what Jesus said and did and what others have said about what he said and did. Forrester Church is a Unitarian Universalist minister, and wrote the introduction to a recent release of The Jefferson Bible, which was published by Beacon Press, one of the Unitarian Universalist publishing houses.
Jefferson literally took the gospels apart, using scissors to excise everything in the four gospels that was not directly attributed to Jesus or did not directly describe his actions. As he cut and pasted, he recombined the pieces and created an edited version of the gospels, a historical account of the life of Jesus that left out the mystical narratives of his birth and death and interpretations of his actions.
He called the small volume of re-edited text The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth. It represented Jefferson's quest to understand and respect the life and works of the man who gave us "the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man."
Jefferson was not the first to edit the text. Each of the authors of the four gospels in the official canon of Christian Scriptures worked with existing texts and narratives, selected what to include and what to leave out, and added new interpretations. Each of them wrote from a particular point of view. Historians have reached a reasonable level of consensus that Jesus did indeed exist, and from the written evidence, we probably know more about his life and ministry than we do about any other figure from his time.
But in order to discover what he taught and how he lived, we have to sort through material that is internally inconsistent and includes attributions and inferences that were designed to support the development of the early Christian community. These are not necessarily factual reports.
By careful analysis of the gospels in the Bible and those that were excluded from orthodox scripture, scholars have even suggested that some of the sayings, parables, and actions that are attributed to Jesus were most likely either direct translations or pretty close to words he actually said or represent factual accounts of events that actually took place. Other sayings and events likely represent the sorts of things he said or did, but may not have actually taken place quite in the way they are described, and still others probably represent things he never said or did.
The crucifixion of Jesus is almost certainly a fact of history. But from a historic point of view, what happened next is unsubstantiated speculation. As historic accounts, the gospels should end with Jesus' death and burial.
But of course there is much more to the story, and its richness can best be understood as metaphor and myth, rather than literal facts of history.
But before I go further, lets explore the nature of reality. We're reasonably comfortable with a conventional viewpoint and understanding of the physical, material world. Most of us agree, at least as a working hypothesis, that the stuff around us that we can sense through touch, sight, hearing, taste, and smell is real.
We expect it to have a quality of permanence and to obey laws of physics that we've devised to describe the behavior of matter. And yet we're amazed and puzzled when two descriptions of the same object or two accounts of the same event differ in significant details, suggesting that the reality we perceive is shaped by the perceiver.
We have trouble grasping the Buddhist notion that it is all illusion, yet postmodern physics suggests that what seems to be solid material all around us is in fact mostly space between particles of matter and that energy fields and events rather than substance define all stuff, including our bodies.
There is another reality, though, that we have even less consensus about. I'm talking about the spirit world that envelops the entire physical world and transcends it. It's a part of reality that is mostly outside our ability to detect with the senses we use to perceive the material part of the world.
In fact, we probably don't even agree among ourselves that such a reality even exists outside of our imaginations. Perhaps it does not. But that does not make it any less real than, say, our dreams. This non-material reality was a common part of the daily life of peoples in most pre-modern cultures. As a source of power and energy, of the sense of communion with all of existence, this spiritual reality is radiant and empowering.
The obsession of modern culture with the material part of reality caused us to lose our connection with the spirit world and it's creative and empowering force. The spirit world that was once more real than the material world has all but disappeared from our consciousness.
I had the privilege to arrive at Tori's home just minutes after she died last week. As I looked at her body, it was very clear that she had experienced a gentle and peaceful death. Her face was turned toward the window and she smiled gently.
Who could doubt at that moment that she had been welcomed into the spirit world?
>From time to time that spirit world intrudes, sometimes gently and other times rudely, unexpectedly jarring our notions of what is real. Our discomfort with this alternate reality and the cultural taboos against it conspire to cause us to deny its existence. Hence our tendency to flee from it in fear and to say nothing to anybody. And yet we are fascinated by its potential, curious to discover it, and hungry for its power.
We seek ways to experience this spiritual realm through meditation, re-birthing experiences, spirit quests, or through ecstatic experience, psychoactive drugs, neo-shamanic ritual, and other means, usually with disappointing results. And yet there have always been a few people with special abilities to communicate with the spirit world and bring back its lessons.
Shamans, elders, holy people, and prophets are among them. Healers, mystics, oracles, and great teachers.
Jesus, the man, certainly belongs in this group. In his very brief ministry - which was no more than three years long, and perhaps only one year long - the Jewish radical taught lessons of loving kindness, radical hospitality, compassion, and healing. When he spoke of himself as the son of God, he probably did not mean to stake an exclusive claim on the title, but to suggest that we are all, each and every one of us, a daughter or a son of God. That is, each of us incarnates the divine and embodies the holy.
As an exemplar who was in radical communion with both the spiritual and the material parts of reality, he mediated an exchange of energy and creative love between them, and he showed us the way to do the same - if we have faith.
The depth of his connection with the spirit world is illustrated by the word he chose to refer to God: "Abba," which translates as "papa." It was a familiar and loving relationship with the numinous. Rainer Maria Rilke captures some of that intimacy and closeness in his poem, "Du, Nachbar Gott, wenn ich dich manchesmal"3
Jesus said that the kingdom of God was here among us, and I believe that he meant here in this life, in this world that includes both the material and the spiritual parts of reality. That it was - and it still is! - readily available to each and every one of us if we simply get out of our own way and let it be, if we knock down the thin wall between us - if we have faith.1The Rev. Duane H. Fickeisen serves the Unitarian Universalists of the Cumberland Valley, PO Box 207, Boiling Springs PA 17007; 717/249-8944; www.uucv.net.
Alas, we have let that life-affirming message be stolen from us by the radical religious right who insist that the only possible interpretation of the scriptures is literal and who fail to see the immensely more powerful potential of the story as metaphor and myth.
We've gone to the tomb and found it empty, and we have fled in terror from a connection with the spirit part of reality and from the real message that Jesus taught. His ministry had nothing at all to do with judgement and damnation or punishment and everything to do with creative love, an animating and life-affirming energy, and the salvation of embracing and being embraced by love. There is no evidence that he believed the essential nature of humankind was sinful and in need of atonement. Quite the opposite, he was a universalist, preaching and practicing a radical love of every person.
Sure he admonished people for bad behavior and recognized the human capacity to bring harm to each other. But he practiced and he advocated forgiveness and healing, and he believed that each of us has the capacity to change ourselves, to behave better, to embrace life and to practice a fundamental love.
But the radical Christian right has stolen that Jesus from us, the Jesus who lived and ministered and who was crucified. They have replaced him with an apparition that offers harsh judgement in place of love, one that divides the world instead of uniting it.
The real crime is that we have let them get away with the theft. What a powerful thing it would be if we chose to recover the stolen goods, to rediscover the historical Jesus, and to embrace his loving radical hospitality. We could become healers and transform our lives and the world.
We might even make room for the mystic elements of the story if we were able to understand them as myth and metaphor rather than demanding that they pass a test of historical accuracy. The stories are powerful. They have the potential to offer us hope and to encourage us toward a deeper communion with the spiritual reality and with all of life in its complexity.
Please understand that I'm not advocating a disrespect or intolerance of anyone else's beliefs. We can respect someone else's belief without adopting it. But we face a grave danger if we make the error of permitting the radical right to define the nature of Jesus for us and then reject him because we cannot believe in their version of him. That error costs us the ability to connect with a powerful force of healing and transformation.
We must go into that empty tomb ourselves and come back out with the memory of the Jesus who mediated between the worlds and who can still offer us hope for healing and love.
We must bring Jesus back from the dead. We can resurrect the real, living Jesus. Not to bring him back to life, but to bring him back into our lives. Just as spring brings new life to nature and causes us to rejoice, let us bring renewed life to our deep connections with the spiritual realm of reality and celebrate.Amen
(c) 2001 Duane H. Fickeisen
Boiling Springs, PA