Other Voices, Other Views, Others Easters
by the Rev. Colin Bossen, April 4, 2010
As the Christian New Testament relates, Easter celebrates the resurrection of Jesus after his execution by the Roman authorities. On Good Friday the world is dark. Jesus the son of God is dead. On Easter morn he rises, triumphant like the breaking dawn, defeats death, offers salvation for all and asserts the might of the divine over the earthly power of the Roman empire. The Romans, or any other terrestrial power, may be able to kill the body but they will never destroy the spirit.
I was at least ten years old before I realized that Easter had anything to do with this narrative about Jesus. In my parent's largely secular Unitarian Universalist household Easter was a holiday where we kids dyed eggs bright, hunted for Easter baskets and shared a large family meal. It was a time for celebration not of Jesus's victory over death but of the beauty of life itself and the transformative nature of Earth's own rhythms. The Easter memories that come most clearly are not of a bloodied body upon a cross, the empty tomb or Jesus displaying his gory wounds to his disciples. Instead I remember stumbling through the wet grass behind my parent's house looking for plastic eggs stuffed with candy and sitting at the dining room table while my mother passed around homemade clover rolls and the spring's first asparagus.
When I finally did learn the Easter narrative I found little within it that resonated with me. It defied my scientific worldview. It did not match my lived experience. I could not imagine that humans were tainted with original sin because of Adam and Eve's ancient transgression in the Garden of Eden. Nor could I believe that this sin had been removed by the blood sacrifice of Jesus. An early Christian leader like Tertullian might claim that this narrative "must be believed, because it is absurd" but because it was absurd I could not believe it.
My views on Easter are not unique. Easter is a difficult holiday for many Unitarian Universalists. If we reject the orthodox narrative and consign resurrection, original sin and atonement to the realm of the mythic then we are left with the rather awkward question of why we bother to mark the holiday at all. Perhaps we do it out of respect for our Christian roots or the Christians among us. Maybe it is simply a force of habit or a result of our efforts to fit into a predominantly Christian culture. Or maybe there is something embedded within the Easter narrative itself that we find attractive, something often obscured by the theology or liturgy of the Christian orthodox.
The orthodox Easter narrative is often presented as the only one. Most in our culture or raised Christian are familiar with its' broad outlines. Jesus enters Jerusalem triumphantly on the eve of Passover. He shares a last Passover meal with his disciples. He is betrayed, arrested, tortured and executed. And then he rises, bodily, from the dead and announces the possibility of salvation with the words, "Go into all the world and proclaim the good news to the whole creation."
This narrative was not the only one present in the early Christian communities. It was, in fact, only one of several. The early Christian communities were far more diverse in belief and practice than the texts of the Christian New Testament would have us believe. As the scholar Elaine Pagels has remarked, "what we call Christianity--and what we identify as Christian tradition--actually represents only a small selection of specific sources, chosen from among dozens of others."
In recent years it again has become possible to access some of those other sources. The discovery of a handful of non-canonical gospels between the late 18th and late 19th centuries followed by the unearthing of The Nag Hammadi Library in the middle of the 20th means that today we have greater access to unorthodox early Christian texts than at any point since the third century. When we look at these texts we discover voices from outside the Christian New Testament, voices that were excluded from the Christian New Testament and voices that proclaim other Easters.
Some of these texts, like the Gospel of Mary and The Apocryphon of John, offer not a Jesus who was resurrected bodily but a Jesus who returned in spirit. This Jesus appeared in mystic visions. He urged his followers to seek enlightenment instead of salvation. As Mary Magdalene transmits his teachings in the Gospel of Mary, we are look to the mind, not the broken body on the cross, for treasure.
The Jesus presented in such texts is the Jesus of the gnostic tradition. The gnostics were an early Christian movement--or more accurately group of movements with diverse beliefs--that existed alongside the communities that eventually formed the Catholic Church. As the Catholic Church developed its pillars of canon, creed and institutional hierarchy it became less and less tolerant. When the Catholic Church merged with the Roman Empire those Christians who did not conform to orthodox rule were brutally swept aside. In the process most of the gnostic texts--and the portraits, sayings and stories of Jesus they contained--were lost.
Now that some of these texts have been found new pictures of Jesus have started to emerge. Often the Jesus found in these texts preaches enlightenment over salvation. He came not to save the world from sin but share with those who would listen special knowledge that would help uncover the nature of reality. The word gnostic itself comes the Greek gnosis, which can be translated knowledge. The gnostic followers of Jesus claimed that knowledge of God could be gained through self-knowledge. They believed that there was a spark of the divine within each and that by nurturing that spark one could uncover a god consciousness similar to the one found within Jesus himself.
Some scholars have argued that there are parallels between gnostic Christianity and the Hindu and Buddhist traditions. All teach that enlightenment is the ultimate goal of religion and that this enlightenment can be gained through self-discipline leading to self-knowledge. These parallels were not lost on early orthodox Christians. The writer Hippolytus compared the beliefs of the Indian Brahmins with the gnostics and labelled both groups heretics. He wrote, "the Indians...say that God is light, not like the light one sees, not like the sun nor fire, but to them God is discourse...of knowledge through which the secret mysteries of nature are perceived by the wise."
God was certainly light for the author of The Apocryphon of John. In one section of the text the divine is described as "the pure light into which no eye can look." In another God is labelled "immeasurable light, which is pure, holy (and) immaculate."
It is wonderful to imagine God as light. The light of the sun--the pure energy of photons--is the source of almost all living things. We ourselves are refined light. Plants capture the sun's beams and turn their energy to food. Animals, we in turn eat that food, transforming light to matter in the process.
Perhaps the gnostic God's light is a little bit like this, a powerful force that drives life forward and is made manifest in each of our lives. Whatever the gnostic God is like two things are clear. First, the gnostic God is complicated and many layered. Like the God of the orthodox Trinity it is a God that is manifold in its being--one essence in different substances. Unlike the orthodox God this gnostic God has male and female manifestations. It is not just God the Father but also God the Mother as well.
Second, the gnostic God is present within each and made known not by a confession of faith or membership in a religious community but by unlocking knowledge already present inside. As Jesus says to Mary, "where the mind is there is the treasure."
Reading these texts, I cannot help but see parallels with our American Unitarian ancestors. William Ellery Channing taught that within each of us there is a spark of the divine. If that spark is tended and helped to grow we all might shine brightly like Jesus. As Channing preached in his famous sermon "Likeness to God," "true religion consists in proposing as our great end a growing likeness to the Supreme Being."
For our religious ancestors Jesus was not to be celebrated because of his sacrifice on the cross. He was to be celebrated because by following his teachings we might come close to touching God. For both the gnostics and the early American Unitarians the orthodox made the critical error of, to paraphrase a zen koan, mistaking the finger pointing at the moon for the moon itself. Jesus was not an object of worship. Instead he was a teacher who pointed out the path that led to self-knowledge and self-discovery.
This only reinforces the problem we contemporary Unitarian Universalists have with Easter. This morn we have not gathered to celebrate Jesus's resurrection and salvation. But perhaps we have gathered to celebrate the possibility of resurrection for ourselves. Resurrection is the transformation of dead matter into living tissue. And each of us has within some dead place, some trouble, pain or failure, that could be made vital again.
There is no end to the catalog of human folly. We fight wars, fight with our lovers, mistreat our children, are ungrateful to our parents and take our friends for granted. Sometimes pride gets the better of us and we are too arrogant to see our limitations. Other times we are paralyzed by anxiety and, for fear of being hurt, cannot act. Visiting and revisiting, poking and prodding, these dead places can lead to wisdom. The adage is true, we learn from our mistakes. Each lesson, each error not repeated, is a little resurrection.
Great preaching, urged Ralph Waldo Emerson, comes from "life passed through the fire of thought." Any life can be made great when it is examined. The better we understand ourselves the better we understand our relationship with the world around us.
The price when we fail to examine the dead places in our lives can be high. We must seek resurrection, healing, and learn from our errors and understand their sources. If we do not we may well be doomed by them.
This point is constantly brought home by the stories that fill the media. Many a mighty man--and less frequently a mighty woman--has been laid low by the unexamined life. The recent sex scandals of figures like Tiger Woods and Jesse James come to mind. How could such public figures imagine that they could keep their affairs secret? It seems clear that they suffer from a lack of self-awareness.
Celebrity gossip, of course, pales in comparison to the recent scandals of the Catholic Church. It seems that each time I turn on the computer or listen to the radio the church's problems are revealed to go deeper. And yet this religious institution seems incapable of introspection. Instead it meets the growing scandal with statements of denial and attempts to blame the victims. There is something heartbreaking in a religious institution's inability to transcend base human reactivity and learn from its mistakes.
This Easter the Catholic Church and its leaders could probably do with a little resurrection themselves. Not of the type contained within their own Easter narrative but of the type proclaimed by the gnostics. A good hard look in the mirror leading to a bit self-knowledge would probably lead to many a cardinal becoming a little more godly.
But within this statement we find at least a hint of a reason why the gnostics lost out to the orthodox. The enlightenment of the gnostics, the resurrection of the spirit, was not a promise given to everyone. It was a path that could be found through self-discipline and constant searching. Not everyone chooses such a path, though anyone might, and so it becomes, in the words of the Japanese poet Basho, "the narrow road of the interior" trodden by only a few.
In contrast, the orthodox promised salvation for all who, with Tertullian, "believed, because it is absurd." This salvation did not require diligent work and sometimes harsh self-examination. Believers were not urged to bring their dead places back to life. What was required instead was an almost blind obedience to the church's one truth. Acceptance of this truth might lead to extraordinary acts of devotion, great compassion for the poor or even martyrdom. Examination of it, however, might lead to the label heretic and a troubled relationship with the church's leadership.
What is wanted is a middle path, a path that promises the possibility of enlightenment for those who seek it and salvation for those who need it. Such a path would both challenge and comfort. It would welcome all and yet call to each to plumb the depths of heart and mind for greater truths.
I would like to think that our Unitarian Universalist faith can offer such a middle path. It was present in the marriage between our Unitarian ancestors, who preached the power of self-knowledge, and our Universalist forebearers, who preached universal salvation. But such an imagining almost seems an act of religious arrogance, a feat unworthy of a sermon lifting up the pursuit of self-knowledge.
Instead let us draw a final breath of inspiration from our poets of earlier. In their verses both Mahmoud Darwish and Fernando Pessoa offer a kind of universal salvation and a type of enlightenment. Pessoa brings Jesus back as an ordinary boy, in an ordinary village doing the stuff that ordinary children so often do. His Jesus misbehaves but also enlightens. He throws rocks and picks at flowers but in doing so uncovers mystic visions. If such a scoundrel is a holy child then surely all might have the capacity to be divine.
And Darwish, he just looks at things and imagines what comes after. The dissolution of the cloud brings the elderberry blossom. Crashing waves create memories of time. Each thing turns to the next. Resurrection is present but it is true transformation. Dead matter is reborn as living tissue but it is different than before. Water turns to that which flows through the oak's veins. Last year's leaf litter nurtures this year's flowers. We are made aware of the transforming rhythm of nature if we only pay attention.
Maybe at last this is the real reason why we celebrate Easter: to proclaim once a year the possibility of resurrection in our own lives and witness it in the beauty of nature. This Easter then let us remember that within each of us is the possibility of starting anew. Within each of us there is a spark of the divine just waiting to light up the world. And today the world breaks into colored song announcing this truth.
Amen.