The Parable and Problem of Easter

A Worship Service by the Reverends Mark W. Christian & Jonalu Johnstone

The First Unitarian Church of Oklahoma City

Sunday March 27, 2005

Reading

from Who Killed Jesus

John Dominic Crossan (pg. 209-210)

Three points:  There was a movement.  The authorities executed the founder.  But the movement continued and spread.  Those three points are history.  I do not find anything historical in the finding of the empty tomb … The risen apparitions are not historical events … I see one other important historical item that needs to be added.  The Kingdom movement was an empowering rather than a dominating one.  The historical Jesus did not send others out to speak about himself or bring others to him.  He told them they could do just what he was doing.  They could heal one another, share their food together, and thereby bring the Kingdom into their midst.  The God of that Kingdom was one who empowered people …The Kingdom movement, in other words, was not the Jesus movement and to remove Jesus was not to remove the Kingdom.  When he was executed, those with him lost their nerve and fled.  They did not lose their faith and quit.  What they found, even after his execution, was that the empowering Kingdom was still present, was still operative, was still there.  Furthermore … Jesus’ presence was still experienced as empowerment, not only by those who had known him before, but by others hearing about him now for the first time.  Easter faith is no more or less a mystery than any other faith, but it did not start on Easter Sunday.  It started among those first followers of Jesus in Lower Galilee long before his death, and precisely because it was faith as empowerment rather than faith as domination, it could survive and, in fact, negate the execution of Jesus himself … An empty tomb or a risen body … were dramatic ways of expressing that faith … But Christian faith itself was the experience of Jesus’ continued empowering presence, however one experienced that, and however one defended that in public discourse.  It was that continued presence of absolutely the same Jesus in an absolutely different mode of existence.

Meditation/Prayer for Easter

In the Christian tradition, Easter completes Holy Week, a time for contemplation of life and death.  From Palm Sunday, celebrating Jesus’ entrance into Jerusalem through Maundy Thursday, when the disciples observe Passover with Jesus, setting the example for what was to become the Lord’s Supper, or Communion, or Eucharist to Good Friday, the day of Jesus’ crucifixion – we reexamine the ups and downs of real life – ceremony and ritual, suffering and despair, punishment and death and ultimately, resurrection -- the triumph of life over death, through the mystery, that comes on Easter Sunday.

Events in the news this week, particularly Terri Schiavo’s case, have further focused us on the privilege of life and the presence of death.  Let us be together in the spirit of meditation and prayer, as we consider life and death.

Spirit of Life, of Love, of Wonder and Mystery,

In the presence of death, we are thankful for life.  For the beauty of the blossoming pear trees which remind us of new life – of hope and promise.  For the greening of the earth and the blessing sprinkled by rain and dew.  For the glory of sunshine glinting through a window.  For the energy of children in search of Easter eggs and sucking on chocolate rabbits.  For the dreams we have for each hour, for each day, for each year of our own lives.  We appreciate it all.

In the presence of life, we remember death.  We recognize endings that come in their time, and those that come before their time.  We struggle with the issues of life and death – why some die too soon, why others remain too long.  Help us, Spirit of Life, to respond to death bravely, fitting it in its natural place, not giving fear power over us.  Let us grapple with our own decisions about life and death with wisdom, courage, and grace.

Let us have faith in the triumph of life over death.  May we be in touch with the cycles of rebirth symbolized by seeds, eggs, and butterflies. Because we affirm our own mortality, let us believe that life matters, however long it is.  Let us realize that the love we give and receive in life saves us and others, no matter what happens after death.  May we know the goodness of life with each breath we take. So may it be.  AMEN

The Parable and Problem of Easter

A Sermon by the Reverend Mark W. Christian

Delivered to the First Unitarian Church of Oklahoma City

Sunday March 27, 2005

I have a problem with Easter.  I guess I have always had a problem with Easter.  As a child, my lack of patience meant that I was temperamentally ill disposed toward Easter Egg hunting.  I preferred the chocolate bunny that was conveniently left out in the open to all those colorful eggs you had to work to find.  The problem was that while I wasn’t inclined toward searching—I really liked the Easter Eggs.  I liked dyeing them—the fizzing sound as the color pellets dissolved, the sharp sour smell of vinegar.  I remember trying to get a perfectly balanced lemon yellow and deep purple egg by dying one side at a time.  I remember the colored collage that the dye dripping from eggs left on the newspaper drop cloth.  I guess I was even caught between wanting to forever admire the beauty of the colored eggs and wondering why we couldn’t eat them right now.

At that age I was unaware of religious context of Easter.  Once I learned that the eggs and candy were only the trappings that accompanied Easter it became far less interesting.  As teenager and twenty-something, I came to realize that I didn’t believe in Easter—theologically.  All this stuff about a God-Man being crucified for our sins and then coming back to life—really.  Who needs it?  I was happier with the Easter bunny—at least the rascally rabbit brought chocolate.

Later, as a parent, the Easter problem takes on new proportion.  The fuss and bother, the mess—yuck.  Then there’s hiding the eggs.  Not too easy to find, not too hard.  Remember where you put all of them or there could be terrible surprises if an M.I.A. egg happens to shows up in say June or July. 

As my path turned toward ministry, my problem with Easter mutated and compounded.  As a minister one cannot ignore Easter.  It will not go away—it is on the calendar for God’s sake.  I came to realize how complex the tradition is.  I discovered that the very name Easter is derived from an Anglo-Saxon goddess—Oestre.  I learned that resurrected saviors were a common motif in many religions.  I had to discover how to synthesize the complicated Easter amalgam of elements from Judaism, Zoroastrianism and Hellenistic Gnosticism with a twist of Jesus tossed in for good measure. 

This is a lot to get your mind around and articulate in an understandable manner.  A deeper problem lurked in that scholarly understanding of Easter.  It doesn’t preach.  Even when I understood it and could convey what I knew—it wasn’t anything that anyone really needed to know.  It was way too much in the head and no nearly enough from the heart.  Why bother?

Perhaps now when I say that I have a problem with Easter, you understand what I mean.  I know that many of you have problems with Easter, too.  Some elements of our problems may overlap.  Some are individually unique.  What we struggle with today is touching something, getting a glimpse of something, that will heal our soul, that will nourish our spirit.  That is why I do what I do.  That, I suspect, is also why you come here as you do.

Lewis Carroll offers sage advice in Alice in Wonderland:  “Begin at the beginning…and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”  Begin at the beginning.  The most central aspect of Easter, theologically, is the assertion that God raised Jesus from the dead.  The eternal question, of course, is “What does that mean?”

The resurrection of Jesus is treated six different ways at six different places, by six different authors in the Christian scriptures.  This multiplicity of testimony begs a basic fact about the bible that we need to remember.  The bible does not seek to convey fact; it hopes to convey faith.  Saying that the bible is fiction, while strictly true, is too harsh.  Biblical truth is more like the truth one might find in poetry and prose.  The bible, like good poetry and prose, is often truer in a lasting and eternal sense than it is in the particulars of how it conveys what it conveys.  So, too, with Easter.

What do we know for sure about the events preceding that first Easter?  What do we know about the events that have come to be known as the passion?  Truthfully: not much.  We know that the biblical accounts were captured and composed some 25 to 75 years after the fact.  What we know is that these stories existed in oral form for one, two and perhaps three generations before they were codified into what we now call scripture.

A leading biblical scholar, John Dominic Crossan, in his book “Who Killed Jesus” speaks succinctly about the paucity of what we know about Easter with historical confidence.

Three points: There was a movement.  The authorities executed the founder.  But the movement continued and spread.  Those three points are history.  I do not find anything historical in the finding of the empty tomb … The risen apparitions are not historical events.  According to most scholars, that’s about it.  The beginning we start from is that there was a movement, its founder was executed, but undeterred by that setback movement survived and grew.

Another contemporary writer—more populizer than scholar—but still compelling, John Shelby Spong, winnows away the trappings of Easter in “Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism.”  Obviously something happened after the death of Jesus that had startling and enormous power.  Its power was sufficient to reconstitute a scattered and demoralized band of disciples.  Its reality was profound enough to turn a denying Peter into a witnessing and martyred Peter, and to turn disciples who fled for their lives into heroes willing to die for their Lord.  Easter was so intense that it created a new holy day, the first day of the week, and in turn a new liturgical act … Easter was of such power that Jewish disciples, taught from their cradle that God alone was holy, that God alone was to be venerated, prayed to, and worshiped now could no longer conceive of God apart from Jesus of Nazareth.  What, we should ask, is responsible for such a transformation?  I think our question should be less on “why” and “how” it happened and more on “what” happened.

The Why and How questions, you see, are what give us problems.  The resurrection occurred because Jesus was the true Son of God.  The crucifixion occurred because God needed a way to let a sin-filled humanity atone for its sin.  This all occurred to fulfill prophesy about a messiah.  These are the parts of the story I can neither fathom nor follow.  These are the “Why” and “How” questions.  If not these “what,” you may ask, are the proper questions?

“Begin at the beginning…and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”  There was a movement.  Israel in the 1^st century was an occupied land.  Israel had been occupied for hundreds of years.  First the the Assyrians, then Babylonians, later the Persians, the Greeks and now the Romans.  The Roman Governors allowed a certain degree of autonomy, religiously, to the Temple Priests as long as they kept the people in line.  Perhaps the best analogy from modern history is the Vischy government in WWII Nazi occupied France.

One also should remember that this was a time when the vast majority of people lived on the edge of famine and starvation.  Between Roman taxes and the offerings demanded by the Temple Priests—death and despair were companions to most of the population.

It is very hard for our modern, empirical, scientific minds to understand—but ritual purity was an enormously effective lever in ancient Israel.  The Levitican codes of Judaism required on-going sacrifice at the temple.  Additionally, transgressions of religious codes required supplementary temple sacrifice.  If one didn’t perform the sacrifices, one was deemed unclean and was treated as a social outcast.  The Temple priests had a particularly efficient way of drawing power from the people.  They both defined what was unclean and prescribed the remedy.  I believe that in the unholy alliance between the Roman Government and the Temple Priests that this power became tainted, it turned oppressive.

It isn’t too hard for us to understand that when someone is an outcast, when they are reviled, when they are isolated and oppressed, when they are hungry and denied access to community and food, that dysfunctional pathology and behavior arise.  The ancients wouldn’t use these terms—they spoke of demons and disease.  The healing they sought came in the form of exorcism and miracle but I have seen the same things happen and called it therapy.  When the outcast experiences acceptance, when the hungry are fed, when community replaces isolation—health improves, demons don’t dominate the soul. 

This, I believe, was the nature of the movement that Jesus founded.  He said to everyone: “Come, sit, eat.  You are loved, the realm of God is now.  It is among you.”  That was, and is, radical stuff.  He included all persons: the despised and the powerful, men and women, rich and poor, clean and unclean.

One of the methods Jesus used to create this movement was parable.  We have a false understanding of parables today.  We think of them as morality plays—as allegory.  The parables of Jesus were, I believe, more complex and powerful than that.  One of my seminary professors, Brandon Scott, is among the most respected Parable Scholars in the world.  He maintains that the parables, while employing the notion of “the kingdom of God” were not really trying to describe the realm to which they referred.  I have come to believe that the parables were more like a Zen Koan that is both obtuse and absurd.  It’s discontinuity, its inability to be effectively reconciled by the hearer, are not designed to describe the Realm of God.  Instead they are intended to disintegrate all previous understandings of God so that the divine can be experienced directly and without preconceived notion.  The parables don’t so much teach as they open us to new experience.

That is what I think Easter is about.  Tragedy strikes this community of restoration.  Jesus is executed—but despite that undeniable fact, the community not only still senses him as present but finds even more significance in the presence they experience now than in the message they heard before Jesus’ death.  Have you ever had someone you love die—and even in the knowledge of that death feel their presence?  That is the “What” of Easter and I find it real, intelligible and compelling

I think the solution I have to offer for the problem of Easter comes down to understanding Easter as a parable.  Easter is not supposed to convey particular information about righteousness or life, about sin or hope.  The unreconcilable aspects of Easter are put to best use when they blow away our conceptions—our preconceptions and ill formed perceptions—of life and love, of justice and religion.  In the void that this death brings, a new experience of the eternal and infinite nature of Life and God and Love can arise. 

A truer spirit can be resurrected from the tomb of the soul.  That is the lesson that the parable and problem of Easter can teach us—if we will let it.  Don’t fear sending your deepest held religious conviction into the tomb of Jesus.  The Easter message is that in the death of belief the experience of Love and God are raised and Life is made forver new.  AMEN