A Meditation on Easter

Quick quiz boys and girls: what do the words east, yeast, and Easter have in common? If you actually know the answer, four points off for being a know-it-all.

Here's my guess: east is where the sun rises, yeast is what makes bread rise, and after three days in the oven, the Son of Man perked up and popped out. Regardless of whether my philology holds up, I like the connection between yeast and Easter. The New Testament does not offer, as many contemporary Christians seem to think, a dualist doctrine. The Christ did not float out of the tomb like some vaporous cartoon dog on his way to the canine quarters of paradise. Christ puffed up, sat up, swung his legs off the slab, and let his feet do the walking. Why else was it necessary to roll away the stone?

I confess that I find it fascinating, and perhaps a little disturbing, that Christ's surprise exit was anticipated by none other than Christ's persecutors. They urged Pontius Pilate to set a watch on the tomb. Matthew 27:

63 Saying, Sir, we remember that that deceiver said, while he was yet alive, After three days I will rise again.

64 Command therefore that the sepulcher be made sure until the third day, lest his disciples come by night, and steal him away, and say unto the people, He is risen from the dead: so the last error shall be worse than the first.

If the Pharisees thought of this… But I digress.

Christ's physical resurrection surely represents the essential promise of Christianity. As Christ got up and walked on after death, whosoever believes in him may do likewise. The grandeur of that promise is easy to appreciate, but not so easy to appreciate fully.

Christianity, Judaism, and Islam collectively, represent a major advance over pagan theology. The pagan Gods are in the knowable world. They dwell on mountains or in deep romantic chasms. They move about the heavens or beneath the waves. Occasionally they come down and do the dirty with earth women. Even where there is a division between world time and dream time, this is just a partition of the world into the directly and relatively knowable.

The God of the Old Testament starts out that way. He walks in the garden in the cool of the day. But He rapidly turns into a God who cannot be captured by any image or even given a proper name. This was, perhaps, the inevitable result of a single momentous idea: that God created the heavens and the earth. If the world includes all rationally knowable things and if God created the world, then He must exist before, outside, and beyond all the knowable things.

This result was anticipated by Socrates, who never made mistakes. Socrates had lost all patience with the pagan gods. If the divine is meaningful, it must be free from all limitations and especially from all moral failings. The divine can admit of no contradiction or correction. By the time that the great Medieval theologians Aquinas and Maimonides were done working this out, it became very difficult to say anything coherent about God. One could safely say only what God was not. He was not mortal, not limited in power, compassion, or wisdom, etc. It was not clear that God could have any mortal passions, as passion implies longing and hence need. Can a perfect being have any needs?

That's some God you have there. There were other problems with this theology that did not irritate the pagans. Zeus, being limited and not all that bright, didn't have to explain why he allowed evils into the world. He just works here. The God of Abraham and Isaac has some splainin' to do. The Medieval Theologians brought enormous powers of intellect to bear in order to solve the problem of evil, and they failed.

A more basic problem is how ordinary human beings can know a God who is so unknowable. How can one have any kind of relationship with a God who has neither a face nor a name? The Old Testament answer seems to be that most of cannot have such a relationship. Only Moses can go up on the mountain and talk to the Big Guy face to face.

Christ provided a more satisfactory answer. Jesus really did walk in gardens in the cool of the day. He can have a name and a face (he looked lovingly at me from my Grandmother's parlor wall). You can talk to Jesus and maybe he can even give you a good hug.

The Christ who suffered on the cross and then up and walked out of the tomb is both knowable and divine. Christianity preserved the essential Biblical idea but also resisted the temptation to move too far in the opposite direction. God may indeed be beyond and outside of the world, but we cannot and can never be so. The Gnostics wanted to believe that Christ came only "in spirit". They held that the physical world is irredeemable. The wee books toward the end of the New Testament tackle this head on. Jesus had a belly button and ate bread. He had nostrils and a scrotum. He was a tangible as my Uncle Roy. Therein lies the promise.

Happy Easter.

Comments

[The Worden Report]

You might be interested in the Archbishop of Canterbury's Easter sermon on greed and excessive profit-seeking. See ... http://bit.ly/f6Td5w
Is generosity enough to forestall or make up for greed, or do we need to go back to the camel and the eye of the needle?

[Mike]

Christ is Risen!

[Donald Pay]

I have no problem with faith in general or any of the variants of Christian faith in particular. If people want to believe in the physical resurrection, as opposed to a spiritual resurrection of Jesus, that's their right. I, however, find the idea of physical resurrection a bit of a stretch. The Gospels certainly don't agree on the details of this supposed most important incident of Christianity, and if this is really the Word of God, you would think God would have gotten his story straight. I'm more inclined to believe that the empty tomb (this actually might have happened) had a more interesting and all-too-human a reason. At any rate, the Easter Bunny came to the Pay household, and I've got a pile of chocolate eggs to eat. It's a miracle!!!!

[larry kurtz]

hey zeus! what do you call easter in indian country? a rez-erection.

[Ken Blanchard]

Donald: I was interpreting the Gospel; I take no stand on whether or how it might be true. Whether the idea of a physical resurrection is a stretch or not depends on the truth of the larger premise: a Creator God who brought the cosmos into being as an act of will. If that premise is correct, a physical resurrection is more than plausible.

I don't think the various Gospel's are in much disagreement on the details. All of them confirm the resurrection of Christ's body, and the physicality of Jesus is identified as non-negotiable in the later, non-Pauline letters. This is for good reason. The idea that resurrection is possible only in spirit is a pernicious doctrine.

You may be right about the empty tomb, as I indicated; however, that is little more than conjecture on your part. Your view of revelation is naive. Clearly neither the Gospels nor the letters are "dictated" by God. If the word of God is expressed in those documents it is expressed by all the information they provide. That includes the character of the writer and the circumstances in which he writes. If the Gospels occasionally contradict one another (they do), then that is part of the information with which they must be interpreted.

I hope you enjoyed your chocolate eggs. I got an Easter basket which included several plastic action figures of she-bunnies in Ninja poses. Happy Easter!

[Miranda]

A late Happy Easter, Dr. Blanchard!

You start by saying that Christianity's contribution is that God is both divine and knowable. But you end by saying that the "promise" is a scrotum and nostrils.

If that's all it is, we're just back to Zeus. So I would say that the promise is something more than that. Part of what makes Christianity so appealing is the promise of forgiveness, which I don't think you find in Jewish or Pagan literature. The Greek gods MIGHT forgive you if they feel like it, but they might also smite you or turn you into an unseemly creature. The Hebrew God is, I think, more consistently forgiving, but forgiveness in The Old Testament often seems to hinge on the right kind of sacrifice and it seems like the Israelites end up angering God as much as they please him. Christianity is different. Even if you mess up a lot (and I certainly do!) God is "faithful and just" to forgive sins. For me, that's where the promise is.

[Bill Fleming]

"Oh God." — Gandhi (The Movie)

(...after being fatally shot by a fellow Hindu for declaring that he was not just a Hindu, but also a Jew, a Muslim, a Buddhist and a Christian. I believe what he literally said was "Rama.")

[Ken Blanchard]

Miranda: The promise is physical resurrection. Not dust. Not a vaporous apparition, but new life. Only things that are alive have scrotums and nostrils. I don't disagree with anything you say about forgiveness.

[larry kurtz]

the plural is scrota, perfessor.

[KB]

Larry: thanks.

[Bill Fleming]

There are dead things that have scrota and nostrils too, KB. I like this quote. "Just to be is a gift. Just to live is holy*."
I'm with Miranda. If you get all hung up with body parts, you're probably barking up the wrong tree, grasshoppah.

————————————————

*Abraham Joshua Heschel — Rabbi

[Ken Blanchard]

Bill: No, except in the sense that statues have nostrils. Christianity promises the resurrection of the body. As for barking up the wrong tree, try barking without lungs or a throat. Human life apart from human bodies is like human beings with angel wings: nice on cards, but incoherent in substance.

[Billl Fleming]

Fascinating that you present yourself as someone who knows what life is, professor. Maybe you should write a paper on it and inform your colleagues in the life sciences. They appear not yet to know.

[Billl Fleming]

Suffice it for now, KB to say that life is a process, not a finality, and that the bits and pieces that comprise your nostrils and your scrotum have been involved in countless other nostril and scrotum constructions that have come before (pun intended) and will come hereafter. Isn't that mysterious and miraculous enough for you, dood?

[Miranda]

Dr. Blanchard: I think what you highlight is part of the promise, but not all of it. Resurrection by itself could be quite awful. Suppose you're brought back to life only to be tortured forever. I think that when you strip certain aspects (such as love and forgiveness) from the message of Christianity, you end up with a promise that is...well...not so promising.

[Ken Blanchard]

Bill, dood, I am not in the market for miracles and mysteries. I want to understand what things are. Yes, life is a process and not bits and pieces. The promise of the resurrection of the body is that the process will recommence after death. That is no small promise.

[Ken Blanchard]

Miranda: my purpose was to emphasize the physicality of the promise in the gospels. I did not intend to spell out all the implications of that promise. It seems to be part of the promise that, just as death is overcome, so will all the other consequences of sin. That includes, I think, all kinds of pain and misfortune.

[Miranda]

That seems fair!

[Bill Fleming]

Still missing the point, KB, but I won't press it, except to say that there is what it is, and then there is what you would like to think it is. It has ever been thus. Whatever helps you sleep, brother. Amen.

[KB]

If you indeed HAVE a point Bill, you have failed to express it.

[Bill Fleming]

The point is that you don't have to have "faith" to have personal involvement with the universe. Nor is it a prerequisite for "eternal life." You are already in it. You can't not be in it. Like the Eveready Bunny (an Easter Bunny cousin?) you just keep going, and going, and going. All scientific evidence points to the veracity of that claim, and virtually none to the contrary.

[Billl Fleming]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_information_paradox

...background for above assertion.