I spent a good portion of last week thinking about the Holy Week story and Easter. I attended a very solemn and moving Holy Week worship at my congregation and then a joyous and beautiful Easter Morning service yesterday. I'm writing this because I think we get caught up in the wrong fights over faith.
Over the weekend, the Christianist website OneNewsNow posted a revealing article. The author, Jerry Newcombe, is an evangelical writer affiliated with the right wing activities of Coral Ridge Ministries out of Florida. Newcombe proclaims:
The resurrection of Jesus Christ is the greatest fact in human history. Yet throughout the centuries to our present time, skeptics have argued against the historical reliability of the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
What follows is a series of assertions concerning the resurrection that are easily refuted but which amount to the idea of defending the actual, physical resurrection of Christ as historical truth:
When I interviewed him [evangelical pastor and author Rene Lopez] about the resurrection of Jesus, he said one reason he believes in the resurrection is the power of the resurrected Christ in his own life. If Jesus could change someone like him, with his 30-plus arrests, and make him a new man from the inside out, then He could walk out of the tomb.
Newcombe then offers a fairly standard fundamentalist defense of the bible:
We begin with the empty tomb. "Now, we often overlook the empty tomb," says Dr. Paul Maier, professor of ancient history at Western Michigan University. "But I think the empty tomb is very important, because that is something that an ancient historian can get at."
According to Liberty University professor Dr. Gary Habermas, "The fact that women reported the empty tomb is the best reason to believe it, 'cause it's not a scenario anybody would make up." The empty tomb was a fact of history.
Another piece of evidence for the bodily resurrection of Christ deals with the first eye-witnesses and the first to testify they had seen Him risen from the dead. René López observes, "If the resurrection was to be a hoax, you would never use women to validate something like the resurrection, if you wanted to lie about it, because in the first century, according to the rabbinic writings, a woman's testimony was as valid as a thief's."
Nonbelievers would not find these arguments persuasive. Lopez argues that we know Christ was real and resurrected because Lopez turned his life around. While Lopez may have turned his life around and his faith may have helped, that does not constitute actual evidence the reality of Jesus or the resurrection. In the same sense, offering biblical stories as "proof" wouldn't persuade anyone who doesn't already accept the Bible as valid evidence.
The earliest account of the resurrection comes from Paul who basically offers a short paragraph saying "He died, he was resurrected, he appeared to Peter then the other disciples." There is no mention in Paul's account of the crucifiction, Holy Week, the passion or the women.
The four gospels provide four separate accounts of Easter. Mark, the oldest gospel, has a very spare account - the women arrive at the tomb and it is empty and they're told Jesus is gone. (Some scholars believe the final verses of Mark were added later to soften the rather stark Easter story.) Matthew and Luke tell similar stories in which the tomb is empty and the disciples see the risen Christ but don't recognize him. Mark, Matthew and Luke are the synoptic gospels - that is they tell similar stories and seem to draw from a shared source (called Q from the German word for source). John's gospel, by contrast, tells a very different Easter story drawing from either a unique Johanine tradition or from a now lost source. We do not, in fact, know the identity of any of the authors of the gospels. As with Christmas, the popular understanding of the Easter story is informed as much by popular tradition as the actual biblical accounts.
The fundamentalist/evangelical project, to defend the accuracy of the letter of the biblical account - to insist that it is a factual, historical account - is well-intended but mistaken. Notice again the Newcombe began his article with the assertion that the "resurrection of Jesus Christ is the greatest fact in human history." Newcombe's literalism is about sustaining a specific theological view and ignores the fact that four Gospels' Easter stories are different and contradictory. They cannot all be accurate. The literalist reading asks us to read the mythic as factual, partly because the popular usage of myth is that it means a falsehood. For the literalist to think of the Gospels as mythic is to think of them as false and therefore useless. In a very specific way, today's fundamentalist/evangelical readers are trapped - knowingly or not - in the language and mindset of a worldview which holds that some things are factual and therefore true and those things which are not factual are untrue. This worldview is rooted in science but in the science of the late 19th through the mid 20th centuries and not the science of the quantum and chaos theory.
To borrow John Shelby Spong's language, if we're to read the Gospels seriously, we cannot read them literally. We need instead to reclaim a notion of the mythic consistent with the psychological reading of myth - metaphor that reveals deeper truths. The Easter stories are mythic recounting which seek to capture a profoundly meaningful experience and which use metaphor to do so.
To find that meaning, I think we need to start with the structure of Holy Week. Holy Week begins technically the friday before but for most Christians it is Palm Sunday, the Sunday before Easter on which Jesus' entry into Jerusalem is remembered. Jesus enters the city riding on the back of a donkey, his ministry is celebrated he is welcomed. The journey through the week grows increasingly solemn, culminating with Maundy Thursday and Good Friday.
Maundy Thursday is an opportunity to retell the story of the Last Supper; in some cases it is an opportunity to strip the sanctuary of its decoration and prepare for the very somber Good Friday service. Good Friday tells the story of the Crucifiction and death. Together, these two days are a somber, even grim, mythological exploration of betrayal, judgement, torment, and finally death. The Christian who recognizes these two days is left to live with the present reality of death on Friday and Saturday. Holy Week observances are reminders of death, a retelling, even re-living, if a tale which leads from joy to death; within many Christian churches, Good Friday is followed by a vigil during which believers keep watch until Easter Morning.
Easter morning the sanctuary, now redressed, is a place of celebration, of alleliua. It is a joyful place celebrating the resurrection, that is the victory of good over evil, of truth over deception, of life over death. The Easter stories, however, are not joyous, instead they invite us into mystery, confusion. The risen Christ is unrecognizable, the tomb is empty and the women are told Jesus has gone ahead.
For me, a key part of the myth is found in some strange rhymes. Jesus is born to a Mary and a Joseph, at his death he is attended by Mary (actually two of them) and a Joseph. This strange rhythm in the story is the metaphorical world of myth breaking through. It's noteworthy that at the beginning of his life, an angel speaks to Mary and after the end of his life, another Mary is addressed by an angel. At the beginning of his life, Joseph takes the role of father, he provides social acceptability to Jesus; at end of his life, Joseph provides him a tomb. Jesus was born amongst the lowly, the socially outcast, and dies amongst the lowly the socially outcast; his mother is Mary, at his death he is attended by Mary Magdalene and other Marys (depending on the account, his mother, and/or Mary the mother of some of his followers). Mary Magdalene is often portrayed as a prostitute; here again the biblical text leads us in another direction; Mary of Magdala is talked about in close proximity to a prostitute and so the two are often confused. She is portrayed as a central follower of Jesus and an influential, propertied woman.
There is another, interesting rhyme in the myth. Jesus is the "son of God" and is crucified next to a man named Barabbas; well Jesus refers to God as Abba, Bar means the son of; so the criminal Barabbas is evocatively named the son of Abba.
Certain parts of the Gospel accounts seem written to accord with writings from earlier Hebrew prophets, notably Isaiah. Where the fundamentalist sees these passages and proclaims Isaiah's prophecies came literally true, reading them metaphorically we can see that Gospel writers made those connections not to assert accuracy but commonality. Isaiah's prophecies about peaceful kingdoms and lambs lying down with lions were and are powerful; by writing accounts of Jesus to echo Isaiah, they are arguing, is of the same tradition and importance as Isaiah. Again and again, the gospels point us to the prophetic tradition with ancient Hebrew faith, a tradition that wasn't about foretelling the future but rather calling people's awareness back to the holy and the sacred. The prophets weren't foretelling future events, they were casting a vision. For ancient Israel, militarily defeated and occupied, the vision of a Messiah, a political leader who would liberate the people and restore the Davidic monarchy and all that implied with regard to a relationship with God, was a powerful and compelling vision, a vision which resonated with the residents of Roman occupied Judea.
Holy Week is a journey about death and life. It is meant to unnerve us before it comfort us. The resurrection stories are told in the language of myths and dreams. The disciples scatter leaving behind the women; only in John's gospel does the slightly dull, earnest Peter dash ahead to the empty tomb. Perhaps Jesus and Barabbas are shadow figures for one another. Mary and Joseph evoke the Great Earth Mother and the Sky God. The women at the tomb are powerfully suggestive; in myth and dream women often stand for the emotional, the spiritual; they are the anima to male psyche, carriers of emotional truth. In Steel Magnolias, Sally Field's M'Lynn says of her daughter, "I was there when she was born and I was there when she died." The men, supposedly strong, couldn't face Shelby's death but M'Lynn could. We see the same sort of emotional truth in the Gospels. The male disciples scatter but the women stay, at the foot of the cross, they're there at the moment of death, they're at the tomb Sunday morning.
The Great Mother of mythology is the Mother Goddess, the symbol of life and earth; that Mary (or several Marys) are present at Jesus' birth and death points us in the direction of the Great Mother, the earth from whom life springs. Jesus is entombed, placed in the earth and the goddess(es) arrive to announce he has been born. The pagan cycle of life, death, and renewed life isn't hidden very deeply in the story. Our European ancestors adopted and grafted the pagan midwinter celebration and the spring celebrations onto Christianity.
Easter occurs in spring, a time of new birth, of renewal after winter. That Christmas occurs in midwinter, a festival of lights, in the darkest season of the year is no accident. The deep mythology of Easter is the mythology of the cycle of life - of death, of new life. It is the Mother Goddess earth nurturing her children and rescuing us from death.
Whether or not Jesus the itinerant preacher from Nazareth was literally, bodily resurrected is beyond the concern of the mythological world. The meaning within the mythology is simple and profound: life goes on. Death is not the end. In and through our relationships - whether our children and grandchildren or memories of our friends and loved ones - we live on and continue to impact the world.
John Shelby Spong, in his powerful book Resurrection: Myth or Reality, says that the resurrection was "true" in the deepest sense without being a literal account. He theorizes that after Jesus' death, the scattered disciples, Peter notably, could not forget Jesus and his life and his impact on his life. He felt that Jesus was still with him, his words still present in his memory. And so, after some time of grieving, Peter took up where Jesus left off. Now, though, rather than preaching his own words as Jesus had done, Peter preached about Jesus. He felt that though dead Jesus was still alive and with him. He experienced Jesus as a present reality. Alive, though dead, risen despite his death.
The deep meaning of Easter is the myth of death and rebirth. For me, the emotional reality of Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, the unnerved sense of loss, is the emotional center of the experience and the release of that sense of loss on Easter Morning feels like a let-down, an easy out. The disciples scattered, terrified of death and destruction and it was the women who led them back.