Christ is risen! Part 3: The song of new life

And somehow, all those attempts to say, “Hah! All your hope of new life was all an illusion! Look, hatred and injustice have triumphed after all” – all those attempts failed. The followers of Jesus said, “No, he is risen! We have not lost him.” And when today – in our rightful scepticism – we say, “Prove it! This is impossible; it cannot have happened”, his followers say, “But we experience all that Jesus promised us. The Springtime of new life in the Spirit has come, and we are living it.”

“Christ is risen” is the song of the human spirit liberated from sin and evil, from death and the fear of death. It puts into words our deepest longing that goodness will prevail and evil be overcome. After even a lifetime of disappointment and failure, after giving up to despair, after suffering torment and betrayal – or imposing that on others – there is a secret antidote that restores the light in your eyes and the hope in your heart. It is miraculous, but not a miracle in the traditional sense; it is an entirely natural transformation, a lifting of the dead weight from your shoulders, the lead weight from your heart. I say it is a secret, but it is really very simple. It’s just that we don’t have the ability to do it – till Jesus taught us, and now we do. It is having the will to care for others rather than ourselves, and granting them our forgiveness and our loving service. And doing this whether they want it or not, and certainly whether they deserve it or not. There are ways in which the liberation works that you need to respect – we’re not waving a magic wand here, and the biggest one is that the gift you’re offering has to be accepted. Once you have accepted that you are completely and utterly loved by God, you can let go of all your egotistical fear and greed. As  you don’t have to protect your self-esteem – because you know you are held securely in God’s friendship – you are free to care for others and to want the best for them, because your greatest joy is to see others set free from all that degrades life, in the same way that you have been set free. “Christ is risen” is the joyful prayer of thanksgiving as we lay to rest our selfishness and take up the task of caring for others. It is what we say as God blesses us with his gift of peace.

Christ is risen! Part 2: Something has happened, and it has set us free.

Early on the first day of the week, the women went to the tomb. They went to anoint a dead body. To revere the remains of the one they loved. To treat with honour the body that had been so disgracefully abused. And it was not there. The tomb was empty.

And here the mystery begins. Something has happened. Theories about the body being stolen or the disciples just making up a story sound feeble. We understand that ancient minds did not think like ours and perhaps the story of the resurrection is a story – but a true story to express deep truths about what Jesus means to them. We understand the power of religious experiences that can transform our lives – and then the gospel is written to give literal expression to what are inward, spiritual truths. But the first disciples were not stupid, or gullible. They knew that dead bodies do not come back to life. None of them had any inkling that such a thing could happen. The male disciples hid in fear and the women went to attend to a dead body. Thomas is no dupe. He did not go along with the rest just because they said Jesus was alive. “Unless I see the mark of the nails on his hands, unless I put my finger into the place where the nails were, and my hand into his side, I will never believe it”.

Christ is risen!

What does it mean?

Life is indestructible. We know that life is so very fragile and Jesus’ death has just demonstrated how easily it can be snuffed out. But the life that God imparts is indestructible. That quality of life that Jesus had opened up to his followers, with its intense sense of God’s presence, infused with an extraordinary love, could not be snuffed out. Once you have found it, it is yours, and it can never be taken away from you. The community of hospitality, created by Jesus’ generous compassion, that freed people from their guilt and opened up to them hope of new life, enabled people to leave behind everything that diminishes life and to embrace everything that enlarges and enriches it. People who were closed in on themselves, and lived in hostile suspicion of others, found that they opened up, reached out, and in forgetting themselves found over-flowing joy in caring for others. People who were used to suffering, who expected injustice, who presumed the powerful would impose their will, found that in Jesus’ presence, it was goodness that triumphed and it was the truth that was, not simply spoken, but which won the day.

Christ is risen!

(A theological reflection in 4 parts)

Christ is risen! Part 1: The great reversal: hate to love; death to life.

On the third day.

For those who believe, who know the gospel, no more is needed to be said to connect us to resurrection life. Except to say, now it is the third day. The day he is risen. Today, Jesus is risen.

This earliest, basic acclamation of faith is the heart of all.

It gains much of its power by contrast with what went before.

Jesus was crucified by his enemies, the victim of their power, hatred and fear. The excruciating pain and bloody mess of it is beyond imagining to all except those who have experienced a war zone of severed limbs and shattered bodies with blood and gore all around. Except that in some ways, this death is worse for being so controlled, so personalised, so completely directed to its chosen victim. Sacrificial theology has plumbed as far as it can go, but crucifixion is not about thought, but the experience of pain. Raw bodily pain that makes you scream and rage and beg. You are fully aware that this is your journey to death, and those who hate you have deliberately chosen to extend your torture as long as they can. No easy way out to annihilation for you. You must endure each breath until it stops. Knowing that your torturers are delighting in what they are doing. No pang of remorse or sympathy from them; they exult in your agony and their victory. So, even as the mind is on the point of imploding under the terror of this ordeal, on top of the physical pain is this understanding of your enemies’ delight and of the destruction of all your own hopes. And for you, above even this, is the distress at the very core of your spirit that the one you trusted, the one you gave your whole life to, has brought you to this hour, and he is doing nothing to rescue you.

How did the followers of Jesus turn this into the profoundest expression of love? They have achieved a complete reversal: the more hatred and pain expressed, the more love and joy is released. For this crucifixion is understood, not as something done to Jesus by his enemies, but as something Jesus has done for love of us. It is not demonstrating the extent of human hate, anger and fear, it is demonstrating the extent of God’s love, revealed in the human person Jesus. It is understood as something that Jesus chose out of his faithfulness to God, believing that God had chosen him to demonstrate to the world that there are no limits to what he will do for love of us. In Jesus, God is suffering on the cross. His death is seen as embodying sacrificial love and revealing to humanity that this is the very nature of God. In the mystery of his death, all that is wrong with us is faced up to, embraced, absorbed, accepted – and overcome. In the very act of succumbing to death, Jesus won his victory of revealing his love for us – the love of God – that would not turn away but loved us to the death.

What is the appeal of Jesus?

Part 9: An afterthought to clear up a possible misconception

Secular minded people sometimes get cross and frustrated with Christians for continually harping on about sin. They see this as a negative, oppressive thing, something that needs to be left behind in order to embrace life. And we can see how sin has played a central role in this defence of, and promotion of, Christianity. It has used the impulse of guilt for sin as a key reason why Jesus became so helpful to so many people, and Jesus’ role as a sacrifice for sin is central to understanding why he is important.

The important point to emphasise is: Freedom from sin is freedom to live life.

So, a focus on sin is not negative and oppressive, but liberating. Any secular tendency to downplay the effect of sin is, in fact, keeping the person trapped by its limiting effects. By promoting the view that human moral failure is not such a big thing really, that “it’s only human” and so to be expected, that we shouldn’t get caught up in worrying about it too much – provided we are keeping the law and not doing anything “too bad”, secularism is robbing people of the transcendent joy and fullness of life that giving yourself to living in tune with God, and so combatting sin, provides. Christianity has a much deeper and truer understanding of human nature and of the dilemma we find ourselves in, of being caught between our most positive possibilities and our most negative temptations. Christians have realised that it is only by finding some means of negating the destructive effects of sin that we can be truly free to live life to the full. This is what Jesus has given us, and is why the acclamation: “Christ is risen!” expresses the joyful liberation of the soul from sin, evil and death. All that is selfish – either in a mundane, grasping, uncaring way, or in more sinister forms of hatred of others – is overcome by the love that Christ embodies and is declared triumphant through belief in his resurrection.

What is the appeal of Jesus?

Part 8: A new settlement for religion

We could stand back and say that Christians are not worshipping God (conceived as a person); they are worshipping a set of spiritual values, which they set up as the centre of their lives. We might say that they have personalised this set of values. You can argue that this is a mistake – based on our primeval tendency to personalise and anthropomorphise abstract principles. However, these principles or values are very easily experienced as being personal, and the ideas about God being a voice which we create in our minds supports the experience of God being personal rather than just a set of ideas.

My claim is that Christianity within this new framework of understanding of who God is and what he does would be quickly indistinguishable from traditional mainstream Christianity. The believer would focus (as is the case now) on their relationship with the person of God, finding in this meaning and purpose and a rich inner spiritual life that they find supremely fulfilling. They would engage in community life with their fellow Christians and engage in their mission programme of relieving poverty and suffering, fighting injustice and spreading their message.

However, they would have complete intellectual compatibility with secular, atheistic culture, (there will still be massive differences on morality, values and outlook) as there would be no conflicting truth claims, and so it would not be necessary to ask people to adopt the Christian package of ideas regarding metaphysical realities if they wanted to join the religion. Instead, Christians would be able to make the appeal: your framework of reality is based on the Big Bang and evolution and the discoveries of science; so is ours, but if you adopt the life of a Christian you can have the completely compatible dimension of a full spiritual life. This has currently been only understood to be available to those who adopt a religious life that has points of conflict with this framework of reality – but no longer.

Christians can thus make a very attractive offer:-

• Not: choose us or a scientific world view

But, choose one of the following:-

• A scientific world view and complete selfish pursuit of consumer pleasure
• A scientific world view and giving a bit of time and money to good causes
• A scientific world view and a fairly strong commitment to an ethical way of life
• A scientific world view and an overt commitment to one of the great secular altruistic ideologies
• A scientific world view and an overt commitment to Christian faith, giving all the altruism of the secular altruistic ideologies, but also a rich inner spiritual life.

I’m not suggesting that Christianity has a monopoly on rich inner spiritual lives, and I feel sure that there is an atheist equivalent, but I do claim that it’s unlikely that an atheist ideology can provide as rich an inner life as religion can. Therefore, it seems a reasonable claim that living a Christian life would be the best option available to everyone

What is the appeal of Jesus?

Part 7: Are you sure it’s true?

Someone might still be sceptical about the list above of those things that are true. This is because the word “God” keeps appearing, and you may wish to complain that we had said that God does not do anything, because we are not allowing God to exist as an independently existing personal agent; he is simply an aspect of the human mind. However, we are adopting a method by which every active verb about God is really a passive mirror image of what human beings are doing and imputing to the “person of God” – in which God is not a person but an idea – a hub of spiritual values (albeit one that has “ignited into a personal reality within the mind of the believer”)

So, in rather more convoluted language, we can translate what the list above means literally: –

• Christians do believe in a set of ultimate spiritual values, which for ease of use, they refer to by grouping them under an idea to which they give the name: “God”. In this sense, the word “God” simply means “what is ultimate” and for Christians, what is ultimate is their set of spiritual values
• Christians do believe that Jesus expressed those values perfectly
• (Whatever the actual socio-political details of events that contributed to it) Christians do believe that Jesus’ death correctly expresses their core spiritual value of love to an ultimate degree
• They are right in saying that these beliefs, including the supremacy of love (the love that Jesus showed them), are stronger than death, because it is possible to still believe in them no matter what, including believing in them after Jesus was killed
• They are correct in saying that trusting in their spiritual values – gathered together under the idea of “God” – does enable them to believe that all their sins can indeed be forgiven, and calling on a trust that the death of Jesus expresses the ability of love to forgive all sins is the way to express their complete commitment to the spiritual values that are expressed under the idea of God.
• When Christians say that “Jesus is alive”, they mean that the values Jesus taught them are still valid and powerful in their lives.

What is the appeal of Jesus?

Part 6: So, what is true and not true?

What I believe this review shows is that all the Christian claims are true. Though for clarity we need to say exactly what is true.

It sounds rather damning:-

• God does not exist
• Jesus was not God’s Son
• He was not raised from the dead

However, all these things are true:-

• Christians do believe that the ultimate spiritual values are those expressed through belief in the person of God
• Christians do believe that Jesus expressed those values perfectly
• (Whatever the actual socio-political details of events that contributed to it) Christians do believe that Jesus’ death correctly expresses how much God loves us
• They are right in saying that these beliefs are stronger than death, because it is possible to still believe in them no matter what
• They are correct in saying that trusting in the belief that God does indeed forgive all sins, and calling on a trust in the death of Jesus, and in his resurrection, is the way of expressing complete trust in God, and complete commitment to their ultimate spiritual values.

What we see is that, in practice, Christianity operates in exactly the same way as it always has. Moreover, Christians are entitled to adopt the same terminology as they always have. What is required is a different framework of understanding, and from time to time Christians will have to keep reminding themselves of what it is in order to avoid lapsing into error and saying something that is untrue. However, in practice, this will be rare, and mainly when conversing with those outside the Christian community.

What is the appeal of Jesus?

Part 5: Jesus’ crucifixion as a sacrifice for sin is still effective in our new understanding of God

So, believers in this version of Christianity argue like this:-

God is the voice we create in our heads which calls us to adopt a particular spiritual life and supports us in this life, a voice which makes real and personal the idea of God, which is a repository for all good values

Jesus was an actual person, who lived and preached as recorded in the gospels, who expressed the spiritual values we approve of to an ultimate degree, and who was killed on a cross.

When his followers realised that the spiritual values embodied by Jesus had not been taken away from them by his death, they either experienced this as Jesus being resurrected from the dead, or they have used resurrection as the symbol to express the truth that these values cannot be destroyed and, in this sense, they “conquer death”.

By preaching Jesus as God incarnate, his followers are expressing their faith in the ultimate worth of the spiritual values that Jesus embodied and shared with them.

When Christians today proclaim that, “Jesus is Lord” they affirm their faith in, and commitment to, these spiritual values. Although Jesus is not Son of God in the literal meaning intended by traditional Christianity, he is “Son of God” in terms of being the complete representation of the values that Christians believe are the very essence of God.

By trusting in “what God has done” in Jesus, Christians are declaring their allegiance to his spiritual values, which they have made their own. Although, literally speaking, God has not raised Jesus from the dead (because we are not allowing God to exist, nor are we allowing any miracle to occur, which a resurrection is), we declare that, in our spiritual value system, God (our ultimate value) would indeed become incarnate in the person of Jesus, and he does indeed, love us enough to die for us, and it is, indeed, the case that his and our spiritual values can never be extinguished, and so by saying, “Jesus lives” we declare, “His values are still the mainspring of our lives”. Our core value as Christians is that God loves us enough to die for us, and this is what we mean when we say that we are Christians because we follow the way of Jesus. We affirm our belief that this is the pinnacle of what love means, and we want to live in tune with this love. And, at the risk of being pedantic, but in order to fully clarify what we mean, we take the sentence, “Our core value as Christians is that God loves us enough to die for us” and turn around the sentence structure to say that it means the same as, “Our core value is that the willingness to die for love of the other is the pinnacle of truth and meaning in life”. We experience this in ourselves that we are loved in this way, and we want to share this quality of love with others.

Once we have adopted these beliefs, we are able to make use of, and benefit from, the liberating effect from guilt and sin that comes from believing that the sacrifice that Jesus has made is, indeed, sufficient to cleanse us from all sin, completely, no matter what we have done, forever.

What is the appeal of Jesus?

Part 4: How did the person of Jesus acquire universal significance? : Jesus the ultimate sacrifice

However, Christianity goes straight to the bottom line by giving us the ultimate sacrifice. God sacrificed himself in the person of Jesus in order for our sins to be forgiven. Note: This is the God of classical theism here, so you can’t get a bigger conception of God; you simply can’t get bigger than that either in theory or in practice. The Christian message is that God loves you so much that he died as a sacrifice for sin, so that you can be free of that sin. In this belief, people find ultimate and complete freedom.

Clearly, this message only works if you believe that Jesus was the Son of God. If he was just a man, then the Christian claim that God died for our sins is false. However, we are working within the framework of understanding that we will not credit anything beyond what science can tell us of the material universe. So, Jesus has to be a man because he can’t be God, because we are claiming that God does not exist in the traditional sense. God has become an idea which is a hub around which spiritual values are able to collect. So, I think it is possible to translate the old understanding into the new, with a profound meaning still intact.

What is the appeal of Jesus?

Part 3: How did the person of Jesus acquire universal significance? : The basis in the impulse to make a sacrifice to atone for sin

This transforming vision that the love of Christ lives on would, I think, explain Jesus’ appeal to the first disciples, but how did he acquire the global appeal to be the foundation of an enduring world-wide religion?

When people do wrong, they feel bad. They then want to do something to put things right and make themselves feel better. We might argue that this is a key root of religion, and in a variety of ways, religions evolved to enable this to happen, and their basis is very often a system of sacrifice. In order to express your sorrow and “do something” about it, by giving up a bit of your money to buy a sacrificial animal and going through the rites that society prescribes, you “do the right thing” and this counters the effect of your sin. We can see that this is psychologically satisfying and “works” as a system of putting things right. Hopefully, if the person is remorseful, they have made recompense to the person they have wronged, been reconciled to them, and then the sacrifice puts right the damaged relationship with God, and reinforces publicly for society the values that it approves of – and which had been broken – including affirming for the benefit of the wronged person that we disapprove of going against our values. Sometimes, it might not be possible to make amends to the person you have wronged, but making amends to God is deemed sufficient – and, indeed, there’s nothing else you can do. In fact, we have been emphasising the primacy of the inner relationship with God as the heart of a faithful life, and so putting things right with God is of supreme importance.

This desire to put things right seems to be a fundamental human characteristic. It is so powerful that some societies have even adopted human sacrifice as a way to try and express the enormity of the task in putting right serious offences. The sacrificial system works provided people have complete trust that by going through the prescribed rituals, their sin has been obliterated. Even so, it’s possible that some people would still feel guilty; they might feel that what they’ve done is so wrong that it can never be forgiven.