Easter, 2011

For awhile now I have been pondering the question: what was the ‘Good News”? What did the Apostles preach after Jesus death? What were their actual words? It must have been something really, really powerful if it convinced people to become Christians – so what was it?

I think I have finally figured out what the Crucifixion/Resurrection/Christian story is all about. The way I see it, the core of Jesus’ preaching was an affirmation of God’s all-pervasive love. Jesus preached that God’s love was manifest everywhere, inside of people and everywhere in the world itself. He called this the Kingdom of Heaven. Heaven was not a place somewhere else but right here. (Yes, I know he said “My Kingdom is not of this world” and he meant it – literally. He did not say “My Kingdom is not of this planet.” He was asserting that his power was not secular power but the divine power of love.) We were not living in a time before the Kingdom was to come but he asserted it was already here and had been here all along. And because of that, we could live as if we were in it, not waiting for it.

This fits with an earlier insight that Jesus saw that humans were estranged from God. God was hidden, far away, unavailable. What he did was to show people that God is not there but here. He went so far as to assert that he was the Son of God and that all people were also Sons of God. In this very world we are surrounded and infused with God’s love. It’s everywhere. There is no place or person that lacks it – not the poor, the sick, the marginalized, etc. All are manifestations of God’s love. Right here. Right now. Always.

This was a pretty radical idea. You can see why people would have followed him. He himself brought God’s presence to them and showed them how God was within them as well. But how was God present? Through some manifest power, might, awe or terror? No. God is present as all-pervasive, abiding and everlasting love. God’s essence is love. God’s presence is love. God is love. (“love the Lord thy God with all your heart and love your neighbor as yourself.”) This was probably a radical idea at the time. If people came to believe they had direct connection with God (or actually that they were, in a sense, God) they were likely not to listen to the priests anymore. So this idea was a threat.

And then he got crucified. His disciples were stunned. How could this happen? If God was present in this world, how could God allow this to happen? What sort of God is it that would allow his most eloquent teacher to be executed solely for preaching about God’s love? What kind of Kingdom was this? I think the disciples lost their faith at this point. They believed they had been deceived. They might even have begun to hate Jesus for deceiving them. They went from love to hate in a short time. (The story of Peter denying Jesus 3 times is illustrative of this point.)They went from the Kingdom of Heaven to the cruel, real world, the world that they had known before he started his preaching, the world that they had believed he had transformed - the new Kingdom. But the world hadn’t really changed at all. They had not given a great gift and been made to see it in a new way – it was just a dream. And it was over. All he had taught turned out to be empty words. He was gone.

Here’s where it gets interesting.

Had Jesus stayed dead we would probably know little or nothing of his message. He would possibly have become just another in a long line of Jewish prophets whose vision was vast and whose stirring words were eloquent, but who just died like the rest of us.

Let me now make this clear: I believe that Jesus’ appearances after his crucifixion were hallucinations –mass hallucinations. Why did they occur? I believe it was because of the power of his message that took root within his followers and burst forth from inside them. This was the message of God’s love. It was the Truth. It was inescapable, ineradicable. It would live even if he did not live. Just because he was gone didn’t invalidate the truth. He had been right.

The Jewish and Roman powers got concerned about him because without their religion they could not control what was already an unruly colony. They killed him. The message was cancelled.

Only it wasn’t. He re-appeared. Why did he re-appear? We know it was hallucination. They didn’t have such a concept. They would have possibly called it a vision. Visions were part of their religious culture. Visions were OK. And, in this case, lots of people had the same vision, simultaneously. So it probably seemed completely real to them.

I believe what they did with this was to fashion a myth. Jesus preached love, God’s Perfect Love. So Perfect that it constituted a wholly new and different way of looking at the world and being in the world – showing the world in a wholly different way – revealing a world nobody up to then knew existed: a world of God’s love, a world in which everyone was a son or daughter of God. He called it the Kingdom of Heaven. And what was really revolutionary was that he also preached that everyone was already a part of this Kingdom. No one was excluded. It was different than the secular kingdom that was ruling the actual world at the time (or now.) And his discovery and affirmation of its existence effectively undermined the authority of the secular Kingdom.

Easter is the story of Transformation – but it’s not Jesus who was transformed. It is the Apostles and Disciples who were transformed. How? Through the Resurrection. They came to understand their hallucinations of Jesus as an actual Resurrection. That was the only explanation for how they were able to see him. There was no other way.

But they took it a step further. They came to understand this resurrection as a confirmation of everything Jesus preached about God’s love and the Kingdom of Heaven. Why? Because God had demonstrated, through the Resurrection, His presence in the world exactly as Jesus had preached it. God had proved Jesus was right! Now it’s one thing for a preacher to share some sort of spiritual vision and get people to believe it. Happens all the time. Was happening all the time back then. There were numerous religious cults. It’s quite a different matter when what the preacher said is directly affirmed by God. Then it becomes really big!!

Jesus preached that this world was actually the Kingdom where God’s love is the absolute power and NOT a kingdom where secular power was absolute.

He was crucified for this preaching.

So the myth evolved that God, in order to prove Jesus was correct in what he taught, in order to prove his love, raised Jesus from the dead as an act of love, demonstrating the power of love to be greater than the power of anything or anyone else on earth! No wonder the Christians were persecuted! They immediately understood that the Kingdom had been proven to be real and there was no other kingdom that was as powerful and as loving as God’s Kingdom. Talk about Revelation! This was the big Revelation. Jesus was right!

So I think that Jesus appearances affirmed to the followers that his message was true and should be carried on, and they developed the myth of the Resurrection to symbolize the transformation contained in the message. They taught that Jesus had been ‘raised from the dead’. They were able to see that the Resurrection proved he had been right.

They were given new life, a new purpose, a new mission – to go out and preach the message that God is Love. But they didn’t just make the statement that “god is love.” They had proof. The proof of that love was the Resurrection of Jesus.

Only, as it turned out, it wasn’t Jesus that had been Resurrected. It was them. They were in despair after he was crucified. Then he ‘appeared’ to them, convincing them that his message didn’t die with him, showing them that his message was alive within them. They became the first Christians to be ‘born again’.

I think the ‘good news’ was that God ‘proved’ Jesus was absolutely correct by raising Jesus from the dead, thereby affirming God’s power over and presence in this world by invalidating (or effectively, cancelling) all worldly power. Truly, Jesus had inaugurated the Kingdom of Heaven. The secular powers were invalidated. God’s power was affirmed. I believe this is what they preached and why people converted. The idea that a truly new Kingdom was at hand was just too powerful to ignore and resist because this idea spoke to the deepest yearnings of the people –yearnings for peace, equality, dignity, and hope. The salvation (from the dark world of suffering, oppression and lies) they had dreamed of was right here before them. The Savior they had dreamed of who would deliver them had already come. He had laid out a simple path. They could be saved from the cruel secular world by joining the Kingdom. Who could resist? But the path wasn’t meant to take them away, take them somewhere else. It was a path to where they already were, a path to a world that already existed. They had been living in it and did not know it. But Jesus opened their eyes. He showed them it was true. And they began to live in it. Hence, the transformation.