An Easter Reflection

The stories that are told in sacred texts are not meant to be factual, historical accounts of something that happened once upon a time.    Rather, they are stories that are told in order to point us toward something that is always happening in every time, in every place, in every human life.

Because if the stories related in sacred texts were only of the “once upon a time” sort of character, they might be interesting, they might raise questions, but they would not ultimately make a difference to us in our here and now.

This seems especially important to remember when we consider the story of Easter Day:  the story (or, more accurately, stories) of the resurrection of Christ.

If Jesus was raised from the dead once upon a time, why should that matter to us now?  Do we know anyone else who was raised from the dead?  Has anyone we have ever loved but lost to death come back to us in the way the resurrection stories seem to describe?   The answers, of course, are No.    And so if we suppose that once upon a time God raised an important Jewish teacher from he dead, but has never done so again for anyone else, then it doesn’t seem that the story of the risen Jesus leaves us with anything particularly valuable.

Over the centuries, of course, the way the Christian tradition has come to be interpreted has wanted to convince us that there is some value to our believing the story of the resurrection, and that this belief somehow wins us something called salvation.   The resurrection of Jesus became bound up, naturally, with his crucifixion (one has to die to be able to be brought back from death).    And all of this was developed into a kind of transactional theology that insisted that God could not “save” human beings without this transaction taking place.    It is a theology that is deeply flawed and deeply troubling if one really bothers to give it any thought and step outside the insistence that believing in this transaction and its power is the central thing about Christian faith that makes our salvation — whatever that is — possible.

There is, however, a key to unlocking the real power of the Holy Week and Easter stories that remains to this day (at least in the liturgical churches) and is, indeed, very ancient.    And that is the proclamation of the church through the ages at the beginning of the Easter liturgies:  “Christ is risen.”    Notice that this ancient liturgical proclamation is NOT “Jesus is risen.”   No.  It is, quite deliberately, “Christ is risen.”   And that is our key.

The truth is that Jesus of Nazareth, the Jewish teacher, healer and prophet around whom the Christian tradition was built, lived from around 3 BC to around 30 AD, and was executed by the Roman Empire by crucifixion.   And he died.    The life of Jesus of Nazareth was ended.  And Jesus of Nazareth did not pop back into life.    He remains dead to this day.

However, the Christ - whom Christians believe dwelt in Jesus and shown forth powerfully in his life — did not die, because death has no power over the Christ.    It seemed for a moment that the death of Jesus meant the disappearance of the Christ.   Easter celebrates the realization on the part of the earliest followers of Jesus that the Christ shown forth out of the apparent finality of death just as powerfully as it shown in the life of the living Jesus.     

Who is the Christ, whom death cannot overcome or contain?  The Christ is what Christians call the authentic, true identity of every human being.  It is the original face that each of us has before our parents were born*.   It is who we truly are when our ego falls away and we recognize that what we habitually think of as the self is really nothing more than a construct of the mind.  The Christ is the Wisdom of Direct Knowing, it is Awareness, it is Being Itself, it is Love, it is Compassion, it is God in us and us in God.     

It is what St. Paul is pointing to when he says in the Letter to the Galatians:  “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.”  (2:19b-20).

And this is what the stories of Holy Week and Easter are pointing us to, as well.   The stories are told in sacred text not so that we might believe in something that happened once upon a time, but because that which happened once upon a time is always happening in every human life.   Or, at least, potentially so.  What Jesus’ life, death, and the resurrection of the Christ show us is not meant to be an article of belief but a pattern for us to follow.

Jesus in his teaching was always pointing beyond himself: “whoever sees me sees him who sent me.  I have come as light into the world, so that everyone who believes (this is, trusts) in me would not remain in darkness.” (John 12:45)      The death of Jesus moves the focus beyond the limited construct of the human self called Jesus to the eternal, abiding field of awareness that we term the Christ — the field of awareness in which everyone and everything arises and passes away, and yet the awareness remains.    

What makes the stories of Holy Week and Easter powerful for us is when we enact in our own lives what we see being enacted in these stories.  Each of us is meant to take the journey through crucifixion of the false, constructed self that each of us carries with us in order to find the Christ who dwells within us all and which is who each one of us truly is.

Yes, the resurrection stories speak of the Christ appearing to the disciples in a way that resembles Jesus.   And yes, some of those stories involve interactions with a Jesus who seems to have come back to life.    The Christ initially shows forth out of death in a way that the disciples can recognize in order to establish that this is what Jesus was about:  initiating his followers into the truth of the Christ, into the truth of the true life hidden in each one of them — and in each one of us.

What we celebrate at Easter is not something that happened once upon a time that we are desperately trying to believe despite the fact that we have no personal experience that seems to correspond to what these stories are talking about on a surface level of reading.

Rather, what we celebrate at Easter is the hope, the promise, and the possibility that the Christ can be raised up out of each of our lives if we will only let go of the belief that what we know as our selfhood is something solid and final.   We celebrate the hope, the promise and the possibility that we can find within us our authentic life, which is none other than the indwelling of Awareness, Divine Wisdom, Love, Compassion, Being Itself.  God in us and us in God.    A profound unity of all humanity and all creation.   This is salvation.  This is our spiritual practice.  This is what heals us.  This is what has the power of heal the world around us as we become sacraments of the sacred.

“The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.”  — Meister Eckhart

*This is from a Zen Buddhist koan:  “What is your original face before your parents were born?”  It is a reference to the unadulterated essence of a person, or their Buddha-nature.    The ancient Christian understanding of the Christ is similar.