Saturday
April 15
Backstories of Easter: Creation, Sin, Death, and Resurrection
By Marsh Chapel
The resurrection discovery accounts are flashy made-for Hollywood events: thunder and lightning, an angel or two (depending on the Gospel), frightened women who hold up better than the guards, the nearly fatuous admonitions to be not afraid, Jesus accepting worship of his person for the first time (or, in the case of John’s Gospel, ducking away from worship), instructions for the women to tell Jesus’s “brothers” (no mention of sisters) to go wait for him in Galilee or, again in the case of John’s Gospel, in Jerusalem. This Vigil time between Good Friday and Easter Sunday morning is a good venue to cool those stories and think about the backstories that make them more than flashy episodes. Holy Saturday, which this Vigil concludes, symbolizes being lost, with the Vigil a search for finding ourselves.
The most important backstory is that of creation, of God the creator relating to the world of creatures. Matthew’s Gospel, with its special attention to the Jewish background of Christianity, would suppose creation as described in the two creation stories at the beginning of Genesis. Paul would have those in mind too, but insisted that the Gentiles also knew about creation and should be held accountable for failing to live up to what this entails morally and religiously. The force of the backstory of creation is to understand the difference between God as creator and human beings as creatures. God as creator is due our pure worship and gratitude.
The second most important backstory for the events of Jesus’s death and resurrection is human sin. Sin is one of the most popular topics of Christian thinking, preaching, and practice. Since the beginning of the Christian movement, the content of sin has been a matter of contention. By the time of the Desert Fathers in the fourth and fifth centuries, sins of all sorts were classified as deriving from seven primary and deadly ones: pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth. This theological preoccupation with the seven deadly sins runs from John Cassian, born in 360, to Robert Allen Hill, who last Sunday gave us a litany of them complete with instructions for how to commit them. In our own time, the question whether homosexual and transgender lives are sinful has preoccupied Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Put aside issues of the content of sin for the moment, however, and look to the root of sin.
According to the Bible, the root of sin is idolatry in the particular sense of human beings wanting to be like God, confusing the difference between the Creator and the creatures. Satan tempted Eve and Adam to eat the apple by telling her that it would make her like God in knowing the difference between good and evil. Now we might think that the knowledge of good and evil is itself a good thing. Indeed, should we not try as much as possible to be like God? Christianity has a long tradition including John Wesley of treating sanctification as theosis, becoming as like to God as we can. Not so in the view of Genesis. In the primal innocence of Eden we could just do what comes naturally so long as we are proper creatures, obedient to God in our creaturely roles. To our late-modern ears, obedience to God’s command not to eat the apple sounds arbitrary. But I take God’s command to be a metaphor in a rule-bound culture for accepting the human place as creatures in relation to the creator God. We find ourselves in situations where our alternative choices have different values. What we choose actualizes those values. Moreover, our choices determine our moral characters as the ones who choose the values we chose. Because we can know a lot about the different relevant kinds of goods and evils, if we just choose naturally so as to bring about what seems the best, we do not have to know anything special about good and evil, only about responding well to the world in which we are created. The Daodejing says something like this in proclaiming the innocence of following the Dao and warning that when concerns for righteousness arise, you know you have already departed from the Dao. Adam’s and Eve’s choice to disobey God’s command was the first level of rejecting their creaturely status, and their desire to have God’s knowledge of good and evil was their second level of rejection. It lost them the innocence of living in Eden doing fine by doing what comes naturally. Significant idolatry is not worshipping statues. It is putting ourselves in the place of God, or trying to do so. Once you do that, everything goes wrong.
St. Paul began his epistle to the Romans by condemning idolatry as the root of sin. You remember that God punished idolaters by giving them same-sex passions. Paul had no conception of homosexuality as a gender orientation. For him homosexual passions were neither a condition of birth nor a matter of choice, as we frame the debate today: they are God-given. The reason he thought it was a punishment was that he and his culture believed that all sex acts require one party to be dominant and the other submissive. Men were supposed to be dominant and women submissive. Like many cultural habits, this one had come to seem natural. Therefore, for Paul, same sex passions and acts caused suffering as unnatural because one of the men had to submissive like a woman and one of the women had to be dominant like a man. So he thought.These acts were not sinful: they were caused by God and they constituted punitive suffering for the idolaters God afflicted. What is important for Paul is the idolatry that brings down God’s wrath in the form of imposed same-sex passion. You see how complicated the discernment of the content of sin is.
Nevertheless, let’s return to the backstories. What about death, the precondition for resurrection? In the Genesis story, Adam and Eve were created to be mortal in the Garden of Eden. God wanted to keep them that way. So after their eyes were open to good and evil, God and his fellow gods banished them from Eden in order to keep them away from the tree of life that would have given them immortality. The gods wanted to keep immortality for themselves and mortality as the natural state of humans. Here was another instance of Adam and Eve wanting to be like God, a matter of idolatry, or so the gods feared. The Genesis story is delightfully fanciful in its anthropomorphic mythic depiction of God and his divine friends. Expelled from Eden, our situation is like trying to make do with some flawed knowledge of good and evil, with responsibilities for running things as best we can, sort of like minimally competent kings trying to run a country under difficult circumstances. You see why, as such klutzy kings, we are prone to pride, greed, lust, envy, wrath, sloth and all the other sins that follow from these.
Between the time of the composition of Genesis and the first century, significant cultural changes had taken place. Whereas polytheism lurked around the edges of the former, Judaism (including Christianity) in the first century was solidly monotheistic. Whereas covenantal fidelity to Yahweh oriented Judaism in the former, apocalyptic thinking from Persia colored the latter. Whereas human beings were assumed to be rightly mortal and created that way by God in the time of Genesis, many people in the first century, especially Pharisees, believed in immortality, a family of notions sponsored by Hellenism. Diverse immortality assumptions included reincarnation of one soul through many lives, the natural immortality of a soul separable from the body that had to go somewhere after death, to hell if not heaven, or purgatory, or limbo, and also the notion that people naturally die and that some of them but not all get resurrected to new life, for instance if they believe in Jesus. Some people believed that, although people naturally die, a just God needs to resurrect everyone so as to punish the wicked in hell along with rewarding the good in heaven. All these backstories about life after death were in the air in the first century; they are not consistent but I doubt many people sorted them out. The reincarnation theory did not go far in Christianity, though all the others did beginning in the first century and remaining through the middle ages up until the Enlightenment.
In the early years of Christianity, the rhetorical center of gravity thus took death as the ultimate evil and new life after death as the greatest good, or salvation. Seeking to be immortal like God was not idolatry for the Christians, as it was for the audience of Genesis, but rather the very center of the desire for salvation. What then was idolatry for the early Christians? It was the twin failure to recognize God as almighty creator and the failure to accept the humility of creatures. As to humility, Jesus preached against hypocrisy, pride of place, and the failure to for the least of people. As to God as creator, Jesus preached the sovereignty of the creator beyond good and evil, sending sun and rain on the unjust as well as the just. Of course, Jesus preached many other things not easily compatible with these points, and Dean Hill has a whole year until the next Easter Vigil to straighten them out.
When it came to understanding Jesus’ death, the early Christians made a mighty theological move. They associated Jesus with God, as the only Son of God, second Person of the Trinity, at God’s right hand in the highest heaven except for a descent to Earth as a slave—a whole host of images that the fourth and fifth centuries tried to sort, unsuccessfully. The early Christians construed Jesus’s death as the death of the real God, except that the creator, having created death as well as life, could not be ended with death. God conquered death by raising the divine Jesus from the dead. Jesus’ resurrection was different from all those other resurrections performed by the prophets and Jesus himself, as well as the early disciples. The resurrection of Jesus was God’s resetting the default on creation. In God’s creation, life triumphs over death. Death as the worst evil was broken. For believers, believing in Jesus as the crucified Son of God triumphantly raised from the dead removes idolatry. To know Jesus as God is to know God as God and not to confuse our own pretensions with God. Paul and many other early writers thought that believers, no longer being idolaters, would themselves be raised from the dead, either soon, as Paul thought, or later, or at some apocalyptic ending of the world. Believing Christians do continue to sin, as we do. But sin does not bind us with any idolatry. Paul said Christians continue to sin more or less out of habit and should just change their ways; get on with sanctification. Sanctification is not salvation, which is the promise of immortality; it is rather how to live our quotidian lives without being idolatrous. Salvation is the faith in Jesus as the true God, faith that destroys idolatry and restores a right relation to God. This faith is not our own work, said Paul, but comes from God’s grace as part of creation. Christians have long disagreed about whether, and if so why, God graciously gives faith to some and not others; let’s skip that problem for now.
Skipping over those problems, with those backstories we can now see how the early Christians, including Paul and Matthew, centered salvation on the death and resurrection of Jesus. Paul pointed out that Jesus’s cosmic restoration of a non-idolatrous way for us to live before God and with neighbors is open to us with our participation in Jesus’s death and resurrection. He said, “Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.” We have new life. Paul also said, “The death he died, he died to sin, once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Jesus Christ.” Matthew’s Gospel ends with Jesus commissioning the disciples to go live the life of preaching that baptism. Our celebrations of Easter are glorious songs in the lyrics of death and resurrection.
Nevertheless, our times are different from those of the early Christians. We know too much about how all the functions of the human mind, soul, and spirit depend upon the brain. Many today find it difficult to take seriously the immortality assumptions of the first century, except in some symbolic way. We also know too much about other religions with similar avatars and other ways of understanding saved life to be comfortable with the attribution of unique cosmic status to Jesus of Nazareth, except in symbolic ways. We are somewhat suspicious that concentration on salvation as an afterlife distracts our proper attention as creatures to deal with the issues in the world God has created for us. The triumphalism of some literal understandings of Christ’s victory over death looks fishy in light of unhealed trauma and continuing tragedy.
Therefore, we look for the symbolic ways in which the death and resurrection of Jesus can convey the gospel that gives us new life, free from idolatry and properly attentive to our creaturely responsibilities. The resurrection of Jesus to new life, however we might balk at the cosmic metaphors, sharply symbolizes that God creates everything, and for no reason of a worldly sortt. The death of Jesus construed as God symbolizes that within God’s creation God creates death too, and death does not destroy God’s creation. The comfort of the resurrection of Christ and the promise of ours does not consist in more life after death, “more of the same” under the conditions of finitude; that really would not help. The comfort of the resurrection rather symbolizes that even with death, and with unhealed pains, sorrows, tragedies, failures, loss of young innocents, loss of lifetime innocence, and the failure to make a moral world– even with all that, the creation is good and the creator is to be praised. Celebration of Christ’s death and resurrection points to the peace that passes understanding. This peace accepts the world as we find it and our flawed efforts to live out our place. That peace accepts these flaws as part of our place. To expect perfection of ourselves is idolatry. To expect the creator to be like a just king and treat us better is idolatry. To expect the world to be just rather than a swirl of cosmic gasses clumping briefly to give us our ambiguous lives and morally freighted choices is idolatry. To construe God in our image, inflated to a perfect kingship, is idolatry. To celebrate the creator in the death and resurrection of Jesus is to rejoice in the fact that everything, whatever it is, comes from God’s creation. Our personal comfort is in the eternity of creation from which time derives and in which we dwell most concretely. We sometimes lose track of that eternity and try to reconstruct it as a temporal process of creation, which is idolatry. This leads to sin, despair, and spiritual death. But when we are reminded by Easter that God is the absolutely free creator of whatever is real, and that this includes us with our varied lives to live as well as we can, and that this is what we are created to be, then we have new life. We live with the joy of the salvation that bears all things including death and from which we can never be separated. We live with powerful courage to undertake the tasks of our watch without regard for winning. We live with the comfort and confidence of our eternal identities in the divine life. We can say to the world, Bring it on! Alleluia, Christ is Risen!
-The Reverend Dr. Robert Neville
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