The Spiral Path

Wonder, Science, and Faith

Archive for the category “resurrection”

05 Aug 2012

RS20: The Messiah Who Misbehaved

A:  Last time, you came out with a doozy.  You said — and I quote — “[Paul] would have thought of it as ‘reintegrating’ broken pieces of divine truth that had fallen out of their proper places.  Pieces such as the Logos [Jesus].  And Charis (grace), who was Paul’s God.”

Bleeding Hearts ((c) JAT)

“They said to him: ‘Tell us who you are so that we can believe in you. He replied: You analyze the appearance of the sky and the earth, but you don’t recognize what is right in front of you, and you don’t know the nature of the present time” (Gospel of Thomas 91). Photo credit JAT 2013.

That’s quite a statement.  You’re saying, in effect, that Paul believed you actually were some some sort of divine figure who was sent to Earth, but that you were somehow “defective” or “broken,” and because of your “brokenness” Paul hated and feared you and tried to “fix” your teachings.  Have I got that right?

J (nodding):  Exactly.  It’s not difficult to see the differences in theology between Paul and myself, and it’s not difficult to see that Paul was trying to found a brand new religious movement, with himself as leader and prophet.  But at the end of the day, you still have to ask yourself why he would bother including me at all.  You have to ask yourself why he would found a new religious movement, and then stick a real person — a person whose family and friends had survived him and could still tell the truth — right in the middle of it.  It was a risky thing to do.  A stupid thing to do from the viewpoint of common sense and practicality.  It would have been much simpler and more logical for him to invent a Saviour from whole cloth, as so many other religious movements had done before him.  He could have invented a new god, and nobody around him would have blinked.  The world of 1st century CE religion was full of invented gods.

A:  So why did he do it?  Why did he take the risk of putting a real person at the centre of his new religious movement?

J:  We’ve talked about some of Paul’s motives in the past.  He was a man who was deeply driven, deeply ambitious.  He was, like so many ambitious men before and after him, a man who was blind to his own issues, blind to his own extreme narcissism.  The world was a confusing and endlessly frustrating place, from his point of view.  So, like so many other narcissists, he turned to ideology to help him cope.  He turned, in this case, to the ideology of religion.  Not faith, as I’d like to emphasize, but religion.  Religion as a cultural institution with clear rules and expectations — rules that bring order and harmony into a world of pure chaos.  Rules that make sense to the head if not to the heart.  Rules that tell people their place in life.  Rules that tell people how to behave toward their neighbours and how to behave toward their “betters.”  Rules that teach people how to obey.  This sense of structure and obedience was greatly appealing to Paul.  It helped him cope with his own feelings of confusion and anger.

A:  So he just went out and started a new religion?

J:  No.  Paul’s mindset — his internal belief system — was the start of his journey, but not the end of it.  In early adulthood, Paul turned to the Jewish tradition he’d been raised in, and at first this satisfied him.  But soon his narcissism, his need for special attention and special outcomes for himself, led him further and further away from questions about compassion and healing and forgiveness.  His clever mind and his skill with rhetoric brought him to the attention of a powerful group of military and political thinkers based in Alexandria, Egypt.

A:  We’ve talked about this before.  You called this group “Seekers of the Rock.”  You said they had a plan to seize power from the emperors of the Julian dynasty in Rome.

J (nodding):  People today often scoff at the idea that such powerful groups exist.  But they do.  They’ve been a fixture of all technologically advanced civilizations on Planet Earth.   The people who found and maintain these groups always ascribe great mystical significance and merit to their work, but, in fact, they’re really just a bunch of severe narcissists who’ve got together to form a “mutual admiration society.”

A:  Misery loves company.

J:  Yes.  Narcissists feel miserable on the inside.  But they feel better if they can keep themselves busy by throwing themselves into “a worthy cause.”  And what more worthy cause could there be than joining the Sons of Light to save the universe from the dire perils of Sin and Death and Corrupt Law and their evil leader Beliar?

A:  Paul mentions Beliar in Second Corinthians (2 Cor 6:15).

J:  And the Essenes before him.  Essene beliefs about Good Versus Evil greatly influenced Paul.  But in the end, even the secret mystical teachings of the Essenes weren’t enough for him, and he embraced the offer made to him by the Seekers of the Rock.

A:  They made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.

J:  One of their seers told Paul he’d been chosen before birth to carry out a great mission that could help save the world and restore order to the entire universe.  There is no more tempting bait for a pure narcissist.

A:  Paul begins his letter to the Galatians by saying God had set him apart before he was born to receive divine revelation (Gal 1:11-17).

J:  Once a narcissist is convinced of such a claim, he or she becomes unstoppable in religious fervour.  He puts on a cloak of religious fervour that is understood by others as charisma — a gift of special grace from God.   He wears it 24/7 and goes without food or sleep if he’s caught up in the self-generated ecstasy of being the No. 1 Prophet and Mouthpiece of Revelation.  But, again, there’s nothing mystical or divine about it.  It’s the self-generated high — the orgasmic high — that narcissists feel when other people tell them how “special” and “chosen” they (the prophets) are.

A:  So Paul believed his own propaganda.  He believed he was a divinely chosen messenger.

J:  Absolutely.  He couldn’t have found the strength to keep going for so long if he hadn’t believed in his own message.

A:  The source of that strength was the “high” he got from being treated by others as special and chosen.

J:  Yes.  It’s an addictive high.  Eventually it damages both body and brain and leads to other forms of addiction, such as addiction to sex or drugs, but in the short term it gives a lot of energy, a lot of stamina for big performances, big bursts of charisma.

A:  Like some pop stars today.

J:  A lot like that, yes.

A:  So how does any of this relate to you?  Why did he decide to put you in the middle of the new religion he was commissioned to create?

J:  Several reasons.  One, he needed a “face” for his new Christ Movement, a movement that was being founded to compete with the Emperor Cult in Rome.  The Emperor Cult had “refreshed” ideas about the living god, the god incarnated in human form, the man who is really the son of God, deity in human flesh, god-and-emperor-as-One, that kind of thing.  These weren’t new religious ideas at the time.  Far from it.  But the influence of the Emperor Cult — which was nothing more than a calculated political ploy designed to build acceptance for Rome’s rule — had a surprising and unintended effect on people.  People began to think more — and yearn more — for an actual living god who could help them in their suffering.  Many people were open to the idea a living god, a Saviour who would come to Earth during a time of great need and save the oppressed.  It’s an idea that still hasn’t gone away.

A:  The Romans were nothing if not oppressive.

J:  Other religious movements of the time — and there were many — focussed on ancient gods and ancient prophecies.  Meanwhile, the Emperor Cult had a “new” god, a god of living flesh.  Paul saw the effect this had on people, and decided to offer them an alternative.  It was quite brilliant, actually.

A:  But why you?  Why not a prince or a member of the Alexandrian elite?  Why not a heroic general?  Why not a famous oracle?

J:  Paul chose me because he was afraid I was actually “the real deal.”  He didn’t arrive in Galilee in time to meet me in person, but he spoke to people who had worked with me, and he read the writings Lazarus and I had left behind.  He came to two unshakeable conclusions: (1) I had been the prophesied Messiah, as shown by the miracles of my ministry, and (2) I had seriously fucked things up.

A:  You always have such a way with words.

J (laughing):  Hey, it’s the truth.  It’s what Paul thought about me.  He could see from his own investigations that I knew something new and important about God, something he didn’t.  He could see I’d been using strange, new techniques to heal people.  He could see that something damned weird had happened around the time of my crucifixion and reappearance from the tomb.  He didn’t argue with the events, with the historicity of miraculous events during my ministry.  What he objected to was how I had used this secret knowledge.  In his opinion, I hadn’t behaved at all the way a proper Messiah should have behaved.  I hadn’t seized the power and the glory. So he concluded I’d got broken somehow, that I’d got broken and needed to be fixed.

A:  Which he had the skill to do, of course.

J:  Of course.  A narcissist doesn’t believe he has limits.  I was so broken he sometimes referred to me as the “thorn in his flesh.”  Other times he referred to me as “the useful one,” the slave Onesimus, as in Paul’s letter to Philemon.  He felt I’d fallen so low during my time as a man that I’d become no better than a slave.

A:  So what was this secret knowledge you had?  What were these strange, new healing techniques you used?

J:  Ah.  That would be science.

A:  You want to explain that?

J:  It’s the simplest thing in the world to put science and faith together when you trust in God’s goodness with all your heart, all your strength, all your mind, and all your soul.  When you believe in God — in God as God actually is — there’s no need to fight the science.  There’s no need to fight the objective realities of science.  There’s no need to hide behind religious laws and religious rituals.  You just go out there and do your thing — whatever your “thing” happens to be.

A:  Which in your case was being a physician.

J:  I was a physician, then and now.  It’s who I am as a soul.  It’s my calling, you could say.  It’s my strength.  Because it’s my strength, I hear God’s voice particularly well in this area.  My instincts, my gut, my heart, my intuition hear messages from God very clearly in the area of medical science.  I can’t hear God’s voice clearly in all areas, but when it comes to questions about medical science, I can hear clear as a bell.  I combined my skill as a natural physician with my faith in God and my faith in the goodness of all souls.  God’s healing angels did the rest.  I didn’t perform the miracles myself.  But I helped create a fruitful garden of the heart where oppressed individuals could believe in their own worthiness, in their own worthiness to be loved and healed by God.  My job was to persuade my friends they could find healing by working with God instead of against God.

A:  This doesn’t sound very broken to me.  It sounds pretty healthy and normal.

J:  Apparently Messiahs who are worth their salt are expected to show a lot more razzle dazzle.  More shields, more swords, more footstools, more thrones, more trumpets.

A:  Sounds a lot to me like an American reality TV show.  “So You Think You Can Prophesy”  . . .  “American Messiah” . . . “Dancing With the Gods” . . . Hey, you know, maybe we’re already there  . . .

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Posted in healing miracles, Messiah, miracles, narcissism, Paul vs Jesus, Paul's teachings, Realspiritik, resurrection and tagged , | Leave a Comment
31 May 2011

JR45: Lien or No Lien on Your Soul?

My red car (c) JAT 2015

“His disciples said to him: When will the resurrection of the dead take place and when will the new world come? He said to them: What you look for has come, but you do not know it” (Gospel of Thomas 51). In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus talks often about “life” and “beginnings,” yet his sayings involving “death” are not what we typically find in eschatological or apocalyptic teachings. Rather, the sayings about “life” and “death” in Thomas seem closely related to parts of the first century CE text known as The Didache, in which “the way of life” and “the way of death” are used as metaphors for how to live a moral life in full relationship with God. In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus spends quite a bit of time and energy trying to persuade the disciples to let go of the eschatological doctrines held by the Pharisees and the Essenes at that time.  Photo of my red car. Photo credit JAT 2015.

A: Last week, I bought a 2007 Pontiac to replace my 1998 Nissan, which was close to death. The Carproof report found a lien against the Pontiac — a financing lien held by Chrysler. At first I wasn’t worried. I figured the paperwork for the clearance of the lien hadn’t yet made it into the computer system at the proper government ministry. But being a thorough person, I decided to phone the ministry yesterday morning to make sure the lien had been cleared. Imagine my surprise when I discovered the lien was still attached to my car! I quickly got the problem straightened out with the dealer I bought the car from. But in the meantime I had a chance to reflect on my feelings about the lien. In Ontario, as in many other jurisdictions, a person who unwittingly buys a car or house that has a lien against it can lose the property they bought. It can be legally seized by the lien holder if the debt hasn’t been paid by the original debtor. The car you think you own outright can be towed away in the blink of an eye by the original lender. It’s a scary thought.

Anyway, I was thinking about my feelings around the lien on my car. I was noticing how upset I was at the thought that somebody could — theoretically — swoop down on my little Pontiac and take it away with no say on my part. I was thinking how I’d paid for the car in full, how I could lose all the money I’d invested (unless I were inclined to sue, which would cost me even more money). I was thinking how unfair it would be for such a thing to happen. I’d bought the car in good faith. Why should I be punished for somebody else’s mistake? Or somebody else’s willful fraud?

So I’m standing in the bathroom and I’m drying my hair so I can get ready for work and it suddenly dawns on me that the feelings I’m expressing to myself about the lien on the car are the same feelings I have about orthodox Western Christianity’s teachings on the soul. The Church teaches us there’s a lien on our souls!

J (grinning): Yes. Not a nice feeling, is it?

A: No! It totally sucks. I never noticed till yesterday how deeply, deeply unfair the church’s claims are. I knew their claims about the soul were based on the writings of Paul, Tertullian, Augustine, and so on. I knew their claims were self-serving. I knew their claims were just plain wrong in light of God’s loving and forgiving nature. But I never felt the unfairness of it before at such a deep level — at a gut level, a visceral level. It’s just wrong to tell people their soul can be taken away from them by lien-holders. It’s so . . . so . . . unfair. And cruel. It’s cruel to tell people they have to invest themselves wholly in their faith while at any time the great big tow truck in the sky could show up to haul them or their loved ones away to the fiery pits of hell. Not to pay their own debts, but to pay somebody else’s debts! Namely Adam and Eve’s debts!

J: Ah, the wages of sin.

A: Very funny. This God-and-Devil-as-lien-holders thing means that devout Christians are always looking over their shoulder, waiting for the cosmic tow truck they can’t do anything about. It makes people feel helpless. It makes them feel like slaves-in-waiting. Their soul isn’t their own. Their time isn’t their own. Their life and their choices and their free will aren’t really their own. They’re always on tenterhooks because they think they don’t fully own their own soul. This is abusive.

J: That’s why it works. From the perspective of certain members of the church hierarchy — stretching all the way back to the time of Paul and his backers — it’s an excellent strategy for gaining control of the populace. People who feel helpless and hopeless tend to cause less trouble. They ask fewer questions. They tend to do what they’re told because they’re frightened. Frightened people turn to strong leaders — in this case, church leaders. The Church is using a psychological control strategy that other groups in other cultures have used to similar effect. Paul’s teachings have been particularly successful in this regard.

The teachings of myself and other like-minded spiritual teachers are useless for this kind of psychological strategy. Totally useless. You can’t frighten people into submission if you’re actually giving them real hope. Real hope doesn’t come from words. Real hope comes from actions — from people’s ongoing choices to help their neighbours. Real hope comes from healing and relationship and dignity and change. If the early church had wanted to teach real hope, it wouldn’t have chosen the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed and the Chalcedon Creed as its operative statements of faith.

A: Ah. You mean they might have mentioned the themes of divine love, forgiveness, healing, redemption (as opposed to salvation), and egalitarianism?

J: If the bishops in the first few centuries of Christianity had spent one tenth the time on compassion that they spent on their endless arguments over the “substance” of the Trinity, medieval Europe would have been a much nicer place to live in.

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Posted in "4 S's", free will, hope, humility, Jesus Redux, life and death, occult themes, Original Sin, orthodox teachings about the soul, Paul vs Jesus, Paul's teachings, resurrection, Soul, Trinitarianism and tagged | Leave a Comment
15 May 2011

JR39: John, Paul, and James: The Lunatic, the Liar, and the Lord

Religious statues in doorway of church in Quilinen France

“Jesus said: No prophet is accepted in his own village. No physician heals the people who know him well (Gospel of Thomas 31).” Photo credit Hemera Technologies 2001-2003.

A: By now people will have noticed that you and I aren’t apologists for conservative or evangelical Christianity. I was thinking again today about C.S. Lewis’s “Trilemma” argument that claims to prove the divinity of Jesus — the “lunatic, liar, or lord” argument (presented in his book Mere Christianity). For Lewis, and for countless other conservative Christians, you — Jesus — have to be lord. Why?

J: Orthodox Western Christianity can’t survive in its present form if there’s no Saviour. The Saviour myth — Jesus as Saviour, Jesus as Lord — provides the perfect camouflage for all the lunatics and all the liars who have shaped orthodox Christianity over the centuries. This applies to both the Roman Catholic church and to mainstream Protestant denominations. Nobody wants to rattle all the “lunatic, liar, and lord” skeletons in the closet.

A: How many skeletons are there?

J: Too many for me to list here. But I can tell you who the earliest ones were.

A: Okay.

J: The earliest “lunatic” was John — by that I mean John the Baptist, who reinvented himself as John the chosen apostle after my death. John was seriously mentally ill, and I make no apologies for being honest about this fact. The word “lunatic” is too harsh, of course, and I wouldn’t use this word in the context of mental health discussions today. There’s far too much stigma around mental health issues already. But pretending that mental health issues don’t exist and pretending that mental health issues don’t touch all families is naive and cowardly. Mental health issues have always been a reality in human society. They’ve always been a reality in religious organizations. Religious organizations are never been exempt from these realities. Pious theologians hurt regular people when they go through contortions to try to “redeem” apocalyptic texts such as Revelation. The book of Revelation was written by John when he was floridly psychotic. This book hurts people. It scares people. It should come with a warning tag on it, but it doesn’t.

The honest truth is that some mentally ill people end up trying to hurt others, especially if psychosis has set in. Not all mentally ill people by any means. But some mentally ill people. Mental health professionals are trained in risk assessment, and they know that only a small percentage of mentally ill individuals are at risk of harming others. This is a reasonable, responsible, and appropriate approach to mental health. The church should take this approach in reassessing the writings of its own theologians — starting with John. They should look at what John actually said instead of pretending that John was so mystically elevated compared to his peers that regular people couldn’t understand his symbolic, mystical messages. The reason they couldn’t understand him is because he was having hallucinations and delusions.

A: Ever the honest fellow, aren’t you?

J: Lies don’t help anyone.

A: Speaking of lies . . . .

J: Nobody who’s been reading this site or your Concinnate Christianity site will be surprised to learn that the earliest “liar” in the church was Paul himself. I won’t go into detail on the Paul question today. If people are interested, they can check out some of our earlier posts about his motives.*

A: Okay. So what’s with the “lord” thing? How does that tie in with the “lunatics and liars”?

J: Well, this brings me to my older brother, James. James and I had . . . well . . . a very complicated relationship. He didn’t believe I was the Saviour as such — not in the way Paul described me. In fact, James despised Paul, and did everything he could to confront Paul’s teachings. But contrary to what scholars such as Bart Ehrman and Barrie Wilson think, my brother James was not a follower of my teachings. He taught his own version of reformed Judaism that undercut my central teachings. He liked me only slightly more than he liked Paul. Unfortunately, he and Paul had a lot more in common than either one realized.

A: In what way?

J: Quite honestly, both were pompous narcissists.

A: That’s not a very nice thing to say about your brother.

J: Maybe not, but it’s true. James was the eldest child and the eldest son born to an elite family of Jewish aristocrats. His maternal grandfather had at one time been a member of the Sanhedrin — the ruling council in Jerusalem. He wasn’t raised to be compassionate and trusting towards God. He was raised to be pious and fearful of God. He was considerably older than I was. He was — like so many eldest children — conservative, highly responsible, obedient, cautious, and “certain” of his role in life. He believed in law, and in particular in the laws of Moses. He was a devout Sadducean Jew.

A: I thought the Sadducees didn’t believe in resurrection. How did James reconcile himself to the strange events that occurred around your crucifixion and “resurrection”?

J: He didn’t. He tried very hard to downplay the rumours that swirled around my “death” and temporary reappearance. He, along with Peter and John, worked very hard to spread counter-rumours. It was he who came up with the idea of saying my body had been stolen from the tomb by my disciples (Matthew 27:62-66). Of course, my body hadn’t been stolen because I wasn’t even dead. Yet. James had more reason than anyone alive to know that I was a real human being and not a god-in-human-form who’d been resurrected from the dead. James, along with Peter and John, and with the help of my older brother Judas, were the ones who had me arrested in the first place.

A: Why?

J: For the simplest of human reasons — pride. Pride and “family honour” and that most terrible of dysfunctional human behaviours — the narcissistic rage reaction. I pushed all my brother’s buttons, and he had a narcissistic rage reaction. If you’ve ever been standing in the way of such an event, you’ll understand what I mean when I say the rage becomes all-consuming and self-absorbed in a way that’s difficult to describe. It’s like the entire universe shrinks to one spot of pure, blind, selfish hatred, and nothing else matters but revenge. There’s no logic to it. Not from anyone else’s point of view, anyway. But from the narcissist’s point of view the logic is diamond-hard. He (or she) becomes fanatically convinced that he’s right and everybody else is wrong. If he’s a religious man, this is the time when he’ll start saying that God is on his side and God demands revenge. Such a person is capable of the most murderous acts imaginable.

A: Including acts against one’s own family.

J: Especially against one’s own family. The people at greatest risk from an extreme narcissist are the people closest to him (or maybe, as I’d like to emphasize, her). Family members and group associates are the ones most likely to observe the mistakes, hypocrisies, memory failures, and lies made by a narcissist — none of which a narcissist wants to hear about. Those who make the mistake of pointing out a narcissist’s errors in judgment (including errors by proxy) may well find it’s the last mistake they make. Extreme narcissists can and do kill when they feel their “honour” has been “unjustly” attacked. My brother James was such a person.

A: He convinced himself that he was doing the right thing in having you arrested.

J: Absolutely. I was attacking the cultural and religious belief systems that gave him great status. I was attacking his right to be called “lord.” All along I was at greatest risk not from the Romans and not from the Jewish religious authorities in Jerusalem (where I spent very little time), but from my own family and friends. They were the ones who had the most to lose if I continued teaching my new brand of Judaism.

A: Where there are no lords.

J: And where “lunatics” are healed and liars are called to account for their lies.

A: Sounds like a place of rainbows to me.

 

* Please see Materialism, Pauline Thought, and the Kingdom

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Posted in Book of Revelation, Favourite Posts, historical Jesus, James brother of Jesus, Jesus Redux, Jesus' family of origin, John the Baptist, narcissism, Paul, religion and mental Illness, resurrection, status addiction, the right to be right and tagged | Leave a Comment
05 Dec 2010

CC48: The Crucifixion and Resurrection

Today is Second Advent, so this seems like a good time to talk about miracles.

You’d think that, with all my talk about science and brain chemistry, I’d be the sort of person who would reject the reality of miracles. Because practical people who believe in science are sort of obligated to reject the reality of miracles. Aren’t they?

Sunset, October 2014 - I captured this dazzling ray effect close to my home when my angels unexpectedly told me to pick up my camera, get in the car, and go! (c) JAT 2014

Sunset, October 2014 – I captured this dazzling ray effect close to my home when my angels unexpectedly told me to pick up my camera, get in my car, and go! Photo credit JAT 2014.

Most United Church of Canada members seem to think so. They’re squeamish about the idea that the soul exists as a scientific reality. Same thing with miracles. Officially, they won’t talk about miracles. Off the record, some United Church members will confide they believe in unexplainable, God-given events. But when they talk about miracles, they speak awkwardly and self-consciously — the same way people react when they’re invited to sit at a formal dinner table where there are three different forks on the left and three different knives on the right, plus a whole bunch of spoons, and they don’t know which utensils they’re supposed to use first. So they spend most of their time trying to watch the other guests to see which fork they should use when. They’re so busy paying attention to their feelings of embarrassment and discomfort that they can’t enjoy themselves. The whole situation is stressful rather than enjoyable.

I’d like to be able to say that United Church members have gone on the defensive about miracles because of repeated attacks from atheistic scientists such as Richard Dawkins. But it’s not that simple. United Church members are on the defensive because they’ve been repeatedly bullied by “progressive” Christian theologians (e.g. Rudolf Bultmann) who have loudly proclaimed that the miracles performed by Jesus in the Gospels couldn’t possibly have happened.

In the view of Bultmann and others, no sensible Christian should believe in these miracles because to believe in miracles is to reject science. These theologians recommend that Christians read the miracle stories . . . symbolically. Symbolically — my favourite word (grrrr).

These same theologians call into question the reality of the Crucifixion and Resurrection. They insist we should understand the Resurrection metaphorically rather than literally. In their view, the Resurrection couldn’t possibly have happened for real. Naturally, this makes it easier to believe that Jesus himself wasn’t real, either, but instead was an invented religious symbol.

I think they’ve got it all backwards. They’ve started with the assumption that miracles aren’t scientifically possible (an assumption that’s not scientifically valid), and on the basis of this assumption they’ve concluded that the miracle stories (especially those in the Gospel of Mark) must have been invented by gullible, superstitious, scientifically uneducated 1st century authors who didn’t know any better. Or maybe by authors who were just following a popular ancient trend of inserting invented miracle stories into their biographical narratives. (The fact that today’s Christian televangelists are still inventing new miracle stories to dupe the public should remind us not to make blanket statements about the motives of all ancient writers.)

Queen’s University history professor Dr. Jaclyn Duffin, who is both a practising hematologist and a professor in the history of medicine (a modern day physician scholar, as it were), has recently published a book about the history of canonization and attested healing miracles in the Roman Catholic Church. She sums up medical miracles in this way: “The doctor is surprised.”

The doctor is surprised. The doctor is surprised that, on the basis of current scientific understandings of the disease process, the patient somehow manages to fully recover despite all scientific predictions of imminent death.

I would suggest that when the doctor is surprised, it can mean one of two things: (1) the doctor was wrong from the beginning about the diagnosis or (2) the doctor isn’t as smart as she thinks she is about the disease process, quantum biology, healing, and God.

Usually it’s the latter.

The Resurrection as described in the Gospel of Mark is very sparse on details. (I agree with biblical scholars who suggest the book originally ended at Mark 16:8, not at Mark 16:20). All we really know for sure is that Jesus was crucified, was declared dead, was taken down from the cross, hastily placed in a tomb, and somehow managed to disappear from said tomb. Mark’s account leaves a lot of scientific wiggle room for a doctor to be surprised.

It’s a powerful symbol, the cross that Jesus hung upon. (It’s okay for symbols such as crosses or a stars to be symbols; it’s just not okay for historical facts to be treated as symbols instead of as facts.) The story of the cross has something important to say to us, even today, because it’s still a story where the doctors are surprised and we, the regular people of faith, are filled with awe.

For me, the miracle in this story is not that a man died and was raised from the dead. (I don’t think that’s scientifically possible.) For me, the miracle is that the man didn’t die in the first place.

How did Jesus son of Joseph escape death on the cross? That is the miracle in question.

It’s a much bigger question than Paul’s Christ myth asks. Paul’s Christ myth asks you to believe with blind faith that a human man fully died but was fully returned to life after three days because he was divine — the chosen son of God. He furthers asks you to believe with blind faith that if you fully accept Paul’s teachings about Judgment Day, then you, too, will be resurrected on that day. Sin is the enemy and death is its consequence. The great question for Paul is, “How can I escape death?”

The Jesus reality (as told by Mark) asks a different question. The Jesus reality asks you to ask new questions about God. The Jesus reality tells a powerful story about the relationship between God and God’s children, and asks you to not rely on blind faith, but to use your own common sense, your own senses, and your heart.

The Jesus reality is a powerful story about the kinds of things that are possible in God’s Creation when human beings walk side by side and hand in hand with Mother Father God.

It’s a story about courage. And trust. And humbleness. It’s a story about God’s free will and our own. It’s a story about miraculous (though still scientific) healing. And it’s a story about grief.

One of the things we can be certain of when we read Mark is that Jesus is not trying to escape death. Jesus has no fear of dying. He tells his disciples he’s going to die, but then he gets on with his life of service as a teacher and healer. He ignores all the Jewish purity laws around disease and death. He puts himself in harm’s way by going to Jerusalem. His Last Supper is not a last supper but a first supper, where he rejects the Passover ritual of eating unleavened bread by choosing instead to drink water and to eat risen bread. He breaks all the laws designed to protect the pious from death. His message is not about escaping death. His message is about embracing courage and trust and gratitude and devotion in our relationships with each other and with God.

The Jesus reality is Mark’s way of saying that death is part of human life, and no one — not even a gifted physician scholar filled with learning and love — can fight this reality. Jesus had to die because he was a creature of Earth, and all creatures of Earth will one day die. It’s meant to be this way. It’s part of the fabric of Creation. It’s painful and emotionally overwhelming for us to lose someone we love, but it’s the way it has to be. Our lives here are only temporary. When it’s time for one of us to go Home to our eternal reality, God the Mother and God the Father (both of whom are brilliant scientists and brilliant healers), come and gently lift us out of our mortal body and tenderly carry us Home. There we’re reunited with our loved ones, and our hearts break open to pour out all the tears and sorrows of our lonely human lives so we can be healed and restored in God’s loving arms.

Yet, despite all this, we’re left with a mystery. Despite the reality of Jesus’ total trust in God, despite the reality of Jesus’ courage in the face of death, we’re left with the puzzling fact that God the Mother and God the Father in their wisdom decided that a man named Jesus of Nazareth would not die on the cross that day, but would, in fact, escape that terrible death, and live to tell the tale — for a short while, anyway, before he, too, surrendered his human life, as all of us one day must.

What is it that God was saying?

Thanks be to God the Mother and God the Father this Advent Sunday.

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