Happy Easter. One of my recent tasks was to record the latest editions of the Newsletter and the viewPoint of the National Unitarian Fellowship. The recordings go on to CDs which are sent to members who have impaired vision.
The Subject of the ViewPoint was religious festivals around the spring equinox. I had written one of them about Ostara the goddess of the old Norse traditions. Her emblem was the hare, and in pictures she was often depicted as a beautiful young woman but with the head and shoulders of a hare. The hare was seen as an emblem of immortality.
So was the egg, new life emerging from the shell. In Chinese culture the hare can be seen in the moon, whereas we have a man in the moon.
We celebrate still with our Easter eggs and Easter bunnies
Ostara was about change, when the length of darkness becomes less than the length of light each day. And that change could also be a symbol for personal change, emerging from personal darkness into something better. All the eight solar festivals of the year are taken as stimulants for change.
Another article was about Easter as a Christian religious festival. It was written by my friend Adrian Wosfeld who lives in Hull. Adrian is a sociology academic and he writes with academic detai.
One of the points that Adrian makes is that writing and reading is different in different ages. He uses the example of school text books. Today’s generation contain information in bullet points and tables. Years ago, as in my generation, textbooks were written with many words and long paragraphs.. They were like academic novels, he says.
Now we are told that the Gospel stories were not written down at all until at least thirty years after the events of Jesus’s life. They circulated in the oral tradition as stories, passed from one person to another, one group to another. A good story has to have dramatic content, otherwise the listener will lose interest.
In what is known as The Apocryphal New Testament, many gospels and epistles that never made it into the New Testament. They ended up on the cutting room floor. They were rejected because they seemed either too close to the Gnosticism or they contained too much supernatural or Pagan material.
In one St Paul is challenged by one of his rivals to a contest and the account is filled with supernatural events, changing shape, flying through the night etc.
It was an age of storytelling and drama. That is one way how history was told. Some of it was drama invented for a purpose. Sometimes we learn about ourselves through drama, reading novels, seeing plays or watching films. While we read or watch, the characters are alive in our heads and sometimes the messages in them can be quite subtle.
I remember having to read Ernest Hemingway’s ‘A Farewell to Arms’ for an English exam. The teacher had said, read it and then we will discuss what the book is about. I read it and to me it was a love story of the First World War set in Italy.
That is not quite all said the teacher. The book follows a formula. The man is developing as a hero, the girl is his tutor, the other characters are distracted from the path of being a hero, or simply there to help him, and it is about the philosophy of nihilism – nothing matters.
Read one of his books and all the others follow the same formula.
I was talking to a lady over the weekend about Easter. She said that she had been a churchgoer all her life and Easter was a special time to her. To her it was more than a story. It was an absolute truth, an historic fact. It was what the church had always taught.
The early church took the dramatic out of the stories and said that all that happened really did happen. The death and resurrection of Jesus was a real historic event.
Even though it was a supernatural event, it did really happen. The church said all the miracles and all the healings were real historic events too. They were supernatural too.
Did Jesus really exist? Of course he did, but maybe only in the legends and dramas that were circulating about him. There is no physical evidence of his existence, just a passing remark by the historian Josephus and that wasn’t corroborated.
If it is only a drama, someone must have existed on which the drama is based, but all the supernatural bits might have been added as the story went along.
The church got itself tangled up in arguments about whether Jesus was fully human or fully divine. If he was fully divine he couldn’t have suffered as a human would have suffered, went the arguments.
Unitarians decided that he was fully human and the most important thing was what he had taught about fairness, equality, turning the other cheek, etc and there were no supernatural events. They could be explained away as ordinary.
There is no doubt the Easter story is an intense emotional and religious experience for many people each year as it comes round. All the depictions of barbaric cruelty, scourging and banging in nails is a distressing drama. The story or the event has become the drama of the Passion.
I wish the sacrifice of suffering and death really did put an end to sin in the world. The Passion play of Easter is played out year after year but does the world ever change? The only thought we can have is that on a personal level it inspires or frightens some people to change direction in their lives.
I do think of the Jesus life as a drama. Not as a play written to entertain but as a means of spiritual development. A drama that works at many levels of consciousness. Like my Hemingway book it can be read as the history of a ‘god man’ or’ man god’.
It would be a case of don’t chase after physical proof just accept the story as real even if it isn’t. If you could really prove there never was a Jesus, would it lose its impact?
I like the whole thing being supernatural because then it touches us at a subconscious level.
So I see Jesus as the spirit guide. Before Easter he is doing his miracles. In each case the healing makes a sick person whole. He is awakening them to a full life. I love the healing miracles by the Wells. The one who cannot see and the one who can’t walk so can never reach the water when the angel comes to heal everyone who can get themselves into it. The miracle lifts them to a higher level of seeing or walking but it is on the spiritual path. The spirit God is needed to make a change which cannot otherwise happen.
And all those ethical teachings are there too about love your neighbour, be the good Samaritan
The drama has a happy ending because death cannot kill the spirit god. While he acted as a human in the first part, he reveals himself as fully divine after the crucifixion.
The disciples who come to the cave cannot see him in this spirit form, but they glimpse the spirit world of angels and powers.
Mary Magdalene is the consort who represents wisdom, she sees him as someone else but the barrier is then lifted. It is she who has to tell the disciples the truth of who they have been following.
The Spirit God is perfection beyond any human achievement. The archetypes of warrior, teacher, healer and visionary all exist within him. The human can only aspire to reach them.
The power of the drama is in leading the reader or watcher along a path that leads to a spiritual enlightenment, to an understanding of how to live a peaceful life.
The final message of the drama is Jesus ascending and saying, , ‘my peace I leave with you’. It is not a peace to be worshipped but a peace to be discovered,
It is for the inner peace of a person who has followed the path and understands how to live life.. They find that peace within themselves by understanding the message of healing the sick, treating others as you would like to be treated yourself, not letting another person’s country, religion or work stop you from helping them.
The question asked is why does this drama survive. Because deep down in our subconscious selves we need it. We need the spirit god the spirit guide to lead us out of the chaos and unpredictability of life in this world to a place of inner peace where we can live in the true light of life.
Someone to roll away the stone from before our cave into new life
tony mcneile a Unitarian 