The Resurrection stories are too bad to have been invented. No novelist would dare dream up the inconsistent collection recorded in the New Testament. The story-tellers agree that Jesus died of crucifixion, with nails in hands and ankles, blood congealing round the assegai wound in his side, mockery from onlookers, farewell words on his lips, and cursing from the soldiers. But after that?
John tells the deeply moving story of Mary of Magdela going to the tomb early and finding it empty. Matthew says another Mary was with her. Mark adds Salome. Luke says it was Joanna. John and Luke say the women ran off to tell the disciples. Mark says they were too scared to tell anyone. John says Mary saw two angels in the tomb. Matthew says she saw one. Mark says they saw a young man in a white robe. Luke reports two men in shining clothes. John says Jesus spoke to Mary who thought he was the gardener. Matthew says both women saw him. Luke says no one saw him until that night on the road to Emmaus.
These reports were drafted decades after the event by writers who were not there, recording memories of people convinced they had known Jesus after his death. The details naturally differed — like media reports of the same incident today — but they believed it. They also believed that, having made his point, Jesus ”ascended into heaven” a few weeks later.
By the time these gospels were written down the followers of Jesus had already branched into two groups. In one, Jesus’s brother James and the Jewish believers in Jerusalem followed the Way of Jesus, which emphasised the practice of living together in a sharing community on Earth in the here and now. In the other, followers of Paul, mostly non-Jews, founded small churches round the Mediterranean, and believed in the primacy of faith as the path to life after death. Both groups were persecuted and their leaders eliminated by the Romans within a few decades.
Similar kinds of contentions lived on for 2 000 years, with frequent variations in the balance between ”life here and now” and ”life after death”. Whenever the church has become ”too heavenly minded to be any earthly good” it moves to the right, corrupts into heresy, and a new resurrection arises to bring the focus back to Jesus on Earth again.
In every age, the human situation changes. But whenever people have had to reinterpret faith they have sought for clarity in Jesus. In every reformation and in every renaissance, no one ever sought another Saviour: they always resurrected Jesus to bring them back to life.
We are children of Darwin, the Big Bang and the global village and we need a new vision: we cannot survive on 19th century religion. The idea of a Christian God in the sky, and heaven ”up there” is dead to those who know about a round Earth in space, and inter-faith. It is time for a new religious dispensation based on the Jesus story to free us from inherited concepts that lead us astray.
In fact, a new resurrection of human insight is happening. Jesus simply cannot be confined to the inherited ideas of colonial churches, and is too crucial a human being to represent a bone of contention between Jews or Muslims or atheists. The language of George W Bush or Blair or Israeli extremists or Osama Bin Laden is the language of crucifying soldiers.
If Jesus, the Prophet and Karl Marx sat down together today they would talk about Earth not heaven, and of the way to justice, peace and full humanity for all, and they would surely reach agreement that worshipping Mammon the God of Globalised Greed makes most people poor; Jesus proclaimed that the vital force of God on Earth lay in the heart of a cooperative human community, within which a uniting, holistic experience of vision, values and skills takes place. That was the way to peace and prosperity, justice and love. We are in the middle of a major reconstruction of faith, a new reformation, a unity in diversity, a secular spirituality, which demands the rediscovery of such a Jesus.
Cedric Mayson works for the African National Congress commission of religious affairs, but writes in his personal capacity
Truth that sets us free
I don’t have the faintest idea whether the physical Jesus really brought his battered and speared body out of that garden tomb to set his colleagues alive with stories. They thought so. But in this urgent April of 2006, I find the story of the empty tomb a compelling vision.
Whenever I encounter truth in the world today that reflects the Way of old Jerusalem, whether it be:
Thabo Mbeki or Jeremy Cronin seeking prosperity and peace;
Ivan Abrahams brewing theology in African pots;
Wilfrid Napier or Ray McCauley reviewing fundamentalism;
A rabbi or moulana pointing the way to care and compassion;
Hindus pondering the message of the arti tray (silver tray used in devotional songs to Maharaji);
Nokuzola Mdende catching the relevance of traditional spiritual reality in ubuntu and seriti (ancestral spirit);
people discarding fanatical heresies, or replacing competing nationalisms with cooperative communities;
businesses making commerce a means not an end; or
journalists commending happy responsible sex, and telling stories of hope and promise; then
recognise the truth of Jesus that sets us free.
And there is the young prophet of Nazareth, bronzed by the sun, not wearing a biretta or a dog collar but jeans and a T-shirt, striding along the path ahead of us, leading us on, out there, amandla!
Poetic stuff? Yes, of course.
But the resurrection story of Jesus is too good to be ignored. It never says: ”Die!” It says: ”Live!” — Cedric Mayson