#9 Awakening Consciousness
Paschal Paradox:
Reflections on a Life of Spiritual Evolution by Diarmuid O’Murchu
From the Precis by Helene O’Sullivan, MM
Concluding Chapter 4
Focus on the Life of Jesus Not His Death
It is the life of Jesus that is all important, particularly the cosmic empowering dispensation of the kin-dom of God. The death is a very small part, the consequence of a life fully and radically lived. To highlight, glamorize, and celebrate such a cruel, barbaric event verges on blasphemy.
This is the reckless patriarchal violence that every authentic religion should be denouncing and renouncing. Without such a rejection, religion will continue to stand accused of fomenting the violence and abuse that continues to wreak havoc on our world even to this day.
With these sentiments one is often accused of dodging the issue to suffering so prevalent in our world. I acknowledge that Jesus suffered, sometimes intensely, in his life (and not merely in his death) in order to rid the world of meaningless suffering. And let us be crystal clear also about the fact that Jesus never advocated suffering for its own sake.
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The goal of his life and mission was to rid the world of all meaningless suffering. The horror, violence, and injustice of his untimely death are often misconstrued because of how Christians throughout the ages have understood that event/ experience known as the resurrection.
In its literal understanding, Jesus, unknown to anybody, and without any human assistance, came out of the grave and had bodily encounters with the apostles and others before ascending back to the heavenly realm outside this earth. Volumes have been written on this topic, long understood to be the greatest miracle of all, in which Jesus himself overcame death and rose from the grave in a newly constituted body. In this approach, death and resurrection always go together.
Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, Christian scholars raised doubts about this literal interpretation. For one thing the three-tier cosmology makes no sense in our time. And when it comes to the resurrection appearances recorded in the Gospels, we need to remember the cultural context where spirit-power was very real, and people had the capacity for mystical/visionary experiences long lost to our contemporaries.
Recall the cryptic reminder from John Dominic Crossan:
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“My point, once again, is not that those ancient people told literal stories and we are now smart enough to take them symbolically, but that they told them symbolically and we are now dumb enough to take them literally.”
The Gospel encounters with the risen Jesus may be more indicative of what was happening to the followers than of what happened to Jesus himself. Literalists in the past used the empty tomb as “proof” for the resurrection of Jesus, but those that continued to follow Jesus based their faith not on the evidence of an empty tomb but rather on the new awakening of God’s living Spirit in their midst.
In other words, the power of the resurrection is better discerned through the transformation wrought in the dis-illusioned followers of Jesus in the weeks and months after his tragic death, rather than in what may have happened to Jesus himself. Instead of speculating on what actually happened to Jesus, let us ask:
“What was the transformative power whereby the shattered, disillusioned disciples came back to a quality of faith on which they staked everything from thereon, even to the point of a martyr’s death?”
This links resurrection with life rather than with death. It then becomes what Christian theology frequently asserts: “the fullness of life.”
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In that case, resurrection can be viewed as God’s ultimate vindication that the life of Jesus (and not so much his death) was a life dedicated to transformative empower-ment and extensive liberation.
Quantum physics helps to deepen our understanding of resurrection (as explained above) while also illuminating the mystery of death—our own and that of the historical Jesus.
All life-forms are constituted and sustained by living energy, that same life force that enlivens everything in the creation around us. And it seems that energy needs to be embodied to function and flourish; without body, energy cannot do much. In the experience of my death—whatever the cause—the energy departs from my particular embodied configuration but does not evaporate into nothing.
According to the basic laws of physics, energy is never wasted. Energy always reconnects with energy, to seek out a new embodied articulation, which is another way of understanding the enlivening power of resurrection energy after the death of Jesus.
After my death, the energy of my embodied existence will go elsewhere. Exactly where, I do not know, and why do I need to know?
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Why not trust the universal cosmic wisdom within which energy is always recycled to co-create even more complex organisms, human and otherwise? This is a reckless sense of trust in the benevolent nature of the universe—what Christians might call resurrection hope!
Befriending the Great Paradox
And for many Christians, diminishing the central role of the death and resurrection of Jesus leaves them vulnerable and confused. Without the comfort and consolation of the cross, without the divine power of resurrection, promising to destroy death forever, what is the point of believing in Jesus or the Christian way?
The point, of course, is that Jesus did not set out to destroy death, which would mean destroying a central dynamic of all creation. Instead through both his life and death, he confronted the meaningless death we humans recklessly and thoughtlessly cause and challenged us to change our ways.
When we give our lives for the sake of empowerment of the other, we embrace the paradox that is central to every paschal journey.
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This is not death pursued for its own sake, nor is it suffering for the sake of suffering.
It is the daily cross we are all asked to undertake to rid our world of the meaningless suffering
largely caused by the blindness that is unable to see the enduring paradox
on which all life flourishes.