Playing a Roman Centurion in the 1965 film “The Greatest Story Ever Told” John Wayne only had one line to say: “Surely this man was the Son of God.” When the director asked him to repeat it with awe, he tried in a cowboy drawl: “Awwwwwwe surely this man was the Son of God.”
The awe gets lost. The true stuff of the love of Jesus of Nazareth lives on, but the way it is communicated has become culturally irrelevant, so you can hardly blame anyone for disinterest or misunderstanding.
Jesus showed that the fundamental stuff of life is not physical material but spiritual consciousness, and this is a lesson we still need to learn.
I have a book on my shelves explaining: “The God part of the Brain”, as if the Creator of brains can be reduced to a creation of the brain.
Anyone bereaved knows we humans experience the strange presence of recently dead loved ones, but the love in Jesus of Nazareth lives on two millennia after he died, and he didn’t even have a family of his own.
The gospels tell us Jesus preached pacifism. Jesus used simple agricultural symbols to communicate. Jesus loved the powerless in his culture, women and children. Jesus healed those oppressed by disease and death. Jesus broke social taboos by mixing with law-breakers and ethnic outsiders. Jesus emphasised inner disposition over outward rule and form.
This challenged a religious establishment struggling under Roman occupation, and led Jesus to an inevitable struggle with the political-military alliance of his day and a famous execution in 33AD.
Jesus spoke Aramaic, but the dominant Greco Roman culture identified him as Christ, the Greek rendering of a Hebrew term, Messiah, meaning anointed one, after a ritual symbolising God’s empowerment by covering leaders in oil.
Jesus made tables. Jesus didn’t write a book. 15 years after Jesus’ demise Paul started this on Jesus’ behalf. Paul had had powerful post-mortem experiences of the love of Christ and interpreted them within his own framework, a Jewish tradition stretching back into a culture of appeasement to primitive fear of the unknown, the vicarious suffering of innocent animals, and even human sacrifice. Abraham was willing to kill his own child for his fear of God. So you could hardly blame anyone today for misunderstanding the living love of Jesus of Nazareth.
Paul also projected his post mortem experiences of the love of Jesus Christ forward, by writing the letter to the Romans into an imperial culture which dominated the known world through relentless organisation, ruthless violence and ceremonial pomp.
Then came the essentialist Greek philosophy which gave us the creeds, still in use. And so it was, a simple ecstatic experience of the living love in Jesus became a more static and highly complex hierarchical system, Christianity.
Culturally irrelevant as this can be, the fundamental stuff in Jesus, not physical material but spiritual consciousness, lives on, as it had for Paul.
“He appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve,” wrote Paul. “Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles.”
Paul didn’t mention a tomb. At least 18 years later, Mark did that. But by then it was easily 65 AD, and in his earliest short manuscripts Mark ends with a man in a white robe saying to three women who loved Jesus: “Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.”
The written account ends like this: “So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid. All that had been commanded them they told briefly to those around Peter. And afterwards Jesus himself sent out through them, from east to west, the sacred and imperishable proclamation of eternal salvation.”
Now then, why am I giving you boring Biblical history rather than the transcendent truth? Because at this point in the emerging New Testament record, we still don’t have a physical body of Jesus, at least as the author of “the God part of the brain” might understand one.
Paul harmonises our matter/spirit dichotomy by talking not about a physical body but spiritual body, or ‘pneumatikon soma’. And in a materialist culture like ours, fully material bodies not appearing can be as unsettling for Christians as their appearance where we don’t need them can be for anyone else.
The vicar, at my parents' church, for example, preaching when someone on the front pew keeled over dead. Or my sister, waiting on hotel tables during a catering exam. She repeatedly offered the sweet menu before looking closer to discover her diner had died after the main course. Or the apocryphal story of the coffin bearer having a heart attack.
But not to worry, from 80 AD on, Luke comes to the rescue by writing about an obviously more physical Jesus who can enjoy eating fish in Jerusalem and then show off his hands and feet. In doing this, Luke says that the true presence in Jesus is not a mere apparition. And then along comes Matthew, writing after 85 AD, describing a big farewell and mission action plan, eleven disciples sent to the entire world.
“When they saw him, they worshipped him; but some doubted. And Jesus came and said to them, ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
Finally in the chronology, gospel Johnny come lately John confirms Jesus’ appearance in Jerusalem the evening of the day he rose, adding that the door was locked, as if to emphasise the risen Christ is not bound by normal space time conditions. He adds that it was locked for fear of the Jews, but disciples rejoiced anyway. Though it enters through walls, the love of Christ is not merely a ghost, and it can turn fear into joy.
Like Narnia’s Aslan in the witches frozen kingdom, the fundamental stuff of Jesus' spiritual consciousness breathes on prisoners of death, and says: ‘Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.’
Here’s something truly relevant - the ancient Greek word for forgiveness, aphesis, doesn’t mean: ‘I know you did wrong but I’ll overlook it.’ It means I let go. And the tense used, apheontai, suggests that John means: ‘If you forgive the sins of any, they are already forgiven.’ Whereas Jesus of Nazareth used to forgive, now forgiveness has already taken place and you realise this in letting go of interpretations and evaluations you have projected onto people. We see the world not as it is, but as we are, using an internal construction, which can separate us from God – and this is exactly what sin is, a separation from the greatest reality there is.
John has transformed the Lucan understanding of forgiveness using material similar to Matthew 16:19 … “the Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, “Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax-collectors and sinners!” Yet wisdom is vindicated by her deeds.”
Within a minimum 60 years of Jesus’ death, the word become flesh was turned back into words. But to exist at all, God must come out of time place and language. We must not keep Jesus in an ideological tomb.
Physical death used to be defined as the heart and lungs stopping. Then we learnt to start them, so it became when brain activity stopped. Now maybe it’s just the neo-cortex.
A hospice musician writes this: “How can I possibly express what I have learned? I believe there is a mask we all wear, the mask of controlling, grasping intellect, which tries to impose order on our experiences and will accept things only in a certain way. Another name for it is fear. In many people who are terminally ill, the mask begins to slip.
“It is as though the individual, completely a citizen of the earth, begins to be aware of another home behind the mask. When the strength of the body begins to fail, the part which expresses fear and feeds on physical strength, the controlling intellect, also recedes.”
Colossians 3: 2-4 calls this our true life: “Set your mind on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you will be revealed.”
The key is to recognise that the fundamental stuff of Jesus lives on in us, as it had in Paul. Not empty physical material but hidden spiritual conscious immaterial. Phillipians 2 says it best of all - Christ Jesus emptied himself, therefore God exalted him, and we should have this same mind.
Then Being expands beyond our little form and takes in everything.
Just as invisible warm breath becomes visible but transient in cold air, so do worldly things arise only to pass, regimes, romances, careers, perspectives, rules, relationships and religions. Even persons? Not quite. Love is more. Love is not a mere feeling, and God is not a person, but a personalising presence. Love it is not static physical matter on which our power is based, but the fundamental basis of reality, ecstatic animating conscious spirit beyond intellect and words, though we say God, and into God Jesus’ love lives eternally. Jesus knew it would. So should we.
