IS - This Then Is The Meaning Of The Easter Message And The Easter Faith

The ultimate reality

The message with all its difficulties, its time-bound concrete expressions and amplifications, situational expansions, elaborations and shifts in emphasis is basically concerned with something simple.   And - despite all discrepancies and inconsistencies of the different traditions in regard to place and time, persons and the sequence of events - the different primitive Christian witnesses, Peter, Paul and James, the letters, the Gospels and Acts, are agreed that the Crucified Jesus lives forever with God as obligation and hope for us.  The men of the New Testament are sustained , even fascinated, by the certainty that the one who was killed did not remain dead but is alive and that person who clings to him will likewise live.  This new, eternal life of the one is a challenge and real hope for all.

This then is the meaning of the Easter message and the Easter faith, completely unambiguous despite all the ambiguity of the different accounts and ideas of Easter.   It is a truly revolutionary message, very easy to reject not only then but also today: "On this subject we will hear you again," said some skeptics to Paul on the Areopagus in Athens, according to Luke.  Not of course that this held up the victorious progress of the message. 

Hans Kung then gives several paragraphs showing how this message "had been prepared already in Judaism".  Instead of giving you that,  I'll give you this passage from Abraham Joshua Heschel's essay Death as Homecoming

In the language of the Bible to die, to be buried, is said to be "gathered to his people" (Genesis 25:8). They "were gathered to their fathers" (Judges 2:10). "When your days are fulfilled to go to be with your fathers" (I Chronicles 17:11).

Do souls become dust? Does spirit turn to ashes? How can souls, capable of creating immortal words, immortal works of thought and art, be completely dissolved, vanish forever?

Others may counter: The belief that man may have a share in eternal life is not only beyond proof; it is even presumptuous. Who could seriously maintain that members of the human species, a class of mammals, will attain eternity? What image of humanity is presupposed by the belief in immortality? Indeed, man's hope for eternal life presupposes that there is something about man that is worthy of eternity, that has some affinity to what is divine, that is made in the likeness of the divine…

The likeness of God means the likeness of Him who is unlike man. The likeness of God means the likeness of Him compared with whom all else is like nothing.

Indeed, the words "image and likeness of God" conceal more than they reveal. They signify something which we can neither comprehend nor verify. For what is our image? What is our likeness? Is there anything about man that may be compared with God? Our eyes do not see it; our minds cannot grasp it. Taken literally, these words are absurd, if not blasphemous. And still they hold the most important truth about the meaning of man.

Obscure as the meaning of these terms is, they undoubtedly denote something unearthly, something that belongs to the sphere of God. Demut [likeness]and tzelem [image]are of a higher sort of being than the things created in the six days. This, it seems, is what the verse intends to convey: Man partakes of an unearthly divine sort of being.

[Which I will admit, I copied and pasted from an online source (complete with typos which I hope I corrected, correctly) because I can't find my copy of the book it's in.]

I have been interested in finding through such authorities as Heschel that the widespread belief that Judaism rejected the idea of an afterlife is not shared universally among Jewish scholars and theologians though they seem to be very reluctant to talk about it as compared to Christians.   I think the interpretation of the biblical language mentioned above does indicate that there was a belief, vaguely expressed, in an afterlife.  This past year, thinking about the story of the Transfiguration in which three of the followers of Jesus saw him talking with Moses and Elijah, something which is apparently taken as much more significant in Eastern than in Western Christianity*, especially taken in relationship with the passages in which Jesus confounds the Sadducees with God's declaration that he IS the God of Abraham Issac and Jacob, on the matter of the afterlife, it's clear that even before the Resurrection, the people who wrote those stories down had to have believed at least some of their ancestors were alive in God.  

Kung continues.  

This Jewish faith, with its apocalyptic background is taken for granted in the New Testament as a whole.  The Christian faith on the other hand - which must of course be freed from purely time-conditioned apocalyptic ideas - includes that Jewish faith in a final concentration.  Jews and Christians believe in the resurrection.  The faith of Jews and Christians rests on the fact that for them the living God is the unshakably faithful God as we constantly encounter him in the history of Israel.  He is the Creator who keeps faith with his creature and partner, come what may.  He does not withdraw his yes to lie, but at the decisive frontier itself adds another yest to his first yes.  He is faithful in death and beyond death. 

* The past week of going through this exercise during the Easter season has made me wonder at how odd it is in Western Christianity that the preparatory period of Lent is so much more observed and kept in mind than the season between Easter and the Pentecost, I don't know if that's a product of an attraction to gloom and a fear of joy, the pessimistic, fatalistic fear of bad news and a fear of not only good news but of the best possible news, universal eternal life in God.  I have the feeling that the long period of Lenten gloom in Christianity should end and the "ultimate reality" that Kung talks about in this passage should replace it.  Though I do have to admit, I rather like Lent, it seems to me that it should certainly not replace this reality. 

Update:  I should also say that doing this, typing out these passages, thinking about them, comparing them with other passages from Scripture and from other theologians has sustained and helped me a lot during this terrible period.  I think it's something I'll continue doing even after Pentecost.   I've been doing it for myself with passages I haven't posted or written about.  I don't have the patience or time to do it the way the old monks did in the scriptoria, putting the book in a book holder and typing the text out has become a real pleasure, a really effective way to engage with the texts and what they say.   I recommend it.