Something Old, Something New

 

Something Old, Something New

April 19, 2022

 

Though I didn’t get this piece posted until two days after Easter, I began drafting it on Easter, and it is an Easter message of a sort. On Easter we Christians around the world proclaim “Christ is risen! He is risen indeed!” Easter is the greatest celebration of the Christian faith. Russian Orthodox and other Orthodox Christians make Easter an even bigger deal than most of us Protestants do, but Easter is the day in the Christian year when were celebrate Jesus Resurrection, God’s sign and seal that Jesus really is the one for us to follow and that with God the end is not the end.

For the most part, Christianity has always proclaimed that in Jesus Christ, and especially in his death and resurrection, God did something completely new. God extended grace for the first time and made salvation possible for the first time. Easter is a magnificent celebration, but I have to tell you that, although I am an ordained minister of the gospel of Jesus Christ, I have a massive problem with that traditional Christian understanding of the Christ event, the culmination of which we celebrate on Easter. My problem is that this interpretation of the Christ event necessarily implies that God’s forgiveness, grace, and salvation were not present and were unavailable on earth until the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Yet that notion has some enormous problems within it. One is that human beings, who we claim God loves now and always has, had been around for a very, very long time before Jesus came. Before quite recent times, historically speaking, Christians didn’t know that humans had been around for a very long time when Jesus came, but we do. Are we to believe that none of the people who came before Jesus were saved because Christ hadn’t happened yet? Because I know God to be a God of love and grace, I simply cannot believe that they were not.

The other problem with this traditional understanding of what happened when Jesus Christ came is what it says about God. It says that once upon a time God woke up one morning and thought, “You know, I’ve got all those people down there on earth. I love them, but I haven’t saved a single one of them. Maybe I should do something about that. I know what I’ll do. I’ll send my Son, who both is and is not identical with me, to earth as one of those human beings. He can teach them and heal them. Then they’ll probably kill him. The powers on earth hate being told they’ve got things all wrong. But I’ll raise him the tomb, and voila! My people are saved. Yeah. That’s a good idea. I’ll go ahead and do that.” And that’s precisely what God did.

This reading of what God did in Jesus is horribly flawed. It says that for some undiscernible reason God decided that people who came after the Christ event could be saved, but people who came before the Christ event could not. I have to ask: Were those of us who have come after the Christ event more worthy of salvation than the people who came before Christ? I sure don’t think so. Did God suddenly one day decide to become a different sort of God than God had been before that day? Did God decide one day to be a God of grace and salvation rather than the God of wrath, judgment, and damnation that God had been before? Again, I sure don’t think so. The idea that God’s salvation came with Jesus and wasn’t there before Jesus just makes no sense.

It seems that some early Christians sensed this problem with the proclamation that Jesus had brought a salvation that wasn’t there before. They seem to have known that that contention meant that all the people who came before Jesus had been condemned just because they couldn’t believe in a person and events that hadn’t happened yet while they were alive. So they made up a story in an attempt to deal with that problem. They said that between Jesus’ crucifixion on Friday and his resurrection on Sunday he descended into hell and brought the souls of the righteous up from there with him. I suppose that story, though it’s totally unbiblical, is better than nothing; but it doesn’t solve the whole problem. It still leaves the souls of people who lived before Jesus being tortured in hell from the time of their deaths until Jesus came to get them. For some of those people that length of time would have been at least tens of thousands of years long. Is it supposed to be OK that they suffered at all, much less for thousands of years, because they lived before Jesus? It’s not OK with me. I can’t believe that it was OK with Jesus or is OK with God. The massive problems with the notion that Jesus brought a new salvation remain. That’s just not what happened in the Christ event.

So does that mean that Christianity is just a bunch of hokum that we should abandon altogether and have nothing more to do with? By no means! If I thought that the only way to understand the Christ event were to understand it literally, that is, as only a matter of historical fact, I’d have to answer that question yes. Dump the whole thing. It doesn’t make a lick of sense. Yet I haven’t dumped the whole thing, and I never will. How can that be? How can I say that my faith tradition may be hokum and still have it be my faith tradition?

The answers to those questions lie in the truth that there is a way of understanding all of the stories of the Christ event that is not literal, that is not factual or at least doesn’t depend on the factual accuracy of the stories. That way is to understand those stories not as accounts of actual historical facts but as the myths that they really are. And before you stop reading here and condemn me as a heretic (which I suppose you may do anyway) let me explain what I and a great many other Christians mean when we call the stories of the Christ event myths.

The word myth has a meaning in theology very different from the meaning the word has come to have in common usage. In common usage, to call something a myth is to say that, while some people may believe the thing to be true, it is in fact not true at all. It is false. That is absolutely not what myth means in theological language, and it Is not what I mean by the word myth here! So please, if that’s what you think myth means, do all you can to set that meaning of the word aside. Please read what I say about the word myth here and understand that what I mean by myth.  I use myth to mean a story that has the power to connect people with God and God with people. A myth may not be factually true, but a true myth is true on a level much deeper than mere fact.

The meaning of a myth on one level is simply the story it tells. But a true myth (and no, that is not an oxymoron) has a much deeper meaning than that. A true myth takes the reader beyond the story itself and points the reader to a truth far deeper than mere fact, a truth about a God who transcends creation absolutely while still being immediately in, with, and for creation. A true myth invites the reader on a sacred journey of contemplation to discover a meaning in the story that is both far deeper than and utterly transcendent of fact. The story elements in the myth are important only in so far as they contribute to the myth’s invitation to that contemplation.

Because myths are stories, they are usually set in a particular time and place. The meaning to which the myth points, however, is not limited to any time or any place. A true myth points to a truth that was real before the time in which the story is set and remains true after the time in which the story is set. To read a true myth as merely a journalistic report about that something that happened to other people a long time ago in a place far away is to rob the myth of most of its mystic power to connect people with God and God with people.

What happens, then, when we think of the stories about Jesus not on the superficial level of fact but as myths that point beyond themselves to God and seek to connect us with God? At the very least we see that when those stories speak of Jesus Christ having brought God’s forgiveness and grace into the world we must not read them as referring only to the time and events of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. Rather, we must understand them to reveal a truth that has always been there and has always been the same.

When we read the Christ event as a myth, we see that it speaks a truth that was not new in Jesus’ time. God did not extend God’s grace to the world for the first time and start forgiving human sin for the first time when or because Jesus came to us. God’s grace has always been present and available to God’s people—and all people are God’s people. God has always forgiven human sin. God hasn’t always done that because Jesus paid a price for that forgiveness. God has done it because God has always has been and always will be a God of grace and forgiveness. The truths about God which the Christ event reveals are not new. They are as old as humanity, indeed, as old as creation itself. We miss that profound truth if we read the stories of the Christ event as mere historical and biographical fact. Reading those stories as true myths transforms stories about a particular time and place into universal truths that has always been there and always will be.

So I ask: If salvation didn’t come for the first time with Jesus, does that mean that Jesus Christ has no significance? I answer: By no means! What Jesus revealed was ancient, but how he revealed it was brand new. We Christians confess that Jesus Christ was at the same time both fully human and fully divine. The eyes of Christian faith see much more in Jesus than just a poor man from a tiny, insignificant town in a backwater part of a backwater province of the Roman Empire. On a superficial level, that’s exactly what he was. But we Christians see in him nothing less than God come to us as one of us. As I’ve become very fond of saying, what happened with Jesus isn’t possible, it’s just true. In Jesus we see the most explicit revelation of God possible. Yes, the manuscripts of the documents available to us come from centuries after Jesus, but they are manuscripts of documents composed in the first century CE. We must read them carefully. We must understand their original cultural context if we are to use them properly. We may question some of the details, but we confess that in the broad sweep of Jesus’s teachings as they are related in our sources we see nothing less than the nonviolent, just, and merciful values and ways of God. In Jesus on the cross we even see how God relates to creation. God doesn’t prevent bad things from happening. Rather, God is present with us as our rock in all the bad things that happen, even when we are convinced that God isn’t with us at all.

These divine truths were always true, and there were people in all the ancient faiths before Jesus who got it, or at least mostly got it. But sadly, in the ancient world too many people didn’t get it though they could have. For example, we see some of the ancient Hebrew prophets and some of the psalmists speaking real divine truth hundreds of years before Jesus. Yet even the prophets made a mistake when they saw God as judgmental and wrathful. God didn’t condemn them or anyone who didn’t fully get it, but God clearly wanted to provide one final revelation of God’s nature and will. The way God chose to do that was to come to us as one of us, a human being like us who we could understand and who we could follow.

The revelation of God in Christ Jesus can speak to everyone, but of course not every one is a Christian and not all Christians understand God the same way. The truth is that neither any particular type of Christianity nor Christianity in general is the only way to God. The revelation of God that we have in Jesus Christ is one way, and for us Christians the best way, to know God and to live our relationship with God. What Christ revealed about God wasn’t new. How he did it was. Therefore we can know that God has been the same God from the beginning of time and always will be. God has been present with God’s people on earth for as long as there have been people on earth and always will be.  God has saved God’s people on earth for as long as there have been people on earth. For that most profound of all divine truths let all the people say, Thanks be to God!