Easter is a celebration of renewal and new life. But it can be much more than a seasonal year marker.
Easter is a celebration of hope and re-birth but it can be more than are statement of truisms – no matter how worthy.
Today we celebrate Resurrection.
We do so in the awareness that we may participate in resurrection in this life and not in another, we do so in the awareness that the spring sunshine is warming cold stones again, we do so in the awareness that our chapel community is growing once again.
Our ancestors in faith understood the gospel message to be a message of transformative love, and they took as a central text the ‘Sermon of the mount’, they reverenced a theological statement not issued from a cloud and graven on stone tablets like the Mosaic law, but poetic and prophetic words spoken by a human Rabbi (however inspired).
They seemed intuitively to know what has been confirmed by the consensus of academic Biblical scholarship – that Jesus was a human man of rare religious insight who offered a challenging critique of the structure of human power and called his radical alternative to it ‘the kingdom’.
A Unitarian Free Christian theologian David Doel writes (in ‘The Man they Called the Christ’ ) that ‘[resurrection] invites us to consider that personal transformation, awakening, is an authentic and ever present possibility.’ Doel quotes ancient gnostic scripture which teaches that resurrection is ‘the revealing of what truly exists … and a transition into newness’.
We may be resurrected here and now if we recognise that our old ways, our deadly patterns of habitual and unthinking behaviour can be transformed.
In the writings of St Paul, resurrection is described as an arousal or an uprising, an awakening. ‘Resurrection is anastasis ‘standing up beyond one’s self’ a transformation from our old self towards a higher aspiration. A restoration of the individual to a living relationship with the inner creative power. Not only then a past event but an awakening, now, to the presence of the Christ in the soul’.
On Good Friday I read the gospel of Mark here in this chapel and the experience was a learning and a living one. By taking the gospel as a whole unit instead as passages or verses quoted in the abstract I heard over and again the challenges that Jesus set; hard challenges, he seemed to show that the individual has power to transform if only we will – if only we dare – to take up our bed and walk – to rise up, ‘rise up kid’ (Talitha cum) he says to Jairus daughter,
‘Just do it’ as the advert puts it.
A deformed doctrinal version of the death of Jesus would have us believe that resurrection was a price paid for human sin, as if Jesus was the redeeming token in a weird cosmic gambling debt between God and the devil.
The Anglican Giles Fraser points out that this often unchallenged orthodoxy
‘Transforms God into some sort of psychopath who murders his own Son as a magical way of dealing with endemic human wickedness’
but the Gospels don’t in the main depict Jesus that way, instead they show a radical who asks us to love our enemies – and who calls God – ‘our Dad’ ; who reflects his understanding of the divine power as a relationship – not a superstition.
And it is relationships which we have celebrated as we welcome new members today, people coming into relationship with this community. People who will participate – with all who are willing – in transforming it, reviving it from stagnation and negative growth to new life, to resurrection.
A Space of possibility 
Much to appreciate here, Jo. Some thorough penetration of the Gospel(s) and commentaries on them 🙂 And I detect some overlap between your message ~ personal transformation, awakening, is an authentic and ever present possibility ~ and mine in Southend on the same day : “Perhaps, for example, the meaning is what Harpur infers: that our true nature is an immortal soul; that this is lost from our awareness when it is locked up in a human body; and that we can recover that higher awareness by our own effort….. resurrection is not a Jesus one-off miracle with a physical body, rather it is something much more universal.”
Your Greek may be better than mine… I’m not quite sure ‘anastasis’ can sustain the English translation you have given. I do get that it sustains ‘standing up’, indeed ‘up standing’ the Buster Keaton image – ‘still standing’ – ‘standing through’, perhaps. It’s the ‘beyond one’s self’ part that I query. Wouldn’t a Greek writer add *ithio-* (in some way, possibly *ithioanastasis* or better perhaps *ithioparastasis*) if they wanted to say ‘standing up beyond oneself’?
Wade, thanks for your comments, and pointing out our overlapping thinking. I have amended the post so that its clearer that I was quoting Doel’s translation of anastasis – my Greek is as paltry as my Welsh – but I like ithioparastasis, thanks for it.