Breaking Free: The God of Israel’s story was not one of endless repetition. Each human life was to be understood not as the fleeting rehearsal of a drama whose essential plot was unchanging; but as a step, however small, towards an end that humankind itself was fashioning. Jehovah’s representation of the world was historical, not cyclical. We, his human creations, were headed towards something that had not happened before.
DEATH AND RESURRECTION lie at the heart of the Easter story.
But Christianity’s preeminent religious festival also echoes a much more
ancient celebration; that of Spring’s triumphant overthrow of Winter’s deathly reign.
Viewed from this perspective, Jesus of Nazareth is but the latest in a long line
of divine revolutionaries whose sacred lives are bound, irretrievably, to the
slow-turning wheel of the seasons; the relentless cycles of birth, death, and
rebirth.
Where Christianity departs so decisively from the nature
religions that preceded it is in its claim to have broken free of their circles.
Jesus’s startling message held that the ferociously jealous sky father,
Jehovah, was a linear god. The God of Israel’s story was not one of endless
repetition. Each human life was to be understood not as the fleeting rehearsal
of a drama whose essential plot was unchanging; but as a step, however small,
towards an end that humankind itself was fashioning. Jehovah’s representation of
the world was historical, not cyclical. We, his human creations, were headed
towards something that had not happened before.
In the pre-industrial world that Jesus and his followers
inhabited, it is difficult to overstate how radical this idea must have seemed.
To people whose very existence depended on the orderly sequences of sowing and
reaping; engendering and slaughtering; the notion of individuals stepping away from
the relentless cycles of the world must have seemed, at best, fanciful, and, at
worst, blasphemous.
Once grasped, however, it is easy to see how this idea might
encourage notions of being among God’s chosen people. To embrace Jehovah’s
linearity was to become a being in history – a shaper of events, rather than
their inevitable victim. It’s what makes Jesus’s trade such a potent metaphor.
For what else is a carpenter but a person who shapes things to a purpose?
Someone who builds things to a plan?
The overwhelming image that emerges from all the Jesus
stories is that of a man on a journey. The great events of his ministry are but
stations: points which he is at once moving towards and departing from; points
on a line.
Reading the Gospels it is impossible not to see Jerusalem as
the city of endings: the inescapable terminus of Jesus journey; the place towards
which every step he takes is leading him. It’s as if he knows that in this
great crucible of faith and politics – of faith as politics – all the twisted threads of his life will be pulled, finally,
into a single bloody knot.
Only in Jerusalem will he have an answer to the question
that has been dogging him ever since he set out from Galilee. Is Death the end
of the line?
Crucifixion is Death at his most cruel. We read that in the
last, agonising moments of his earthly life, Jesus cried: “My God, why hast
thou forsaken me?” And then: “It is finished.” As if, in the brutal reality of
his own demise he finally understood the futility of his faith in straight
lines.
From the perspective of Calvary did Jesus realise, at last,
that space is curved? That what we perceive to be a straight line is, in fact,
just a tiny section of a circle so vast that the brief span of human existence
is simply too short to comprehend its immensity.
Or did he, hanging up there against the sky, understand that
life is both linear and circular? That the quest for understanding, for
meaning, leads us always straight on. But, also, that the quest itself is
repeated endlessly. That every generation is driven forward by the power of all
the lives lived before it. Like those voyaging spacecraft, flung ever further
into space by the gravitational heft of the planets they pass by.
And isn’t this the true meaning of Jesus resurrection? That the
all-too-human truths he wrenched from his own life lie waiting to be rediscovered
in every generation. That the carpenter’s invitation, to step outside the dull
circles of our lives and shape the world to some purpose, is one we all hear,
but by no means all of us heed.
Perhaps only a God born in the desert could place such faith
in the act of journeying. Where water is abundant, it is easy to forget how far
people are willing to travel to quench their thirst.
This essay was
originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The
Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Thursday, 2 April 2015.
