Every Easter my husband tells me the same story about Easter. He says it is the time of year when Angels roll back the stone from the tomb where Jesus is buried, that he emerges from the tomb, looks around, and if he sees his shadow, he goes back in for 6 more weeks. This is the hysterical Jesus.
Today, I will describe a few other Jesus’s. The historical, the metaphorical, and the miraculous Jesus.
Historical Jesus
As a youngster, I didn’t believe the bible was true, not any of it. I couldn’t believe that people knew what happened so long ago! I didn’t realize that people were writing down history long before Jesus’s time. However, I did believe in God, and had a deep feeling that a spark of God was in every person. I also believed in an all-loving God.
So, my first thoughts on Jesus, once I understood that he could have lived over 1900 years ago, was that he may have lived, but he wasn’t very nice. How could an all-loving God say that some people must be predestined to go to Hell, just because they were born in an area that did not have Christianity, or born of parents who were not Christian? So, at a very young age, I did not believe that particular message of Christianity, and I did not believe in Hell. They just didn’t go with my concept of God.
Since then, my concept of God remained, but my knowledge and experiences have changed regarding Jesus.
Once I went to college and was surrounded by a critical thinking community, full of scientists and technical thinkers, I rejected God altogether. I admit, I was one to follow the crowd. I just wanted to fit in, especially since I was the weird one in my family. There I met my husband, and several years after college, while we were building careers, we married. A topic we explored together was our beliefs in the world. We had both been brought up in families who attended church, and his family was even more religious than mine. Although we saw no need to attend church for ourselves, we agreed that once children were born, we would bring them up going to church on Sundays so they could decide for themselves.
Shortly after our first child was born, I started going again, and found that the hour and a half in church on Sunday morning brought me such peace that I did not find the rest of the week. I kept going. Eventually, we all went. My husband and I found lifelong friends there. It was a place of community, fun, peace and even some spirituality.
The pastor at the church frequently said, “All of the Bible is true, and some of it even happened.” It fit with my faith at the time – a faith in a God of justice and peace. The pastor spoke of Jesus in the historical sense, a teacher. This was a comfortable Jesus for me at the time.
Last week we read about Holy Week, from the Gospel of Matthew, and it was told like a bit of history. Almost all of it was completely believable and could happen today.
So, right up through Jesus’s death, the historical record is easy to believe. At least for someone who can believe that people wrote down history in those ages – Ha! The reason Jesus is in the Bible? For those who believe in the historical Jesus, it is for the teachings. To learn how to live. To show people that God loves us. That Jesus suffered, much more than we today could imagine suffering. To give us an example of a person who was a prophet, a rabbi, and a human.
Metaphorical Jesus
The metaphorical Jesus is quite a bit different. To take Jesus’s life as a metaphor is to expand his metaphorical teachings into his life as well. Jesus loved to tell parables, to teach people of his day about God and how to live by giving examples they could relate to in their every day lives. They knew about gardening, fishing, sheep herding and about business, depending on their occupations. So, he would tell stories using these examples.
So, how would his life be a metaphor? Or better yet how is his death like a metaphor?
Notice that he died in the spring, and like a flower, grew out of the soil 3 days later. Or maybe it was like a caterpillar in a chrysalis that emerges like a butterfly. New, renewed, different, more brilliant, able to fly and capture your eye and your imagination. The caterpillar was grounded, only able to be on the earth. But as a butterfly, Jesus could traverse between heaven and earth, between the spiritual realm and the physical realm.
So, the metaphor is there, but you may wonder why? What does being reborn mean to us, the caterpillars, here on earth?
Perhaps, it means that we are like Jesus – as we go through life, we have mini-deaths. The death of the infant who transforms into the toddler. The death of the single person who marries. The death of a career when a person is let go. Each of these deaths are followed by a transformation into a new life.
I had a rebirth of a kind this week. Wednesday afternoon, after a long walk, I lay down on the couch, and asked for God to heal me. I asked for healing of my chronic fatigue which I have had for over 34 years. I asked for the healing so that I could do God’s will here on earth, so I could be one of God’s lights in the world. So I could be the best minister for God and God’s people that I could be.
Then I went into a very deep sleep for a couple hours. This was the sleep of chronic fatigue. It is so deep that it almost hurts. Coming out of it is like swimming upward through mud. I asked God, why not heal me of this? And I then understood: this is my cross to carry.
I can choose to suffer and continue fighting against the fatigue as I have done for three decades, or I can choose to surrender to it and accept it and allow it. That does not mean that I love it or ignore it. Instead, I can turn toward it, face it, and no longer be afraid of it. It then loses its power over me. It loses the power to make me suffer.
I cried at the foot of the cross. I understood Easter at a level I never had before. I suffered, and then I understood. That is the healing, that is the resurrection – the learning of each lesson in this human life. The suffering followed by the surrender.
You are being asked by God this Easter morning: what suffering have you been carrying? Another way of asking is, what needs to die in your life so you can transform and live better? Can you now lay it at the foot of the cross of Jesus? Can you accept that parts of this life will be hard, but that you are loved beyond any limitations? Can you be lifted up this morning, knowing that this life is hard, but worth it?
The metaphorical Jesus helps us understand our challenges, and gives us hope for new life.
Miraculous Jesus
Finally we come to the miraculous Jesus. In this scenario, all the events where Jesus appears to people, are true. In the scripture reading today Jesus first appeared to the women, one of which is Mary Magdalene. In the Gospel of John, she thinks he is a gardener at first and doesn’t recognize him. But once he says her name, she can now see him. The miracle is that he is really there. And he is in a physical form that can be seen, heard and touched. There is no explanation, there is no metaphor. Jesus is God in physical form and he returned to a live body after his body had died.
If we believe that Jesus raised a couple people from the dead – a young girl and his best friend Lazarus, then we can easily believe that God can raise Jesus from the dead. Does that feel like a stretch, to believe in miracles? Or can you only believe in some miracles but not others? Or is it easier to discount miracles, wondering why miracles happen to some people and not others? You would have to believe that God’s will is for the highest good.
This brings us to the concepts or facts of death and life. Here is what we know for sure: if you were born, you will die. That is a universal truth, at least, here on earth, as we know it. Going a step further, if you are listening to my voice, or reading this sermon, you probably believe that you have a body, which is terminal, and a soul, which is eternal. You believe in a higher power as well. Let’s assume this about your beliefs.
This means that when you die, your body will be deceased while the real you, your soul, will continue. We may not have many clues about whether there is a heaven or hell, and we may not know for sure if we will meet Jesus, but there are many clues about a few things we can expect after we die.
NDEs are Near Death Experiences, when a person clinically dies but then comes back to life. In Raymond Moody’s book “Life After Life”, an initial collection of over 150 contemporary NDEs were presented. The NDE typically includes many of the following: The light which is often interpreted to be God or the Supreme Being is ineffable and transmits joy, peace, love, comfort. They meet with deceased loved ones, friends, and relatives that welcome them. They return to our mortal life they say reluctantly. Upon returning to their earthly body most live a more purposeful, love-filled life. Thereafter the fear of death is largely absent.
The reason I bring these pieces of information in here is to open your mind and your heart to the gift of an afterlife. We are both a physical being, and we are also a spiritual being. When we die, we go on. And some people are given a chance to be resurrected, perhaps so they can finish what this life started, or to bring information back to the physical plane. This information gives us comfort, peace and hope of seeing our loved ones again, and the knowledge that what we feel on the other side is not pain and suffering, but instead is love, unconditional love.
Jesus came back with information too, to deliver a message of redemption, love and hope; that through the experience of him dying and resurrecting, we can see that we also are God’s children. And our bodies also will die, but we will live on into eternity as souls.
I finally came to believe in the miraculous Jesus. Although I have seen miracles over the years, it was the accumulation of several in recent times that I now accept them as part of this life, as opposed to impossible events.
Yes, I went through a metamorphosis of my own, first from not believing Jesus existed, to believing he was a teacher or prophet, to being able to look at his life and death as a metaphor to learn about my own living, to finally, believing that he is God incarnate, miracles and all. His life and his death and his resurrection, all are miracles to me. They hold love, peace, and especially hope.
Will the real Jesus please stand up? Which is real? Which ever you believe in, is the truth for you. You do not have to believe in the same Jesus that I do.
This Easter, walk away with this message. Jesus’s resurrection shows us a few things. First, that we can have Heaven on earth by carrying our cross, instead of rejecting it and fighting it. In other words, surrendering to our suffering so that the suffering does not have power over us. Also, his resurrection is an example of how our lives have mini-deaths in it, and that we can hope for a better life after each transition. Finally, he teaches us that there is life after bodily death, when our soul ascends to Heaven.
Jesus Christ has risen today. Halleluia! Every Easter my husband tells me the same story about Easter. He says it is the time of year when Angels roll back the stone from the tomb where Jesus is buried, that he emerges from the tomb, looks around, and if he sees his shadow, he goes back in for 6 more weeks. This is the hysterical Jesus.
Today, I will describe a few other Jesus’s. The historical, the metaphorical, and the miraculous Jesus.
Historical Jesus
As a youngster, I didn’t believe the bible was true, not any of it. I couldn’t believe that people knew what happened so long ago! I didn’t realize that people were writing down history long before Jesus’s time. However, I did believe in God, and had a deep feeling that a spark of God was in every person. I also believed in an all-loving God.
So, my first thoughts on Jesus, once I understood that he could have lived over 1900 years ago, was that he may have lived, but he wasn’t very nice. How could an all-loving God say that some people must be predestined to go to Hell, just because they were born in an area that did not have Christianity, or born of parents who were not Christian? So, at a very young age, I did not believe that particular message of Christianity, and I did not believe in Hell. They just didn’t go with my concept of God.
Since then, my concept of God remained, but my knowledge and experiences have changed regarding Jesus.
Once I went to college and was surrounded by a critical thinking community, full of scientists and technical thinkers, I rejected God altogether. I admit, I was one to follow the crowd. I just wanted to fit in, especially since I was the weird one in my family. There I met my husband, and several years after college, while we were building careers, we married. A topic we explored together was our beliefs in the world. We had both been brought up in families who attended church, and his family was even more religious than mine. Although we saw no need to attend church for ourselves, we agreed that once children were born, we would bring them up going to church on Sundays so they could decide for themselves.
Shortly after our first child was born, I started going again, and found that the hour and a half in church on Sunday morning brought me such peace that I did not find the rest of the week. I kept going. Eventually, we all went. My husband and I found lifelong friends there. It was a place of community, fun, peace and even some spirituality.
The pastor at the church frequently said, “All of the Bible is true, and some of it even happened.” It fit with my faith at the time – a faith in a God of justice and peace. The pastor spoke of Jesus in the historical sense, a teacher. This was a comfortable Jesus for me at the time.
Last week we read about Holy Week, from the Gospel of Matthew, and it was told like a bit of history. Almost all of it was completely believable and could happen today.
So, right up through Jesus’s death, the historical record is easy to believe. At least for someone who can believe that people wrote down history in those ages – Ha! The reason Jesus is in the Bible? For those who believe in the historical Jesus, it is for the teachings. To learn how to live. To show people that God loves us. That Jesus suffered, much more than we today could imagine suffering. To give us an example of a person who was a prophet, a rabbi, and a human.
Metaphorical Jesus
The metaphorical Jesus is quite a bit different. To take Jesus’s life as a metaphor is to expand his metaphorical teachings into his life as well. Jesus loved to tell parables, to teach people of his day about God and how to live by giving examples they could relate to in their every day lives. They knew about gardening, fishing, sheep herding and about business, depending on their occupations. So, he would tell stories using these examples.
So, how would his life be a metaphor? Or better yet how is his death like a metaphor?
Notice that he died in the spring, and like a flower, grew out of the soil 3 days later. Or maybe it was like a caterpillar in a chrysalis that emerges like a butterfly. New, renewed, different, more brilliant, able to fly and capture your eye and your imagination. The caterpillar was grounded, only able to be on the earth. But as a butterfly, Jesus could traverse between heaven and earth, between the spiritual realm and the physical realm.
So, the metaphor is there, but you may wonder why? What does being reborn mean to us, the caterpillars, here on earth?
Perhaps, it means that we are like Jesus – as we go through life, we have mini-deaths. The death of the infant who transforms into the toddler. The death of the single person who marries. The death of a career when a person is let go. Each of these deaths are followed by a transformation into a new life.
I had a rebirth of a kind this week. Wednesday afternoon, after a long walk, I lay down on the couch, and asked for God to heal me. I asked for healing of my chronic fatigue which I have had for over 34 years. I asked for the healing so that I could do God’s will here on earth, so I could be one of God’s lights in the world. So I could be the best minister for God and God’s people that I could be.
Then I went into a very deep sleep for a couple hours. This was the sleep of chronic fatigue. It is so deep that it almost hurts. Coming out of it is like swimming upward through mud. I asked God, why not heal me of this? And I then understood: this is my cross to carry.
I can choose to suffer and continue fighting against the fatigue as I have done for three decades, or I can choose to surrender to it and accept it and allow it. That does not mean that I love it or ignore it. Instead, I can turn toward it, face it, and no longer be afraid of it. It then loses its power over me. It loses the power to make me suffer.
I cried at the foot of the cross. I understood Easter at a level I never had before. I suffered, and then I understood. That is the healing, that is the resurrection – the learning of each lesson in this human life. The suffering followed by the surrender.
You are being asked by God this Easter morning: what suffering have you been carrying? Another way of asking is, what needs to die in your life so you can transform and live better? Can you now lay it at the foot of the cross of Jesus? Can you accept that parts of this life will be hard, but that you are loved beyond any limitations? Can you be lifted up this morning, knowing that this life is hard, but worth it?
The metaphorical Jesus helps us understand our challenges, and gives us hope for new life.
Miraculous Jesus
Finally we come to the miraculous Jesus. In this scenario, all the events where Jesus appears to people, are true. In the scripture reading today Jesus first appeared to the women, one of which is Mary Magdalene. In the Gospel of John, she thinks he is a gardener at first and doesn’t recognize him. But once he says her name, she can now see him. The miracle is that he is really there. And he is in a physical form that can be seen, heard and touched. There is no explanation, there is no metaphor. Jesus is God in physical form and he returned to a live body after his body had died.
If we believe that Jesus raised a couple people from the dead – a young girl and his best friend Lazarus, then we can easily believe that God can raise Jesus from the dead. Does that feel like a stretch, to believe in miracles? Or can you only believe in some miracles but not others? Or is it easier to discount miracles, wondering why miracles happen to some people and not others? You would have to believe that God’s will is for the highest good.
This brings us to the concepts or facts of death and life. Here is what we know for sure: if you were born, you will die. That is a universal truth, at least, here on earth, as we know it. Going a step further, if you are listening to my voice, or reading this sermon, you probably believe that you have a body, which is terminal, and a soul, which is eternal. You believe in a higher power as well. Let’s assume this about your beliefs.
This means that when you die, your body will be deceased while the real you, your soul, will continue. We may not have many clues about whether there is a heaven or hell, and we may not know for sure if we will meet Jesus, but there are many clues about a few things we can expect after we die.
NDEs are Near Death Experiences, when a person clinically dies but then comes back to life. In Raymond Moody’s book “Life After Life”, an initial collection of over 150 contemporary NDEs were presented. The NDE typically includes many of the following: The light which is often interpreted to be God or the Supreme Being is ineffable and transmits joy, peace, love, comfort. They meet with deceased loved ones, friends, and relatives that welcome them. They return to our mortal life they say reluctantly. Upon returning to their earthly body most live a more purposeful, love-filled life. Thereafter the fear of death is largely absent.
The reason I bring these pieces of information in here is to open your mind and your heart to the gift of an afterlife. We are both a physical being, and we are also a spiritual being. When we die, we go on. And some people are given a chance to be resurrected, perhaps so they can finish what this life started, or to bring information back to the physical plane. This information gives us comfort, peace and hope of seeing our loved ones again, and the knowledge that what we feel on the other side is not pain and suffering, but instead is love, unconditional love.
Jesus came back with information too, to deliver a message of redemption, love and hope; that through the experience of him dying and resurrecting, we can see that we also are God’s children. And our bodies also will die, but we will live on into eternity as souls.
I finally came to believe in the miraculous Jesus. Although I have seen miracles over the years, it was the accumulation of several in recent times that I now accept them as part of this life, as opposed to impossible events.
Yes, I went through a metamorphosis of my own, first from not believing Jesus existed, to believing he was a teacher or prophet, to being able to look at his life and death as a metaphor to learn about my own living, to finally, believing that he is God incarnate, miracles and all. His life and his death and his resurrection, all are miracles to me. They hold love, peace, and especially hope.
Will the real Jesus please stand up? Which is real? Which ever you believe in, is the truth for you. You do not have to believe in the same Jesus that I do.
This Easter, walk away with this message. Jesus’s resurrection shows us a few things. First, that we can have Heaven on earth by carrying our cross, instead of rejecting it and fighting it. In other words, surrendering to our suffering so that the suffering does not have power over us. Also, his resurrection is an example of how our lives have mini-deaths in it, and that we can hope for a better life after each transition. Finally, he teaches us that there is life after bodily death, when our soul ascends to Heaven.
Jesus Christ has risen today. Halleluia!
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