Universal Resurrection ©
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester UU Church
March 31, 2024
There is so much that we understand about this time of year, this time when life begins to emerge from the cold, barren earth. We know enough science to anticipate this emergence, to celebrate it and be grateful for it, but to not be mystified by it.
Much of the story of Easter remains shrouded in mystery, however. It cannot be explained by science, by our human understanding of death. And perhaps that is why we revisit this story every year, to explore, to question, to try to unlock small pieces and fit those pieces into the puzzle of what it means for us today.
One thing we know: we have extensive documentation about the torture and death of Jesus of Nazareth on the cross. We know that during the Roman occupation of Palestine crucifixion was a common method of execution, of maintaining control over an oppressed people. There are reports of hillsides dotted with crosses. The accounts of Jesus’ trial and of his time on the cross are described in detail. And then, after his death, he is removed to a tomb, and then what?
The fact is that no one knows. No one claimed to witness the resurrection. The Gospel of Matthew recounts what amounts to a conspiracy theory, a phenomenon with which we are all too familiar with today. According to the author of Matthew, the Pharisees and the chief priests went before Pontius Pilate and warned him that ‘the imposter’, as they called Jesus, had claimed he would rise after three days. So they asked that the tomb be guarded, so that the disciples would be unable to steal Jesus’s body, and then claim that he had indeed been raised from the dead. The account goes on to say that when the women arrived at the tomb there was a great earthquake, and an angel of the Lord appeared and the stone covering the entrance was rolled away. The guards ran to tell the chief priests, and were given a large sum of money – a bribe – to not tell anyone what they had witnessed, but rather, to tell people that the disciples had, in fact, removed Jesus’ body. This account in the Gospel of Matthew appears nowhere else. It does serve to teach us that humans knew how to create conspiracies even in the first century of the Common Era. You have to feel some compassion for the authorities, who thought they had settled the issue of whether Jesus was the Messiah, and were beginning to discover that the story simply wouldn’t go away.
And the story has never gone away.
Because no one had actually seen it, it took hundreds of years before artists began to create images that depicted the resurrection of Jesus. The earliest art showed tombs with the door ajar, empty inside, sometimes with the winding sheets left strewn on the floor of the tomb. Images such as those were safe, as they showed what had been described in the texts as they began to be written in the first century after Jesus’ death. In his book Resurrecting Easter, John Domenic Crossan carefully documented the evolution of images from Jesus’ resurrection – from Jesus first shown sitting up in a sarcophagus, to eventually standing. Eventually, by early in the second millennium, the elaborate image of Jesus liberating humanity from Hades was created in the Byzantine church in Turkey that Jeremy read for us a few minutes ago. And then Crossan began to notice something. He started to see that there were two ways of showing the resurrection. In many images, Jesus was emerging from his tomb alone. And in many others, Jesus was shown descending to Hades in order to bring others back from the dead along with him.
Where did the idea of Jesus descending into the underworld come from? There are brief mentions here and there in the New Testament. But the idea flourished with the adoption of the Apostles and Nicene Creeds around the second and third centuries of the Common Era. Many of you probably know the words in this excerpt well: Jesus “was crucified, dead, and buried; he descended into hell; on the third day he rose again from the dead; he ascended into heaven, and sits on the right hand of God the Father Almighty.”
In the creeds, while there is mention of descending into hell, there is no mention of bringing others back from the dead. The art, and the language, emphasize Jesus’ solo journey. And so art that emerged from Western Christianity, Roman Christianity, emphasized Jesus’ individual, personal, resurrection. But art in the East – what was once the Byzantine Empire, began to show more frequently and with greater detail Jesus rescuing others from the underworld, bringing them back to life with him.
This is a fascinating example of how Christianity is not a monolith; that over the centuries practices and beliefs diverged and evolved differently. Christianity of the West, dominated by Rome, emphasized the resurrection of the individual, the saving of the individual. A very common understanding of the Easter event is that Jesus died to save those who believed in him from their sins. And only them. The Christianity of the East retained the emphasis on the collective resurrection, always depicted by the deliverance of Adam and Eve, the first humans, as a parable to represent all of humanity.
Now, people so often get bogged down in trying to figure out which belief is the correct one. But with an event completely shrouded in mystery, as is the resurrection, there really cannot be one definitive answer. We can make the choice for ourselves.
What does the idea of universal resurrection mean for us, here today?
This congregation was founded, of course, on the saving message of Universalism: of universal salvation. We asserted the belief that a loving God would never consign humans to an eternity of punishment, of suffering and torture. We were all to be saved, all to be liberated from the fear of eternal violence and pain.
In the 20th century, that vision expanded. What does universal salvation – universal resurrection – tell us about our life on earth? Well, if no one is to be left behind, locked behind the gates of Hell, shouldn’t that apply to our human lives as well? Are we called to work for the liberation of all people, to end oppression wherever we encounter it?
What might universal resurrection look like for Unitarian Universalists?
Well, for starters, it has to be centered in love. A large love, agape, that holds all of us, all of the creation, not just our family and friends, but expanding the circle: to people we will never know, people who live in other countries, and to care of the planet itself: to other species, plants, everything with which we live and move and have our being.
Jesus embodied that love. He used his life and ministry to urge his followers toward something that he named as the Kingdom of God. Now, many interpreted that as an actual place, as heaven, or paradise. But our view of that realm has expanded as well, helped by modern prophetic voices such as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, and his belief in something that he called the Beloved Community.
Jesus never asked us to choose which form of resurrection was the right one. He never demanded that we recite statements of belief. But he did ask us, over and over again, to care for each other, to love one another, to learn to love in a way that transforms, and that gives life to one another. He asked us to seek the Kingdom of God.
Resurrection. Anastasis. Up-rising. On this Easter morning, what needs our communal acts of resurrection?
The other day, on Good Friday, local clergy organized a walk along the boulevard to remember the plight of children around the world. We stopped at intervals to tell stories of the suffering of young ones: stories of violence and famine in Gaza, stories of migrant journeys to find a safer life, stories of the impact of gun violence here in the United States, civil war in Sudan, the treatment of transgender children such as Nex Benedict; 14 stories in all, each profoundly tragic. Someone said to me, “a country should be judged by the way it treats its children.” I would expand that to say that a world that allows its youngest and most vulnerable to suffer must be judged harshly. And we, we Universalists who believe that a hellish life after death does not exist, how do we respond to the hell that humans create for one another here, in daily life?
UU’s sometimes talk about ‘a love that will not let us go’. But we also are called to embody and to share a love that will not let others go, and that prevents us from looking away, from doing nothing to help the transformation, the rising up, of all. We are all involved.
The message of the ancient Eastern Christian painters of frescoes, the carvers of church interiors, was that we do the work of resurrection together. No one is to be left behind, resurrection, liberation, is a collective act. We give each other a hand and lift each other up – rising up to a new day, a new life, new hope. We are all involved. It is an incredible birthright, and an incredible challenge, all at once.
Retired UU minister Carl Scovel wrote these words: “What I am saying is simply this, our tradition and current witnesses testify to a transcendent compassion which at times invades our life, fills our hearts, and teases us out of our despair with the thought that whatever evils, dangers, and sins may surround us, we were made for love and for fulfillment, and the purpose which made us for this will not be thwarted…The heart of our faith which exploded in the saving impossibility which we call the resurrection sweeps out over all humanity in all times. The promise is to all….That love does not leave us, ever.” (Carl Scovel, in The Unitarian Universalist Christian, Volume 57, 2002, p. 42-43.)
May it be so.
Amen.
