1000.Ea2B.2024 — Rex A E Hunt

7 April 2024

IT TOOK JESUS A THOUSAND YEARS TO DIE…
“It took Jesus a thousand years to die” is a quote from the important book, Saving Paradise, published in 2008 by
Rita Nakashima Brock - born in Japan and raised in a Buddhist family, and
Rebecca Ann Parker - an ordained United Methodist clergy person who also holds dual fellowship with the Unitarian Universalist Association.

Jesus’ death has been all around us this past week
as traditional church celebrated the Easter Festival which included
the misnamed Good Friday - good, because fundamentalist and traditional church
believes that Jesus died "for us… to save us”.

It is called ‘penal substitutionary atonement’… and weren’t we lucky!

Theologian Arthur Dewey comments:
“The death of Jesus, embedded in primordial images and emotional overlays, speaks volumes to many churchgoers. Unfortunately, such uncritical acceptance of the ‘traditional’ story of the death of Jesus often has had tragic ramifications… Salvation by the blood of the Lamb has had its price, a very human price”.

oo0oo

So, what can now be said about Jesus’ cross and death.
Said from a progressive perspective, I admit.

Briefly, Jesus, a homeland Jew within Judaism within the Roman Empire, died.
But he did not just die.
He did not die of old age or catch some terrible disease
or crushed by a falling arch.

He was killed—murdered, his body ripped apart—
because of what he said and for what he stood for.

For standing up to Empire,
not to atone for the so-called ‘sins of humanity’.

For Pax Romana, peace was achieved through war, violence, and victory.
For the sage Jesus, peace was achieved through distributive justice.
His execution by Rome is a critical aspect of his death.

Following his death those close to him were both surprised and shattered.
Stricken with fear and grief, they were in no mood to be
looking for that 'silver lining’
that supposedly comes with every cloud.

But some people did think about his death.
Only because his life mattered more...

Jesus was dead. But he was not dead to them.
His spirit was still coursing through their veins.
It had risen from the dead.

So for fundamentalist or traditional or even some progressives
the ‘cross’ or Jesus hanging on a cross, has had a significant place in their spirituality.
Well… not ‘always’ really.
So back to Rita and Rebecca in 2001.

oo0oo

In 2001 Rita Brock and Rebecca Parker, for one reason or another,
began to be curious about the place of the cross in Christianity.
But especially so after Rebecca found a startling footnote in a book that said
“there were no images in churches of Jesus dead on the cross until the tenth century.”

They didn’t believe it. A thousand years…
Western Christian churches are so saturated with crucifixions, they said,
“that we found the claim incredible. We consulted a noted religious art historian, Diane Apostolos-Cappadona, to see whether this was true, and she said, rather matter-of-factly, that it was. It turns out she had done her master’s thesis on the emergence of a dead Christ, and she had concluded it had to do with a shift in Christology in Western Europe”.

Armed with note books and pens, a tripod, Nikon camera, and a strong sense of curiosity, they
“visited early Christian sites… in Rome and Ravenna. We added a trip to Turkey to see the magnificent sixth-century cathedral Hagia Sophia in Istanbul along with the Chora Church, renowned for its Byzantine mosaics. (Both of these beautiful buildings are now mosques.) We also visited several obscure tenth- and eleventh-century monastery churches in the… Kackar Mountains of northeastern Turkey where the Tigris and Euphrates originate. We failed to find a single image of Jesus dead on the cross.”

I repeat: “We failed to find a single image of Jesus dead on the cross”.

What they found instead was
“images of escape from danger or persecution and iconographies of paradise that were painted on catacomb walls, carved into sarcophagi, and frescoed and mosaicked on sanctuary walls, apses, and ceilings.”

So what did the absence of crucifixion images mean?
At first they felt discouraged.
“The images seemed to confirm that early Christianity was, as some have argued, an otherworldly, secret death cult ritually enacted in the catacombs.”

But after more research including auditing a course at University of California, Berkeley, in their art history program,
and rethinking almost everything they thought they knew
about the first millennium of Christianity and its theological resources
they arrived at some stark conclusions:

(i) Much of what is problematic in Christian theology emerged with atonement theology
beginning around the ninth to tenth century in northern Europe;

(ii) For the first thousand years Christians gathered to worship in a visual environment of abundant life, absent images of a crucified Christ and in concert with rich theological ideas and biblical commentary focused on blessings in this world.

To counter atonement’s dominance, a dominance where Christians
have gone to the point of vilifying, persecuting, burning,
and warring against those who challenged atonement ideas, they concluded
“a strong, comprehensive, profound, and appealing counter-weight is required”.

They found that in paradise theology!
It was simply orthodox Christianity for a long time and it endures in Eastern Orthodoxy.
“This legacy means [this-world paradise theology] cannot be dismissed as ‘unchristian' the way many alternative theologies are because they depend on marginalized or modern sources, as rich and inspiring as those sources may be. In addition, the re-sacralization of earthly life, with traces of paradise everywhere, invites curiosity and an openness toward beauty, illumination, and knowledge to be found outside the walls of the church, in all creation”.

Why paradise theology?

Paradise enabled mercy and comfort to be experienced
despite the cruelties and violence of empires.
“Articulating a paradise theology required us to dig deeply into the first millennium’s rich and powerful visual, sensual, and ritual world, rather than attending exclusively to texts and doctrinal controversies”.

oo0oo

It took Jesus a thousand years to die….

Easter is not in what happens after death, or Atonement Theology,
or ATs cousin, prosperity theology, with its secular equivalent: trickle-down economics,
but what the knowledge of the words and deeds and the way of the sage called Jesus,
does for our lives… before death.

To be embraced by life, not scared of it. In all its particularity.
It must be concretely practised.
It must be 'a way of life’.

“A theology that asks why Jesus died, rather than why Jesus lived, buries everything that Jesus did to form life-affirming, justice-oriented communities. Atonement theologies locate meaning in being individually saved from the consequences of sin by his torture and murder, which sanctifies violence and trauma. And it conceives of a God who commits or uses violence as the only way to save humanity.”

We need to crucify the sacred cow of ‘penal substitutionary atonement’.
We need to give back to Jesus his humanity.

Westar Institute executive director and scholar David Galston is very direct. He writes:
“The Jesus of history does not hold the confessed Son of God status that Christianity has given him. He was, like all of us, a human being who was right sometimes and wrong at other times. Giving back to Jesus his humanity requires, on the part of later generations like us, a certain act of generosity and, even, humility toward him.

"Accepting Jesus as a human being, not a Savior or a God, is the sincere act of loving him both as he was and for who he was. People who hold this respectful quality of love for Jesus are, amazingly, not welcome in the church.”

Bibliography
Crossan, J. D. God and Empire. Jesus Against Rome, Then and Now. New York. HarperSanFrancisco, 2007
Dewey, A. J. Inventing the Passion. How the Death of Jesus was Remembered. Salem. Polebridge Press, 2017
Galston, D. “The Historical Jesus is not the Christ”, Westar Blog, 27 September 2023
_________ Embracing the Human Jesus. A Wisdom Path for Contemporary Christianity. Salem. Polebridge Press, 2012
Miller, R. J. “Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love of This World for Crucifixion and Empire” by Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker. An Interview with the Authors”. The Fourth R 36, 4. July - August 2023, 3 - 10, 22
Pascoe, M. “The scariest lines in the world’s best seller”, Published in The New Daily, 5 January 2024
Paterson, S. J. “Killing Jesus” in (ed) R. J. Miller. The Future of the Christian Tradition. Santa Rosa. Polebridge Press, 2007.
__________. Beyond the Passion. Rethinking the Death and Life of Jesus. Santa Rosa. Polebridge Press, 2004.

Rex A. E. Hunt