I have been contemplating my past and present concepts of Easter and would like to share a blogpost that simply poured out of me this week:
As a young Evangelical child, I was taught that Jesus died in my place, more-or-less as punishment for my sins. God, being perfect—and particularly perfect in love—needed to stop us from doing unloving, evil, wrong, bad, naughty things. So we all had to die and we had to be punished for all the unloving and imperfect things we embodied and acted on. I did not understand that the punishment of hell that was taught to me, did not fit the crime. I believed in eternal separation from God as the punishment for sin—particularly the ultimate sin of refusing to reciprocate God’s love.
I did, however, get the impression that it was actually all about love. A warped kind of love, to be sure. But I was taught that God was, in fact, love, and that God loved all humankind equally, (I’m no Calvinist).
God wanted all people to know and receive God’s love and therefore salvation from their own hatred and evil, so that they too could becoming loving people, able to behave in more loving ways, and able to live forever in a love-relationship with other people and with God. I looked forward to these positive aspects of the “Gospel message” about the love of God and the eventual love of people in relationship with a loving God in eternity in heaven.
When I deconstructed hell in my late teens through to my late twenties (it took ten solid years for me to fully embrace that there is no separation from God, that no one is stuck in hell for eternity and that hell itself is more of a disciplinary response to sin than a punishment without end), I saw the Gospel a little differently.
In my early thirties I believed that the major reason Jesus died at Easter was to save humanity from eternal death. I embraced the idea that the consequence God had placed on our evil—our lack of love toward self, God and others—was still a limitation to our life’s duration, only now I saw death as final. I believed that when God originally told Adam and Eve that sin would bring about their deaths, God meant they would cease to exist, forever and in every way. There was no afterlife for them. No heaven. No hell. No purgatory. No reincarnation. Completely and utterly dead. Deader than a doornail. God said a solid “no,” to our inability to love one another, and saw no other option than for the human race to die.
BUT, God being omniscient, knew even before the fall of humankind into sin, that God would be born at a time in humanity’s distant future, with the fullness of the Godhead dwelling in Jesus, and the fullness of humanity also in Jesus’ loins/womb or however you want to picture that—and Jesus, the God-human, would die our death, and resurrect everyone and everything back to life—past, present and future.
AND the Holy Spirit would form us into new creations whose sin was overlooked because of Jesus, and we would become more and more loving like God is, saved from the condemnation of sin, the consequence of sin (death), and also being saved from sin in the sense that we would gradually become more and more loving people (on God’s terms and through God’s grace, not our works-based, guilt-driven striving).
In the afterlife (and possibly throughout our lifetimes on earth) there would be some kind of “hell” that disciplined us and taught us how to truly forgive and reconcile with one another—because we were first truly, madly, deeply loved and forgiven by God—so that we were capable of loving each other and living for all eternity, in love.
Now, in my forties, I have a different interpretation of Easter again, because I don’t think that the consequence of sin, as death, means we were going to cease to exist, after all. I think Easter / Jesus is a symbol of death and resurrection that has always been happening and will continue to happen for as long as necessary.
I embrace the idea that Jesus is fully God and fully human, and that I am too am both fully God and fully human.
Jesus’ birth, life, death and resurrection are a symbol to us of what God has actually been doing in the world since the beginning of time. God created beings who would have to learn how to love. Or perhaps Godself is still actualizing—through us—how to truly embody unconditional love. I believe there is a final destination of love, forgiveness, grace and embrace, but the only way to get there is through Easter-on-repeat.
Death and resurrection repeated over and over again.
The evolutionary processes of the planet.
We live, we make love and war, we learn, we die.
We come back in other atoms, particles, plants, animals, people, DNA, memories, etc. and we live, we make love and war on repeat, and we learn and we evolve some more, and we die.
And we come back, a little wiser, a little more intelligent, and a little more evolved, and we live, striving to make more love and less war, and we die.
And we come back again and we live, and we love, and love gains momentum and becomes the most powerful and prevailing force in the universe, until war and evil and hatred are eradicated and the whole cosmos is love.
Just as God is love.
I, truly, would like feedback. What do you think? What are you learning about Easter, Jesus and God? If you’re an atheist, does the symbol of Easter resonate in any way with you? Evolution, doing its thing with a goal of ultimate love and maybe, possibly, a utopian future? If you’re a Christian, do you think Easter has more to do with our lives on earth, or the afterlife? I have spent a big chunk of my life obsessed with how this life affected the hereafter, instead of being more present to the here and now. My understanding of Easter has definitely been impacted by my desire to be more present. To make a difference in the world as it is, to create a better world and, yes, still aiming for a better future, but with much more presence to the reality of our world in the now…
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