How do we interpret the easter story without the resurrection voodoo?
This year, I have encountered a couple Progressive Christian clergy who read the easter story through the lens of civil disobedience. Drawing on The Last Week, by John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg, John Shuck sees the trashing of the temple as an act of protest against those who rip people off and “hide under the cover of religion and piety.” He contrasts this with the Jesus Christ Superstar interpretation which has Jesus throw a hissy fit because people are selling stuff instead of using the temple as a house of prayer.
Gretta Vosper offers a similar gloss, also beginning with Crossan and Borg’s book, then turning to Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine. Corporatist interests use political oppression and economic exploitation to enrich themselves at the expense of the most vulnerable. But there’s a third prong to oppression which Klein ignores: the active legitimation of oppression by conservative religious leaders (Shuck’s politicians who go to church with their big-ass bibles). Gretta goes on to suggest that we liberals who stand quietly by and tolerate such religious bullshit engage in a kind of passive legitimation and have to bear a share of responsibility too. Easter is a time, not for making nice, but for calling to account the bailout bums of corporate America, and for pissing on the G20 parade.
I have an additional thought: maybe there’s an act of cultural disobedience embedded in the easter story too. The traditional gloss offered by the “let’s read it as metaphor” school of interpretive contortionism is that the resurrection reveals the movement of easter week as one tending toward renewal. So we have bunnies and chicks and other symbols of springtime fecundity. After a cold dark winter, the snows melt, the earth warms and new life springs up – an acutely powerful event in the collective imagination of Canadians. But the cyclical nature of life has long dominated the Mediterranean basin too, particularly in Egypt with the annual flooding of the Nile and the fertility cults that arose around that event. We have, for example, the myth of Horus in ancient Egypt, and elsewhere the myth of the Phoenix in ancient Greece, both of which arose from a cyclical conception of the natural order.
The Jesus story sits at the point of impact between competing views of history. Thomas Cahill’s The Gifts of the Jews suggests that the primary contribution of Judaism to Western Culture was the linear conception of history. Without this, the distinctly Western notion of progress would have been impossible. Yet taken to its logical rational teleological pathological conclusion, progress has become an instrument of colonial powers and the rationale for oppression of subjugated peoples. Roads displace indigenous peoples in the name of progress. Machines displace workers in the name of progress. Resources become the occasion for slaughter, all in the name of progress. Progress is our telos – the goal to which we move – our bright and perfect future, the end of time (“end” here is a double entendre). Without a linear conception of time, the idea of a rapture would be unthinkable, as would apocalypse, and the plot for thousands of dreadful movie scripts.
Imagine what it must have been like in Jerusalem 2000 years ago. Squeezing from one side was the occupying power, the Romans, the rationalists of the age, laying down roads, inventing concrete, developing complicated systems of taxation. They were in cahoots with the Sanhedrin, the local religious/judicial leaders, the caretakers of a new world view which provided the Romans with a perfect rationale (“we are the future”). It was a symbiotic relationship which allowed two powers to feed one another and dump their shit on the commoners.
The easter story is a revolt against time and the myth of progress. What gets resurrected is a different kind of story, one that was already passé 2000 years ago, the story of the god who dies to rise again. Circularity also has its own brand of justice: what goes around, comes around.
It is ironic that our rational science, which has been a slave to the progress of linear history, has recently concluded that time isn’t so linear after all. As Stephen Hawking points out in A Brief History of Time, there’s no particular reason why the arrow of time should move in one direction and not the other – not a particularly original insight when considered from the perspective of Oriental religious and mystical traditions.
At easter, cultural disobedience can be the handmaiden of civil disobedience. If we refuse to accept the myth of progress, if we refuse to rely upon science for our salvation, if we refuse to nurture naive utopianisms, then we can strip away many of the assumptions that keep us from rolling up our sleeves and getting down to the business of offering practical succor to those who have suffered the practical consequences of our not-terribly-practical thought experiments. Progress had its day. Now it’s time to be Progressive.
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January 28th, 2010 at 7:04 pm
So, David…if progress is a myth, then so is being progressive.
January 28th, 2010 at 7:06 pm
Hi Trevor, Thanks for dropping by. My last two sentences were more a play on words. But you may be right. If we think about historical progress as something distinct from scientific progress as something distinct from moral progress, then the last two sentences of my post …