It’s a lovely Spring day, and Easter is just around the corner. This morning, we are heading out on foot to repair some sections of the two-track road that is the last half-mile to Helder’s place. The rocks and gravel were placed earlier in the week, and our task is to fill and smooth the worst places. We decided to head West on the footpath past the pond across a meadow carrying our shovels to intercept the road since following the road is twice as long.

Easter morning, we are expecting around 40 people for the annual Sunrise service at the cabin! The event will be in the meadow at the very edge of the cliff, overlooking the many lakes below with a great view of the Elk mountains to the East.

Everyone will bring food and drink for the brunch after. Some will bring folding tables and chairs. There will be games for the children, and some will stay on into the evening around the bonfire, enjoying life -giving stories, wine, and maybe even some good Irish whiskey. Some will spend the night in campers or tents and head back in the morning.

As we cleared the rise, we stopped in our tracks and just stared. The hundred yards, or so, of meadow to our right until it gives way to the deep woods was aflame-full of Scarlet Ghea.

Helder, what do you think?

Was Jesus’ body raised from the dead?”

Christian dogma would have us affirm that his body was raised as evidence we are Christian. But after all these years, Passerby, I truly don’t know. But I’m not sure it matters much to me anymore.

• • •

Something happened on that morning. But the stories that the Gospel writers tell conflict with one another in some remarkable ways, so it is hard to know exactly what did happen. On this point, the writers all agree…there was no body! If Jesus’ body was not raised, then somebody made off with it, but to what motive? Remember how the Jews, being aware of his claim to be raised on the third day, asked that a guard be set at the tomb to prevent his followers from moving the body so that they might afterward claim a miracle had happened. Did they fall asleep? Did it happen like the religious Jews were afraid it would? Maybe. But then what?

It feels true to me that the most credible part of the story is Mary of Magdala’s visit to the tomb by herself early in the morning. The Gospel of Mary (I have no idea if it is the same Mary), at least what we have left of it (it was found in an ancient dump), describes the relationship between Jesus and Mary as the most intimate of all his relationships. That feels right to me.

She sees the empty tomb, meets a man she assumes is the gardener, and asks him what happened to Jesus’ body. He speaks her name, and she then realizes it is Jesus, who, oddly, she does not recognize and who asks her not to give him a hug because “I have not yet ascended to my Father.” Apparently, what she encountered was not Jesus in the flesh, who she would have recognized immediately, but something else. But what?

Other stories about encounters with Jesus post-resurrection tell a similar story of folks who, despite knowing him quite well, no longer recognize him. Behind closed doors, cooking breakfast on the beach and the road to Emmaus.

Something happened, Passerby, but my conclusion is, what they were experiencing was not the flesh and blood body of their friend, Jesus, with whom they were familiar.

What then, Helder?

The Jesus described in the vision of the revelation to John was obviously not the Jesus of Nazareth that the followers knew. The voice Paul heard that struck him blind on the road to Damascus had no body at all, simply a voice, and identified himself as Jesus, but no one else heard his conversation with Paul or his instructions to Paul. Paul experienced a vision of Jesus.

Having considerable experience with ‘open vision,’ I could accept but have no way of being certain that what Mary saw and heard was a vision. While they do not involve matter, vision is not less real, but the mode of experience is very different. Only the Great Spirit initiates open vision. It cannot be sought or initiated by us.

She reported to the eleven exactly what she actually saw and heard; the eleven were amazed and disbelieving, and the stories began. When Peter and John ran to the tomb, they didn’t see Jesus but an angel. The couple from Emmaus ran back to Jerusalem to say that they had seen Jesus there and about how he broke the bread and then vanished from their sight, and so it goes. Does flesh and blood vanish from sight? Not likely. All great mythology begins with some morsel of history. Again, vision is not less real, but the mode of experience is different. It is reality breaking into our universe of matter with intention, for explicit purpose.”

Vision is not less real, but the mode of experience is different.

There is one other possibility I am the most attracted to and that I (and countless others) have pondered, some to the point of dogma: The resurrected Jesus was not flesh and blood, spirit or vision, but a brand new creation. Something that has no precedence—a resurrection body. A body of flesh, a Son of [a] Man, more capable and with more potential than either body or Spirit alone, and one that will never happen again.

That would account for the post-resurrection stories and the empty tomb, but that would also be something we have no hope of experiencing: a one-off on Her part. I could never dream of imitating Jesus in this. (Or, was She demonstrating in Jesus the full potential of the human-kind?) I base that judgment first on my own experience of dying and second, more significantly, no one but Jesus has ever been what the Gospel writers say he was post-Easter.

It’s not possible for the human-kind, and yet, knowing what I know by experience of Her, She is willfully capable of such an evolutionary quantum leap and would clearly have the motive for validating, in Her own and for our own best interest, one time, the life and teaching of Her Prophet and our Rabbi, Jesus of Nazareth. If the life of Jesus could be so simply dismissed by evil, by his murder, then Her message of the new way of being human and Her self-revelation through his words and deeds would also be dismissed. Jesus could have been just one more murdered prophet. One more crucified Messish figure. While there is little evidence this new way is practiced by the ‘church’ today, and not since the church was created by its bargain with the empire in 315 AD, there is substantial evidence of how seriously his earliest followers took him at Her word.

After all these years, Passerby, I truly don’t know.
But I’m not sure it matters much to me anymore.

At any rate, whatever happened on that day does not prove to me that Jesus is God. He was a man, as I am, beloved and anointed by Her, but not God. He is however, a man clearly alive and engaged with us to this day. I have often, over these many years, had contact with Rabbi Jesus who is certainly not dead. (and for that matter, with others, long dead, none of which I have known, including St Francis.) My interest is in paying attention to what Rabbi Jesus teaches me every day and imitating him in every way I am able to. He teaches me the love of his Father with all of my heart, soul, mind, and strength. I want to do that. I am not so much concerned with the religion men invented that now often obscures who his Father is and what Jesus actually did and said.

Well…let’s get our backs into this road, and maybe we won’t have to walk home in the dark.”