About Easter 

By Harry T. Cook 

3/29/13

Harry T. Cook

Easter is usually about answers -- answers that tend to partake more in proclamation than fact, more in belief than knowledge, more in faith than reason. Seldom are questions of import raised in Easter sermons.

Yet, one question ripe for consideration is why in the early centuries of the Common Era several persons took pains to craft stories about a dead Nazarene provocateur coming back to life.

The lore of a good many religions of that era had no shortage of dying and rising heroes. Why, among the many such stories, would those signed with the noms de plume of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John told have been considered exceptional?

E.L. Doctorow, who can tell as marvelous a story as anyone ever has, said: "When Bacon and Galileo insisted on putting claims of knowledge to the test with observation and experiment, storytelling as the prime means of understanding the world was so reduced in authority that today it is only children who continue to believe that stories are, by the fact of their being told, true. Children, and fundamentalists."*

The Greek word μυθ (myth) means "story." The Easter stories (they vary among several of the 20 extant gospels) seem in their own individual ways as mythological in nature as the Adam-Eve, Cain-Abel, flood and Tower of Babel narratives in Genesis. Such stories survive in the human epoch because they are seen as vessels of truth, if not truth themselves.

Maybe the Easter story says that there are things worse than death. What could be worse? What could be worse would be to cede power and authority to the wrong forces. What could be worse would be to fail to speak up for those whose voices are muffled and ignored. Going through life with nothing to show for it but unwounded bodies and untroubled minds might be death itself.

In the same way the Confederate flag is not a symbol of victory, the Christian cross is not a sign of triumph. The cross was originally an instrument of execution. It's how it got done when the Romans were in charge. They borrowed crucifixion from the Seleucids and Carthaginians. They used it to suppress dissent, to humiliate their enemies and to warn potential ones.

The cross is a call to remembrance. The Sage of Nazareth is remembered for his persistence in passive resistance and its advocacy. Turn the other cheek, and see what they say about that. Mohandas Gandhi and Dr. King are remembered for the same reasons.

We remember them not because they lived to a ripe old age in retirement homes taking tea every day at four o'clock. We remember them because they saw that there were worse things than death. Against enormous odds, they took on the principalities and powers and lost. But are there remembrance days for Jesus' executers? For the assassins of Gandhi and King? There are not.

In St. Mark's telling of the Easter story, he leaves the women at the empty grave astonished, unsure and afraid to tell anyone about it. That's where Mark's gospel ends -- and with a conjunction, no less, as if the scribe had lifted his stylus from the page in mid-sentence. Some of us who study such texts think the ending was deliberate as if to say, "If you want to know how this story turns out, finish it yourself."

*Doctorow, E.L. Reporting the Universe. Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press, 2003. 55

re essay of 3/22/13 The End of Imagination               

Sherry Blomquist, Kenilworth, IL:

What a gift your essays are in this time when ministers preach bromides instead of addressing real issues and when journalism is in such a low state. We read you every Friday. It helps us keep our sanity. Thank you.

John Bennison, Walnut Creek, CA:

Your exhilarating list of imaginative thinkers -- beginning with the exemplary quote by one who is not -- is telling with regard to the rigidity of the religious and their ecclesiastical hierarchies.  Imagination is the greatest of spiritual gifts, but is often utterly lacking in the one human enterprise where it should most flourish and thrive. Prophets and poets have always known this, as in "Imagine there's no heaven. It's easy if you try. No hell below us. Above us only sky."  [Speaker John] Boehner and his ilk couldn't imagine such a thing as that either.

Arthur Wilson, Portland, OR:

A late friend of ours put us on to your writing. And you never disappoint. We especially like the "imagination" one. Spot-on with [Speaker John] Boehner and others who forget when it is that they are living their lives. It's NOW.

Brian McHugh, Silver City, NM:

Ah ... all that rationality!! The problem with the people you are addressing is that for them "rational" is an unknown virtue.

Ralph McLean, Vancouver, BC, Canada:

Via a friend at the Center for Progressive Christianity we get your writings and profit by them a great deal. I fear you may be right about the end of imagination. I wonder who the first person to think of a lift or elevator was. Being able, whenever that was, to imagine stepping into a box and pushing a lever or button that would make that box take you several dozen or hundreds of feet aloft without single heaving of the chest is what you were talking about. Thinking ahead. Thinking big. Never saying, "No, we can't." The corporation I used to work for is stinting more and more on research and development. It's more profitable to grind out the same old stuff than to pay people to imagine and create. Bell Labs in your country used to be such a place.

Tracey Morgan, Southfield, MI:

[Speaker John] Boehner's constipated intellectual future is not so much a "failure of imagination" but an embrace of political realities (for him) and obeisance to Catholic morality. His position might very well never evolve. James Dobson's hasn't. I suspect that, as a species, when we become rigidly comfortable with our presents, change threatens us, psychologically. Others, like the Koch Brothers, simply profit from the present. Why move on?

Karen Solomon, Cincinnati, OH:

Your problem is that you make way too much sense. These days people like the kind of nonsense that you hear on ranting and screaming talk radio shows. The grenade throwers get more attention. What a pity.

Fred Fenton, Concord, CA:

Thank you for your essay about the role of imagination in advancing knowledge and creativity. The human mind is a wonderful thing. It can help us overcome ignorance and prejudice and find better ways of doing things. We can imagine a government that works to eliminate the growing gap between rich and poor in this country. We can imagine a Pope who allows priests to marry and women to be priests. We can even imagine ourselves being wiser and more caring of the rights of others. For these fantasies to become reality will require more than imagination. It will require a spirit of renewal and a willingness to sacrifice. It will require leaders who share wealth and power instead of concentrating it in themselves. It will require us to be brave enough to promote change in ourselves and others.