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In the last issue I noted some of the tortured ways that have been adduced to account for Jesus being alive after the Passion. Faced with a host of conflicting views such as these, and conscious of the conflicting character of the resurrection accounts in the New Testament, we can nevertheless scarcely fail to learn a lot about the significance of the Event they claim to tell us about.
When I was growing up, the predominant focus in popular Christian piety had been the passion and death of Jesus. It was largely seen in terms of his atonement to God for our sins. Against this background it is hardly surprising that guilt and repentance became the dominant religious attitudes before God.
In the 1940s and 1950s theologians in Europe began to stress that surely the really important things about Jesus was not the suffering and passion, but the Resurrection. Popular piety started to follow this view, but in many regions of the world this theological stress had little effect. Guilt, rather than the joy in the triumph of Jesus through the resurrection, still remains the dominant religious attitude today.
Most of the Old Testament is very reticent about the afterlife. What Christianity tried to express about survival of death derived from the teachings of Jesus and his apostles. But it was spelled out in the early Christian centuries by departing from the basic Hebrew model of the human person, which formed the background for the teachings of Jesus and his close associates. This process occurred mostly in the Greek culture that surrounded early Christianity. The Greek tradition saw the human being as composed of an immortal soul and a perishable physical body which the Hebrew background of Jesus and his disciples did not. So we have the odd situation of many believers in the Judeo-Christian tradition espousing today a very non-biblical form of one of the most fundamental teachings of early Christianity.
At the time of Jesus it seems that it was, in the main, only the Pharisees who believed in the resurrection after death, and presumably it was on that system of Pharisaic thought that St. Paul erected his teaching on the resurrection as he understood it. But first century Jewish thought had no room for the idea that an individual was made up of two elements, a body and soul. They envisaged only a unified entire living person. Consequently, in the words of Paul, the resurrecting of Jesus was all about him being alive as an entire living person after the crucifixion. It was not at all about the resuscitation of a corpse from the tomb, which is what later Christianity seems to have turned it into. Consequently one wonders afresh what all those conflicting accounts were really trying to say.
Besides, the early Christian tradition never understood the resurrection as simply bringing Jesus back to life again - essentially the same thing as when Jesus raised the daughter of Jairus, the widow’s son at Naim, or restored Lazarus to life at Bethany just before the first Easter. The early accounts of the resurrection all speak of a radical transformation in Jesus. Is there any clue remaining for us to understand what this was? Jesus’ Ascension, which the early Christian writers say took place after the resurrection at a distance varying between 40 days and 18 months, as Ireneus places it, is another major milestone the Christian faith needs to bring back into focus.
When all is said and done Christianity envisages the ascension as Jesus going up in a vertical direction from the earth, as if in some form of cosmic elevator, in order to sit at the right hand of God the Father in Heaven. But ascension has a very different meaning in several other major religious traditions, where it refers to the divine element which is in every human being, having been brought forth within the physical incarnation. Thus that individual now walks the earth as a God, realized into a man or a woman. From this perspective the life of Jesus takes on an entirely different perspective. He can no longer been seen as all about appeasing God by suffering for our sins, and we realize it was all about a magnificent journey that culminated in ascension. That is, he brought forth in his human nature that full dominance of the divine life within him. This also happens to be the destiny of us all, and it is in this light that we see Jesus as the great exemplar in blazing a trail for all of us to follow rather than the savior who died to appease the vengeance of his Heavenly Father.
Just as fifty years ago the focus in the life of Jesus shifted from the suffering and Passion to the Resurrection, we now need to move the focus further on to the Ascension, not as a pious belief but as a very sane exemplar of what it is realistic for every man and woman who ever walked this earth to attain.
Miceal Ledwith, L.Ph., L.D., D.D., LL.D. (h.c.) has been a Professor of Theology and University President of MaynoothCollege in Ireland, a member of the Vatican’s International Theological Commission, and has lectured extensively throughout Europe and North America. He has been a long-time member of the Ramtha School of Ancient Wisdom, and was featured in the movie What the BLEEP Do We Know!? He has released two DVDs. For an extended version of this article, please visit Miceal's website: www.hamburgeruniverse.com
