A CONTEMPORARY SPIRITUALITY

August 2016

I’ve been brought up as a Christian, I committed myself to follow Christ in my teens, I felt called called by God to be a Christian priest and was duly ordained.  The Christian faith is the star that I have sought to follow all my life, and central to it, its foundation stone, is the Resurrection from the dead of Jesus of Nazareth.  How does that story speak to all of the above?

            I have always found it difficult not to believe in the Resurrection of Jesus as historically sound.  I don’t pretend to understand exactly what happened, but certain facts seem to be clear. Namely that His followers either betrayed, or denied, or deserted Him. When He had been killed they all ran away and hid fearful for their lives. But a few days later they re-emerged full of confidence, telling anyone who would listen that He was alive, and willing to suffer & die for this conviction as they travelled around the then known world.  The Resurrection stories are a bit confused as if the people who tell them do not quite know or understand what happened, but there is a pattern.  People are surprised, often don’t initially recognise the figure who meets them, doubt the experience, find themselves forgiven, accepted, loved and then challenged and sent out.  Forgiveness and acceptance without judgement are key.  [A pattern you will recognise in the TDEs NDEs and ELEs that I described in ‘Life after Death’ [32] and is like the process that Mary is described as going through in the story of The Annunciation in Luke] 

It appears undeniable that something must have happened. If you disbelieve their claim of Jesus resurrection, then you have to come up with an alternative explanation for this dramatic turn-around in their behaviour.

The significance of Jesus’ resurrection seems to me to be several-fold:

Jesus believed himself to have been called at his baptism to speak and act in God’s name. But he was caught on the horns of a dilemma. The very God of whom he spoke was primarily concerned with inner, not external, transformation. A few followers understood that, but the religious authorities of his day saw him as a threat, and connived at his death. At its most basic the resurrection of Jesus was God’s way of vindicating Him: of declaring that Jesus’ insight into, and knowledge of, the nature of God was fundamentally correct.  If God exists and raised Jesus from the dead then we are offered a bigger picture that brings ultimate meaning and purpose to our lives.

For Jesus’ resurrection is a sign that death does not have the last word. There is a bigger picture that places this life on earth within a context in which we come from God at our births and return to God on our deaths. This life is not all there is but is rather a preparation for what is to come.  Jesus vision of God’s purposes will be realised beyond death, and Jesus’ resurrection is the first fruits of that.  This seems to have been the core of the preaching of the first Christian communities.

They also believed that this Jesus of Nazareth whom they’d known, was still in some sense alive and continued to accompany and guide them. They prayed to Him and He seemed to answer their prayers and indeed to guide and direct them in ways that were strange to them, and sometimes contrary to what they’d previously understand Him to teach.  This is as true for us now as it was for them then. To learn to trust this process is to enter into eternal life and to begin to incarnate it here, now, as Jesus Himself had done.

In summary, my mullings have nourished my trust in God as revealed through Jesus; my awareness that the Risen Christ has guided and sustained me throughout my life, and my trust that He will continue to do so both in life and in death; and my hope that death is but a gateway through which we will all pass, and that there is nothing for us to fear.  This life is a part of a bigger picture, in which we come from God at our births, are held and sustained by the Risen Cosmic Christ through our lives, and return to God at our deaths.