The Unclad Soul

The Semana Santa, as they call it in Spain, or Holy Week, begins for Christians all over the world soon. You know the historic story and the familiar scenes of the trial of Jesus and his final journey to the Cross. It is an epic story, a story filled with drama and cruelty and mystery and love. What is it really about? The classic Christian interpretation tells us we are all sinners lost without hope. We were born ruined, the children of the first parents, corrupted by their selfishness, by their ignoring God’s command to stay away from the Tree of Knowledge, and supposedly by their wanting to be like God. As the sons and daughters of Adam and Eve whose sin we inherited and are sure to repeat, according to classic Christian theology, we are all to be punished and sent to hell. So Jesus came to die for our ruined souls. He died in our place so God would not send us to hell. He paid the ransom for us, we are told. His physical death took care of our spiritual debt. He then rose ...

Religion, if it’s any good at all, has always been under attack.  Not because of its claim of righteousness, or its attempts at some lofty holiness, or because of its fundamentalism.  Historically, the best religion, the healthiest and courageous and most dangerous religion, has been attacked because of its struggle against systems of corruption, of injustice, of brutality, of exploitation and other crimes against humanity. Jesus was crucified for these very reasons.  People of religion over the years created these elaborate and complicated and puzzling and sometimes preposterous doctrines and ideologies about salvation and atonement and the rapture and the second coming and eternal damnation and so forth as a way of attempting to interpret scripture.  But Jesus was not killed for any of that.  He was killed for attempting to stand against the cruelty and injustices and inhumanity of the Roman Empire.  He was killed for his impatience with institution...

The resurrection of Jesus Christ has always been a kind of struggle for me. Theologians, philosophers, poets, and novelists have for two thousand years wrestled with it.  Even the New Testament writers didn't agree in their accounts of it.  In spite of misconceptions about how the Gospels were put together scholars have shown that none of the Gospel writers were actual eyewitnesses to the resurrection.  And St. Paul, who writes about it the most, never mentions an empty tomb, the stone rolled away, talking angels at the grave site, or Jesus reappearing to meet with his disciples.  Paul's interpretation of the resurrection seems to be in a spiritual sense only. Many would argue that without a resurrection we knock down all of the pillars of the Christian faith.  But do we need a resurrected Christ in order to be inspired and perhaps even transformed by the life of Jesus?  Wasn't it his life after all that captured the world and still influences followers...