True Myth
Easter Day
Easter Day
“Then was our mouth filled with laughter, and our tongue with singing.” Psalm 126.2
A burglar breaks into a house when he knows the owners are away. He’s just about to lift a silver vase when he hears a low growl and a piercing voice saying “God is watching you!”
He hesitates a moment and then goes for an antique carriage clock. There’s a murmur of a growl again and the same penetrating voice saying “God is watching you!”
He shines his torch around the room and is relieved to see a parrot in a cage. “God is watching you!” says the parrot.
He goes up to the parrot and say. “What’s your name then?” “Moses”, the parrot replies.
“What sort of a man would call his parrot Moses?” says the burglar to the parrot.
“The same sort of man” says the parrot, “who names his rotweiler, God!”
I’ve spoken to you before about the strange practice, popular in the middle ages, especially in the East, when the priest would start the Easter sermon with all manner of jokes and ribaldry in order to elicit the Risus Paschalis - the Easter Laughter - from the faithful.
Easter morning has been referred to in some theological writings as the Divine joke. The laughter of God.
The German Protestant theologian Jurgen Moltmann, who wrote the book The Theology of Joy, put it this way: "The Easter laughter is rooted in the wholly unexpected and totally surprising 'reversal of all things.' God had brought this reversal about by raising Christ.... The expectation was for cosmic death, but what comes is eternal life."
It is always difficult for us to recapture something of the surprise of Easter - we all know how the story ends.
But even if it is not a surprise to us year after year, it is an assault to our intellect year after year. For it raises the Big Question always at the root of Christianity’s troubling uniqueness.
Here is the Big Question. And it is of course multiple choice. (Much easier to mark!) You may tick either A or B.
A: Is the idea of a God who became a human being, who died and rose again, a myth which nurtures the ‘Christ within us’; which releases the power of that myth at the heart of our own consciousness; an ancient by-product of human self-awareness?
OR
B: Is there a reality which is beyond the cosmos, the First Cause of the cosmos, a Being who is the Ground of our Being; a transcendent God revealed in the man Christ Jesus?
If you ticked A, then the Easter story ends in the darkness of Good Friday.
The existentialists were right when like Sartre they asserted, “There is darkness without and when I die there will be darkness within.”
All the other high-flown talk about the power of myth is whistling in the dark. Although of course priests like Don Cupitt and the Sea of Faith group, the so-called non-realists, or textual nihilists, would deny this. They somehow find hope for living in this myth tradition; this psychological self-trickery.
And if you ticked B when in fact A is correct, then as St Paul puts it, you of all men are most to be pitied. For you have based your life on a lie. You have supposed there is ultimate meaning when there is none. Life is a Cabaret if you’re lucky, and a Nightmare on Elm Street if you’re not.
But wait a minute, we’re Anglicans. We don’t do ‘tick one box only’. We tick both and keep our options open. The only bit of the word ‘fundamentalism’ we like, is ‘fun’. And we’re pretty sure we know which ones of our brothers and sisters put the word ‘mental’ into fundamentalism.
I’m reminded of those words of GK Chesterton: "Life is serious all the time, but living cannot be. You may have all the solemnity you wish in your neckties, but in anything important (such as sex, death, and religion), you must have mirth or you will have madness." (G. K. Chesterton, Lunacy and Letters, edited by Dorothy Collins (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1958), p. 97.)
But by ticking both boxes, we are making a profoundly Christian statement. The Answer to the Big Question is A because of B.
I had of course set up the old rhetorical device of a false dichotomy. The Resurrection of Jesus fulfils all our mythic longings, because it happened. And even more than that. The mythic longings are only there because the death and resurrection of Jesus permeates all time, from before the beginning of the world.
We see the dying and rising myth enacted everywhere around us, and it has deep resonances within our psyche. Christ is within us, and the image of God is implanted within every human. And the self-awareness of most humans for most of the last 10,000 years has been caught up with god-awareness.
And this is not surprising, for there is a God who is out there, beyond space and time, who has seeded us with longings of immortality. He is there and he is not silent. He woos us to faith by his wounds of love.
Let’s bring it back to the events we celebrate this Easter Day.
Of course I believe in the Death & Resurrection of Jesus both theologically and historically; and I have experienced that new-life-through-death which the Spirit works in me personally. I would not dare stand here unless, having not seen, I had yet believed.
And yet… at a very deep level I cannot conceive a dead Man resurrected to a new and supernatural state of being. It is alien to all I experience in my everyday world of life and stay-dead death. It relates more to the powerful imagery of legend, saga and myth, whether The Iliad or Star Wars.
But if it is just myth, A and not B, then I take no comfort from it. For that would be to deceive myself and others. I want no fairy story to sweeten the bitter pill of life, and more to the point, the bitter pill of death.
Having not seen, I am drawn by the authenticity of Christ and his people, to believe.
That great student of myth, CS Lewis, puts it well: “The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact.” (1979:43) Mythology is full of dying and rising gods. But in Christianity, “we pass from a Balder or an Osiris, dying nobody knows when or where, to an historical Person crucified under Pontius Pilate…” (Eng ed of God in the Dock, Collins, 1979:44)
We are indeed people of the Empty Tomb, and yet we must not rob the Death, Resurrection and Ascension of Christ, of the mystery and potency of myth. Or as Lewis puts it: “ We must not be ashamed of the mythical radiance resting on our theology.” (1979:44/5 ‘Myth Became Fact’ is in Undeception and also in God in the Dock, Eng & US eds)
“…the mythical radiance resting on our theology…”
Today we celebrate the cornerstone of our faith. Christ is Risen, and because he is risen, because I choose to believe that he is risen, then I encounter True Myth. The Holy Spirit gives me a hope that I cannot explain, but which has been the at the heart of Christian experience through the centuries.
The 20th century theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr reminds us that " humour is, in fact, a prelude to faith, and [that] laughter is the beginning of prayer." (Reinhold Niebuhr, " Humour and Faith," in Discerning the Signs of the Times (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1946), p. 111. )
So here is some more risus paschalis from our Jewish friends to aid us in our Easter faith. Christians find it hard to laugh about God sometimes because they often take it upon themselves to speak for God. Our Jewish friends on the other hand, have a wonderful sense of religious humour , partly because they take it upon themselves to speak to God rather than for God.
So there is this atheist Jewish grandmother, who took her beloved five-year-old grandson to the beach. Decked out in his sun suit and hat, the little boy builds sand castles at the water’s edge. The grandmother dozes off, and the boy is suddenly swept out to sea. The frantic woman calls for help, but there is no one else on the beach. So swallowing her pride, she falls to the ground and prays, "God, if you exist, if you are there, please save my grandson. I promise I'll make it up to you and be a good Jew.” Suddenly a huge wave tosses the grandson on the beach at her feet, laughing and smiling. The grandmother hesitates for a moment, and then drawing herself up to her full height, she wags her finger at the sky and shouts: "He had a hat, you know! "
This is the Day of Resurrection hope. And it is the hope of the Risus Paschalis, the laughter of Easter that carries us through this vale of tears and on to join the laughter of heaven.
“Then was our mouth filled with laughter, and our tongue with singing.” Psalm 126.2
