Midweek Faith Lift
April 24, 2019
The Rising of Love- Easter Sunday
Rev. Deb Hill-Davis
Happy Easter! Today we celebrate one of the deepest mysteries within the Christian tradition. It is the triumph of life, the rising of love, a breakthrough to the dawn in human consciousness that there is more than this life, that there is more to us than our human experience. It is the even more profound realization that the primary path to that awakening is through our shared experience of human suffering. Jesus as our Way Shower demonstrates this most profoundly. As our highest example of anointed beings, Jesus the Christ does not escape suffering, he endures it in the crucifixion experience. That is a profound awareness for us. Jesus doesn’t escape his own, undeserved suffering; he endures it. He is the innocent lamb who does not deserve to be crucified, nevertheless, he is.
During all of those times when we want to escape our own suffering, when we feel we don’t deserve it, when we want to fast forward through it without feeling or experiencing it, or we want to lash out, Jesus is ever-present to us as the prime example that the only way out of this human experience is through it, no matter how painful or difficult. The assurance we take from the story of Jesus is that we are never alone in our human suffering and that the experience of suffering offers a breakthrough into Life beyond our human understanding of life. We in Unity do not subscribe to the traditional understanding that Jesus died for our sins and if we just believe in him and are saved, accepting Jesus as our personal savior, then, we are saved and will be with Jesus in Heaven. That never made sense to me, it seemed like a one and done, with all the emphasis on an afterlife rather than an experience of the Divine energy of God in this life.
So how do we look at this whole crucifixion/resurrection story? We look at it as our own story, one that we, too, have lived and continue to live in our spiritual growth and evolution. As I reflect on my life experiences and all the crucifixion experiences that I have had, I can say that the bar for me to experience “crucifying” pain was at times set fairly low. Every crucifixion experience that we have helps us break through to a deeper and higher understanding of our true Divine nature; the realization that we are part of, an expression of something far beyond our human understanding. We begin to understand our Divine Nature in each one of those ego-bruising insults to our human sense of self-importance.
In Unity, we look at the cross metaphysically such that it represents that profound intersection of our humanity and our Divinity. The horizontal beam is our human timeline. The vertical beam is our True Divine nature. We live at the intersection of our humanity and our Divinity. At all the various points in our human lifetime, we can locate our human crossbar at a lot of different levels in consciousness. In fact we can see our human journey from having the cross upside down, where we are beginning very early in life at the lowest level of awareness of our divine nature, our Godness. Gradually, over time, as we endure and experience the insults, the growth opportunities that our human crucifixion experiences give us, our human consciousness rises on the crossbar as we grow in our awareness of our Divine consciousness.
When it rises to the level of the cross of Jesus, then we are living at the level of the heart, where our humanity and Divinity are in that Divine synchrony and we experience our life through the energy of Love, no matter how it is showing up in the outer. No matter how it is being experienced by our human selves, we experience it through the energy of Love. We are rising in Love! This is a very moveable bar, this crossbeam! And our lived experiences may give it a big bump downward, but our willingness to endure the pain of learning our spiritual lessons provides the energy for the resurrection, the upward push of love.
So here’s the deal, I don’t think it is possible to understand the energy of resurrection, the rising in Love without understanding the energy of crucifixion. In the crucifixion, Jesus was the innocent victim; he had committed no crime. This profound innocence demonstrates for us how to rise out of our own sense of victimhood, something profoundly embedded in the human ego, human consciousness; our sense of being “wronged” is powerful and in the end, not helpful as it truly leads us into a dead end. The history of the Jewish people’s traditions helps us to understand what the cross really means in a much deeper way.
There are three healing images from the Hebrew Scriptures, which represent the deeper meaning of Jesus’ death and a new way for the human consciousness to rise out of “victimhood.” Richard Rohr describes it this way in his April 14, Palm Sunday blog:
The first one is an ingenious Hebrew ritual from which the word “scapegoat” originated is described in Leviticus 16. On the Day of Atonement, a priest laid hands on an “escaping” goat, placing all the sins of the Jewish people from the previous year onto the animal. The goat was then beaten with reeds and thorns and driven out into the desert. It was a vividly symbolic act that helped to unite and free people in the short term. Instead of owning their sins, this ritual allows people to export them elsewhere—in this case onto an innocent animal.
We continue as humans to do this practice today. Rather than taking responsibility for our own shortcomings and transgressions, we export them elsewhere, blaming the “other” whoever that might be. We frequently do that without any real awareness that we are doing it, which is why it is effective as we claim “innocence.” The death of Jesus as an “innocent scapegoat” makes this visible and unavoidable to see for humanity. If we are to grow out of victimhood, we first see how we engage in scape-goating and then we take responsibility for our “sins” or shortcomings in order to mature and come up higher in consciousness on the vertical beam of the cross. As Rohr continues about scape-goating: “The Scriptures rightly call such ignorant hatred and killing “sin,” and Jesus came precisely to “take away” (John 1:29) our capacity to commit it—by exposing the lie for all to see.”
The next ritual of Jewish tradition is that of the a Passover during which a lamb is the innocent victim (Exodus 12) that is slaughtered and eaten in ritual fashion as prescribed to Moses. The blood of that lamb is smeared on the door- post of each home so that the “angel of death” passes over and does not slay the oldest or firstborn male child in the household. This is the ritual that is repeated during the Passover celebration, which is frequently concurrent with Easter. Jesus is frequently described as the “Lamb of God” who takes away the sins of the world. What does this mean and what does it have to do with the crucifixion and rising in Love?
Again from Richard Rohr, Monday April 15, 2019
Jesus takes away the sin of the world by dramatically exposing the real sin of the world (which is ignorant violence rather than not obeying purity codes); by refusing the usual pattern of revenge, and, in fact, “returning their curses with blessings” (Luke 6:27-28); and, finally, by teaching us that we can “follow him” in doing the same. There is no such thing as redemptive violence. Violence doesn’t save; it only destroys—in both short and long term. Jesus replaced the myth of redemptive violence with the truth of redemptive suffering. He showed us on the cross how to hold the pain and let it transform us, rather than pass it on to others around us.
While on the cross, Jesus expresses forgiveness, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” He does not plot revenge, seek to destroy those who are destroying him. He is fully inside the human experience of darkness as the scapegoated innocent and he does not respond by scapegoating them. As Rohr continues:
Jesus on the cross identifies with the human problem, the sin, the darkness. He refuses to stand above or outside the human dilemma. Further, he refuses to be the scapegoater and instead becomes the scapegoat personified. In Paul’s language, “Christ redeemed us from the curse . . . by being cursed himself” (Galatians 3:13); or “God made the sinless one into sin, so that in him [together with him!] we might become the very goodness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21). Wow! Just gaze upon that mystery.
Jesus walks the victim journey in an extraordinary way. He neither plays the victim card himself for his own aggrandizement, nor does he victimize anybody else, even his murderers. He forgives them all.
Then finally, Jesus, on the third day, the day of the Resurrection becomes the “Lifted-Up One.” The “Lifted-Up One” is the image of the bronze serpent that Moses lifted in the desert, which has become a symbol for doctors and healers to this day. We read the account in Mark:
Mark 16:1-8
16 When the sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him. 2 And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. 3 They had been saying to one another, “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?” 4 When they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled back. 5 As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man, dressed in a white robe, sitting on the right side; and they were alarmed. 6 But he said to them, “Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. 7
The Easter story is the story of healing, of being lifted up out of victimhood in everyway, and into the heart energy of the higher Christ Consciousness of Jesus. When we experience all of life from a “Risen Consciousness of Love” then we are no longer trapped in the dead end tomb of victim consciousness. We are truly “Rising in Love.”
Blessings on the Path,
Rev. Deb