fiction

Notes toward a Supreme Fiction

I think a sensitive reading of the gospels tells pretty much the same story. The resurrection narratives are fairly transparently symbolic. Mark, the first gospel writer, tells the story in a way that says the baptised (represented by the young man dressed in white) are the only proper witnesses to the resurrection--those who have themselves experienced death and rebirth. (See my Easter sermon for lectionary cycle B 2006 for a more extended explication of this idea.) Matthew, having inherited the story from Mark, tries to convey the idea that crucifixion and resurrection constitute the same event insofar as he has the righteous dead coming alive out of their tombs at the moment Jesus dies. Symbolically, this way of telling the story says the solidarity Jesus shared with the defeated (symbolised in Mark by the two thieves crucified on either side of him, with Mark's reference to Isaiah 53), brings other people "to life". This is the kind of thinking we see again in the Gospel of John, where Jesus, in the context of the raising of Lazarus, says "I am" the resurrection and the life. In John, to have eternal life is to become a follower of Jesus (5.24; 17.2), and it is a dimension of life here and now. This is language much more appropriately read at baptism services than at funerals.

Dawkins attacks Christians for believing in what he considers silly things like life after death. He needs to understand how religion works on a deeper level than popular understanding. In the popular understanding it may be true that people deny the reality of death. Properly understood, Christianity enables people to accept the reality of death and accept it without fear. It is in that sense, I think, that Paul said death has no victory. What Christians fundamentally believe in is the importance of standing in solidarity with the margialised, the oppressed, the despised, and the good news that standing together like this (a stance which Mark calls "the Kingdom of God") makes for a much better world than wars do. Death, for Christians, is not just our biological end. It is also living isolated and alone, whether that is a condition of being shunned by others for reasons of race, class, sexuality and so on, or a condition brought on by one's own narcissistic self-absorption. Life is connectedness, and we are invtied to choose between life and death in terms of choosing which way we want to live. On the cross, Jesus was connected to his brothers and sisters in such a deep and profound way that those who believed in what he was doing saw it as the very depth and profundity of life most richly conceived. That is the paradox of the cross. Crucifixion and resurrection are the same event, two sides of the same coin. This is the kind of thing that religious discourse can say which remains opaque to the reader looking for scientific fact. Fundamentalists, trying to read such stories literally, miss the point and fail to understand their own religion. Like Dawkins himself, they can only see what they read in scripture as sterile, scientific fact to be defended or defeated by argument. The proof of religious discourse, on the other hand, is defined by where you choose to stand.