The ‘rapture’ has captured the imagination of Christians for the past two centuries. But do these modern conceptions of ‘flying away’ into the sky to be with Jesus really reflect what is going on in the New Testament?
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Revelation moves backward and forward in time, it collapses different images together … Moses, Elijah, David, Sodom, Jezebel, Babylon … all caught up in a swirling cacophony of images and symbols. and ultimately all centred around the story of Jesus Christ as it challenges the dominant narrative of the Roman empire. All telling and re-telling the story of God and Christ from multiple angles and perspectives. Jesus is portrayed as confronting the violent powers of Empire, and he conquers over it precisely through sacrificial love.
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If God is a God who tortures people forever for not getting their religious choices correct, then God is a monster. That kind of God can be used to justify violence and war and oppression. That kind of God sets us up for tribalism. God asks us to forgive, and when we say ‘how many times’ he says ‘again and again and again.’ So does God do the same? Do we hold God to a lower ethical bar than we hold each other?
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In many ways heaven is a difficult topic to talk about. It’s difficult because there are so many ideas about what it entails, and it’s difficult because despite all of these ideas, no-one really knows exactly what we’re dealing with. And the more you talk about it, the more it can start to sound like a science fiction movie and we end up sounding a bit delusional! Pearly gates. Clouds. Wings. An old white man playing God. Maybe some streets of gold. A mansion for you, and you and you. What do we do with all of this and where do all of these ideas come from?
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Throughout this series we have offered 4 ways of looking at the meaning of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ: Jesus as archetype, crucifixion as the "death of God", the kingdom of non-violent love, and the overturning of scapegoating and the sacrificial system. In this episode we discuss together what the "good news of the gospel of Jesus" might mean for us now.
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The events of Easter are a rejection of sacrifice as a way to please God or to bring peace. It is a repudiation of the image of a bloodthirsty God, and of scapegoating as a means to manage human violence and appease God (or the gods). Jesus enters into the human system of retributive and "redemptive" violence, experiences it, exposes it, and then invites us to move beyond it into something new.
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At the centre of Christianity is Jesus - a nonviolent revolutionary executed by the partnership between religious powers and the State. His revolution is to continue to love – even as they carry out their violent ends against him.
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At the centre of the Christian tradition is an executed man... and a God who dies. What does this mean for religion, for faith, for experiences of suffering and pain, and for our ideas of truth?
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In this episode we discuss the idea that one of the primary New Testament ways of talking about Jesus death and resurrection was to talk about it as something we ‘enter into.’
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