Easter 2025 April 20 Dr. Roger Ray Ideas are Immortal
The 2005 movie, V is for Vendetta, is set in a dystopian political future in which the government maintains a fascist control of the people through control of the media in a constant barrage of lies and propaganda. I trust my love for this film requires no explanation.
The plot revolves around a character who wears a Guy Fawkes mask who is planning to complete the gunpowder plot of 1605 and succeed in blowing up the Parliament building in order to awaken and unite the people to stand up to their fascist government.
The subtext of the narrative is that Fawkes can still inspire action, even 400 years after his execution. The main character of V knows that he will die in the process of carrying out his plot, but he is assured that his survival is irrelevant. The point is the idea of the revolution that needs to happen, the idea of freedom, democracy, justice, and as such, it is an idea that cannot be killed… ideas are bulletproof.
Though entirely fictional, martyrdom in order to immortalize an idea has many historical precedents. Many of us here can remember June of 1963, when the Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thích Quang Duc, burned himself to death at a busy intersection in Saigon. His public martyrdom drew attention to the injustice of the Vietnam War and was, at least a part, of the turn of public sentiment from support to protest.
I was in my first year of seminary in the spring of 1980, having only been introduced to liberation theology, when Archbishop Oscar Romero was assassinated by American trained and funded political assassins in El Salvador. One of his aids came and spoke to us in the Vanderbilt chapel the next month, giving us an eye-witness account of the murder of this liberation theology icon. The progressive priests of Central and South America were systematically captured, tortured, and murdered in the years that followed, all with the blessings of a conservative Vatican that chose to ally itself with brutal dictators out of fear of socialism.
The current pope, though he was a part of the machinery that silenced liberationists in Argentina, is now trying to assuage the Catholic Church’s collective guilt by having Romero canonized as a saint, which, of course, Romero would not have wanted, and which entirely misses the point. But, as I have observed before, if all you have is a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail. The Catholic Church is guilty of having cooperated with the arrest, torture, and murder of their own priests and rather than confess their own sins, they want to elevate the first well known martyr to sainthood.
Not at all unlike the way our country has treated the 1964 assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. We cannot canonize saints but we can make his birthday a federal holiday and then name all of the most dangerous, crime riddled streets in major cities after him. Now even conservative politicians try to use King’s name and quotes to polish their own reputations while trying to ignore everything he said, but, ideas are bullet proof, and even from his grave, King still speaks to our hearts.
Of course, today is Easter in the western world, following the traditional observance of the events of the Christian Holy Week in which the world’s most well-known martyr is remembered. The oldest biblical accounts of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus were actually recorded by Paul, a zealous believer who never met Jesus in the flesh and who knew very little about the real story. It is important to note, in reading Pau, as the first Christian to write about Easter, but even as a zealot, Paul never implies that there was an empty tomb or that anyone had seen Jesus after the crucifixion in any way other than as a vision.
If you read the New Testament in the order in which its parts were written, it is not hard to see how the mythic nature of the Easter story evolved. Paul wrote his letters 20 to thirty years before the first canonical gospel was written. Paul describes the Easter event in I Corinthians, chapter 15, this way:
For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures 4 and that he was buried and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures 5 and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. 6 Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died.[b] 7 Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. 8 Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. 9 For I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle,
Paul never met Jesus in the flesh and wasn’t a part of his ministry. But Paul was an early convert who preserves a tradition that the church has shared with him. He did believe that 3 days after he was murdered, Jesus appeared to Peter, then the 12 apostles, and then to some gathering of some 500 men and women, and finally, he appeared to Paul. But, you see, he says that they way that other people saw Jesus after the crucifixion was the same way that he did…. Jesus appeared to Peter, the apostles, to a congregation of hundreds, and then to Paul . . . in a vision.
Paul would have believed that the body of Jesus was buried in an anonymous grave somewhere outside of Jerusalem, but the body of Jesus was of no interest to Paul. Paul believed that the Christ, the spirit of God, was appearing to the faithful.
The first canonical gospel, Mark, speaks of an empty tomb but reports no appearances. Mark describes Jesus as an ideal martyr whose death does not end his message. Mark seems to want his readers to have similar courage in the face of Roman occupation and threat . . . the courage to become martyrs in opposition of Rome.
The Gospel of Thomas, which probably predates what we have in the New Testament, does not mention a resurrection at all. At the end of the first century, the early church added narratives about a physical resurrection as the message of Jesus was being tamed and transformed from a message of liberation theology, a message of revolution against an evil empire, and into an illusory promise of eternal life after death.
The church, conspiring with the political authorities of the day, tried to kill the idea of radical compassionate revolution and to replace it with what Karl Marx accurately described as being the opiate of the people . . . a religious narrative intended to keep the poor and enslaved quiet and cooperative.
I know that many of my peers in the traditional church think that I am somewhat uniquely radical in my re-presenting of the Jesus narrative, but I will leave it to Thomas Jefferson, who, in a 1814 letter to Horatio Spafford, said it better than I ever could: the priest has been hostile to liberty. he is always in alliance with the Despot abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own. it is easier to acquire wealth and power by this combination than by deserving them: and to effect this they have perverted the purest religion ever preached to man, into mystery & jargon unintelligible to all mankind & therefore the safer engine for their purposes.
Others have very magical beliefs about the promise of Easter but I think the best interpretation comes from the 20th century Greek poet, Dinos Christianopoulos who wrote, “They tried to bury us but they didn’t know we were seeds.” A government killed Jesus but that didn’t kill his teachings. Sadly, however, the church tried to bury his message in magic and superstition, and yet, thousands of years later, some still can hear him calling us to revolution.
A government killed Dietrich Bonhoeffer and generations of seminary professors have tried to make his message tediously boring, but his death reminds the church that it is our job to stand up to fascism.
Our government, working with a despot in El Salvador, killed archbishop Romero, assassins killed Gandhi, JFK, Bobby Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr. but ideas are bullet proof. They tried to sweep them under a rug. Since they were killed, governments have tried to silence their voices, tried to scare us with threats of violence and hunger; they buried them, they just didn’t know that they were seeds.
We are not the keepers of a dead religion, encased in magical thinking and silly, childish promises of some kind of literal heaven or frightened with the fires of an imaginary hell. We are the one thing that governments and churches fear the most, we have an idea; and we have refused to be frightened, to be silenced or even to play dead. Because they know, all that stands between us and the end of fascism, what has kept us from real liberation, is that we were not united and aware.
Whether our generation will awaken from its childish indifference or not remains to be seen but this much I know, the world is ripe for a revolution, a reformation, in economics, in government, and in religion. Whether it will happen in my lifetime or not, I cannot predict, I just know that it should.
