Universalist Unitarian Church Santa Paula, California

Celebration of the Man Jesus at Eastertime
by Reverend John Alexie Crane

They have been moved in the past (as well as in the present) by a deep conviction that acceptance of the idea of Christ is in some way absolutely essential to the conduct of human life. The idea of Jesus as the Christ has mattered profoundly in the European-American world into which we were born. So intensely has it mattered down through the centuries that many believers have been willing to die or to kill in its defense.

Scholars, in the past 100 years or so, have come to understand that Jesus was a man who lived in the ancient world, and that Christ is an idea about the man that developed among his followers after his death. We Universalists and Unitarians, many of us, have long since set aside this ancient idea, have had little enthusiasm for the notion that Jesus was the son of God and our savior. Rather, they see him as a man not a god, and have done so since the 16th century in Europe and the 18th century in America. It is his teachings that have mattered to us, not his divinity.

What did this man teach to his followers so long ago.? Let’s focus our attention on this aspect of the man here at Eastertime. As I have, over the years, reflected on his teachings, I have come to see him as an independent, autonomous individual, an original thinker about the conduct of life. He also knew in himself a deep and persisting love for people, caring about their well-being, a desire to do what he could to enable them to live fully and well. He cared actively and consistently about the well-being of the ordinary people he found around him. Not the rich and powerful but just ordinary folks.

He was an independent, autonomous individual. He did not just passively accept the social conditioning he experienced in growing up among his people, did not conclude that their way of life was ultimate ultimate and inviolable. He was not merely a dutiful conformer. Rather, he took the tradition of his people into himself, into the depths of his being, and found his way to what he held to be higher and finer, more just, more richly rewarding patterns of human relationship.

He rebelled against the accepted ethics in his society, insisted that people could reach a higher level of existence. He rebelled against the oppressive restrictions of the interminable list of rules and customs by which his people rigidly and self-righteously governed themselves. The rules were made for people, he said, not people for the rules. They were presumably designed, that is, not to restrict life, but to enable humanity to find its way to fullness of life.

There is considerable insight caught up in those few, simple words. They place the well-being of humanity close to the center of all living concern: not rules, not laws, not kings or princes, not animal sacrifices or other religious rites and rituals — but humanity.

Jesus was concerned in his religious reflections to discover how people might govern themselves in order to create a good life, a full life. It was the same motivation had earlier guided the Buddha in the East. Both men were rebels against the long-established, long-accepted, most respectable ways of their people. (It does not follow from this, of course, that every man who rebels against the ways of his people is a Jesus or a Buddha: it does mean that rebellion is sometimes creative, and when it is so, it may be extraordinarily valuable to civilization. It is here that the growing edge of life is to be found.)

Jesus spoke out vigorously against those who merely went through the motions of being religious, the merely proper, respectable people, those who exploited others in self-righteousness, those who enjoyed lording it over others in order to expand their own sense of selfhood. Jesus could see that this was not the way it ought to be in our lives, could see that this would never produce a good life for all.

What alternative did he propose? He suggested the quite radical idea that instead of, in civilized life, having people busy themselves at trying to outdo, outwit, and dominate each other, we should instead encourage them to approach all individuals with a desire to helpthem live fully and well, to wish each other no harm, to regard each other as equal in importance. Living in such a spirit (Jesus taught all those who would listen), people would find their way to the most fruitful, most rewarding kind of civilized relationships.

So you see, he was a lover, Jesus was, a lover of people and also a reformer. It was not that he was all peaches and cream, all sweetness and surrender. He knew anger in himself, as well, and did not hesitate to let it go, to express it against those he felt deserved it. He knew a sense of outrage against all those who in any way detracted from the dignity and worth of the human being. He was infuriated by those who smugly practiced a religion of outward show, of mere public display or formal observance.

These are eminently fine personal characteristics that Jesus held in himself. We do well, here at Easter time, to celebrate his memory, for he was a memorable man. We would do well to keep these personal characteristics in mind, to reflect on them occasionally, as in our turn, we set about the task of fulfilling the humanity that is in us, of reaching the highest level of being of which we are capable.

That, I believe, is the kind of man Jesus was; and that is the kind of religion, the kind of life he urged upon those who encountered him. He wanted people to live, really to live, fully and finely.

However, a few years after Jesus’ death, a man named Paul of Tarsus took up this religion, and added a great deal of his own identity, his own thought and feeling to it. Jesus had a ministry of about three years, and died a round 30 CE. Paul wrote his letters to the earliest Christian groups between 50-60 CE. He did this before the first Gospel, Mark, was written in about 70 CE, so that we find much of Paul as well as of Jesus in the New Testament.

“The wages of sin is death,” Paul argued, “but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.” The early Christians adopted this notion of Paul’s, and it became of central, crucial importance in the Christian philosophy of life. It is my own feeling that it is difficult to overestimate the amount of spiritual confusion, of conflict, bloodshed, and destruction that this extraordinary idea has generated in our culture. It argues that death is a punishment inflicted upon humanity for its sins, but that, if individuals can in some way be saved from their sins, then they will be saved from death, will live in eternal bliss. And salvation will come only to those who believe Christ is their savior; that this is the ultimate truth about life.

For centuries the fundamental message of the traditional religion of the western world has been that through Jesus’ death on the cross and his subsequent resurrection, all those who embrace him as their savior will be saved from death unto eternal life. An extraordinary conception! Even so, for some two thousand years it has loomed very large indeed in the thinking of our people, and it is only in recent times that it has begun to decline in significance.

The people of the western world will gradually come to see, I believe, that when Jesus said, “I came that people might have life and have it more abundantly,” he did not mean that by believing in him people could be saved for eternal life in the hereafter; rather, he was giving expression to his awareness that if people would fill their present lives, here and now, with significant living, if they would reach up to the highest level of being possible for them, then they would find the abundant life, not in the hereafter, but here on earth. If people would relate to each other in love, caring about each other’s well-being, Jesus taught, then they would find the more abundant life.

Which is to say that salvation is not something that will come to you (or be withheld from you) when you die. Now is the time to be saved. Here and now. Either you are saved in this way; or you are not. If you are not saved, there is no point in looking for salvation after death. If you are saved, then you don’t worry about what will happen after death. You live fully in each present moment; and when you do this, each moment expands, enlarges, spreads out until it approaches eternity in its dimensions.

Dr Alexie Crane
2880 Exeter Place
Santa Barbara, CA 93105
(805) 682-3476

Lex1304@aol.com

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