The brilliant show Futurama is about a gang of misfits who work for a package delivery firm called Planet Express. Professor Farnsworth is the mad scientist owner who, every episode, barges in on the gang exclaiming, “Good News, everyone!” Then, he describes their next delivery and how it will most assuredly lead to their untimely death.
The Christian good news — the gospel — is often like Professor Farnsworth. We claim it’s about the “good news” of Jesus Christ, which one would assume has to do with the socially equitable and just lifestyle he lived and taught, but is most often merely about the necessity of his shed blood on the cross at Calvary.
Good news, everyone!
Consider this: If Jesus’ death and spilled blood are so important, what’s the reason for Jesus to come back from the dead? The story could end with the crucifixion, and that’s it. Resurrection muddies the waters and is a pretty strong argument against the sacrificial lamb trope. If the authors were after a martyr, Jesus’ death at Roman hands was more than enough.
But Jesus’ students and all the people they later tell about him didn’t want or need a martyr. They needed — and received — someone who understood their suffering at the hands of the landed elite because he grew up disenfranchised, just like them.
The real Jesus story is about the power of an individual to change the system. It’s about the power of resurrection: new life, new ideas, new approaches to problems for individuals and societies alike. It’s a story bursting with springtime hope, celebrating the glorious, miraculous gift of sentience, a fresh alternative to the abusive idea that life and death result from sin.
If we look at the gospel of Jesus Christ and see Jesus’ death as blood payment for our unpayable sin debt, that’s not a lesson. That’s just shaming. It’s an ancient view of the cosmos Jesus disagreed with.
Religious people of Jesus’ era (and many people today, unfortunately) believed the world, and we, are fallen because war, crime, poverty, and the other infirmities of the human condition continually invade our psyches. We indeed witness our fair share of people acting with malice. Two grotesque world wars and the stirrings of a third don’t instill confidence in the human condition, either. But just because we haven’t evolved enough to coexist and cooperate doesn’t imply being human is somehow a penance.
Jesus doesn’t perceive being human as punishment. Whether for Adam’s faux pas in the Garden of Eden or our inattentiveness to the covenant, thinking this life is already the hell so many people want to avoid in the afterlife is the misbegotten worldview Jesus is trying to move his disciples away from as quickly and urgently as possible.
Jesus never says — and the gospel authors never put in his mouth — anything about the necessity of his death to save us from sin. Paul writes about Jesus’ death as repayment for sin. But Paul is the only one who thinks that, and he so thinks primarily because of his Pharisaic background. Why do we listen to Paul instead of Jesus?
Jesus says he’s here to fulfill a scripture from Isaiah, which is literally about caring for the poor, not about dying for some imaginary cosmic screw-up:
Isaiah 61:1–3 (NIV)
The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is on me, because the Lord has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor and the day of vengeance of our God, to comfort all who mourn, and provide for those who grieve in Zion — to bestow on them a crown of beauty instead of ashes, the oil of joy instead of mourning, and a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair. They will be called oaks of righteousness, a planting of the Lord for the display of his splendor.
Isaiah 61 is a passage of scripture we should all be fulfilling, frankly, and that was Isaiah’s original point. Isaiah doesn’t tell us to wait for a Messiah to right the world, to stop the wars, to feed the hungry and house the homeless. Isaiah says get to it, right now! It’s our job to right the world.
It was apparent to Isaiah and Jesus, and it should be painfully obvious to us today: God is not going to solve any of our problems. We need to get to work. Righting the world is our job. And that means we need to change internally, psychically, spiritually. We need to resurrect the love we’re afraid to give others. Afraid because for our entire lives religion has taught us to be ashamed of ourselves.
And if we can’t first love ourselves, we will never be able to love anybody else.
Jesus doesn’t shame people into changing. The Jewish orthodoxy had been doing that for a thousand years by the time he was born, and it’s the same approach the church Paul built would attempt for the next 2000 years, without much to show for it.
Instead of shame, Jesus encourages us. He tells anyone who will listen for a couple of minutes how much better we, and our world, could be if we would do the hard, introspective, spiritual work and realize, maybe we’re not inherently good, as Pelagius argued, but that at the very least, we are capable of being better. Like Jesus, we, too, can be resurrected by simply dying to our mistaken notions of a punitive God and a fallen world.
Jesus’ good news of resurrection forces us to recognize that being born is not a sin and the world is not fallen. Instead, we should acknowledge that our ability to think — sentience — is an evolutionary gift! Our intellect is much more nuanced than our too-often dichotomous, binary thinking about good and evil, saved and unsaved, hell-destined or heaven-bound reveals. Being alive is the way the universe expresses itself, gets to know itself, Carl Sagan once said. How can that be sinful?
No, my friends. Humanity’s sin is not the mere fact of our birth. If anything, it’s that we have so little reverence for the life we are given — our own and others.
Jesus’ good news, like all honest good news, is simple. It’s not cloaked in prerequisites. It doesn’t require pomp and circumstance or alms or tithes to a church. It cares not whether you are straight or gay, black, white, brown, mixed, religious or not. The good news transcends our human judgments and simply demands we love each other with our hearts, minds, and souls.
Amen.
Question: How does Easter’s new life/resurrection message encourage and comfort you in a challenging world?
