Jesus and the Spectacle of Death and Resurrection
Part 1 of the series Jesus and the Spectacle of Faith
Introduction
In December 2022, I wrote a post entitled Jesus and The Spectacle of Christmas. I opened that post with these words.
I rarely write about religion, faith, God, Christianity, or the church. The principal reason is that people prefer to debate the institutional and cultural forms of Christianity rather than reflect on the personal and spiritual aspects of faith. Before Christianity was a church, before it was institutionalized as the state religion of the Holy Roman Empire, before it became a political power center in the West and the East, it was a community of faith of people living common lives. It is still, for the majority of Christians worldwide, a community of faith.
No one is a perfect example of what a Christian or person of faith is. The argument that we are all hypocrites and not perfect representations of what we believe is true. No one is perfect. The fact that the church in all its temporal forms doesn’t match the expectations that people both within and outside the church have for it simply shows that it is a human institution seeking spiritual fulfillment. In fact, people still believe it in spite of rationalistic claims against it and political repression which seeks to destroy it. It is simply a testimony to the human character of religion as a phenomenon that, as an act of fact, transcends time and space as we know it.
Here I begin a three-part series exploring aspects of the story of the Christian faith from my perspective. I was raised in the church. I was trained to be a minister. I have been an ordained minister for 42 years. Most of what constitutes ministry has been in the world of organizational leadership. In effect, I have lived straddling the line that separates the secular and the sacred.
It is impossible to understand my perspective without having read The Spectacle of the Real. My basic understanding of "spectacle” comes from Guy Debord, who says,
“The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.”
It is impossible to understand Christianity without an appreciation for the place that images have in interpreting what the faith means.
The Apostle Paul wrote to the believers in Colossae a clarification of who Jesus is.
He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.
In the ancient Hebrew scriptures, the book of Genesis we read,
Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.’
So God created humankind in his image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.
God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.’
I believe that Guy Debord’s characterization of spectacles defined by images having a socially mediating function applies to how Christians, for two millennia, have understood the Christian faith. Jesus is the image of God or, more specifically, God in the flesh. Human beings are created in the image of God. It was our desire to be God that led to the banishment of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. The social relation of images, whether religious or not, define who we are as individuals and our relationship to one another as a global society.
In the essay that follows, I will look at the Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Creation stories in Genesis, and finally, faith as a human experience in the context of the divide between the secular and the sacred. I will post each part separately and then will combine them together into one very long post. I promise that I am writing on behalf of myself alone. My interest is simply to look at this aspect of my own life in a manner that others who know me in a different context may understand. And in so doing, I come to understand my own faith journey better.
Part 1: A Spectacle for Believing
We just passed through the holy season of the Resurrection, commonly known as Easter. In the Christian tradition, it is a holy day greater than Christmas. It represents the culmination of a series of events that began with a dinner among a small group of friends and ends with an empty tomb and a surprise visitation of the Resurrected Christ. It is the perfect story for dramatization as a spectacle of faith and religion.
Throughout the world on Easter Sunday, people rise in the dark, before dawn, bundling up against the cold of a Spring morning. They meet in a garden or a cemetery to celebrate what Christians believe is the overcoming of death. As the sun rises, the imagery of light coming into the world after the death of Jesus points to what has been the enduring belief of the church for two millennia — the restoration of all creation in relationship to its creator.
The Meaning of Jesus’ Death
A central theme of Christian belief is that Jesus came to save sinners. His death on the cross was a sacrificial death for humankind. The theological term is “substitutionary atonement.” As a Protestant, the method of accepting the atonement for our sins is called “being justified by faith alone.”
This is the traditional belief of the church. It is the antithesis of modern scientific fact. And yet, the Christian church is as modern as any scientific laboratory. In the modern world, The Spectacle of the Real represents a type of salvation by submission to public opinion and political allegiance.
Modern church discourse increasingly treats the death of Christ like a favor God has done for us. Sort of like, he picked up the check for dinner. The idea of substitutionary atonement has been replaced by something more like “forensic psychology.” God forgives us so that we won’t have to feel guilty anymore.
This idea of “forensic psychology” reduces the events of Holy Week to God having empathy for us. This reductivist theology has led to the modern assumption that if God loves everyone, everyone must be saved. Of course, this would mean that Hitler must be saved, school shooters must be saved, and, worst of all, Donald Trump must be saved. Universalism breaks down when particular examples of people make it difficult to accept.
Sociologist Christian Smith, in his book, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers. described this approach to modern religion as “moralistic therapeutic deism.” The specifics of this view of religion are described this way.
A God exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth.
God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.
The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.
God does not need to be particularly involved in one's life except when God is needed to resolve a problem.
Good people go to heaven when they die.
Forensic psychology is a version of this secularized version of historic Christian belief.
The Reimagining of Sacrifice
The historical view of Jesus’ death on the cross is that it was a sacrificial death for our sins. René Girard challenged this view. He doesn’t discard the idea of substitutionary atonement. Neither do I because the biblical narrative is consistent in its depiction of human beings living in an alienated state with God, their creator. The theology of the church, since its early days as the Christian faith community, has interpreted Jesus’ death in this way. Girard adds another dimension to this historical belief.
Girard wants us to understand the events that led up to Jesus’ crucifixion from the perspective of the Scapegoat mechanism. The practice of designating someone as the scapegoat is a function of mimetic conflict. Simply described, in normal human relationships, we tend to identify aspects of other people that we seek to imitate. This is how children learn to behave well or poorly. In institutional and social environments, when the imitator begins to become too much like the one they are imitating, conflict arises. Girard sees this as the source of violence in society.
In the story of Jesus’ life, Girard sees that the leaders of the Temple in Jerusalem recognize that the public was beginning to see this itinerant teacher as the long-awaited King of the Jews. If he is The King of the Jews, then his position within the Jewish religion usurps the Temple leadership of their positions of privilege and power.
The Gospel of Mark tells the story.
As soon as it was morning, the chief priests held a consultation with the elders and scribes and the whole council. They bound Jesus, led him away, and handed him over to Pilate. Pilate asked him, ‘Are you the King of the Jews?’ He answered him, ‘You say so.’ Then the chief priests accused him of many things. Pilate asked him again, ‘Have you no answer? See how many charges they bring against you.’ But Jesus made no further reply, so that Pilate was amazed.
Now at the festival he used to release a prisoner for them, anyone for whom they asked. Now a man called Barabbas was in prison with the rebels who had committed murder during the insurrection. So the crowd came and began to ask Pilate to do for them according to his custom. Then he answered them, ‘Do you want me to release for you the King of the Jews?’ For he realized that it was out of jealousy that the chief priests had handed him over. But the chief priests stirred up the crowd to have him release Barabbas for them instead. Pilate spoke to them again, ‘Then what do you wish me to do with the man you call the King of the Jews?’ They shouted back, ‘Crucify him!’ Pilate asked them, ‘Why, what evil has he done?’ But they shouted all the more, ‘Crucify him!’ So Pilate, wishing to satisfy the crowd, released Barabbas for them; and after flogging Jesus, he handed him over to be crucified.
As Girard points out, this mimetic threat is treated with violence. Jesus is sentenced for a false claim. The Temple leaders, with the Roman authorities playing their part, sentence Jesus to death by crucifixion. It is a particularly brutal, torturous form of execution. The image of seeing Jesus hanging from a Roman cross reminds the public who really is in charge of Jerusalem and Palestine. Jesus’ death as the scapegoat serves to restore order to society and reaffirm the power and prestige of the Elders of the Temple and the political rule of Rome. The Roman government’s complicity shows that this was not only a religious or even a tribal controversy but rather the ongoing management of political relationships within the region.
The death of Jesus would have been just another death by crucifixion if it were not for the Spectacle of Easter morning. Without it, there would be no satisfaction for forensic guilt against the God of creation. Jesus’ death would just be another story of an itinerant rabbi caught up in a power struggle between Jewish and Roman authorities in the first century AD Jerusalem.
The Non-Spectacle of a Dead Man Resurrected
The spectacle is not a collection of images,
but a social relation among people, mediated by images.
Guy Debord
Turn on your television or go to YouTube on Easter morning, and you find Easter Sunrise Services from all over the world. There is a Spectacle character to these ceremonies, especially the one that takes place in Jerusalem at the site of the empty tomb. The imagery of dawn breaking on the horizon is unmistakably an image metaphor of the light of God casting out the darkness of the world. As the services commence, someone will shout, “Christ is Risen!” echoed in return by those gathered, “He is Risen indeed.” This is the narrative moment of Resurrection Sunday two thousand years ago, being relived contemporaneously.
Within the Christian tradition, this is a spectacle at its most sublime. And like Christmas, these two moments on the church calendars are the most spectacular in the sense that Guy Debord describes. These two moments, attract individuals and families, who never darken the door of the church on any other Sunday, to ascent to something meaningful having taken place. At least for my generation, it is an act of nostalgia for a once-dominant culture. While many still believe America to be a Christian nation, in reality, our religion is The Spectacle of Sacred or Secular Religion. Whether it is two Sundays a year in church, a Sunday tee-off time at the golf club, the Sunday afternoon NFL game or NASCAR race, or the daily meditation ritual on the “Breaking News” of the latest global political crisis. The spectacle of images draws us toward the feeling of participation in something meaningful and real.
Distance in time makes it easier to turn this moment into a shared remembrance that transcends socio-political boundaries. This is how Christian Smith’s “moralistic therapeutic deism.” becomes the modern world’s reverse accommodation of the Christian faith for modern times. This is described by a Harvard graduate student during commencement in the 1990's.
“They tell us that it is heresy to suggest the superiority of some value, fantasy to believe in moral argument, slavery to submit to a judgment sounder than your own. The freedom of our day is the freedom to devote ourselves to any values we please, on the condition that we do not believe them to be true.”
While the Spectacle of Easter is celebrated, one wonders whether the participants at the sunrise service understand the claim being made. In fact, at Christmas and Easter, two claims are made that violate the logic of modern-day scientific reasoning. A child is born to a virgin, and a man dead and buried in a tomb rises from the grave. Two millennia of claims to these being made-up stories to promote religion does not seem to have been very convincing.
As the Easter story is told, at the moment of resurrection, there was no one there. No one can say, “I was there the moment he rose up and stood.” There was no fanfare. There was no expectation that something would happen. Those closest to Jesus were in mourning, wondering what was going to happen to them. Would they be targeted by the same people that crucified their Lord?
Initially, the risen Jesus was not even noticed. No one was looking for him. Think about what happens after a memorial service of a loved one who has passed in your family. No one goes out to the grave, waiting for them to rise up out of the ground. Only the closest ones will go to the graveside days a few days later, to say a prayer, quietly speak to their departed loved one, and remove the symbolically-meaningful dead flowers.
The Gospel writer Luke tells this story of what happened.
But on the first day of the week, at early dawn, they (the women) came to the tomb, taking the spices that they had prepared. They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they went in, they did not find the body. While they were perplexed about this, suddenly two men in dazzling clothes stood beside them. The women were terrified and bowed their faces to the ground, but the men said to them, ‘Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen. Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be handed over to sinners, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again.’ Then they remembered his words, and returning from the tomb, they told all this to the eleven and to all the rest. Now it was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the other women with them who told this to the apostles. But these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them. But Peter got up and ran to the tomb; stooping and looking in, he saw the linen cloths by themselves; then he went home, amazed at what had happened.
This is not a Spectacle of the Real. There are no experts declaring their opinion about what happened to the body. None of the authorities were there to deflect attention away from some nefarious act of grave robbery. Even Jesus doesn’t show up, jumping through the door, shouting, “TaDa!”
Jesus leaves the tomb and takes a walk. He meets a couple of guys on the road to Emmaus. Even they don’t recognize him. They had already heard about the empty gravesite. They tell him what they had heard. The gossip of an empty tomb was spreading fast. Jesus doesn’t even acknowledge what has happened. They walk with this stranger, then invited him to their home for a meal. Then, Jesus revealed himself to them. They spoke to one another of this encounter, saying, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road ...” Then the two men left and went to find Jesus’ disciples and tell them what had happened.
This is a very strange occurrence in the context of our contemporary obsession with public spectacles. Jesus has been resurrected from death. He is taking his time to go see his closest friends. Why is this?
Again, Luke tells the story of Jesus’ reuniting with his disciples.
While they were talking about this, Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, ‘Peace be with you.’ They were startled and terrified, and thought that they were seeing a ghost. He said to them, ‘Why are you frightened, and why do doubts arise in your hearts? Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself. Touch me and see; for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.’ And when he had said this, he showed them his hands and his feet. While in their joy they were disbelieving and still wondering, he said to them, ‘Have you anything here to eat?’ They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate in their presence.
I have thought a lot about this story over the years. During my seminary training, we explored every facet of this story. The focal point has always been the power of God to give life, and in this act of resurrection, the power of life over death. Even with this perspective resonating with Christians through two millennia, I always felt that there was something more to this story.
The Spectacle Nature of Reality
The Spectacle nature of reality treats events as singular in nature. They are one-off events that only have meaning, as commentators tell us they have. Maybe you are a Springsteen or Taylor Swift fan, and you want to immerse yourself in as many of their concerts as possible, and with others like you, tell stories about the night in Omaha or Austin when their moment of genius was felt. Or maybe you are a sports fan, who cannot afford to miss a single game of your team, as you and other fans relive your team’s former glory. Or, you are faithful in attending your church every Sunday because the music and sermons remind you of that moment when your faith was born. Our purpose is to experience the Spectacle and relive it. We don’t even have to believe the whole to find the experience fulfilling. This is why the pull of Christmas and Easter remain THE Spectacle moments for the Christian church.
These Spectacle events are particular moments. They point to a more comprehensive story that defines why those particular moments have meaning. In the context of the Christian faith, it is God’s purpose in creation that establishes this larger story of meaning. In Part Two of this series, I will explore The Spectacle of Creation.