Yesterday’s Daily Meditation was about the need to emphasize again — or perhaps for the first time in America — the Empty Tomb as a primary Christian symbol. It is striking to me that the Gospel accounts of the Empty Tomb present a very specific detail: the linens in which Jesus’ corpse was bound are left behind. They stay inside the tomb. “Peter saw the linen wrappings lying there.” (John 20:6) A quite clear message of letting go, leaving behind the trappings of death.
Yet, people for centuries have clung to those linens and made them into a relic. The city where I was born, Turin, welcomed indeed the “holy shroud” in the 16th century. True or false as this relic may be, the duke and the archbishop built around it a whole apparatus of religious and political power.
The “Shroud of Turin” has corroborated historically a vision of Jesus as “man of sorrow” and has presented Christianity as a religion exalting pain and death. Early Christians did not feel or think in this way. The highly developed mysticism of Paul of Tarsus, for example, does not deny the pain of the world, yet it images all suffering in the context of the resurrection.
The notion of the Cosmic Christ, which almost disappeared in modern Christianity, meant that the presence of the Risen Life was felt everywhere, in all creation, as well as within the individual and the community. A thorough exploration of this topic is found in Matthew Fox’s The Coming of the Cosmic Christ, where he writes about the deep need for a mystic consciousness, the fact that Jesus himself was a teacher of mysticism, the early Christians’ belief in the Cosmic Christ, and about putting this concept to good use today.
Jesus offered connections to the dispossessed, not only by conversation and scandalous association at meals, but by undergoing the death of the unconnected, the death of the dispossessed. Paul’s genius, in turn, consisted in stressing the identity between the Cosmic Christ and Jesus-on-the-cross, underlining that Christians revere the most humiliated one — precisely him and not somebody else — as ruler of the cosmos.
Did Paul mean that Christians, through their head, Christ, should claim domination and power? No. That’s yet another mistake that Christians have made and — if we look at reports about the “White House Faith Office” — they keep making. The identity between the Cosmic Christ and Jesus-on-the-cross means instead that the lust for power of any (wannabe) emperor has been emptied and ridiculized by the cross of Christ.
Real cosmic power resides instead — according to Paul and his first-century communities — in the most humiliated. In their eyes, this is what“saved” them, this is what connected them in community. Were they fools? Maybe. But God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength. (1 Corinthians 1:25)
All quotes from Matthew Fox, The Coming of the Cosmic Christ: The Healing of Mother Earth and the Birth of a Global Renaissance, pp. 73, 135
Banner Image: Leaving behind the tomb and grave wrappings: “The Resurrection of Jesus.” Painting by Sebastiano Ricci, ~1715. Wikimedia Commons
Queries for Contemplation
What is the apparatus of oppressive power built today around the cross of Jesus? How can we counteract the manipulation of the Christian message by people who are in love with power and money?
Recommended Reading
The Coming of the Cosmic Christ: The Healing of Mother Earth and the Birth of a Global Renaissance
In what may be considered the most comprehensive outline of the Christian paradigm shift of our Age, Matthew Fox eloquently foreshadows the manner in which the spirit of Christ resurrects in terms of the return to an earth-based mysticism, the expression of creativity, mystical sexuality, the respect due the young, the rebirth of effective forms of worship—all of these mirroring the ongoing blessings of Mother Earth and the recovery of Eros, the feminine aspect of the Divine.
“The eighth wonder of the world…convincing proof that our Western religious tradition does indeed have the depth of imagination to reinvent its faith.” — Brian Swimme, author of The Universe Story and Journey of the Universe.
“This book is a classic.” Thomas Berry, author of The Great Work and The Dream of the Earth.
