Easter Horror Stories

Easter is coming! Rescue, healing, wholeness, death and Resurrection... Salvation! But what does salvation mean, how does it work, who is it for, and what has it got to do with Jesus, whoever he is? Churches around the world read stories of salvation from the Hebrew Scriptures in the lead up to Easter, and connect them to stories of Jesus, especially his murder and the Resurrection. Inevitably, some kinds of people get saved, and others get left out. Someone is always rescued at the expense of someone else. The stories we read are not so much "love your neighbour" stories, as "be glad you aren't your neighbour" stories. There was winners and losers, God's team and the other team. These stories feature God as a violent, genocidal maniac, rightly troubling anyone who allows themselves to be troubled by what they read in the biblical witnesses. As a new Christian in my twenties, these stories horrified me, yet I felt compelled to "believe them," since they were part of the package. I fervently hoped that there was some mysterious divine explanation for their overt xenophobia and control by fear approach to questioning authority. Eventually I came to see that the biblical witnesses are a collection of arguments about the nature of God and humanity, not a monolithic or coherent thesis. We can contrast, for example, the xenophobia of much of the Old Testament with the books of Ruth (where a foreigner becomes the ancestor of David) and Jonah (who sulks when God cares about foreigners and is sternly rebuked). So now let us work through Lent in the lectionary, to frankly examine the horrific Old Testament stories, in parallel with the stories of Jesus being read around the churches. Let us see what Jesus, and the Hebrew prophets who inspired him, made of those stories. Then we will arrive at Maundy Thursday, bad Friday, and finally Easter Sunday, asking not so much what the Resurrection was, but what it means.