Explainer
Creed
Easter
4 min read

Life before death

Embracing death, parading it down streets, and even downplaying their egos, Julie Canlis contemplates why Christians do death.

Julie connects Christian spirituality with ordinary life in Wenatchee, Washington State, where she teaches and writes.

A Good Friday procession of people and priests hold a cross horizontal above their heads.
Good Friday procession in Bielsko-Biała, Poland.
Silar, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Easter is not about the Easter Bunny. Easter is about the paradox that we all try to skirt: only in death is there life.  

But Easter is not just about metaphorical death and rebirth, at least not for Christians. Christians don’t believe that Jesus died for our self-esteem. Nor that he raised an Idea of himself. As Thomas Lynch, undertaker and poet in Midwest America reminds us,  

“Do you think they would have changed the calendar for that? Done the Crusades? Burned witches? Easter was a body and blood thing, no symbols, no euphemisms, no half measures.”  

Christians believe that Jesus’ body died. Ceased breathing. Flatlined for three days. And then (in myth-like fashion of the dying and rising god) this human being who lived at certain GPS coordinates, and had DNA from his mother, was given his life back. Not resuscitated. But resurrected. Yes, reader, Christians believe this.  

Our culture is body-obsessed when we are living, and body-denying when we die. 

Who are we without our bodies? When people die, Christians insist that their body isn’t just a “shell” of the real person. No, their body still is the person. That’s why cremation didn’t catch on in the Christian west until recently, and even so, your local priest might turn up their nose if you want to distribute the ashes into jars to be divided between the grandkids. Often, as soon as a person dies, our impulse is to insist, “she’s not there.” This is because our culture is body-obsessed when we are living, and body-denying when we die. As Prof John Behr, a University of Aberdeen specialist in thinking about death, observes, we want to live like hedonists and to die like Platonists. Easter presents a counter-narrative here. Our bodies have meaning. Jesus’ body has meaning. 

 In re-living the events of Holy Week, all eyes are on Jesus’ body. And Jesus’ body is doing some very physical actions – like healing bodies, raising bodies, touching unclean bodies, washing feet. And then it is his turn to have his body ravaged by arrest, torture, sleeplessness, betrayal, and execution. All eyes are not on the idea but on the body of Jesus. So much so, that they put guards at the tomb so that there could be no more monkey business about this man’s body

It might seem peculiar to us that Christianity, infamous for its historically mixed relationship to the body, is centered on one man’s body. Ancient Christians spoke poetically that the tomb that held Jesus’ body became a womb. In his death, in the absolute silence of death, Jesus chose to share dead-ness with us. That this was the essence of his “work.” That his work could only be accomplished by surrendering, doing nothing – and that in doing nothing, he undoes the great “nothing” that threatens each one of us. Almost everything we fear, big and small, is somehow connected to a fear of death in one form or another. It is not death, per se, but the “fear of death” that enslaves us (says an early Christian preacher in Rome. And so, Easter stands at that pivot point between fear of death and life. Christians celebrate Easter as the day the world tilted. Where death no longer has the final say, but is something we can now use to our advantage. In fact, life begins to break in precisely through death. This is only because, as James Alison once said in an Easter sermon, “He entered into death and made it untoxic.” 

The question is not “is there life after death” but is there life before death? 

And so, strangely, Christians embrace death. We parade it on crosses through the streets. We paint it on our tombs, over our meeting houses, wear it on our chests. Because in embracing death (and the even more enslaving fear-of-death), we defeat it. Because of this belief, ancient Christians flung themselves at lions. They endured the agony of torture. They sanctified suffering. They also practiced small unnoticed “little deaths” of that great overlord, the ego. Not because suffering or death is good, or to be sought. But because death and suffering have been transformed into portals. Even in baptism, with oblivious babies being christened in frilly white dresses, we are dipping them defiantly into the waters of death and waging war on death. This is the mystery of Easter. This is why every Sunday is called a “little Easter” because even as we shuffle into that old stone church, something outlandish is being proclaimed. Death is not a friend, but neither is it to be feared. The worst has already happened. Now we can get on with living. The question is not “is there life after death” but is there life before death?  

And here is the final kicker: Christian orthodoxy proclaims that Jesus still has his body. (Not every Christian would insist on this, but it has been central to the tradition for two millennia). Easter isn’t just a mythical story of the paradigmatic victory of life over death. Paul talked about it as a complete reversal: that instead of death swallowing life, Jesus’ embodied life swallows up all death. Christians believe that he is alive and well, in some kind of body (“transfigured” in Christian slang), pouring out blessing on all embodiment. This isn’t a body that is somewhere floating above us in the clouds, but is an embodied person raised as their whole life narrative into eternity – as one recognizable life. Resurrection is not the hope of our joining Jesus in the clouds, but of this same raising of our whole lives into Life itself. This is called “putting on immortality” like a coat – where everything from our past (even scars, like Jesus still had) is integrated into one recognizable life.  

This is the Christian hope of Easter, as we live in the interim, no longer fearing but using death for dear life.

Article
Art
Creed
1 min read

How the Creed connects us to a bigger history

Faint shadows in literature and dawning art give glimpses of greater things.

Susan is a writer specialising in visual arts and contributes to Art Quarterly, The Tablet, Church Times and Discover Britain.

Painting of hand of God touching hand of Adam.
Sistine Chapel ceiling detail.
Michelangelo, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Singing the Nicene Creed on Sundays in Latin, a language I do not understand, does not detract from its meditative power. Admittedly not reading music, means attempts to pin the syllables to the blobs on the stave part company with the sounds of the choir and congregation, around the time we turn the sheet over, at ‘sedet ad dexteram Patris’. Sometimes I get back on track by ‘qui locutus est per prophetas’, and sometimes I wait until Amen. Either way it is a meditative experience, on a different level to day-to-day information processing. 

Even in a first language the Creed’s surface is oblique for the modern mind. This initial impenetrability accounts for why, outside the Church, celebrations for the Creed’s 1700th anniversary are niche.  

BBC Radio 4 is running a six-part series Lent Talks, with thinkers and theologians expanding on aspects of the text through personal experience.  

In the first episode theologian Frances Young perceived God’s almightiness in caring for her son Arthur, who was born with profound, life-limiting disabilities. Arthur’s presence in Young’s later-life, ordained ministry, underlined how almightiness is experienced through gentleness: “A hidden, elusive Loving and redeeming presence, gently transforming everything through sheer grace.”  For astrophysicist and theologian David Wilkinson, contemplating ‘That God made all things seen and unseen’, validated science as a Christian endeavour. Wilkinson recalled uncharacteristically hugging a fellow astrophysicist on a Durham street in 2015, at the news of the first direct observation of gravitational waves. The observation captured the earth moving a fraction due to a ripple in spacetime. Incremental glimpses of the workings of the universe serve as stepping stones to fully appreciating creation, and the awe of our place in it. 

Glimpsing a part of a concealed whole, leading to the understanding of greater things, features throughout the Bible. In the King James version of Hebrews we learn: “Who serve unto the example and shadow of heavenly things”. More modern translations use ‘copy’ instead of example. Endeavours on earth, done in the right spirit, can serve as a foretaste or shadow of heaven, of eternal life.  

While the language of the King James Bible offers all things to all men and is woven through literature, the Nicene Creed’s presence is scant. 

As a literary device, a part serving for the whole, or foreshadowing future events works in drama or poetry, but in novels there is less to see. Rectory-raised Jane Austen would have heard the Creed throughout her church going life, but church service scenes are missing from her fiction. Charles Dickens’ faith journey from criticising the established Anglican church of the mid-nineteenth century, to exploring Unitarianism, make the absence in his novels of the Creed, with its centrality of the Trinity, of a piece with his spiritual outlook. Raskolnikov’s glimpse of an icon in the pawnbroker’s home in Crime and Punishment, points to Dostoevsky’s greater ease with fragments momentarily illuminating the bigger picture: ‘in the corner an icon-lamp was burning before a small icon’. 

Modern artists also offer transcendent moments of faith gesturing towards an overarching framework of belief

Visual art's capacity for rendering the invisibility of the past, the distant, the imagination and the metaphysical, make it a more likely medium for extending the Creed beyond the walls of the church. 

In 1541 Pope Paul III allegedly fell to his knees in wonder in the Sistine Chapel, at the presentation of Michelangelo’s Last Judgement fresco on the altar wall. Michelangelo’s unorthodox, for the times, meditation on personal salvation depicted a cowering Virgin Mary, a beardless Christ, an unbiblical, pointy-eared Charon, the ferryman in Greek mythology, appearing in the underworld, and cascades of nude bodies tumbling towards their eternal fate. By the late1550s Michelangelo’s friend Daniele de Volterra was ordered to paint draperies on some of the naked figures, to correct indecencies. But the devout Michelangelo’s personal vision of the Creed’s ‘judge the quick and the dead’, had already been copied by numerous artists since its unveiling. Giulio Bonasone’s engraving, after Michelangelo, The Last Judgement, 1546, is just one example of the Renaissance artist’s contemplation of ‘the life of the world to come’, as he entered his seventh decade, taking flight into the wider world. 

Modern artists also offer transcendent moments of faith gesturing towards an overarching framework of belief. In turn of the century France, as the country underwent a Catholic revival, Gwen John was one of many artists working on making modern art full of religious meaning. Conventional paintings of the Annunciation show Mary with the Angel Gabriel, with the white-robed angel, spreading their wings. Drawing on her friend Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem Annunciation (Words of the Angel), John created an Annunciation scene, with no visible angel. In Girl Reading at the Window, 1911, a young woman in contemporary dress, is illuminated by light coming through the window, as is the white lace curtain, gently blowing out to touch her dress. Setting aside the expected haloes and wings, John brings to life the Creed’s teaching ‘was incarnate of the Holy Ghost and the Virgin Mary’. 

A dawning realisation heralding a far greater truth is also apparent in Emil Nolde’s Paradise Lost, 1921. In bright, unnaturalistic, colours and in a heavily outlined, naïve style, Nolde catches Adam and Eve’s expressions, as the full consequences of their banishment from Eden become apparent. A moment in time indicates the long road ahead to the promised world of the Creed. 

At the height of the Cold War in 1971, nearly three million Soviet citizens went to see Andrei Tarkovsky’s epic portrait of medieval icon painter Andrei Rublev, five years after the film’s original release. Despite censorship, monochrome projection and no posters advertising the screenings, people found a way to engage with a depiction of belief, creativity and a search for meaning, set against the viscerally brutal backdrop of Tartar pillaged,1400s Russia. 

In an age of Netflix narratives and individualism, connecting with the collective wisdom of churchmen in Constantinople from 1700 years ago can, unavoidably, feel like a stretch. But like the best art, the Creed offers the chance to step out of time, braiding us into us into the faith and vision of others, in ways none of us can understand. 

 

Listen to the BBC Lent Talks

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