Resurrection: Beyond suffering to a new acceptance and embrace of the challenges of life

​Resurrection: Beyond suffering to a new acceptance and embrace of the challenges of life by Rev. Michaël Merle

Report by John-Peter Gernaat

This talk considers an aspect of Resurrection: suffering. Suffering is a focus of Passiontide. Suffering is a reality of life. No one can say that they have not experienced suffering. The intensity may differ.

We should remember that when a child moves into youth and is offered the sacrament of Confirmation the young person is reminded to remember the importance of that moment in their lives and to never forget it, “not in sorrow nor in joy”. At that age the young person hears that it is a reality that we experience sorrow in life.

It is worth considering what difference Resurrection makes. Resurrection is a principle as well as a real event. It therefore makes all the difference. In this talk it is the principle of Resurrection that will be opened up. We know that it is real and that it has had its effect on the whole of Creation. We are living in the time after the Resurrection. Yet, the Mystery of Easter is outside of time. It happens in the centre point of the great span of time and yet, it transforms all of time. Everything that came before and everything that will come after is transformed by this event.

What is the principle of Resurrection? We find it described in the Book of Revelation. John experiences an ever unfolding and opening of pictures and experiences of the whole of Creation and he sees these in the spiritual world at hand of the mighty events that accompany earth reality. He arrives at the vision where God and the people are one. They are with God; they are God’s people. This is an aspiration of humanity through all of time, to be the ‘people of God’. It was an expression that lives in the Jewish tradition, and it is a definition for Christians. The intimacy described in Revelation is the aspiration of human beings, to be with God and God with his people. “And every tear will be wiped away, no more suffering, no more pain, no more death.”

This is the condition that the Buddha described as the aspiration of human beings. He described life as suffering, because we become attached to aspects of earthly life. And here, in Revelation, is the picture of the goal described by Buddha, the human community moving beyond suffering. This seems like the end, the goal. But the Book of Revelation has not yet concluded. It continues. The very next sentence is the sentence of Resurrection, it is the idea not of reaching the end of suffering, but of going beyond suffering. “And a voice is heard that says: ‘Behold, I make all things new’”.

The goal is not to come to the end of suffering, but to create something new. It is to experience something beyond that which has come to an end.

Our goal is not to come to an end, but to start a new beginning.

We hear this in John 16. The Spirit of Truth, the Paraclete, the One who advocates on our behalf, the One who speaks for us, and to us and instructs us, and guides us: the Holy Spirit, when he comes he will convince the world:

• concerning missing the mark of destiny,
• concerning the wholeness of character and action that is without blemish,
• concerning the Divine decision to determine how things conclude.

The goal of working towards the development of a new beginning, rather than working towards an ending, is to be found in the teachings of the Buddha, in seed form. It is never done, never over. That is the great joy. This is in the expressions of the instruction of the Spirit.

The Spirit will tell us something of missing the mark of destiny and so not sharing in the reward, as a literal translation of the Hebrew, usually translated as ‘sin’, ‘sinfulness’. This is a separation from what is meant to be because we have failed in our actions, we have fallen short. This is part of the reality of being human on the earth. We need to know that when we miss the mark, it is not the end. There is more to be done. We can continue to aim at hitting the mark, which is our destiny. We therefore need to be instructed about the offence of missing the mark of destiny and not sharing in the reward. If we fail at this, we will fail at the greatest of our efforts which is to put the trust of our spiritual well-being in Christ.

When we realise that there is a destiny: meeting the Christ, coming to terms with the Christ-in-us.

Once we know this, we need to know under what conditions we will get there. This is the character of wholeness and action that is without blemish, that is pure, that aligns to a true intention of being human. When we fail, we use the expression ‘that’s human’, but it is the experience of being less than human. We use the same expression for being ‘less than human’ and for ‘striving to connect with the higher self in the human’. Yet, we can also see this as that when we fail to be fully human there is something we are being called to that aligns us with the Divine in the human. Let us change the expression: ‘to err is to be a fallen human, but to forgive and to love is to discover the Divine in the human being’. This is our task. We live in the tension between our lower nature and our higher self.

The way in which things will end has been determined because they will not end. They are the seed of the new beginning. This is what the spirit instructs us in. This is the great joy that we can experience when we realise that we can move beyond suffering.

To understand this three-fold teaching of the spirit we can turn to the eight-fold path of Buddhism. We must firstly understand the condition under which we find ourselves, which is that we live in a world in which we keep missing the mark. This is how we end up suffering. We fall short of what we know is our calling as human beings. When we become conscious, and we realise that we are missing the mark, we become aware that something is missing; it feels misaligned. At this realisation we need to keep going.

This is the first path of the eight-fold path which the Buddha described as Right Understanding. We must know that this is the condition under which we find ourselves. We live a life in which we do fail. But that is not the end. There is a great danger in Christianity in thinking that because I failed, Jesus, who succeeded, will do it for me. We have to do it through the power that Christ has made available to us, through the Christ-in-us. Through grace, Christ has made this possible. We must work with this power that is available to us every day. We are no longer ‘children’, we are ‘adults’, in the sense of our development as human beings, and we must do it ourselves. We will find that it is no longer going to be done for us. The Right Understanding is that we must know that we can move beyond suffering.

How do we move into the second part of the teaching, the character without blemish? It comes at hand of the next three paths in the eight-fold path which pre-date the eight-fold path. They were a path of Zarathustra (the first incarnation of Zarathustra): Right Thought, Right Word, Right Deed. This is how we live a life of character and action that is without blemish: the Good-Right Thought, the Good-Right Word, the Good-Right Action. Our thinking, our speaking and our gesturing have to be aligned with the Good-Right Intention: the intention to do the Good, to do it as it should be done.

The third part of knowing that there is a conclusion comes through the paths of Right Living, Right Effort and Right Mindfulness. We now know that how we live, the effort we put in on a daily basis and the mindfulness that we have to bear. The word ‘mindfulness’ comes to us in the Act of Consecration of Man: we celebrate together and fulfil together the Act of Consecration of the Human Being in mindfulness of Christ’s Deed. It is Christ’s Deed that makes it possible for us to know that we live in the concluded reality. What is this new reality? It is that the end is a step to the new beginning. There is no end.

When our livelihood, our effort and our mindfulness are geared in the way of the new reality, we arrive at the eighth path, which is Right Concentration. The Right Concentration to live in the new reality, the reality of a new beginning is the seed. When we have drawn everything together in the last moment, we are fully concentrated, not on what has been and come to pass, but on what is going to happen. Even in the end of something we live in the anticipation of “behold, I make all things new”. We are living in the Resurrection. This is why there is such a concentration in the 14th to 16th chapters of John’s Gospel on ‘joy’. “This is my joy that I give you, so that your joy may be complete.” We live in joy, and joy always comes with a certain anticipation. This is why many people struggle with joy, thinking that it does not last. Joy is experienced in the moment. Therefore, in the next moment we need to have a new joy. It is not that joy lasts forever, but rather that we can experience joyful moments every moment. Every moment is a moment in which we can be filled with the joy of anticipation that in the next moment we can be filled with the joy of Christ. This moment is the end of this joy, but it is not the end of the picture. “I make all things new.” Joy is not meant to be a continuous experience. People look for a bliss that lasts, but joy lasts only if it happens in every moment. Joy is engaging. It does not wash over us; it happens because we swim. If we let it wash over us, we will drown. We must be active in every moment in it. If we are not pushing against the water in every moment, we sink. That is the experience of joy, it requires us to be engaged, in the moment. If we are not, then it does not last. If, in the next moment we are not engaged, there is no joy. It then becomes a moment in which we have slipped back into suffering, rather than through Resurrection going beyond suffering.

This does not mean that life is without challenges and difficulty, it certainly is. But the difficulties change when our inner attitude to them changes. It is not easy, it is hard. If it was easy everyone would already have done it, and we would be in the ‘new’ already. It takes effort. We must take it up and live it. We must be mindful at every stage. We must be conscious all the time. If we fall out of consciousness, we are out of it.

When we were very young, as small children, we knew what it was to live in the moment. This is an inner attitude that we need to rediscover. As children we did not have to concern ourselves with the next moment, but as adults we know what we have to face. Yet, we can know that we have the ability to face it. We can face every challenge, no matter how difficult they are. Our whole experience of Resurrection and the joy of Resurrection is that it goes beyond that. This is what is so beautiful about the experience of Resurrection. It is not that it has made things new, but that it is always making things new. It is happening in a continuous present, not in the past.

In our human experience we do not consider our lives to be without purpose. As human beings we develop a remarkable ability: to communicate beyond the sense-moment. We develop a language, and we develop the ability to record it for future generations through a coded symbology (writing) that allows future generations to read what we have left behind as a result of having been here. What we record does not die with us, it lives on as a new beginning for those who read it in the future. It is in our make-up to do this. It is in us to leave behind a record of our lives so that others, who follow, can read it and recognise the struggles, the sorrows and the joys. Whenever anyone picks up a book the story is always new. It is important that we live, always, in the excitement at what is new in the human story. This is the principle of Resurrection: “I make all things new”.

There is only one thing that Resurrection establishes as an absolute reality: that death is no more. Death is not the end of the story. Death has been conquered; nothing dies. There is always a continuation. Death is the mark that there is a new chapter, it is not the end of the book.

Even when we get to the amazing realisation in Revelation that there is no more death, there is no more suffering and no more pain, we may think that this is the end point at which we have arrived. We may think that this is when we live forever in the bliss of being with God. But, “I make all things new”. A new journey starts. There is more to do. Our task will not be done when we become what the Christ prefigured – the fully resurrected human being – and what we call in Anthroposophical language Spirit Human. We do not cross the threshold into ‘eternal rest’, we are always in the doing!

We may notice that a lot of the Gospel is written in the continuous present tense, because the message contained therein is always now. When we read a translation and it is written in the past tense, it is not how it is written in Koine Greek. There it is written in the continuous present tense. Jesus says to us in the present. It is a story of what is unfolding.

The Koine Greek is very difficult to translate without becoming clumsy. John’s Prologue does not read: “In the beginning was the Word”. The verb in koine Greek contains all three tenses simultaneously: “In the was, is, and shall be the Word”.

That is the mystery of Resurrection and what takes us beyond suffering. Suffering always ends and becomes a part of the experience of our lives, in the past. It is transformed into the ‘soil’ from which our future arises. Suffering is not the end of the story. We go beyond it in the continuous living experience of joy, of life, of new beginnings, of Resurrection