Suicides’ Specter to Weigh on Easter Messages

With the lighting of paschal candles and the ancient proclamation “He is risen!” Christians throughout the world today celebrate the central tenet of their faith--the resurrection of a Jewish holy man they call the Son of God.

But as millions of the faithful observe the holiest day of their liturgical year, the Easter stories come against a backdrop of hopelessness--or misplaced hope--made grotesquely real by the mass suicide of 39 members of a cult in Rancho Santa Fe.

Devotees of the cult, known as Heaven’s Gate, believed that by shedding their earthly “containers” they would live on another planet as the “next level in human evolution.”

It was a tormented distortion of the Easter story--one that pastors, priests and ministers said they will be hard-pressed to ignore today.

“We’ve all been shaken by this,” said the Rev. Ignacio Castuera of North Glendale United Methodist Church. “Here in a technological time we still have people who believe in death as a way to liberate themselves from the body in order to meet some protector from outer space.

“The resurrection story in the Bible is not that way,” he said. “The resurrection story in the Bible is much more connected with power to change, or the power to overcome situations here on Earth.”

Nevertheless, as members of the clergy see around them despair sometimes so dark that whole groups can be driven to suicide, they are confronting anew how to make relevant a 2,000-year-old story of hope that to some is, if not incredulous, at least archaic in its accounts of life after death.

A poll this year by Barna Research Group of Oxnard found that 39% of Americans believe that Jesus did not return to life physically after his crucifixion, 50% believe that he did, and 11% had no opinion.

Christians have been disagreeing since the early church about the resurrection. And the Easter stories told today will be dramatically different, depending on the church. In Protestant fundamentalist churches, the faithful will hear the miraculous story of the literal physical resuscitation of Jesus’ crucified body. In Unitarian churches, they are more likely to hear of the resurrection as metaphor.

In the vast majority of mainstream churches, both Roman Catholic and Protestant, they will be told that the resurrection was profoundly “real,” a holy mystery involving nothing less than God’s intervention in human history that holds power and purpose nearly two millenniums later.

Even before the crucifixion, some believed in resurrection and some didn’t. Scriptural accounts suggest that the men closest to Jesus--his disciples--found it difficult to describe their own religious experiences three days after his execution on a cross by Imperial Rome.

In the first 500 years of the church, scholars and theologians say, it was torn between believers in a spiritual resurrection and a physical one.

The earliest view, influenced by Greco-Roman philosophy, was that Jesus’ resurrection was of a spiritual nature, according to Gregory Riley, associate professor of the New Testament at the Claremont School of Theology.

Later, he said, the emphasis and creedal statements began to emphasize a bodily resurrection.

Today, the creeds proclaim that Jesus was both “very God and very man.” But having said that, resurrection explanations still diverge. Differences can turn on subtle distinctions and nuance. What is meant by body? What is meant when a theologian or a church says the resurrection was “real?”

Riley said many seekers are more comfortable with an early Christian view of a spiritual resurrection that the Apostle Paul suggested when he used words like a “spiritual body,” or a body clothed “with immortality.”

“Saying that Jesus was raised as a spiritual being works a great deal better for us,” Riley said. One reason, he added, is intensely personal. We want to know what will happen to us when we die.

“We can imagine loved ones still being alive in some spiritual state with Jesus . . . whereas if we’re all waiting around for the resurrection of the very flesh we are carrying, there’s no telling where our loved ones might be,” he said.

Another Claremont professor sees accounts of near-death experiences and apparitions as lending popular support to the spiritual view.

“It looks like a bunch of evidence suggests that those [out-of-body experiences and apparitions] are the inside and the outside of the same kind of experience,” said David Griffin, professor of philosophy of religion.

But both professors, as well as most Christian theologians and spiritual leaders, don’t push too far.

Indeed, to emphasize the experiences of others is to miss the point, said Father Thomas P. Rausch, chairman of the department of theological studies at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.

The point, he said, is what happened to Jesus.

“Roman Catholics take the resurrection of Jesus as the first principle. There’s absolutely no question about it,” Rausch said. “The resurrection of Jesus was a real event that happened to Jesus.”

The problem with “liberal theology,” Rausch said, is that it reduces the resurrection to the experiences of the disciples. Likewise, the problem with a fundamentalist view, he said, is that it comes close to reducing the resurrection to “the resuscitation of a corpse” overemphasizing the “physicality.”

The Rt. Rev. Frederick H. Borsch, Episcopal bishop of Los Angeles and a New Testament scholar, worries about ignoring the physical manifestations of Jesus after the resurrection.

“If one looks to early resurrection stories found in the Gospels--although one could dispute what kind of body it is--it is a palpable body. There are scars. . . . There is some way they still recognize Jesus--the sound of his voice, actions in the blessing and breaking of the bread. . . . There was something physical about the earliest experiences.”

By contrast, the deaths of the cult members were seen by Christian ministers as life-denying--a point more than a few planned to make to their congregations.

“This was not an act of faith. I’m shocked, angry and upset,” said the Rev. Julius Del Pino of Shepherd of the Hills United Methodist Church in Mission Viejo.

The cultists, said Methodist minister Castuera, were the literal embodiment of an anguished “huddled death” mentioned in a hymn.

“Easter is the story that can help churches or individuals exchange a huddled death--or any kind of death--with a power to change,” Castuera said.