“Deliberately Diverse” represents the individual thoughts and opinions of a group of Taylor friends who almost never completely agree about anything but are gratified by the opportunity to stimulate deliberately diverse discussions in our beloved community.
Today’s column represents the thoughts and opinions of Mitch Drummond, NOT the Taylor Press.
Every spring we remember the life of Jesus, celebrating Jesus’ entry in Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, remembering the last supper on Maundy Thursday, his betrayal by Judas and subsequent arrest and torture by Roman guards.
Then on Friday, we mourn his crucifixion and death. On Easter morning, we celebrate his resurrection, where he appeared to Mary Magdelene and the other women. After that it was written that he appeared to as many as 500 people. He suddenly appears, disappears, sometimes unrecognizable. Paul encountered him 30 years later on the road to Damascus in a life changing vision.
So, what took place that Easter morning? Was the body of Christ somehow reanimated? Was he given a new physical body? Or was it a more mystical, a spiritual presence? Many feel strongly
otherwise.
I believe option three the most likely. In his book, ‘Rabbi Jesus’, Bruce Chilton, Ph.D. an American scholar of early Christianity and Judaism, suggests the resurrection on Easter Morning was Jesus’ angelic, nonmaterial, transfiguration into a spiritual body, the same one Peter, James and John saw on Mount Hermon at the transfiguration when after praying and meditating, Jesus appeared in a spiritual form along with Moses and Elijah.
Studying under John the Baptist in the desert, Jesus may have been introduced to the Merkavah, an ancient Jewish mystical meditation on Ezekiel’s vision of the flaming chariot, in which one ascended to heavenly palaces and the throne of God, a supernatural place outside the natural world. To enter this alternate reality requires a transfiguration of the body. I’m sure Jesus would have shared with his disciples this practice of mystical meditation and communion with the divine.
In the first three hundred years after the death of Christ, the early church was persecuted by the Romans. Many Christians chose martyrdom over submission.
Why were they so willing to die? Maybe they had already experienced the Merkavah and visions of this other reality. Many believed that the ascent in the Chariot required suffering. Thousands of early Christians chose that route.
After the resurrection, the transfigured Jesus is said to have ascended into heaven, to one day return so that the living would be transfigured and the dead raised. The Revelation of John, the last book in our cannon, had a lot to say about the end times, much of which have been debated over the centuries. The western Church in Rome accepted the Revelation in the second century; the eastern Church waited until the fourth century. Many then and now still believe the book to be fraudulent and that it should not have been included.
So, what about the long awaited war of good versus evil and the rapture when all the dead will be raised?. Will bodies be flying out of their graves? I am more inclined to believe that if there is to be a second coming and rapture of the saints, it will be more like that Easter morning, a final ride on Ezekiel’s chariot to that alternate reality.
