Love Alone Remains
Given by James Covington on April 16th, 2006
As you may know, the breaking religious news in recent days has been the unveiling of the Gospel of Judas. After being lost for nearly 1,700 years, the Gospel of Judas was recently restored, authenticated and translated.. That event, along with the soon to be released movie The DiVinci Code, based on the book, has certainly captivated the religious headlines. I loved the book. My reaction to the Judas revelation is mixed. The Gospel of Judas was written around 180 A.D. by someone from the Gnostic tradition. Gnostics belonged to pre-Christian and early Christian sects that believed that elusive spiritual knowledge could help them rise above what they saw as the corrupt physical world .
The Bible’s New Testament Gospels– Matthew, Mark, Luke and John — depict Judas Iscariot, one of the Twelve Apostles of Jesus, as a traitor. In biblical accounts Judas gives up Jesus Christ to his opponents, who later crucify the founder of Christianity.
The Gospel of Judas, however, portrays him as acting at Jesus’ request. The text begins by announcing that it is the “secret account of the revelation that Jesus spoke secretly with Judas Iscariot during the week, three days before he celebrated Passover.”
It goes on to describe Judas as Jesus’ closest friend, someone who understands Christ’s true message and is singled out for special status among Jesus’ disciples.
In the key passage Jesus tells Judas, “‘you will exceed all of them. For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me.’” In other words, Jesus says it is necessary for someone to free him finally from his human body, and he prefers that this liberation be done by a friend rather than by an enemy.
“So he asks Judas, who is his friend, to sell him out, to betray him. It’s treason to the general public, but between Jesus and Judas it’s not treachery.”
Christian Gnostics believed that the way to salvation was through secret knowledge delivered by Jesus to his inner circle. This knowledge, they believed, revealed how people could escape the prisons of their material bodies and return to the spiritual realm from which they came.
I find this interesting, I guess. Certainly, from a historical perspective, it is always fascinating to discover earlier writings of the scriptures or of any book, for that matter. It is suggested by some that this account of Judas’s betrayal of Jesus may lesson the anit-semitism that exists to this day, since, Judas, a Jew, has always been the target of hatred for the betrayal of Jesus. Well, perhaps. Although I doubt it. I believe anit-semitism, unfortunately supercedes the act of Judas’s betrayal. However, whatever the case concerning Judas, to me the Easter story is less about Judas’s betrayal and the actuall resurrection of Jesus than it is about love and humanity.
The Gnostic believers may have hoped to escape the physical bounds of humanity, but alas, it is not possible. Not if we want to live the gift we have been given. And that to me is what Easter is about: the life we have been given. How do we live it responsibly and compassionately?
I love Easter. I adore the spring fashions, the soft pastels and festive bonnets. My spirits lift in tandem with the glorious brass and high-soaring chorales. And yes, I love the story, the Easter myth itself, a story about betrayal and forgiveness, sacrifice and redemption; life rising out of its ashes, tragedy transformed into triumph, all captured in a vivid human archetype—the eternal, all-forgiving, all-renewing love in the life of a man named Jesus.
Easter helps me to remain focused on this life and how to live life now. Before betrayal. Even after betrayal. Before death.
Because heaven knows, we humans do betray one another both personally and on a global scale. On the global scale, alas and tragically, we have often betrayed one another in the name of religion.
Human beings kill in the name of Islam. Human beings kill in the name of Christianity. Given the opportunity, Judaism kills. Until the last, most secular and bloody century of them all, war was almost always a religious sacrament. Moors slaughtering Christians, Christians, Moors. Catholics slaughtering Protestants, Protestants, Catholics. And everyone killing the Jews. From the beginning of human history, terrorists for truth and God have raped and eviscerated, drawn and quartered, slashed and burned one another as if possessed by a kind of divine dementia. They have betrayed their own humanity.
Today, the ongoing war in Iraq is less a war against terrorism, than it is a war against radical Islam. Or so it is perceived throughout the Muslim world, and by the religious leaders who opportunistically seize upon the sectarian chaos there to incite yet more terror. However we explain its presence, the occupying army is Western and Christian. Many would say because of either our naivety or arrogance, we have re-cocked and re-triggered the retributive logic of religious enmity—the lex talionis (”an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth”).
A century ago, many so-called modernists, declared the coming end of religion. If God was not dead yet, he soon would be, euthanized by scientific progress. Free from the grips of superstition, we would leave the horrors of religious war and ignorance behind as we marched forward into a brave new world. Then followed the most brutal century in human history. 20 million people killed in the Gulags alone, by a proudly anti-religious Soviet imperium. In retrospect, it seems that perhaps the only thing worse than believing in God is believing only in ourselves.
Out of the rubble of last century, the question that emerges is no longer, “How can we induce people to abandon their faith, in order to bring peace to the planet?” It is instead, “How can we answer to the better angels of our nature and model a saving faith, one that saves not only us but our most distant neighbor as well?” One that saves us not for the next life, but for this life? How do we save our earth? How do we work for the common good with all people, of all faiths? How do we live with one another in peace? How do we come to see that we all share the same gift—the gift of life—that we are all one?
In answer to these questions I say the letter of any particular religion will never save us, but only the universal spirit. Every scripture—the Koran, the Torah, the Gospels—contains both fonts, both letter and spirit. The letter divides us, sheep from goats, saved from damned; the spirit saves. Which brings us back to Easter. If love is the story, death itself can always be redeemed. But only by love, that abiding spirit of the human heart.
However I am not talking about a romantic love, a soft pie in the sky love. No, I speak of a sacrificial love, a love that sacrifices for the good of others, a love that works for justice so that all human beings are treated fairly and given the same rights. I speak of a love that forgives, a love that will let go and not insist on its on way. Forgiveness, too, requires sacrifice. We must sacrifice self righteousness, our preoccupation with having been wronged, and the advantage of holding another in our debt. Ultimately, the courage to love requires the courage to let go.
When his disciples asked him how they could get into the Kingdom of Heaven, Jesus replied, in essence, that when we die there will be a quiz. The questions are not “Do you believe in the Trinity and that I died for your sins?” They are “Did you feed the hungry and heal the sick and clothe the naked and house the homeless and visit those in prison?” As Thomas Jefferson so memorably said, “It is in our lives not our words that our religion must be read.” We are not saved from our sins by believing in Jesus but by following Jesus, and every other prophet of God’s love. Anyone, however eloquent, who inspires hatred for any part of the human family, for any group of God’s children, is a false teacher and serves a false god.
Life after death isn’t the heart of Easter’s message. About life after death, no one knows. What Easter teaches is that there is love after death, and that love after death is shaped by life before death. In other words our actions invest life with purpose and a meaning that abides. It was the love of Jesus that transformed his followers, not his resurrection.
We Unitarians are sometimes accused of having a thick ethic and a thin metaphysic. Even on Easter, I will rush to say, “Guilty as charged.” We test our faith by deeds not creeds. As Henry David Thoreau put it when asked about the afterlife, we take things one life at a time. Our book of revelation is the book of nature. We read the story of our lives and the story of life itself in its rich and luxuriant pages. As Jesus himself did, we follow the spirit not the letter of the scriptures. Love to God—the ground of our being, being itself—and Love to Neighbor are our two great commandments, summing up all the law and the prophets. We see ourselves as being saved in and for the world, not from the world. Whatever we may think about life after death, we devote our full spiritual attentions to life before death, seeking to live in such a way that our lives will prove worth dying for.
Religion is our human response to the dual reality of being alive and having to die. We are not the animal with tools or the animal with advanced language. We are the religious animal. Knowing we will die, we question what life means. Question of ultimate meaning are religious questions. One may answer them, of course, with non-religious answers. Just make sure these answers are not too glib. If fundamentalists of the right enshrine an idol on their altar, an impossibly petty, tyrannical and tiny God, fundamentalists of the left strike that idol from the altar and believe that they have done something creative or important. Both remain in thralldom to the same tiny God.
Theology is poetry, not science. It almost has to be. By cosmologists’ latest reckoning, there are some 100 billion stars in our galaxy and ours is one of perhaps 100 billion galaxies. Divide the stars among us, and in our galaxy alone, every individual alive on earth today would be the proud possessor of seventeen personal stars. In the cosmos itself, the star to person ratio is 1.7 trillion to one.
So do we stop and shake our heads in humility and wonder? No. We sit on our tiny spit of sand on this vast cosmic beach and argue over who has the best insider information on the creator and the creation. Is it the atheist or the theist? The Hindu or the Buddhist? The Catholic, the Protestant, the Muslim or the Jew? Is it Jesus? The Buddha? Mohammed? How about Darwin, Gandhi, or Freud? Billions of accidents conspired to give each of these compelling teachers the opportunity even to teach. Knowing this—pondering numbers beyond reckoning—doesn’t strip me of my faith. It inspires my faith. It makes me humble. It fills me with awe.
If our religion doesn’t inspire in us a humble affection for one another and a profound sense of awe at the wonder of being, what finally will? If we can’t see our own tears in the eyes of all who mourn and would be comforted, how will we find comfort when we too enter the valley of the shadow?
So for me, Easter in the spring when all things are born anew, is when I gaze into the heavens and recognize anew that we are all more alike than we differ, certainly more alike in our ignorance than we differ in our knowledge. It is a time to remember how fragile life is and how precious love must therefore be. And so here are, at this very moment. Think about it now. You and I together, each of us alone, looking out on eternity, measuring time.
Alone we walk and yet together. We look into forever and we weep. And then we look back. How amazing it was! Wasn’t it amazing? The people who loved us. The people who tried. Our parents, they weren’t perfect no, but neither are we. Our children, if we are blessed to have children. Our friends, the sun and moon, touch and sight, taste, hearing, smell, every miracle we take for granted every day of our lives until the day we die. How amazing it was, life before death.
Look back and mourn. Then look back and sing. Remember how profoundly we are blessed. Yes, and then we too are resurrected.
Whatever our theology, I believe we all share the same quest—to save ourselves–not from others, but from ourselves. Saved from self-absorption, self-pity, self-despite. Saved from self-righteousness. Saved from unwarranted displays of conspicuous piety. Saved by love.
Let me leave you with a question. What if this is your last Easter? Or the last Easter you are blessed to share with someone you love? Will anything you do or feel today remain? In your heart you know the answer. Love remains, only the love we give away remains.
Death doesn’t conquer love, love conquers death. Those who love us live on in the love we receive. Years ago, my best friend, Mack Taylor was dying of leukemia. A few days before he died, we were talking about life after death. He said to me something I shall never forget: Jim, I don’t believe what you and I have will ever cease to exist. And he was right.
After we die, only the love we have given away during the course of our lifetimes will surely endure. But that is enough. Love is enough. And we save one another.
With every kind word. . . with every chorus of appreciation. . . with every gentle touch. . . with the gift of forgiveness, and in the quest for peace, we teach one another the Easter message: Choose Life. Love your neighbor as yourself. Can you imagine anything more amazing? I can’t know what happens after life as we know it, but I do know this: It is life before death that counts and love alone remains. Each miracle is enough for me. Happy Easter!