Easter Island Planet

 

 

 

 I  have often wondered what was happening on the South Island of New Zealand on the day that Jesus was tortured to death outside Jerusalem. Or in South America. Or Alaska. Those undiscovered lands might as well have been on other planets for all they could know of what was going on in a small city at the East end of the Mediterranean. The Romans knew about China and India — but the ancient Empires of the East knew as little and cared less about what we call Europe than the Romans knew or cared about the Red Indians of North America. And yet, we say, Christ died for them:

The happenings of Good Friday and Easter are so insular, so parochial, so marginal to the great political transactions of the world. What if it had in fact all happened on an island — Easter Island perhaps where there are stone gods — in the Pacific 2000 years ago? Could such little dramas in a place so remote from the major populations of our race ever make a claim upon the hearts and minds of every man and woman who ever has or will ever live on this planet? If not Easter Island why Palestine? If Palestine why not Alaska?

The question is not so speculative as it might seem at first sight. There was a time — perhaps in the heady missionary days at the end of the last century when it did not seem impossible that the Christian Gospel might indeed evangelise the whole world. If over half the globe could be painted pink to signal the spread of British justice and Christian values it wasn't an impossible dream that the process might continue until Christ was known and worshipped universally; that "every knee would bow and every tongue confess him King of Glory now". The splendid hymn "Hills of the North Rejoice" is a classic of that triumphalism.

But now our perspective has shifted dramatically. We begin to see that most of the human beings who have lived or will live on this Earth will not in this life acknowledge Jesus as Lord. Triumphalist Christianity is increasingly distasteful to many people — as distasteful as imperialism. And the horizon has suddenly expanded almost to infinity. Out there among the galaxies there are millions upon millions of planets. Statistically some of them must be capable of bearing intelligent life. What shall we say to visiting aliens from Alpha Centauri about Jesus and his resurrection? We are as remote to them as Easter Island is to us. Perhaps they will have their own Gods and will be as eager to recruit us as we them.

It's easy for this train of thought to induce in thoughtful Christians a failure of nerve. Everything becomes relative. Our own world has known many religions. Strange cults and sects proliferate all over the world, all making universal claims. It is felt to be grossly intolerant for anyone to criticise or compare one with another. Since they can't all be true, then none is. Religion is like cuisine, a matter of taste. Where shall we go today — Indian or Chinese or Thai or traditional English, meat and two veg with the C of E? How, then, can Christianity maintain that the death and resurrection of Jesus is of universal or cosmic significance when it is even struggling to preserve a global claim on our own planet?

It's important that we do address this question on this Easter morning of all days; otherwise we shall seem to ourselves and to others like those Inca priests in South America who woke before dawn each day to perform the ritual sacrifice which they believed made the sun rise. A charming delusion and one which sustained a civilisation. But it makes us smile now.

Are our claims for the Resurrection just such a childish illusion? For we do affirm that those events on that remote outpost of the Roman Empire do touch everyone — and not just all the members of our race who breathe the air of this planet but all rational spiritual beings in every corner of the universe. All must say "YES" in their own strange tongues to the events recorded in the brief pages of the Gospels, written on this our Easter Island planet.

How can that be? Because the affirmation which we make about the Cross and Resurrection of Jesus is that it reveals something about the infrastructure of the Universe. After all, we don't think it peculiar that an experiment done in a laboratory in a back street in Cambridge should reveal to us the hidden subatomic processes of stars on the far side of the Universe. Atoms behave the same way in Cambridge as they do in the Nebula in Orion. Physics, like mathematics, is universal. Pi and Pythagoras are constants everywhere. We don't think it odd that medical research done on Porton Down about the immune system should be confirmed by experiments in Peking or California. Our DNA is global. Nor are we much surprised to discover that novels written in Latin America or Nigeria or Japan in cultures greatly different from our own should nevertheless grab our hearts and tell us something about ourselves. Truth and love are universal.

As R S Thomas has reminded us there are also Laboratories of the Spirit. The Christian affirmation is that the whole Universe is held and interpenetrated by a Creator Spirit. All rational spirits in every corner of the cosmos are echoes of the Cosmic Christ — that aspect of God which is universal love and truth and beauty. Whether they know it or not all creatures live and move and have their being in Him. He is the Giver of Life. A glimpse of God on Easter Island makes him recognizable everywhere. The less we know of him the more insular and destructive we become — destructive not only of one another and our environment, but also destructive of ourselves. What can the Creator Spirit of the Universe do with our rebel island with its dark stone gods?

On Calvary we are shown what our way of life on this planet is doing to the universal love, truth, and beauty of the Creator Spirit. And here on Easter morning we are shown that His beauty, truth, and love are in the last resort, and in spite of all appearances to the contrary, stronger than our sin and our death. Of course we can't know whether other rational and spirit filled creatures on other planets absorb that awareness of God with their mother's milk — or however they nurture their young. Perhaps they see naturally what is almost invisible to us and live their lives in the unclouded sunshine of God's grace. That makes no odds. For should they ever come to visit our dark earth and hear the story of the Passion and Resurrection of Jesus Christ they will be profoundly shocked and moved but, I think, unsurprised. For in that Laboratory of the Spirit which we call Christ's Passion they will recognize at once the last resort of a familiar Universal love which cannot bear to let any of His creatures fall into darkness, but will go even to the extremity of death to rescue them.

Jesus does not belong just to the Christians, nor does his Resurrection. He belongs to the human race whether they know him or not, and his Resurrection is a proclamation to all human kind just as his Cross is. Just as a great novel addresses and demands a response of every reader of every time and culture so Calvary and Easter address everyone who sees or hears — this morning is about you. It is about your life, your humanity, your place and meaning in the totality of this mysterious universe. It tells you you have a destiny beyond the stars. Calvary is for you too. It tells you what it has cost universal love to win that destiny for you. And although Jesus is for us the human face of God, that holy, beautiful, and loving Spirit which addresses us through Jesus with human words from a human mouth and with a liquid human tongue, that love is still the Word of God which speaks all the tongues and languages of all the galaxies and all their rational species.

He calls all of them as he calls us into communion with himself: he offers all of them, as he offers us, eternal life and love. He teaches them and us how so to live in love and obedience in this physical universe that we can be drawn on through death into communion with him and into that new Creation which lies beyond the final dissolution of our bodies and our present Universe.

For us in our sin-darkened world the only way he could teach us that was by the proclamation of the Cross. Of his dealings with other worlds we cannot know. But perhaps in the eternities we shall hear their stories too, and then with shame and pride tell them how Love was crucified on our Easter island; and how three days later the New Creation of the whole universe was inaugurated outside an empty tomb on this our Easter planet.

 

  Easter Sunday, 1995