Peter Bolland is a professor of philosophy at Southwestern College in Chula Vista, California, where he teaches World Religions, Ethics, Asian Philosophy and World Mythology. He also serves on the board at the Unity Center in San Diego. This article was published in Unity Magazine.
… Every year in the spring billions of Christians all over the world celebrate the resurrection of Jesus. Many believe it was a literal event—that Jesus actually came back from the dead. For others, the story is a metaphor signifying the undying nature of Spirit. Either way, Easter signifies the triumph of life over death, a theme ancient agricultural people would have no trouble understanding.
Even a cursory glance at the world's mythological and religious traditions reveals the widespread presence of the dying god motif, the archetypal tale of the gift-giving god whose sacrificial death brings rain or corn or eternal life. …Sacrificial death, initially seen as an act of destruction, becomes an act of creation. As old forms dissolve, new forms arise. The tomb becomes a womb.
… Central to the dying god motif is the theme of generative sacrifice. The death or suffering of the god always results in tremendous benefit to the world at large. …Gods all over the world gave their lives in order that we might have corn or fire or everlasting life. …It isn't lost on any of us that the very marrow of our life is won only through struggle, and yet the persistent vision remains that we live not in a hostile universe but in a profoundly nurturing and cooperative one. On the surface—struggle and scarcity. Beneath the surface—endless abundance, infinite creativity and a deep, resounding harmony.
In Jesus' story we see an amalgam of … elements—the willing and self-directed sacrifice, the death and resurrection, the bringing of gifts and the presence of a divine order beneath the vale of tears.
But there is still a deeper layer yet to be uncovered.
What if the story of Jesus isn't about Jesus at all?
… What if each of us is the dying god of our own lives? What riches are uncovered if we read the dying god stories not as literal, historical events but as metaphors for our own evolution from material, biological beings bound by instinctual conditioning into spiritual beings of awakened consciousness? Is it any wonder then that the dying god is so often born of a virgin or through some other nonbiological process? … The hero, the gift-giver and the dying god live and have their being in higher consciousness, not in the lower realms of ego, competition and conflict. In the Gospel of John, when Nicodemus asks for Jesus' advice, Jesus simply says, “You must be born from above.” In other words, each of us must shift from lower consciousness to the higher plane of God-consciousness within. The virgin birth signifies that each of us, at the level of our divine essence, was not born from the union of sperm and egg but are identical and unified with the eternally Real …what Jesus called “everlasting life.” Shifting out of body and ego identification is the work of every spiritual tradition.
If the purpose of myth is to teach us how to live our own lives, then what have we learned?
In Buddhism the central metaphor is that of awakening from the sleep of ignorance, suffering and conditioning. In Christianity the central metaphor is death and rebirth, coming out of our animal nature with its instinctual drives of acquisition and conflict and rising into the unifying experience of God-consciousness, transcending all boundaries and limitations. Resurrection is transformation. Rebirth signifies death to the ego, to limitation, to space and time. Rising from the “grave” of our lower nature embodies the realization of awakening.
… Life, in essence, is synonymous with the eternal Ground of Being, the Real, what we in the west call God, and as such it is ultimately untouched by death. “Death is not the opposite of life,” Eckhart Tolle writes in Stillness Speaks. “The opposite of death is birth. Life has no opposite.”
… It is still possible for us to exhume the universal spiritual wisdom of the Christian story, that each of us is the presence of God-consciousness in the field of forms. … Like the sun breaking over the horizon at countless sunrise services throughout Christendom this Easter, we, too, are gradually dawning to the truth of our divine nature. Dare to say it out loud. Let your sun rise. Let the wisdom within you shape your thoughts and words and actions. Become, finally, who you really are. This is the hidden meaning of Easter.
