He Is Risen

A Rabbi's Take On Easter

This morning around six, while I was walking Sofiyah, my Goldendoodle, a man in a grey F-150 pulled up beside us and asked, “Are you Rabbi Rami? Today is Good Friday. Did you do it?”

The “it” was, of course, “crucify Jesus.”

“Yes,” I said, “I’m Rabbi Rami. And yes, I did it. And you’ll thank me on Sunday!”

The man looked confused and drove away. You may be as well. This essay may help.

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This Sunday is Easter, the day of Jesus’ resurrection (Orthodox Christians will celebrate it next Sunday). Without the Resurrection, Jesus is not the Christ but a prophet; not the Son of God but the Son of Mary; not the Savior of the world but a reformer of Judaism.

As a Jew, you might think I would prefer prophet and reformer over Christ and Savior, but I won’t give up the resurrection so easily. I stood in the tomb where Jesus’s body was laid, felt the Shekhinah (the feminine Divine), and heard a still small voice whisper, “He is risen!” I believe that you and I can rise as well.

While the Gospels differ in details, here is the basic story: the Romans crucified Jesus on Friday. A Pharisee, Joseph of Arimathea, takes Jesus’s body to his family tomb before Shabbat and seals it with a large stone. Mary Magdalene, possibly with Salome and Mary, the mother of Jesus, visits the tomb on Sunday and finds the stone rolled away and the tomb empty.

In the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, an angel or angels appear to the women. As Luke’s angel tells them, “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen.” In John’s Gospel, Mary Magdalene is the only one who goes to the tomb. When she sees that the stone has been removed, she rushes off to tell Simon Peter. Peter and the Beloved Disciple hurry to the tomb ahead of Mary. The tomb is empty; they see nothing inside.

When Mary Magdalene catches up with them, she peers into the tomb and sees two angels, whom the men could not see. Turning away from the angels, she then sees Jesus standing nearby. Mistaking him for a gardener, she asks if he has taken away the body of Jesus. The gardener said, “Mary!” and immediately she recognizes him and calls out, “Rabboni! My teacher!” And Jesus said to her, “Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father.”

If this is history, as billions of Christians believe, then our only choice is to worship Jesus as Christ. But if it is a myth meant to guide us closer to Truth, then we should ask not “is it true,” but “how is it true?” Here is how it is true for me.

Why does Mary see what the men cannot? Because Jesus is the Word, and the Word is Chochma, Lady Wisdom, and Tao—the Great Mother of all existence (see John 1:1, especially the Chinese translation where the Greek Logos is translated into Chinese as Tao, Proverbs 8:22ff, Tao te Ching Chapter 6). The myth tells us that to experience Divine Life as all life, you must awaken to your feminine Wisdom consciousness.

Why does Mary see Jesus as a gardener? Because Jesus calls himself Ben Adam, Earthling (adam is derived from adamah, Hebrew for earth), and the task of every earthling is to be a gardener: tending the soil and caring for the earth (Genesis 2:5, 15). While the male apostles and the patriarchal church can’t see Jesus as a gardener, Mary and mystics like Andrew Harvey, Cynthia Bourgeault, and the Daughters of Wisdom can. (I have been blessed to learn from all of them, and urge you to do so as well.)

Why, when Jesus calls Mary’s name, does she call him Rabboni, “my rabbi,” instead of Adonai, “my Lord”? Because Jesus doesn’t want to be worshipped but followed. To worship Jesus is to turn Wisdom into dogma and the Word into an echo, whereas to follow Jesus is to rediscover Wisdom and the Word anew with each moment.

What does the risen Jesus teach by saying, “Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father”? When Jesus calls Mary’s name, he is drawing her out of the tomb of the past and into the garden of the present. Yet the present itself is quickly turned into the past if held onto. “Do not hold on to me,” Jesus says. That would be another trap. It is not Jesus that matters, but Lady Wisdom and the Great Mother he embodies and points to.

And finally, what does it mean that Jesus is resurrected in the body and not just in spirit? This affirms the holiness of the body, and a God who is the Source and Substance of spirit and matter. The body is risen, precious, and holy. The Word made flesh is not holier than the flesh that carries it. This is the Jewish Original Blessing of Genesis — the natural world is good!

Easter, when liberated from the ignorance of apostles who cannot see angels or Jesus, is a profound call for personal and planetary resurrection. He is risen, but only if you are risen; he is risen, but only if you are lifting others; he is risen, and all are risen, but only if you stop looking for the living among the dead.