Why Religion?

by Elaine Pagels

  Astonished, I remembered what the emergency room doctor had told me, when he saw me a few days after Heinz died with boils all over my body: post-traumatic stress can obliterate memory. Yet blocked memories return, often in fragments. When Mark died, we felt that the worst we’d ever imagined had happened; how, then, had this unimaginable loss shattered our lives a second time?

  After I returned from Austin, these questions recurred. I was startled to realize that somehow I still wanted to believe that we live in a morally ordered universe, in which someone, or something—God or nature?—would keep track of what’s fair. Was this a relic of Western cultural tradition that moralizes history, like those old Bible stories I’d heard, that suggest that doing good ensures well being and doing wrong brings disaster? The biblical story of Sodom, for example, in which a volcano erupts and destroys two cities, concludes that the Lord “rained fire from heaven, and destroyed those cities . . . and all their inhabitants” because “the men of Sodom, young and old, all of them, down to the last man” were evil. No mention of women and children, I noted; were they only collateral damage? Another Bible story, noting that King David and Bathsheba’s first son died young, explains that “the Lord struck the child . . . and it died,” to punish their illicit sexual connection.

  Now, working hard to stay steady, or seem to, I could no longer afford to look through a lens that heaps guilt upon grief. Although I wasn’t a traditional believer and didn’t take such stories literally, somehow their premises had shaped my unconscious assumptions. Now I had to divest myself of the illusion that we deserved what had happened; believing it would have crushed us. Instead, I turned again to what Heinz often had said about chaos theory and randomness, and I shifted more toward his understanding of nature. Now I was living in a world where volcanoes erupt because that’s what volcanoes do, regardless of whether anyone in their path is good or evil, and in which children often die young, for no reason we can find.

  Two years later, when members of the Episcopal church in Aspen asked me to come back and give a sermon there, at first I said, “No, thank you; I’m not a preacher.” I didn’t say that the sight of Heinz’s casket, placed in front of that altar, was indelibly imprinted in my memory. But on second thought, I agreed. I did want to speak there—to speak against the facile comfort that churches often dole out like Kleenex. So the next summer, voice breaking with emotion, I spoke what emerged from internal turmoil, contrasting two stories that helped me find words. For while scholars of literature like to say that we use stories to “think with,” we also use them to “feel with”—that is, to find words for what otherwise we could not say.

  On that Sunday morning I contrasted Job’s story—Job loses everything, then gets it all back—with the story in Mark’s gospel. For while Jesus of Nazareth and his followers likely knew Job’s story, Mark’s account of Jesus doesn’t end that way. Mark opens by claiming to announce “good news of Jesus, Messiah, Son of God,” but the story he tells ends in disaster, when a posse of armed men suddenly capture and arrest Jesus at night, as his followers scatter and run. The original version of Mark’s gospel says that after his captors amused themselves by mocking and torturing Jesus, they handed him over to the Roman governor. Accused of igniting revolution, although innocent, he was mocked, spat on, and beaten before enduring a cruelly slow and humiliating public execution. In the original version that Mark wrote, Jesus, crucified in agony, cries out, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” then “let[s] out a loud cry” and dies.

  Similar things have happened, of course, to countless others, and still do. And in Mark’s original version, as so often in stories we hear today, no angel appears, no miracle intervenes. Instead, after telling how Roman soldiers crucified Jesus, this story ends with an abrupt, disturbing scene at the grave site, in which Jesus’s women followers, having come to tend his body, find it missing. This version ends as the women, hearing a young man say that they’ll see Jesus alive again, are so shocked and frightened that they “went out and fled . . . and said nothing to anyone, because they were terrified.”

  When I first read that version, I wondered, How could Mark possibly claim to publish “good news” when his story ends in desolation and terror? In graduate school, I learned that some of Mark’s earliest readers had asked similar questions, and some decided that he couldn’t have meant to end that way; he must have left his story unfinished. Editors of contemporary Bibles apparently agree: nearly every Bible published today includes another ending that some other writer added to Mark’s original narrative.

  So far as we can tell, this is what happened: Someone among Mark’s early readers, wanting the gospel to end on a more positive note, wrote a second ending, adding several episodes to mitigate that awful final scene. This second ending says that after his burial, “Jesus first appeared to Mary Magdalene,” but when she told the disciples, “they would not believe it.” Then Jesus appeared to two others “in another form,” but none of the disciples believed that either. Finally he shocked them by appearing a third time, while they were at dinner, and scolded them for refusing to believe that he’d come back to life. This second ending, now included in virtually all Bibles, concludes as Jesus, triumphant, “was taken up into heaven, and sat down at the right hand of God,” while his disciples, filled with the holy spirit, “went out and proclaimed the good news everywhere.”

  Rereading this after Heinz’s death, I began to note how, when the writers we call Matthew and Luke set out to revise Mark’s narrative, each piled on even more elaborate resurrection stories, obviously writing them to refute what skeptics were saying. Luke suggests that what “terrified” the women was seeing two men in dazzling clothes—angels, apparently—suddenly appear in the empty grave, announcing that Jesus was alive. Then Luke adds that Jesus appeared to two disciples on the road to Emmaus, just as the others were hearing that “the Lord actually has risen, and appeared to Peter!” Luke agrees that at first the disciples themselves didn’t believe it, and were “astonished and terrified, and thought they were seeing a ghost” when Jesus suddenly “stood there among them, and greeted them.” To dispel their shock and disbelief, Jesus showed them his wounds, saying, “Touch me and see; for a ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you see that I have.” But, Luke adds, since they still were “disbelieving and wondering,” Jesus asked for something to eat, and ate fish in front of them, to prove that he was “not a ghost!” Like Mark’s second ending, Luke’s account concludes as Jesus ascends into heaven, promising to send “power from on high,” as his disciples “rejoice with great joy.”

  Matthew, like Luke, writing independently about ten years after Mark, adds a whole chapter to counter rumors that Jesus’s followers stole his body to fake a resurrection. As Matthew tells it, after Jewish authorities alerted Pilate to this danger, the governor ordered soldiers to secure the grave with a huge stone, and stationed guards to keep watch. But suddenly “there was a great earthquake, and an angel of the Lord descended from heaven . . . rolled away the stone and sat on it,” as the terrified soldiers fell to the ground “like dead men.” Matthew admits that the women ran away, but not, he insists, because they were shocked into silence. Instead, he says that they “ran in fear and great joy, to tell his disciples.” Then, even before they departed, Matthew says, Jesus appeared to the women, who ran toward him and “held on to his feet and worshipped him.” Here, too, the point is clear: to show that he was physically present, not a ghost. In Matthew’s final scene, “the eleven,” the male disciples, too, see Jesus alive (although, oddly, Matthew notes that even then “some doubted”). Now ready to begin his reign, Jesus proclaims that now, in heaven, God has given him “all authority, on heaven and on earth!”

  Troubling as others found Mark’s original version, I preferred it. What he wrote sounded more like the world in which we live. For when he began to write, he faced a challenge that I, like so many of us, could understand: how to hold on to hope when confronting what looks like disaster. Hi
s challenge, of course, was particularly dramatic. The Greek philosopher Celsus, who despised Christians, spoke for many outsiders who mocked their grandiose claims. How, Celsus asked, could anyone possibly believe that Jesus of Nazareth, who’d died decades earlier, not only was, but still is, God’s Messiah, divinely chosen to rule the whole world? If Jesus really were God’s son, how could his followers have abandoned him and gone into hiding, while enemy soldiers seized and killed him as a common criminal? And how could hope survive the war, when Jesus’s followers—and his whole people—had endured what, in Mark’s narrative, Jesus calls “such suffering as has not been seen from the beginning of creation until now, no, and never will be”?

  Like many other Jews who lived through that war, and a handful of others still loyal to Jesus, Mark apparently felt that the old script—things turn out well for the righteous, badly for evildoers—no longer worked. Few of his contemporaries shared the confidence of the psalm writer who’d lived a thousand years earlier in King David’s empire, declaring that just as Israel’s king rules triumphant on earth, the Lord reigns supreme in heaven. Although some of Jesus’s followers clung to the hope that someday such glory days would return, they, like the poet of the Job story, felt their faith shaken: If God really were in charge, how could his chosen messiah fail so miserably?

  Reflecting on that story, I realized that despite his original ending, Mark had no intention of writing “bad news,” as the philosopher Nietzsche later mocked him for doing. Now I began to see that Mark’s decision to include Satan in the story does more than demonize people. Paradoxically, it also allows for hope, even when his raw narrative seems to offer none. For rather than give in to despair, Mark changes his vision of the supernatural world to show that evil is far more powerful than previously imagined. While refusing to give up hope that God reigns in heaven, Mark no longer sees his rule uncontested. Instead, he pictures Jesus living in a world in which evil forces have gained the upper hand and now virtually dominate—a scenario that resonated with many among his earliest audience, and with the experience of many people even now.

  At the same time, Mark envisions Satan’s power, however crushing, as temporary, soon to be eclipsed by divine miracle. Luke says that Jesus shared that vision and declared, “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven!” Thus the gospel writers can claim that instead of having failed, Jesus deliberately dared risk suffering, even death, to challenge the forces of evil, since he anticipated their eventual defeat. Perhaps because we all need hope, warranted or not, countless others who love these gospels have done the same. From the first century to now, followers of Jesus including the Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Roman Catholic archbishop Oscar Romero, Russian Orthodox Mary of Paris, and Baptist minister Martin Luther King Jr., each acutely aware of the power of hate, greed, and fear, nevertheless held on to what King called “a dream,” a vision of justice and brotherhood, while taking action to realize it here and now. Every one of them knowingly risked death to do so, and was killed.

  Now I could see that the story Mark tells would make little sense without Satan. Mark’s vision of God’s spirit contending against Satan enables him to tell a stark, unflinching account of Jesus’s death, while picturing it as only a preliminary skirmish in a cosmic conflict now enveloping the universe. For as Mark sees it, the story he’s telling doesn’t end with death, or even at the grave site, where his own narrative ends so abruptly. Instead, he anticipates that just as Jesus prophesied, God’s victory is coming soon—but coming beyond the frame of his narrative, perhaps even beyond the frame of human history. Seen this way, he writes not about failure, but about an unfinished victory.

  Such stories stirred something in me, and I wondered, even though Mark and Heinz are dead, could there be something mysterious going on in the universe that we don’t yet see? As I struggled to understand how these strange gospel stories became so deeply embedded in Western culture, and in my own imagination, I felt that their earliest writer, Mark, would not have dared announce “good news of Jesus of Nazareth, Messiah” had he not been convinced that some powerful divine mystery lay hidden in what he wrote. For even while telling how Jesus was tortured, mocked, and killed, Mark suggests that what looks like total defeat may end in hope. Throughout his story, Mark weaves in many hints to suggest that since God allowed his enemies to kill Jesus, his death must somehow have been “necessary”: that it held secret meaning in a divine plan that Jesus alone understood.

  He says, for example, that even on the night before Jesus died, he told his closest followers that the coming bloodshed would offer salvation “for many people,” adding that even after his death, he looked forward to celebrating a triumph, when he would “drink new wine in the kingdom of God.” And at the very moment when Jesus, on trial for his life, is sentenced to death, Mark pictures him warning the judge of his coming victory. Asked “Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One?” Jesus declares, “Yes, I am; and you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of God, and coming with the clouds of heaven!” Each of the later gospel writers echoes these themes of voluntary, meaningful suffering, so that instead of arousing rage and violent retaliation, the passion story often evokes wonder.

  What people listening in the Colorado church that morning heard, I don’t know. Even though I didn’t share Mark’s conviction, I could not help hoping that what happened might not wholly defeat us. And to my surprise, finishing my book on Satan felt like an exorcism. For those who find suffering inevitable—in other words, for any of us who can’t dodge and pretend it’s not there—acknowledging what actually happens is necessary, even if it takes decades, as it has for me. How, then, to go on living, without giving in to despair? I recalled lines from Wallace Stevens: “After the final no, there comes a yes / And on that yes, the future world depends. / No was the night. Yes is this present sun.” Only when I began to awaken in the morning and see the sunlight, grateful for its warmth, could I dive into the secret gospels again. What was it I loved about them?

  Besides our beloved teacher Krister Stendahl, who said that at first he thought these books were “just weird,” others warned us not to read them—certainly not to love them. We’d seen how Bishop Irenaeus denounced them two thousand years ago as “recent writings,” loved only by people too ignorant to discriminate between milk and poison, between genuine jewels and broken glass. But the Gospel of Thomas, which spoke to me from the day I first opened it, seemed to articulate what I often recall having seen, as if in a vision, on the day of Mark’s funeral.

  As Heinz and I walked out of the church on that day behind Mark’s small wooden coffin, I had the sense that we were walking naked. We stood together in the vestibule as friends and colleagues came to embrace us. How could we possibly go on living? Did we even want to? At that moment, I desperately longed to escape from this life, seeking either our lost child or oblivion. It was then that I had seemed to see that vision of a huge net made of ropes, surrounding all of us, with open spaces through which we might be propelled into infinity, yet bound with knots that held us in this world. Later, someone told me of the Hindu image of the god Indra’s net, embracing the world, often pictured blazing with jewels, or as a spiderweb hung with drops of dew. What I’d envisioned, instead, was a net of thick rope, with knots strong enough to anchor a ship in turbulent waters or tether an airplane in a hurricane. What drew me back to the Gospel of Thomas was a particular cluster of sayings that seemed to speak of what that vision meant—especially sayings that were previously unknown, strange, and compelling.

  For unlike the Gospel of Mark, which pictures Jesus announcing that “the kingdom of God is coming soon,” as a catastrophic event, the end of the world, the Gospel of Thomas suggests that he was speaking in metaphor:

  Jesus says: If those who lead you say to you, “The kingdom is in the sky,” then the birds will get there first. If they say, “It is in the sea,” then the fish will get there first. Rather, the kingdom of God is within you, and outside of you
. When you come to know yourselves then . . . you will know that you are the children of God.

  Here, with some irony, Jesus reveals that the kingdom of God is not an actual place in the sky—or anywhere else—or an event expected in human time. Instead, it’s a state of being that we may enter when we come to know who we are, and come to know God as the source of our being.

  In Thomas, then, the “good news” is not only about Jesus; it’s also about every one of us. For while we ordinarily identify ourselves by specifying how we differ, in terms of gender, race, ethnicity, background, family name, this saying suggests that recognizing that we are “children of God” requires us to recognize how we are the same—members, so to speak, of the same family. These sayings suggest what later becomes a primary theme of Jewish mystical tradition: that the “image of God,” divine light given in creation, is hidden deep within each one of us, linking our fragile, limited selves to their divine source. Although we’re often unaware of that spiritual potential, the Thomas sayings urge us to keep on seeking until we find it: “Within a person of light, there is light. If illuminated, it lights up the whole world; if not, everything is dark.” Emerging from a time of unbearable grief, I felt that such sayings offered a glimpse of what I’d sensed in that vision of the net. They helped dispel isolation and turn me from despair, suggesting that every one of us is woven into the mysterious fabric of the universe, and into connection with each other, with all being, and with God.