There was a body bag. Inside the gray vinyl bag was, not surprisingly, a body. Whose body was it? I didn’t know for sure, but there was the possibility that the body might belong to Jesus. Yes, that Jesus, the central figure of the New Testament.
It was very early morning. I was in the men’s locker room at the community college. It was gray and foggy outdoors, but there was enough light to penetrate the room’s small unwashed windows, which had a scrim of grime and mud clods.
I was surrounded by about a dozen witnesses, both male and female of various ages. The locker had a very special purpose that morning. I was supposed to unzip the cadaver bag and reveal to the witnesses whose body was inside of it. Then upon the prearranged agreement, if the body did indeed belong to Jesus, I would have to convert to Christianity because to discover his body in the bag was supposed to be proof, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the claims of orthodox Christianity were all true.
I did not want to agree to such a conversion or have to acknowledge that orthodox Christianity was true for a variety of reasons. A big one is that I didn’t want to concede that God punished billions of people by burning them in hell for eternity. Or if not burning them, inflicting them with mental anguish and tormenting them forever and ever. This seemed too harsh, and it was a major reason I had spent most of my life resisting conversion.
Sometimes in those moments when I was not resisting and was actually trying to acquiesce to the terms of conversion as I saw them, I still did not convert in my heart because I did not trust a God who felt compelled to sentence so many people to eternal perdition. I found such a God so repulsive that in my fear I could not make myself a true believer happy with being “born again.” People who said they had fallen in love with such a God struck me as repulsive. To me such a God only gained followers by making them terrified sycophants begging to be spared, admittedly a gross oversimplification on my part.
In addition to the Hell Doctrine, I have struggled all my life with the orthodox view of The Crucifixion as a sacrifice in which God had to transfer his wrath from us to his Son. In the words of many believers: Christ had to pay the ransom for our sins. Such a God seems demonically stubborn in his rigid holiness that demands eternal fire for the damned.
I should point out that the Christian God has many faces, many more appealing than the one I’ve described. Over the decades I have read softer versions of Christianity. Some of these softer versions come from liberal Christians who are lambasted as lukewarm false prophets from more fundamentalist sorts. Others describe themselves as Universalists, in which Hell is more of a self-inflicted wound owing to our selfishness and egotism rather than a judgment from God and that the Crucifixion is not merely a sacrifice to prevent God from unleashing his wrath upon us but an example of the way we should take our Cross and sacrifice our lives to others as a way to find salvation, in part through transcending our self-centered, narcissistic enterprises.
I wish I had the more benevolent God of the liberal or universalist Christian in my spirit, but sadly the hell-bearing one of my teen years is the one that bore a hole inside my blackened heart. Believing in the Hell God was its own kind of hell.
So as you can imagine as I stood in the locker surrounded by witnesses, I did not want the body inside the bag to belong to Jesus. I unzipped the bag, and what I saw was terrifying. A pale, clammy woman in her late twenties with short-cropped brown hair woke up from an apparent coma, looked at me and the other witnesses and asked what had happened to her. She was dressed in a sky blue silk robe.
I immediately told someone to call an ambulance. Rather than being relieved that the body did not belong to Jesus and that I did not, according the the bargain I had made, have yield to the major claims of orthodox Christianity, I was horrified by the woman whose awakening was a sort of miracle in its own right.
Yes, the body was not that of Jesus, so I was off the hook, so to speak, but on the other hand I was presented with an entirely new and unforeseen problem: This woman had miraculously risen from the dead, an allusion to the New Testament miracles Christ performed, and therefore her body was not a definitive refutation of Christianity. If anything, her coming back from the dead was a Christ-like miracle, and I found myself, yet again, tormented by my acute agnosticism, and I found myself overcome with the condition of Herman Melville who was famously described by Nathaniel Hawthorne in this manner: “He can neither believe, nor be comforted by his unbelief.”
To conclude, then, the dream was yet another exercise in futility, raising my hopes for some kind of satisfactory resolution over my religious torment when in truth the dream compounded by spiritual agony all the more.
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