‘Love, grace and transformation’

As Holy Week approaches, the Very Rev Dr John Chalmers explains why Jesus is an archetype.

WHATEVER you believe about the life and times of Jesus of Nazareth you cannot but be disturbed by the conspiracy around his arrest on jumped up charges, the farce of the trial to which he was submitted and the injustice of his sentence to death.

By all accounts Jesus personified a way of living which rejected violence, which favoured the poor over the mighty and which preferred humility to supremacy and yet he died the death of a criminal in what might be described as an archetypal instance of prejudice and injustice.

Of course, history is strewn with cases of good people whose lives have been snuffed out because they got in the way of the ambitious and the powerful. Worse still, too much of history’s violence and war has been waged in the name of God so the Church itself is not an innocent party.

Sadly too, you do not have to look back in time for examples of ruthless oppression and the sacrifice of the innocent to suit the ends of one form or another of belief or ideology.

It is distressing to look around the world from the ravaged ruins of Somalia to the Uyghur internment camps of Xinjiang Province; from the dust bowls of South Sudan to the war-torn regions of Afghanistan and see something akin to the crucifixion of Jesus repeated daily.

In Matthew 25:35 Jesus is directly identified with the most marginalised in society. Whatever is done for the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the ragged, the sick and the prisoner is seen as being done for Christ himself. On this sort of analysis, it becomes easier to understand what it means to say that Good Friday was archetypal in its significance.

An archetype is an original model or symbol that resonates with human experience. The psychologist Carl Jung is, perhaps, most famous for his work in describing the archetypes which belong in our collective experience. He referred to the collective unconscious as the means through which human beings are connected to each other and to our ancestors through a shared set of experiences. Jung believed that we used this collective consciousness to give meaning to the world.

You will be glad to know that I have no intention, in this article, of unpacking what Jung believed about the “collective unconscious”. Instead, I simply want to highlight the idea that understanding Christ as an archetype is a rich seam, to be mined by those searching for the deepest truths in the Christian narrative. The Christian faith has to be understood on many different levels and for some people it is the richness of the symbolism attached to the narrative which gives it its deepest meaning.

If there is any truth in the archetypal nature of Christ’s suffering and death, then most surely the same is true of the story of his resurrection. On Easter morning, when we say, “Christ is Risen” and we hear the response, “He is Risen Indeed”, we are expressing the most profound hope that while death cannot be avoided it can be transformed.

In contemplating the death of Christ, Carl Jung said: “There was need of a fantastic, indestructible optimism, and one far removed from all sense of reality, in order, for example, to discover in the shameful death of Christ really the highest salvation and the redemption of the world”.

Interestingly, in Western Christianity Jesus in his resurrection is often pictured walking alone out of the tomb carrying a white flag. It is an image of the resurrection of an individual. However, in the Eastern Church the resurrection of Jesus is pictured as the Harrowing of Hell with chains and bolts, and locks flying in every direction. This imagery suggests a hopeful message that the resurrection is not only about Jesus but about society, humanity, and history itself being redeemed. Christ as the archetype of love, grace and transformation. ¤