This editorial is written as a small experiment in the medium. Instead of headlines only, we are inviting low level participation in the flow of the inquiry. To pause is to presence yourself in the narrative: create space for a dialogue with us as you read. To ask: is this true?

Writing this editorial in the space between Good Friday and Easter Sunday is a luxury. Whatever our belief - or absence of belief - in the Christian story of the death of Jesus Christ and his subsequent resurrection, it has lived as a metaphor in large parts of the globe for over 2000 years.

In the common understanding (much debated), the story describes one person's life-long mission to transform society, moving to a tragic ending. Despite his popularity and the efforts of his followers, and his own belief in the trajectory of his life, Jesus is moved to the point of no longer understanding why he has failed. He feels abandoned and appears to give up. The crucifixion is not short and sharp, but long and drawn out, offering a spectacle of causes, context, behaviour and the relationship with power. Eventually the very mortal body of the spiritual leader is shown to be incontrovertibly deceased.

But the Bible does not stop with the death of the saviour - the narrator is an observer of tragedy, not a participant. One day later, Jesus' tomb is empty, and he is believed to be resurrected. Brought back to life.

This does not presage a happy reunion with his mother and followers - he does not return to public life. But his movement is reinvigorated and goes on to create a dominant world religion.

Pause

All these years later, the luxury of the day in between the death and resurrection is knowing how the story turns out and having some space in between to process. What is the nature of the loss we are facing today? What does such loss signify? What is the gift of re-incarnation to come?

Yet with too much distance from events (historically true or not), it's not easy to re-enact in our minds or hearts. It may be too difficult to ‘go there’ and too tempting to skip to the ‘resolution’. Is the superficial idea - that this is simply a horror story with a happy ending - the reason that so much of society celebrates Easter with chocolate eggs and fluffy bunnies?

For the willing, it's not too difficult to locate this metaphor in the present moment, however painful to do so. To equate the struggle of Jesus' life with the environmental movement, or the movement for social justice in any one of its forms, is to think of the difficulty - maybe insurmountable - of standing up to power. Not simply as a battle between personalities, but as a clash of unstoppable dynamics.

The clash of unstoppable dynamics

Pontius Pilate caught in the populism of the crowds, finding himself unexpectedly signing Jesus' death warrant, reminds us too easily of Ministers giving in to the oil lobby. Unable to maintain the vital importance of giving up fossil fuels, or taking care of the lowest paid, choosing instead a quick win in the growth economy. Or take Judas, pledging his life-long support for Jesus but betraying him at the first chance of capitalising on his relationship with him. Isn't that how Ministers line themselves up to become candidates for the top job? All the while betraying the voters in the promises they made to get elected.

The slow walk to failure

Or see the contemporary resonances of Calvary. It’s like watching the small window of opportunity to change direction on any of our big societal problems slowly disappearing (see the latest IPPC report or the numbers of people moving into poverty, or incarceration). Can’t we compare that to the walk up to Calvary, dragging the cross? Not seeing an end in sight, only more suffering ahead and terrible confusion on the part of his ten male disciples (maybe comparable to our major institutions?) around how this could be happening.

All the while, Mary Magdalena and Mother Mary - like unpaid community workers and the mothers of soldiers today - can only grieve and prepare to pick up the pieces. How many works of art in churches all over the world continue to carry this picture of whole-system powerlessness?

So what does resurrection mean in this context?

We won't attempt to do the job others have done so well, in the deep reckoning of this metaphor within the Christian churches of many denominations. Or even in texts designed for those without faith - but with an appetite for intellectual deliberation. But the vast majority of people will never take the chance to read those scripts – less that 37% of people go to church regularly today, probably less read philosophy. So it is worth thinking about how it is playing out, even subconsciously within the broader society.

Does resurrection mean we fail, but the spirit lives on to fight another day? Such as what happened after Martin Luther King was assassinated? His death gave birth to the next level of the fight for black equality—making it a white cause too. Eventually it lead to Black Lives Matter and the possibility of seriously disrupting the status quo.

Or does resurrection mean that the human race fails to stop climate change, but Gaia herself - the holistic unity of planet Earth - can regenerate? Possibly giving rise to another, more evolved human species through the human DNA still latent in the biodiversity. (No guarantee of course, a revised evolution could be insect, mycelial only).

At this moment, between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, neither of these options feel very attractive. A possibility of change - after centuries of injustice - does not seem much to invest in for the movements giving their lives every day, or the people they represent. For Black Lives Matter activists, patience is a synonym for collusion.

In the environmental movement, when we hear people accepting human extinction as odds-on - which many do - we wonder if they can really imagine what that feels like. How it might be to carry the cross up the hill, step by step? Or to give that job to your children?

Pause

Others might take the metaphor to mean that Jesus Christ's story was always intended as a warning, but not a reality. The church sometimes narrates this as "Jesus died on the cross so that we don't have to". To them, his resurrection might mean that, deep down, we have what it takes to come through. Death is only an idea - maybe a necessary one to keep us on our toes. Like the illusion of the nuclear deterrent: perfectly capable of annihilating whole populations but used only as an assurance of mutual destruction. No elected leader would ever use one, because in so doing they would be certain to kill their own people. But Putin's renewed threat to use a nuclear bomb in Ukraine does not leave us comfortable or confident in that idea: we've had too many examples recently of men under pressure losing their ability to control their emotions.

Pause

All these examples stay with the Easter idea that nothing could have been done to change the situation: Jesus Christ was sent to his death by a system that could not change itself fast enough. Despite all the examples of new behaviour that Jesus offered, nothing fundamentally changed in those with the power.

On the other hand, the people who followed him - largely the weak, vulnerable, or those 'woke' to his message - mobilised sufficiently to carry on his belief in them (more, mabye, than their belief in themselves) after his death. But without the possibility of an ending, the pattern repeats itself as our collective human condition.

Pause

Where does that leave us now? Able to contemplate what will happen if nothing changes before that moment - 2030 in the case of climate change - where all we consider to be good is condemned? Do we surrender to that inevitability of failure and faltering hope for the future? Does that make life easier, or intolerable?

What could Jesus have done to change his destiny? To really go into play mode here invites the absurd - but also the mundane and obvious. What if Jesus had listened to his mother and got out of his hero mode? Accepted that no one person can do what needs to be done on their own? What if he replaced half his disciples with women - Mary Magdalena an obvious candidate - and engaged the women in their communities to offer new forms of power to the weak and poor? What if, instead of throwing the traders out of the church, he had used the church buildings to generate new forms of income for the homeless? What if, instead of subjecting himself to the whims of the political leaders he worked directly with the people to build on the qualities he recognised in them?

This is not intended as an affront to the story of Jesus, but to use the story to examine ourselves at this moment in time. Is this what is really meant by 'we don't have to' experience what Jesus did, because we have the benefit of hindsight? The Easter tale helps us know that extinction is possible, and that resurrection gives us no clear wins - but only the offer of continuing in hope. So what do we do to change the story?

Pause. Challenge.

Most of us reading will have to consider that in the picture of society painted by the Bible, we are not the weak and vulnerable, but the holders of power. Some of us are missionaries with a clear goal and a desire to help those excluded until now. This includes the natural planet, who is only slowly being recognised as having rights of its own. But few acknowledge the failure implicit in that heroic model. Some of us are salaried by the institutions that cannot - or will not - stop the decline. All of us have been the beneficiaries of the inequality and extraction of natural resources to fuel our lifestyles.

How are we willing to shift the system as it appears in ourselves? When leading the crusade with our trusted band of warriors does not lead to the desired results, what might? To what extent are we upholding the current system by opposing it performatively, not truly amassing the power to change it? Where we battle for small improvements that mostly enlarge our reputation?

What status do we hold by drawing our attention to our efforts more than to the skills and resources of those we hope to champion? In what ways is our desire to be right getting in the way of simply changing our actions to make something better? Who are we overshadowing that might bring new intelligence to our dilemma?

We know the behaviours which manifest this. It’s when we get on transatlantic flights to take part in climate conferences. When we eat food that is irresponsibly sourced because we haven't got time to think about it properly. When we expect those without money to give away their data for us to capitalise on, without payment. When we invite the indigenous people to conferences, we designed and got funded for without a strategy to give them back their land.

Pause

These are not easy questions but hopefully the right ones for this weekend. Rather than share with you seven blogs about how others are responding to challenge, we're making space for all of us - ourselves included - to consider what it is that we can do today to change the tragic outcome we are observing from a distance.

Did Jesus die to expose a socio-economic-political system that makes his cause untenable? When we are the system, what can we give up that will lead to a different outcome for his cause—which is our cause? How can we get in between Good Friday and Easter Sunday to transform the meaning of crucifixion and make real the resurrection?

Alternative Editorial: Giving Up to Move On