“I call upon heaven and earth this day to witness that I have put before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life! Choose life, so that you and your descendants may live.” (Deuteronomy, 30:19)

Should we be astonished that the story of a violent, unjust murder of a young Jewish teacher 2000 years ago possibly tells us more about life than it does about death? And, less positively, that this same story still resonates in contemporary “global affairs” as human beings continue to divide along factional religious lines, harming those they call “other”, rather than saving or healing them as that same Jewish teacher encouraged?

Driving us all are stories of what it means to be human

And what kind of human we are becoming? The power of that story is unique to our species. It’s central, too, to how we construct a sense of self: an inner as well as an outer identity. Plus, consciously and unconsciously, it shapes how we find and sustain our place in the world. What we think life is. What our own life is for.

Because “story” is the default position of the brain, much of our inner storytelling is barely conscious. It is subject to continuous influences and conditioning. Time, place, culture: all influence the stories we internalise, embellish, believe, discard, create, then recreate.

We are lucky indeed if we can learn to question our conditioning, however benign, and the biases and assumptions that conditioning produces. New information and experiences can push us towards greater consciousness. But only if we allow that. A strong sense of curiosity, plus confidence they are entitled to question and inquire, are gifts every child should receive as a human right. Many do not.

Ideological certainties are ubiquitous. Unavoidable. We are marinated in them by media and culture. Religious stories can affect us even more. They come with the added dimension of an authority that dramatically transcends the “human”. They provide identity. They may promise a “forever” destiny. Yet the total rejection of anything that smacks of religion can arguably be as constricting. This is because, from the enduring ancient stories from North, South, East and West, come glimpses of archetypal figures and longings that are richly and universally human.

The biggest stories of religions are, after all, simultaneously startlingly complex and wondrously simple. Dismissing them as wholly absurd, or arguing that they are purely myth, is to miss the vast dimension of the poetic, creative, mystical, unknowable aspects of human life and consciousness, whether or not this is acknowledged or claimed.

More than one-third of people alive on our planet are nominally or, in practice, ‘Christian’

There are multiple meanings to the word “Christian”, stretching from extreme (and sometimes horrifyingly cruel) fundamentalism to something closer to the life lived by the historical Jesus. This life, from evidence in the gospels and beyond, seems to have been one of radical inclusiveness, a conviction that behaviour matters far more than dogma or “belief”, and that laws are to be broken if they create contempt or divisiveness between human beings.

Jesus (like most Jewish teachers of his time) was himself keen on story. His stories were teasing, sometimes oblique – but unfailing on those key themes of inclusiveness, mercy, humility, compassion, and forgiveness. There’s also passion in his stories, and in the many stories about him. There’s no pretence about his anger when people put money as their highest “good” or seek to justify their greed; anger, too, when the marginalised or “stranger” is ignored and shoved aside; super-human compassion when the fear that gripped his friends drove their betrayal of him; joy, laughter, wine and dance when celebration was needed.

If the stories written about Jesus over the first century or two after his death are similarly consistent, then the myriad interpretations of those stories in the 2000-plus years since have served multiple purposes. Some interpretations are clearly intended to build worldly power – often at the expense of the very people Jesus seemed most determined to “see”, acknowledge and protect.

Easter is the pinnacle of the Christian calendar

It, too, is laden with interpretations.

For those who believe that God required the sacrifice of Jesus to atone for humankind’s all-too evident propensity for sin (deliberate wrong-doing), Good Friday is a day of immense sorrow – and equally immense gratitude that Jesus was willing to be that sacrifice, whatever it cost him.

Many other millions of Christians, though, including the contemporary Franciscan writer and teacher, Father Richard Rohr, strongly reject this story of God “needing” such a sacrifice. They would also question or reject the related 4th-century belief articulated by Augustine of Hippo that we humans are born in a state of “original” sin and must be cleansed as well as redeemed… an idea abhorrent to Eastern faiths that more likely encourage followers to claim their “original perfection”: the capacity for compassion, mercy, peace and peacemaking.

That the historical Jesus did die a gruesome, humiliating, agonising death is established for all but the most cynical. Fewer people, including Christians, wholly accept the story of his resurrection, the rising from the dead told in all four best-known gospels. (Full disclosure for what it’s worth: I’m with the resurrection story, not the Jesus-died-for-my-sins one)

Yet why, in secular Australia in 2025, do any interpretations around Jesus’ death and “rising again” remotely affect the general public in a disastrously troubled world?

Rohr suggests that the death of Jesus demonstrates “death transformed, not death avoided”. The torture and dying of Jesus also demonstrate that he lived forgiveness, not revenge. In tribal times — including our own — that matters. Writer Mavis Moon suggests on her blog, “Jesus takes away the sin of the world by dramatically exposing what is the real sin of the world (ignorant attacking and killing, not purity codes), by refusing the usual pattern of attacking and killing back, and, in fact, ‘returning their curses with blessings’ (Luke 6:27), then finally by teaching us that we can ‘follow him’ in doing the same.”

We can also consider questions of illimitable defiance, again lived and not just taught by Jesus. Defying the purity laws in favour of caring for strangers, shunned or abused women, the marginalised: that’s already worth a few alleluias. But defying death? Rising from the dead…continuing to teach “beyond the grave” not with words only, but also by example? That moves me. Do I care if every fact can be verified? Perhaps I should. What I know is story.

Might we see the passage from Deuteronomy as a call to life singing in the Hebrew scriptures and renewed in the Easter story? Might we hear that unequivocal call to value life as the clue to Jesus valuing all lives? More crazily wonderful still, to his move from life to death to life… redefining “death”, newly celebrating life, “so that you and your descendants may live”?

Who am I to judge the motivation of the historical Jesus in refusing to condemn those who betrayed him? Or those who caused his agonies and death? What I do note is that he called to God for forgiveness, stressing their ignorance of their own potential (“For they know not what they do…). I note also that Jesus’ all-too recognisable excruciating despair was expressed when he cried out, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” And that this was not the end of his story. Or ours.

Through the immeasurable profundity of the story of the resurrection, Jesus demonstrated that even death itself was followed not by “nothingness”, nor by “his people” rising up in vengeance against “those people”, but by a recommitment to the awesome, unlimited brilliance of life itself.

None of us can ask for more.