The Resurrection Of Jesus Christ

The Christian story, as I learned about it growing up, is a story about a good man who was badly treated and eventually killed, but who was raised from the dead by God to show us his true identity as the way to, and the truth about, eternal life. The more I learned of the story in later years, even by doing a theology degree or three to learn it, the harder it got to come up with other ways of putting it. And the harder it also became to answer the myriad questions it puts to our ordinary understanding of how things work, in this world and the next.

One question is made inescapable by the Johannine tradition that presents Jesus as the gateway to heaven rather than, as in Mark and Matthew in particular, the proclaimer of a message about God’s coming kingdom on earth. John 14:6 quotes Jesus saying something that seems very out of character, that no one comes to God except by him. While these attributed words may have been comforting to Jewish Christians kicked out of their synagogues late in the first century, they are very troublesome in a 21st century global context.

Believe in Jesus as the gateway --- the only gateway --- to God’s sheepfold, and lo and behold, you’re through the gate. Don’t believe it, and the gate will close before you and remain closed forever. The major problem with this way of thinking is that it is grace-less. It makes getting into heaven a matter of saying and doing the right things, not a matter of God’s saying and doing good things to and for us that we not only do not deserve but can never deserve.

Another question about the Easter story stems from the way it tries to link Jesus’ resurrection with our own. Because he lives, it is said, we too shall live. It is the “because” in this affirmation that gives me pause. No reasonable person doubts the universality of the human hope to survive physical death, either individually or in a larger fellowship or both. And plenty of reasonable people have believed for a very long time that life in a world beyond this one is something not only worth counting on, but even a certainty that we can indeed count on. There should be no surprise, then, that Jesus could make it off a cross alive. Or that the crosses each of us has to bear in this life can be overcome in the next. The real surprise comes with the assertion that our making it to the next life is somehow dependent upon the fact that only Jesus made it.
“In” Christ, it is taught, resides our eternal destiny. The “in” here gives me as much trouble as the “because” just did. It cannot be that we climb into Christ merely by choosing to believe in him. If we are “in” him, it must be because we somehow have already been gathered into him, but the mysticism of all this begins to run riot very quickly. Except that it reminds us of who the Gatherer truly is, with whom we have most truly to deal. When all are safely gathered in, and when the whole of creation cries the Alleluia that has no end, it will be God and God alone who is glorified.

And finally, there is the question of the resurrection of the body. Not even Paul, the greatest Christian debater of the first century on this question, left things quite the way that many people seem to believe he did, with a conversation-stopping either-or to the Corinthians on the order of accept Jesus’ bodily resurrection (“seen” by 500+) or die forever in your unbelief. “Bodily” resurrection? You mean, like my going-to-flab, arteries-hardening, adrenaline-surging, one-thing-after-another-going-wrong body? Or like the body of a friend who was down to flesh and bones at the time of his death from a demonically rampaging cancer? Or like the mangled bodies of a family broadsided at an intersection by a drunken driver who ran a stop sign? No, Paul wrote, not like these. Whatever the spiritual” body is that we will inherit, it will be less like the flesh that Jesus became and more like the Life and the Light that he once was. It will be a body so gloriously changed as to be beyond the power of all our language to express.

The Christian story, as I am thinking about it this Eastertide, is the story of a good man who believed in an even better God, a God whose pure, unbounded Love hallows all things and transforms everything that is less than good in them into something that is good beyond all our thinking and imagining, in worlds without end.