The audacity of Resurrection

We talk a lot about the cross, our sins and the atoning sacrifice of Jesus. Most of our clichés and songs follow these themes.  When someone talks about “sin” it is usually confined to personal purity of the mind, heart and body. In other words, our personal disobedience or lack of Christian piousness that separates us from God and for which Jesus had to die a redeeming death. Our songs and theology are about personal sins as opposed to more global humankind sins - the workings of our autonomy from the very beginning. 

 The sin of an individual can lead to more family-wide, business-wide, community-wide, and even global wide consequences affecting the innocent and the guilty alike.  This is seen in the alcoholic father who destroys his family or the greedy CEO who embezzles money to take care of himself while the humans who do most of the work at the company become unemployed and they and their children begin to experience the repercussions of that greed in their declining quality of life and strained relationships. This is seen in power struggles like in the Congo where sexual crimes against women are used to elicit fear and helplessness within villages to advance the control of one group of human beings over another. With that, our cultures expose the collective sins of our priorities. This weekend there will be a few players in the NFL playoffs who will receive a paycheck of over a million dollars for their 3-4 hours of work. (Oops, I forgot their daily practices. Let’s graciously chalk it up to a 50 hour work week.) Yet, while they receive a million dollars to play a game to the delight of myself (I will be watching) and millions of other fans, there are children who will at the same time die of starvation. Sure, we can consider the complexities of capitalism, poverty, and corrupt governments, but imagine yourself trying to explain it away to God instead of your less educated friend. Suddenly the silliness of our theories and answers is exposed by the sheer reality of the dehumanizing inequity. Sin is not just about you and your eternal destination; it is about God’s intentions for humankind.

 While this may start with the individual, it doesn’t end there and this faith is bigger than any one of us just like the reverberations of our personal sins. The audacious claim of Christianity is not a better life for one through increased individual morality or even individual forgiveness. It is resurrection and it is new creation. Undoubtedly, there is a lot of goodness and beauty in this world providing glimpses of the enduring original intent of God for human existence, but, as mentioned above, the pain and suffering is enduring and unending as well. So, many of us do not want to die, but we are ready for the disease, abuse, abandonment and oppression of this world to end. In the face of such overwhelming foes, we digress and feel like dying ourselves.  In this tension of longing for life yet experiencing so much that kills it, resurrection is a complete hope. Yet, and this is important, it does not revert us into escapist theology that causes us to stick our heads in the sand,  hunker down in our churches until it is all over nor move us to self-righteous, self-saving  hope that breeds arrogance or disdain for the “un-enlightened”.

  No matter what we think about our origins, religion, what is sin and what is not, there is a reality that none of us can deny - we all die.  The Christian faith offers not only a story of our creation, sin and its ramification, but it also claims an audacious promise. This promise is not that your sins can be forgiven.  It isn’t in the atoning death of Jesus in his becoming our substitute in the penalty phase of the “wages-of-sin-is-death“arrangement. The promise is resurrection.  In fact, Paul says that if Christ has not been raised as the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep, then “your faith is futile and you are still in your sins.”  In essence, if Jesus wasn’t resurrected then His death does nothing for any of us. 

 But, we don’t talk about resurrection much. In fact a reading and acceptance of 1 Corinthians 15 can get somewhat uncomfortable in the presence of those who do not believe it especially when we get to the part where Paul begins to offer an explanation of what our bodies might be like. Do we really believe not only that Jesus was the son of God and not only that he died in an atoning sacrifice for the atrocities of humans, but that he was raised from the dead and is a sign of the future awaiting us - that indeed the body he was raised with is a new type of body made for a new type of creation and that we are headed for that destiny? It sounds like science fiction. Maybe that is why we don’t talk about it a lot accept in phrases like “died and was raised 3 days later” or in common phrases that we don’t even think about like “going to heaven”.

Resurrection is at the heart of the Christian faith, but how can we claim something so audacious? In Surprised by Hope N.T. Wright says it best

“But how can the church announce that God is God, that Jesus is Lord, that the powers of evil, corruption, and death itself have been defeated, and that God’s new world has begun? Doesn’t this seem laughable? Well it would be if it wasn’t happening. But if a church…is actively involved in seeking justice in the world, both globally and locally, and if it is cheerfully celebrating God’s good creation and its rescue from corruption in art and music, and if, in addition, its own internal life gives every sign that new creation is indeed happening, generating a new type of community –then suddenly the announcement makes a lot of sense. “