"RESURRECTION"

 “RESURRECTION”

We are now in Eastertide, the season of the Resurrection.  Most of us are not sure what to do with the doctrine of the Resurrection, because it seems so supernatural, and at most it applies only to what happens to us when we die as individuals.  We like Easter and its springtime arrays of new life surging forth, but we are not certain about the idea of Resurrection.

In that reluctance, we join a long list of witnesses who are not sure what to do with the Resurrection.  The primary witnesses to the Resurrection in the Bible were not considered trustworthy by their culture – they were women.  In that culture (and in ours), we are not sure that women are trustworthy.  The male disciples did not believe the women’s testimony about a risen Jesus, and indeed Thomas says that he won’t believe anyone’s testimony about the Resurrection until he can put his fingers into the wounds of the crucified Jesus.

But the women disciples themselves struggle with the Resurrection.  In John’s Gospel, Mary Magdalene cannot recognize the risen Jesus, even when he stands right in front of her, talking to her.  And, the earliest Gospel account of the Resurrection in Mark finds the women running from the empty tomb, saying nothing to anyone.  Indeed the Gospel of Mark ends on an incomplete sentence, with most scholars believing that the original ending has been lost.  But, what if the author of Mark wants it that way, leaving it up to us, the future readers, to complete the incomplete ending?  What if part of the power of Resurrection is that it requires us to complete it?  We know that the women eventually told the story of the empty tomb and of the Resurrection, and what if that is our calling in response to the Easter story?  

I grew up believing that the doctrine of the Resurrection was about what happens to us when we die.  Over the years I’ve come to shift my understanding of the Resurrection.  Its meaning is not to tell us what happens to us when we die.  Its meaning is to tell us what is happening to us while we’re living.  I’ve had many resurrections in my life – on racial classification, on gender identity, on weapons, on the power of economic class, and on many others.  

In this season of the Resurrection in 2023, perhaps its central power is where it leads us into new life in this life, not in the life to come.  May we be able to see the risen Jesus standing right in front of us – if we cannot, may we listen to the witnesses who tell us about the risen Jesus.  It will change our lives – I know that it did mine, and it continues to do so.  

In his fine essay on the Resurrection called “He Is Risen,” Thomas Merton put it this way in 1975:   “We are called not only to believe that Christ once rose from the dead, thereby proving that he was God. We are called to experience that Resurrection in our own lives by entering into this dynamic movement, by following Christ who lives in us.” In a time of the killing of children, of the indictment of an ex-President, of the expulsion of two Black members of the Tennessee legislature, these words of Resurrection from Merton and others are, indeed, words to live by:

    “We are called not only to believe that Christ once rose from the dead, thereby proving that he was God. We are called to experience that Resurrection in our own lives by entering into this dynamic movement, by following Christ who lives in us.”