The Resurrection of Jesus: A Love Supreme
A few years ago while visiting my parents in Kentucky, I went out for the evening with my brother Wayne and my sister-in-law Stacie. Stacie’s father is a Pentecostal minister, and over a beer in the bar, she asked me, “Do you believe in the resurrection?” “Yes,” I said. She immediately shot back, “Well, what’s it like?” And I had to say, “I don’t know!” That conversation propelled me back to the Bible: I did some Bible study and quickly found out, as I knew, the Scriptures don’t have too much to say on the topic. Basically, what little can be said is that Jesus eats with his friends, goes fishing and does Bible study with them (Luke 24:43, John 21:13; John 21:6; Luke 24:27). Resurrected life sounded pretty good, but that was not really much to go on.
And maybe that is the problem: resurrection is far outside our experience. In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus seems to comment on this difficulty. In the story of the Rich Man and Lazarus, the Rich Man’s final, futile attempt to at least save his brothers by sending Lazarus back to warn them is rebuffed by Abraham: “If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.” (Luke 16:31) Resurrection is just not something we see every day. It completely violates the way in which our world works. The dead are dead. Just that, nothing more. They do not come back to life.
Because resurrection is such an alien notion, such an unknown to us, there is little we can do except speculate on what it might be. That appears to be the way in which the Sadducees confronting Jesus about resurrection approached the subject. The debate with the Sadducees about resurrection in Luke 20 is one of those great, “What if…?” conversations. But it is based entirely on the Sadducees’ assumption that conditions after resurrection are the same as those prior. Jesus overturns this assumption in his response. But overturning the assumptions do not help us in this matter; we still live in a world where these assumptions apply. Resurrection remains foreign territory to us.
One possible way to solve this conundrum is to look back at an earlier stratum of Christian writing, to examine if Paul’s letters, written in closer chronological proximity to the event of resurrection, tell us any more than the Gospel writers. While this may seem like a promising course at first, especially in the light of Paul’s claim in 1 Corinthians 15 that the risen Jesus was seen by more than five hundred, and with Paul’s own testimony as one to whom Jesus also appeared, still it conveys little content about resurrection itself. But there are two related characteristics of resurrection that do stand out in Paul’s writing: the first is the power of resurrection and the second is its transformational nature. To put it bluntly, Jesus’ resurrection made a big change in Paul’s life.
Powerful transformation or transformational power, I think Paul’s witness on this point gives the insight on resurrection. Paul testifies that the resurrection of Jesus made a difference, literally made all the difference, in his life. While resurrection is alien territory, a condition unlike any we might have undergone before, Paul’s example shows us that the encounter with resurrection is fundamentally transformative at its core. The presence of resurrection will shake the foundations of our reality (and in Matthew’s telling of the story, resurrection is accompanied by earthquake, Matthew 28:2).
So then, perhaps the crucial question about resurrection is not my sister-in-law’s inquiry, “what’s it like?” but a more far-reaching one: “What difference does resurrection make in the world and in my life?” Allow me to relate another story: over twenty years ago I was the pastor of a church in the South Bronx in New York City. It was at the height of the crack plague in New York, and throughout the smoldering remains of too many burned out neighborhoods in the South Bronx, the smoke of crack cocaine was now burning out too many human lives. Even in the midst of the tragedy, as it does every year, Easter morning arrived, a glorious April morning. I arrived at church early and found everything was prepared. I decided to take a walk around the neighborhood. I hoped that somehow, somehow beyond all odds, I hoped somehow beyond all hope, that Easter could make a difference in our community. As I walked I heard the cry, incessant around the neighborhood, “Tato, tato, tato…” This was the cry of the lookouts employed by the crack dealers, a form of Spanish shorthand for “Todo es claro” “All’s clear.” (Now, on the rare occasions when a police patrol car was sighted in the neighborhood, the lookouts would change the call to, “Feo, feo,” a slang word for the cops, shorthand for “5-Oh” after the popular police drama “Hawaii 5-0” on TV, but also it was a play on the Spanish word for “ugly”) At any rate, that Easter morning as I encountered the first lookout on my walk, I stopped and told him since this was Easter, when we rang the bell at the start of the service, I wanted him to stop yelling out “Tato” and instead call out “Resucito” (He is risen). Well, he shook his head like I was crazy, but said “sure.” I did this with a couple of other lookouts I found, but then it was time to get back to church for the services. We had a great Resurrection Day celebration. The following day I headed out to take communion to some of our elderly and sick members who did not make it to church on Easter Sunday. As I rounded a corner, I met one of the lookouts I’d seen the day before. He broke into a wide smile and called out, “Resucito, Padre, resucito!” Yes, small; yes, seemingly insignificant in the face of the disaster displayed daily in the South Bronx; but yes, a difference, a word of hope heard in the midst of the storm.
If the crucial question is whether resurrection can make a difference in our world and our lives, as I found out in the South Bronx two decades ago, the focus of that inquiry must be sharpened. What is the nature of resurrection and how does its nature make a difference? Here again I find myself turning back to the Bible. In the most basic etymological sense, resurrection has to do with standing. It is a standing up, a rising up, or more precisely, a standing again. Now standing in itself is rather trivial. If what we mean by resurrection is simply that the dead Jesus stands again, what cause is there for celebration? Easter would be devoid of any real meaning. Jesus was alive, died and rose again. Quite frankly, what is the big deal? A corpse re-vivified? The other resurrection mentioned in John’s Gospel, the resurrection of Lazarus (John 11:43), would be on equal footing with Jesus’ own resurrection if the significance of resurrection is simply coming back to life. Lazarus too, was alive, died and rose again.
There is, though, a unique difference in Jesus’ resurrection that is extremely significant, and that in fact makes all the difference. I am reminded of a lyric by the late “godfather” of rap, Gil Scott-Heron, best known for his recording, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.” In an anti-apartheid anthem, “Let Me See Your I.D.” on the album “Sun City” he wrote, “Like my grandmother once told me, if you don’t stand for something, you’ll go for anything.” To me, the resurrection means just that: Jesus stands for something. Most pointedly, in the resurrection Jesus stands for me. The resurrected Jesus stands for you also, dear reader. As a matter of fact, I believe that the resurrected Jesus stands for the world. This ‘standing for’ is the aspect we celebrate at Easter: that Jesus the Christ was crucified, dead, and buried and on the third day rose again for me, for you, for us. This resurrection is standing with, and standing with meaning, a solidarity with all in the midst of life and death. Standing for, standing with, solidarity, if you will, is the ultimate affirmation of my life, of our lives, in the midst of struggle.
Reflecting on resurrection as the ‘standing for’ of solidarity, brings to my mind the Occupy Wall Street movement. As an American expression of the same deep sense of outrage that gave rise the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street is a movement to throw off tyranny and dictatorship and launch true democratic resistance to the forces of finance capital. The participants in Occupy Wall Street demonstrated what it can mean to stand for something. The strong yearning for justice, a call for fair treatment and concern for the basic human needs of food and shelter for the 99% in contrast to the callous greed of the 1%, the powerful non-violent resistance to the police provocations of pepper spray and mass arrests, showed a deep solidarity and a willingness to stand forth in the struggle. Commenting on this “Deep Democratic Awakening” in the Occupied Wall Street Journal, (North American Edition, Nov., 2011),V,1. Professor Cornel West of Princeton University wrote, “We the people of the global Occupy movement embody and enact a deep democratic awakening with genuine joy and fierce determination. Our movement–leaderless and leaderful–is a soulful expression of a moral outrage at the ugly corporate greed that pushes our society and world to the brink of catastrophe. We are aware that our actions have inaugurated a radical enlightenment in a moment of undeniable distrust and disgust with oligarchic economies, corrupt politicians, arbitrary rule of law, and corporate media weapons of mass distraction. And we intend to sustain our momentum by nurturing our bonds of trust, fortifying our bodies, hearts and minds and sticking together through hell or high water in order to create a better world through deep democratic revolution.”
This sense of sticking together through hell or high water in order to create a better world, is exactly what the resurrection signifies to me. Indeed, the older English translations of the Apostles’ Creed stated that, “He descended into hell” before the proclamation that, “The third day he rose again from the dead.” Resurrection is a solidarity in the midst of struggle, in that daily descent into hell, a life standing for the other. Professor West goes on to state, “We must embody a universal embrace of all those in the human family and sentient beings, and consolidate an unstoppable fortitude in the face of systems of oppression and structures of domination. We will suffer, shudder, and struggle together with smiles on our faces and a love supreme in our souls.” Perhaps it is those words that best describe the resurrection of Jesus in terms of how the resurrection makes a loving difference in our lives and in the world: the supremely loving power of God is such that in the resurrection of Jesus, God stands with us, through hell or high water, in the struggles against the death dealing domination of the fallen powers of this world, a love supreme in the form of the risen Christ.
Now a non-believer or simply any other faithful Christian might object to this characterization of resurrection. A non-believer may well ask, “But since you are still engaged in struggles, how does the resurrection make any difference?” (This reminds me of a quick and funny way to distinguish Jews and Christians: if the world is in such need of redemption, Jews need to answer then why has the Messiah not come; and if the Messiah has come, Christians need to answer then why is the world in such need of redemption?) To me, the resurrection makes a difference because as the resurrected Jesus stands for me and stands for the world, the struggles we undergo for justice take a new form and move toward a new resolution. Recently, a homeless man, Anthony Horton, died in a fire in the New York City subway system. His death would likely have gone unnoticed, except that he had written a graphic novel, Pitch Black, which was published in 2008. In one frame of Horton’s book a character relates rules for living below ground in the subways. One of these is: “Always have a way out that is different from the way in.” This is what is powerful and significant in the resurrection: by raising Jesus from the dead to stand for us, God makes a way out in the struggles for justice and peace. That love supreme made manifest in the resurrection of Jesus from the dead marks a new beginning in human history of God overturning the powers of death and destruction that the solidarity of God’s love of humanity shines forth in the dazzling white robes of the angels at the tomb: the stone was rolled away, ‘he is not here, for he has gone ahead to Galilee, as he told you.’ (Mark 16: 6 – 7)
Christian testimony about the resurrection does show over and over again the difference resurrection can make. Pastor Dennis Jacobsen relates a story in this regard from his trip to the Buchenwald concentration camp. He heard the story of a Lutheran pastor at the death camp; he could only recall the name as Paul Schneider. Jacobsen tells the story: ‘Early one Easter morning, Pastor Schneider stood up in his tiny cell and shouted through the bared window into the courtyard of Buchenwald, “Christ is risen.” The prison guards rushed in and beat him mercilessly. When they left, he stood up and shouted again through the window, “Christ is risen.” The guards entered his cell and broke both his legs. When they left, somehow he got his hands up to the bars of the window, pulled himself up, and shouted once more into the courtyard, “Christ is risen.” This time the guards charged into his cell and beat him to death. (Jacobsen, Doing Justice, Fortress Press, 2001).
The difference the resurrection can make in a Christian’s life can be dangerous and even deadly. There is, as we all know well from Bonhoeffer, a cost to this discipleship taking up the cross to follow Jesus. But we can do this, we are called to do this, by that love supreme that makes all the difference through the resurrection. The Jesus who stands for us in the resurrection bids us to stand for others. Pastor Schneider’s testimony shows that the risen Jesus stands for us as you and I stand for God’s love in the face of brutality and cruelty. In the midst of the most savage inhumanity, Jesus’ resurrection calls forth a new life of love and solidarity. Resurrection is both God’s call to us and God’s grace abounding and enabling us to stand for others. Resurrection is the call and the empowerment to be in solidarity with ‘the least of these,’ and thus to confront the structures of oppression and tyranny and to seek their redemption as the path to the liberating horizon for the “widows and orphans,” the outcasts and the non-persons. Even in those extreme circumstances in which this confrontation might ultimately lead to death, the risen Jesus stands for us. In standing for us in the confrontation with the powers of death, Jesus manifests the power of God’s love supreme drawing us back into full communion with God and our sisters and brothers.
Back to that bar at home in Kentucky: my sister-in-law’s question is still ringing out: “Do you believe in the resurrection?” “Yes,” I will still answer. Her next question: “Well, what’s it like?” is also still ringing out to me. I still don’t know in a material way. I do believe in the resurrection of the body, which is why eating with your friends, going fishing and doing Bible study with them sounds pretty good. The resurrection of the body means that our bodies, my body, is important and that our material existence was created by God in the beginning (“and it was very good” Genesis 1:31) and will continue to be of value to God in the eschaton. But more important to me now is the resurrection of Jesus; that the risen Jesus stands for me, for you, for us. Jesus stands for us and we are drawn to stand for others in that solidarity, in that peace of Christ and with that love supreme in our souls. Although resurrection is alien territory in a sense, outside of our daily experience, the resurrection of Jesus, unlike the resurrection of Lazarus or any other resurrection story in the Scriptures, is different because the resurrection of Jesus is God’s ultimate and eternal relation to us: God standing with us and for us. In the resurrection of Jesus God’s love supreme shines forth and beckons us, calls us and strengthens us to stand for others in the light of that love. To me, the most eloquent statement in the Scriptures on this subject is from Paul’s Letter to the Romans (8: 31 – 32, 34b – 39):
“What then are we to say about these things? If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not with him also give us everything else? … It is Christ Jesus, who died, yes, who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us. Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will it be hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written, "For your sake we are being killed all day long; we are accounted as sheep to be slaughtered." No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Amen!