Impossible Possibilities

The Christian writer Tertullian who lived in the 3rd century is often misquoted as having written "I believe because it is absurd." What he actually wrote was:

The impossibility of the resurrection of Jesus was a problem for the earliest Christian writers. Paul's first letter to the Thessalonians uses the Greek word that denotes rising up from a reclining position to describe what God did to Jesus. In the gospel of Mark that we just heard the Greek word used for rising is that used for awakening from sleep. There was no word equivalent to the English word for resurrection because there was no conceptual category for what happened. There was no perfect word to fit the circumstances because what happened was totally new and unprecedented and unimaginable. It was more than that; it was simply not possible.

The dictionary defines "resurrection" as "The act of rising from the dead or returning to life." So, from the time of the earliest Christian writings we have a new category, a new concept. There is a sense in which this idea of resurrection as a totally new concept is in keeping with others aspects of Jesus' life. After all, he introduced new radical concepts of forgiveness, of loving, of the immediate presence of God, of a friendship with God that is available to each of us. He introduced to us the new concept of living forever with God. He promised that to us and sealed the promise with his own rising.

We have historical accounts of Christ's death on the cross. But we have no such accounts of his rising. Nobody saw him rise. No one was there when it happened. We have accounts of the discovery of an empty tomb and accounts of meetings between Jesus and his friends after he died, but no eyewitnesses to the resurrection.

A skeptic will treat sightings of the post-crucifixion Jesus the same way we understand sightings of Elvis - as hallucinations or, at best, as a subjective vision of unfulfilled wishes.

Like all miracles, the miracle of the resurrection is ambiguous, or in the words of Archbishop Rowan Williams, "ungraspable." And there is no hope of seeing it for what it is without the lens of faith. This faith brings us to a realization that the Easter Christ is a life giving force that emanates from the love of God for each one of us.

By invoking faith I intentionally sidestep the empty tomb except to note that its emptiness says something about the unknowable nature of God. I do not attempt a proof that Christ was raised. Neither do I simply assert that the memory of Jesus lives on in the Christian community, although I believe it is true that it does.

Instead, the doctrine of the resurrection, rooted in deep faith, is based on three other assertions.

The first is that Christ lives on. He has revealed a potentiality of human life that was never before known, namely, a never-ending life in God. As St. Paul put it Christ "has abolished death and brought life and immortality to light."

The second point is dependent on the first. It is that Jesus' disciples experienced for themselves a new life, a transformation, a radical shift. This shift was from a self-centeredness that had its ultimate expression in their abandonment of Jesus the night before he died, to a life so centered in and directed toward God in Christ that most of them happily endured torture and death. They did this because they were convinced by their experience of the risen Christ that death was defeated by him. In other words, they knew that they shared in the resurrection of Christ as an ongoing, eternal reality instead of the one-time resuscitation of a corpse. I myself have experienced the reality of the risen Christ in my life many times and I know many others who have as well. I will even go so far as to say that people I have known have seen the risen Christ, which is not the same thing as saying they have seen Jesus in the pre-crucifixion sense. My daughter was one such person and her certain knowledge that she had seen the risen Christ made facing her own death not only possible but even joyful.

The third assertion is that our conviction about Christ's resurrection tells us something profound about God. The resurrection means that God is the source of all that is new, all that gives forth life. At the risk of a bad pun, we can assert that God's work never results in a dead end, but that it can always open the way to new, previously unimagined possibilities. As the Anglican theologian John Macquarrie wrote: "The cross speaks of God standing with his creatures in the flux of events; the resurrection speaks of his always being ahead of events."

Through the ongoing experience of the resurrection there is an emergence of a new level of personal and human existence. It is an existence that is connected to God so that we experience God in a personal relationship. This existence, while promising an everlasting life, can be experienced right now through the eyes of faith.

Perhaps the most vexing thing about this new concept, this new category, of the risen Christ is that it is not something we can grasp intellectually. There is an old, and familiar story about a farmer working by the side of the road in rural Maine when some city people stop to ask him how to get to Millinocket. He tried a couple of times to give them directions but kept stopping himself after becoming confused with his own directions. Finally he gave up and threw his hands in the air exclaiming, "You can't get there from here." It's the same with the resurrection. You can't get there intellectually. You can't get there rationally. You can't get there from here. You can only get there by the spiritual experience of the risen Christ.

And that takes us to the place of our most profound discomfort - the necessity to allow this to be a spiritual exercise, an exercise not in acting or thinking, but in listening to God. It requires a letting go, a surrendering of our wills to God that can make us feel vulnerable and out of control. It requires the suspension of everything familiar until the unfamiliar, ungraspable, unknowable God becomes familiar and known.

This liturgy was designed by the ancients to help us get there - to get us to a place deep in our hearts where we know Christ's resurrection is certain because it is impossible. The symbolism of walking in darkness into a new light, the rehearsal of our salvation history as daylight streams in through the stained glass, the washing away of our old selves with baptismal water, the encounter with the risen Christ in the sacred bread and wine - all these things awaken in us the realization that everything has changed, that the long dark winter of our lives is over and a springtime of never-ending possibilities lies before us. Our prayers of praise and thanksgiving, like incense, rise up to God in the words of the morning prayer of the Eastern Church:

Amen.