Reconciling the resurrection

...None of these seems to have much to do with the way things happen in our world — though you can now have your ashes shot into space for a price...

...However, to make doubly sure, a soldier jammed a spear into his side (19:33-34...

...Furthermore, the presence of the Spirit in this created world also provides a' 'foretaste'' — a clue that the ultimate outcome is not tragedy...

...They may admit that they really don't think of Jesus as any different from other inspiring religious leaders and teachers...

...It's not too hard to think of the exalted Jesus as "alive with God" if you don't think of the "crucified Jesus" as the one who is risen, a naive docetism that manages to persist to our own day...

...In so doing, the oppressor, the person of violence, stands condemned while the suffering victim has both voice and hope...

...It was not just an intellectual conviction that he'd been wrong...

...That statement may sound a lot better in the abstract than it does when we are challenged to act on it...

...If we really do confess Jesus as Lord and affirm that God raised Jesus, then we have an obligation to preach the Gospel...

...On the basis of that new relationship, they have a responsibility to embody and proclaim the Gospel...

...The unrecognized figure on the shore cooks breakfast for the disciples (21:9, 12-13...

...We sometimes like to engage in a collective "guilt trip" over the severe manifestations of human sinfulness in our world...

...It offers to draw persons of every imaginable background, language, and ethnic group together in the power of the Spirit...

...That "faith" which is tied to resurrection makes real demands on us as Christians...

...c) salvation comes to humanity through belief in Jesus...

...The cross challenges our presuppositions about power and greatness...

...But the Gospel never does that...

...We confess that our own commitment to what is good and just follows from that belief...

...Certainly, resurrection is often associated Commonweal: 202 with the vindication of God's justice in a world where evil seems to prosper and righteous and just people suffer because of their commitment to what is good...

...But we are often a lot less sure about the claim that there is no other way for such healing and reconciliation to come to humanity than through belief in Jesus...

...In the midst of the suffering that is entailed by the struggle for justice, we find out what the crucified as raised by God means for ourselves, for our world...

...You don't "kill" such a person by taking away bodily life either...

...So maybe there is "faith," the kind of faith expressed by Socrates in the Crito and Phaedo or in the neoplatonic mysticism of a Plotinus, without resurrection...

...Even now, they say, they frequently look to these other traditions to infuse life into a Christianity which has gotten too familiar, too mixed up with its Western cultural biases and habits...

...In fact, that's the kind of argument that many second-century gnostics made: what returned to the divine realm could only have been the "inner, spiritual" savior, for it was simply too much to ask people to believe that "the crucified" could be risen and exalted in heaven...

...But why "Jesus...

...And maybe, it's more that kind of faith than faith that "God raised Jesus" which we feel comfortable with in our world...

...It does not encourage the disciples to condemn themselves...

...So the rhetoric goes...

...claims that only Jesus of Nazareth has been raised, and, more importantly, exalted to a place "with God" unlike that of any other righteous or wise person...

...Resurrection is spoken of as more than a promise to the righteous, though it is that...

...The risen Lord keeps all the sin and suffering of humanity present before God...

...The killing of thousands in the course of revolution is justified by the oppression which is being overthrown and the new order to be established...

...Some intellectual historians would say that it was the great discovery of Socrates and the Platonic tradition that the commitment to "reason," to "justice," and to "the good" which humans are capable of making, demands that there be an "immortal" dimension to persons...

...So we would rather err on the side of a "live and let live" principle of toleration...

...What about the other great religious and spiritual leaders of humanity...

...Hope, faith, love, all three of these are profoundly transformed in the perspective of resurrection...

...We have to be able to answer for the claim that Jesus is Lord in the face of Christians who seem to be far more concerned with other values, perhaps the preservation of a privileged way of life, than anything remotely related to what Jesus taught or stood for...

...But resurrection does commit us to something that the philosophical view does not...

...Paul is quick to point out to the Corinthians that resurrection is not the same thing as a "near death" experience...

...Resurrection is not a condemnation of the disciples or of Paul, the persecutor...

...The most dramatic example comes from St...

...Take "Jesus is Lord...

...Exalted with God, Jesus lays claim to the worship and obedience of all creation (Phil 2:9-11...

...We are, after all, both victims of the systems that generate much of our modern suffering and...

...Matt 28:16-20...

...But, had they been born in a Hindu or Moslem country or been born Jewish, they would find faith, morality, access to God and one(s) to worship as Lord there...

...It was customary to hasten the death (by suffocation) of a crucified person by breaking his legs...

...When we do that, we really part company with the New Testament...

...It wasn't like the pain that leads to future pleasure...

...And, somehow, without imperialism and domination, we have to be able to answer for preaching the Gospel to others whose religious faith may often appear superior to our own...

...However, unpacking this formula is not as easy as we had once assumed...

...But the cross/ resurrection complex is a statement about God's perspective on suffering, self-offering, and service...

...Exalted with God, Jesus is the source of the Spirit present within the community (John 14:16, 26...

...Those presuppositions sometimes corrupt our thinking about resurrection because we think Jesus "earned it" by suffering...

...He does not take an adversarial posture toward them...

...And most of us have had more than enough encounters with a narrow-minded, fundamentalist evangelism of our neighbors that calls all persons sinners unless they have experienced a particular brand of conversion to Jesus and biblicistic literalism...

...As long as we live in a world which, as St...

...We'd be a lot happier with an Easter message that told us that "all is well" with the world now...

...We acknowledge that our experiences of healing, forgiveness, and reconciliation with God are tied to Jesus who remains living and present with God...

...We find that the Resurrection stories are frequently linked with commissions to evangelize, to tell others (e.g...

...Both Jesus' preaching and the Gospel proclamation of cross/resurrection strive for the most fundamental non-dualism...

...It came with a mission...

...To raise the question of "whv Jesus of Nazareth" and not one of the great prophets or Buddha or Mohammed or Elijah or even Moses, most Christians begin to realize that they have to fall back on their conviction that Jesus was somehow also ' 'God'' from the beginning...

...We have already seen that the confession of Jesus as exalted Lord implies there is more to this resurrection than some simple assertion that "there is life after death...

...Jesus' legs were not broken because the execution squad was sure he was dead...

...From the perspective of such philosophical reflection, "God raised him from the dead," would seem to be a mythological particularizing of the real truth of immortality...

...Ghosts, apparitions, and various psychological hallucinations may do a lot of things, but they don't fire up the charcoal grill and cook fish for breakfast...

...But the Resurrection does not encourage that kind of introspection...

...Jesus shows the disciples the marks of crucifixion (20:20...

...First, when the bodies are turned over for burial the Roman guard verifies the death of Jesus...

...It is no accident that' 'repentance'' in the name of the crucified and risen one is the central theme of the Gospel message (Lk 24:47...

...Here, (a) Jesus, an identifiable, human person from Nazareth, is Lord...

...It was permanent...

...Whatever they may have thought of themselves, those who crucified Jesus are never allowed to become his enemies...

...They remind us that on the cross Jesus takes on the sinfulness and suffering of the whole world...

...Paul says, is still awaiting its final transformation by the creative power of God (Rom 8:18-27), the risen Lord calls us to "life in the Spirit," which means reflection, repentance, renewal, The insights into the socio-political significance of resurrection derived from liberation theology should not be reduced to the ideologies of liberation movements...

...Of course, the Gospel narratives do insist that the Resurrection of Jesus means the transformation of his bodily reality...

...But, for many, it has the disadvantage of producing images of a corpse disappearing from the grave, peculiar appearances to followers, and an equally improbable tale of that same entity taking off into heaven...

...If Jesus is Lord, then the world has to be called to obedience to that Lord...

...We don't expect to come back in the same bodies that were buried...

...The earliest, and only certain, Old Testament reference to resurrection promised that God would raise up "the wise," righteous people who had led many others to righteousness in the days when Antiochus IV had outlawed Judaism, and the very existence of the faith of Israel was in danger (Dan 12:2-3...

...Resurrection is described as Jesus' enthronement at the right hand of God...

...Similarly, if you win a big race after training hard for months, you think you've "earned it...

...The reason that they are Christian has more to do with the cultural accident of being brought up in a Christian family and a largely Christian environment...

...Jesus instructed his disciples to avoid all such relationships of retaliation...

...Yet, the Christian community PHEME PERKINS holds a doctorate in New Testament and Christian Origins from Harvard University...

...This assertion is nowhere more evident than in John, the Gospel which most clearly expresses Jesus' unique unity with God...

...Much of the "consciousness raising" experience of liberation movements derives from a heightened dualism in the socio-political world...

...But that may not be quite as easy as it sounds...

...It might be more easily accessible to persons who are uneducated or unable to reflect on the truth embodied in such philosophical analysis...

...Acts 2:32-39...

...You don't have to be a Christian to believe in personal immortality...

...If resurrection was just an "escape," then the "dangerous memory" of the cross would be lost...

...Jesus was not the only righteous person to suffer persecution and death...

...Resurrection is spoken of in connection with the vindication of Jesus, the one who was crucified, who died and who was buried...

...He is the source of the Spirit, of forgiveness, of God's presence...

...He now had to go preach the Gospel among the non-Jews (Gal 1:13-16...

...Rather, resurrection remains an offer of healing, of salvation...

...It would be a claim about the "deathlessness" of all human persons whose lives have been "in touch with" the transcendent, universal values of justice, goodness, compassion...

...Exalted with God, Jesus is the source of forgiveness for the Christian community which turns to its heavenly "high priest" (Heb 4:14-16...

...Paul himself...

...Resurrection was not just the establishment of Jesus' position as Lord...

...He is to be worshipped...

...The cross, however, will not forget any victims: not the victims of the oppressing regime, not the victims of the revolutionary...

...But Socrates had an answer for that one too: the person who has a clear vision of goodness and justice will suffer any kind of personal injury or harm rather than ever violate that vision by doing or participating in injustice...

...But recently, liberation theologians have begun to challenge this naive docetism from a new perspective...

...But they all remain an "offer'' which still has to be answered from our side as the Christian community which keeps alive this dangerous memory of resurrection...

...We have to be able to answer for our belief in God's transforming power in the face of Christians who are as happy with the mechanization of death in the modern hospital as anyone else...

...b) God, the creator, the God of Israel, raised this Jesus from the dead...

...The connection between the risen and crucified Jesus is asserted twice in John...

...God's taking on suffering as Jesus dies on the cross was not temporary...

...Did they do less to bring the human race to God...

...Most of us are properly embarrassed by the colonialism of Christian missionary efforts in past centuries...

...Then, Jesus makes a return appearance a week later in response to the doubts expressed by Thomas (20:24-29...

...Of course, as Christians we experience our salvation bound up with the reality of the risen Jesus as Lord...

...The resurrection message parts company with much rhetoric of liberation in its affirmation of forgiveness, healing, and hope...

...You don't make a person out of computer circuits or complex neurological and bio-chemical interactions...

...Nor does it lend itself to the revolutionary dualisms of oppressed/oppressor...

...Throughout the New Testament, we find Jesus' place as "Lord" linked to resurrection...

...Paul's answer in Romans 10:9 describes three essential elements of the Christian vision of resurrection in a succinct formula: "If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved...

...As Catholics, we have some inkling of how little we like the process of action, reflection, and repentance when we consider the reactions to recent pastoral letters on nuclear war and the economy...

...The risen Lord is not just any inspirational leader or any victim of oppression...

...Other Christians become uneasy...

...Revolutionary ideologies often assume an innocence about the violence of their own origins...

...Remember, resurrection doesn't allow us to remain stuck in an anthropological dualism of soul/body...

...It commits us to saying that the creative power of God transforms material reality (1 Cor 15:35-50...

...Instead, both are brought into a new relationship with the Lord...

...Why a Jewish teacher and miracle-worker from Galilee, who lived a rather obscure life, and even, as some Jewish scholars have pointed out, a rather unsuccessful one...

...In various ways, the Gospel stories make it evident that the one whom they know as risen from the dead is indeed the one who was buried...

...But, the liberation theologians insist, theological reflection can only genuinely begin in the midst of action...

...A professor of theology at Boston University, her many published works include The Gnostic Dialogue, Hearing the Parables of Jesus, and Resurrection (Doubleday...

...Paul captures this side of resurrection symbolism when he speaks of the fact that nothing at all can separate us from the "love of God in Christ Jesus" (Rom 8:31-39...

...Jesus bears the divine epithet "Lord...

...Paul's experience of the risen Lord was like the call of one of the Old Testament prophets...

...In Acts 2:14-40, Luke has Peter preaching resurrection to the assembled Jews in such a way that it does not even encourage them to assume guilt for the death of Jesus...

...Precisely because the Gospels show us that the disciples all "failed Jesus" in the passion, we are able to discover the reconciling and healing side of resurrection...

...Finally, salvation through Jesus...

...responsible for many of them...

...SO IT MIGHT seem that you could make a philosophical case, though the arguments would be very complex, for the immortality of the soul that would not only say as much as "God raised him from the dead," but would also have the advantage of being more universal...

...What we need to see most of all is the "crucified" permanently before God...

...The connection between such immortality and our sense of the higher, universal ethical values guarantees that we don't need to make the case for resurrection on the basis of some naive idea that immortality is the only way to deal with rewards and punishments...

...That "God raised him from the dead" also surprises...