The point about the Resurrection of Jesus is that by any normal standards it is so preposterous that it cannot possibly have happened. Unless God himself intervened and made it happen. There is no half-measure that will soften the absurdity of the claim: it doesn’t help to say Jesus was partly resurrected, “spiritually” resurrected, resurrected as a myth or resurrected as some quasi-mystical Jungian inner resurrection.
It is entirely binary, either/or. One moment there was a corpse, the next a living Jesus in a real body. Either believe it or don’t but, for God’s sake – and I mean that literally – don’t turn it into a watery imitation of what it claims to be. Like this:
Confusion about the resurrection continues to this day. I think that many of the original chronicles were essentially myths created by the first believers to help them make sense of events beyond human explanation. Their uncertainty is probably best summed up in a comment by one of the men at dinner in Emmaus—“We had hoped,” he said, “that he might have been the one who would redeem Israel.” But at this point, obviously, that hope was fragile.
Jesus makes an attempt to explain how his passion and death had long been intimated in the Hebrew scriptures; but even then, he is met by hesitant disbelief.
It took time and spiritual discernment for the early Christian community to come to experience the meaning, if not the actuality, of Jesus’ reappearance.
Eventually, however, “The Lord is risen; he is risen indeed!” became an experiential truth, a claim that many would make personally. Still later came the conviction that everyone could experience a personal resurrection just like Jesus. What started as a claim from a few confused people matured into a global confession of faith.
Recognizing how the reality of “resurrection” burst upon a perplexed group should remind us that there will always be stages of doubt as well as conviction. I continue to evolve in my own discernment of what it all means.
The definition of Episcopal evangelism—we submit it to anybody else who [needs] another way of understanding evangelism. We worked hard on this, too! There was a whole task force! What we came to was: “Evangelism is a spiritual practice where we seek, name and celebrate Jesus’s loving presence in the stories of all people, then invite everyone to more.”
“The more time you spend thinking about yourself, the more suffering you will experience,” says the Dalai Lama. “We create most of our suffering, so it should be logical that we have the ability to create more joy.”
