14
The Resurrection Journey
Everything will be all right in the end. If it’s not all right, it is not
yet the end.
—The Best Exotic Marigold HotelWe’ve been talking about how suffering and sadness can take on a positive
meaning when we shift to a “one-lump” view of reality. But if all of us are one
in suffering, wouldn’t we also need to say that we’re one in life too? In this
chapter I want to enlarge your view of resurrection—from a one-time miracle
in the life of Jesus that asks for assent and belief, to a pattern of creation that has
always been true, and that invites us to much more than belief in a miracle. It
must be more than the private victory of one man to prove that he is God.
No preacher or teacher ever pointed this out to me, but in Paul’s discourse to
the Corinthians on the nature of resurrection, he says something very different
from what most of us hear or expect. Paul writes, “If there is no resurrection
from death, Christ himself cannot have been raised” (1 Corinthians 15:13). He
presents “resurrection” as a universal principle, but most of us only remember
the following verse: “If Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless, and
your faith is useless” (15:14). Verse 14 gives us a good apologetic statement
about Jesus’s resurrection, but the preceding verse strongly implies that the
reason we can trust Jesus’s resurrection is that we can already see resurrection
happening everywhere else. Why didn’t we see that? Maybe it is because only
modern science now makes it apparent?
If the universe is “Christened” from the very beginning, then of course it can
never die forever.
Resurrection is just incarnation taken to its logical conclusion.
If God inhabits matter, then we can naturally believe in the “resurrection” of