The consumerist society in which we live has successfully commercialized religious holidays. This is well known, easily observed, and not a little ink has been spilled reminding us of it. Easter is no exception.

And yet, the blame game where Christians point their accusing fingers at the big-bad secular culture for the ascendance of the Easter bunny each spring rather than the risen Christ is a cop out, a strategic dodge that has become as tired and hollow as its counterpart winter refrain, “Put Christ back into Christmas.” The appropriate response for Christians is not to indict contemporary culture—as if we were not part and beneficiaries of it– but to challenge the Christian community as to why so many of us tend to forget, be indifferent about, or fail to understand not just what Easter celebrates but to what resurrection calls us.

As Christians we have not done an especially good job of teaching that Easter is a season and not merely one (hopefully sunny) day each spring. It is a season that by design is longer than its prefatory season of Lent,[1] emphasizing that the feast is greater than the fast, that Jesus’ lament of agony in the garden, “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death,”[2] or his sense of abandonment on the cross, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?”[3] are superseded by his post-resurrection appearances, oblation “Peace be with you,”[4] and the assurances of “Be not afraid,”[5] and “I am with you always, to the end of time.”[6]

The liturgical calendar is meant to remind us of an undying truth, perhaps the ultimate truth: that despite any appearance or evidence to the contrary, death is neither the largest reality there is nor the final word. Rather the largest reality is love. Only the arms of infinite love are big enough to embrace and disarm death. The resurrection of love in the raising of Jesus has the final say, is the greatest power in the universe and the one enduring truth.

Resurrection: More Than a Season

More urgent than knowing that Easter is a season is the sad truth that saddens too few, namely, that most of us, myself included, are too comfortable to care about Easter resurrection, too privileged to need it, too cowardly to live it, and too safely removed from the exigencies brought on by suffering in its many manifestations to fully grasp it. Most of us intentionally or unconsciously live at a distance from the contemporary crucifixions of poverty or hunger or homelessness or the constant terror of violence and fear of violation or torture or human trafficking or the desecration of the earth and the acceleration of endangered species or war up close and personal.

Instead, from the private liturgies and the front pew that is the comfort of our couch, before we can either look away and shake our heads cringingly or yawn indifferently, we catch glimpses of emaciated, forlorn, forgotten, or terrified people on TV who don’t look like us, and say “change the channel and please pass the chips.”

Easter commemorates resurrection but resurrection means little when we suffer little, remain unmoved by, or removed from the injustices and suffering of others, the agony in the garden that is the earth, and the anguish of the planet which too is the body of Christ. Who needs resurrection when you live on the 66^th floor of a gold-plated ivory tower high above the mayhem and the danger and the fray, or for that matter in our cozy American cul de sacs, suburbs and towns? How can we believe in resurrection, and why should we, when we do everything in our power not to believe in death, when we steer clear of those who are the living reminders that all is not well with the world or with us, when we pull the shade on anything that might disturb us, might remind us of our secret discrepancies, our incompleteness, and our dust to dust mortality?

The transformative power of the resurrection is in reality and necessarily the transformative power of the CROSS and resurrection just as the transformative power of the cross is in reality the transformative power of the cross and RESURRECTION. Some things are so intimately connected that if we were to pull them apart each would no longer be as true or as consequential as it was when joined to the other: grief and praise, spirit and flesh, solitude and solidarity, God and the cosmos, dying and rising.

The paschal mystery in which the Christian life is rooted is neither just the cross nor just the resurrection but both together. It is a twinned mystery or it is not the paschal mystery, not the mystery of the dying and rising of Christ which for Christians is the pattern and promise of our entire lives. If our lives and our spirituality do not consciously hold the blessed tension of cross and resurrection, death and new life, at best they are rendered incomplete, at worst they are exposed as false.

Good Friday without Easter becomes just another cruel and unjust execution whereas Easter without Good Friday is nothing more than a warm-fuzzy, Easter-Lite; an impotent charade masquerading as the Christ-life. The one requires the other in order for the Gospel to contain and offer the transformative power of truth.

For a number of people who dub themselves “recovering Christians”– a plethora of former fundamentalists, evangelicals, main-line Protestants, and Catholics who carry varying degrees of indifference, anger, or wounds from negative religious upbringings, or soft-core atheists, or in-your-face atheists– resurrection is nothing more than a naïve superstition, an intellectual embarrassment, a carrot on a stick, or the fuel of fools.

And still for others for whom resurrection does take on more meaning, it often only does so because of some personal crisis, loss, or brush with death and remains largely a private matter.  

The Fallacy of Private Resurrection

Far be it from me to suggest Easter has no significance for the individual, especially for persons who are suffering or dangling from the bow as the boat is going down. I get it, the sudden urgency and, in the parlance of the day, “a come to Jesus moment.” But it’s still based on a misunderstanding. Any connection of resurrection with salvation in which salvation is debased and shrunk to a personal assurance of an afterlife that is disconnected from one’s responsibility in this life is greatly suspect. Concern for one’s own personal salvation without concern for life’s concentric circles of community, human-generated injustices and suffering, the well-being of the earth, and some compassionate action or justice-work on our part, is a fundamentally flawed understanding of the reign of God, resurrection, and the salvation they point to and embody.

We live in a time when privatized Christianity and its addendum afterlife have cheapened the radical,[7] cosmic nature and earthly implications of the Christ-life by reducing faith to a palsy-walsy me ‘n Jesus affair and by diminishing the resurrection to a get out of jail card we suddenly pull out of a pair of jeans we haven’t worn in forty years as the speech cloud above our head reads, “Just in case.”

One chief problem with a privatized Christianity is that it necessarily reduces Easter to a privatized resurrection. Doing so distorts the gospel, ignores the way of Jesus, neglects his core teaching, namely, the reign of God, renders the resurrection anemic, twists salvation into a narcissistic transaction, leaves us with a puny understanding of who God is, suggests we are free of responsibility for the care of creation, and conceals the wild extravagance of God’s dream for all the living beings of earth.

As Julia Esquivel made clear in her provocative poem “Threatened with Resurrection,” there are no private resurrections. An elementary school teacher turned activist in the 1980’s, Esquivel lived amidst the daily oppression and brutalities in Guatemala’s civil unrest, “exhausted from the endless inventory / of killings since 1954” inflicted upon her people, especially the peasants and indigenous, who began to resist the US backed military regimes who kept the poor disenfranchised and always with us.

In his comments on Esquival’s poem, Parker Palmer writes:

For Esquival, there is no resurrection of isolated individuals. She is simply not concerned about private resurrections, yours or mine or her own. Each of us is resurrected only as we enter into the network of relationships called community, a network that embraces not only living persons but people who have died, and nonhuman creatures as well.[8]

Palmer goes on to say that for Esquivel resurrection only has personal significance if the person is understood as a communal being and if resurrection flowers as a corporate, social, and political event “in which justice and truth and love come to fruition.”[9] Those who think of resurrection as an eschatological reality that only applies to the afterlife usually live in the luxury afforded by power, privilege, and protection that keeps them at a safe distance from daily threats to their lives where, for so many others who suffer unnecessarily and unjustly, the yearning for resurrection is born and becomes their daily bread and their unholy communion.[10]

The resurrection as an eschatological promise activates ultimate and transcendent meaning. But we would do well to unlearn the idea that it refers only or primarily to time, or time after time called heaven or eternity. Eternity is not what will be bye and bye but what will be, is, and always was in the mind of God who is boundless love. For those who have eyes to see let them see. Resurrection eyes open not so much to a far off, endless future but to the fullness of life in which time as the primary category of meaning is replaced by the lavishness of infinite love as the one, defining, and ultimate reality. It is as true now as in the not now. It is not time that is resurrected after death but love.

Resurrection as a Conscious Practice

Resurrection is not merely or even mainly a doctrinal tenet demanding intellectual assent. It is instead a God-imagined mystery we are invited to participate in, namely the unexpected overturning of death by life through the subversive power of love. It is an incarnated and subversive mystery inviting faith, a faith evoking action, an action eliciting hope, and a hope engendering new life, the ripeness of justice, and the fruition of love. Not only is resurrection not limited to the afterlife, it is in fact our earthly vocation and mission. Kentucky poet-farmer Wendell Berry has it right when in the last line of a poem he charges us to “practice resurrection.”[11]

Avoiding the mistake of putting resurrection out to pasture until after death, to practice resurrection means to refuse to let go of the blessed tension that unites it to the cross and to insist that the cross which Jesus died on and that is the central symbol of the Christian life be connected to the crucifixions that are occurring right now, right here, in our day if we but have the eyes and heart to see them.

If resurrection means to be raised up then to practice resurrection means to pay attention, to be on the lookout for, to be concerned about, to go be with, and to compassionately respond to the down and out, the crestfallen, the pressed down, the bottomed out, those who have been laid low and run down not only by the arbitrary and precarious realities of life but more so by the not so random acts of unkindness, human selfishness, indifference, callousness, injustice, exploitation, and violence. Those persons who consciously practice resurrection are more not less aware of dying and death, more not less concerned about the downtrodden and the prevalence and presence of unjust suffering.

Resurrection signals the deepest desire of God’s heart– the fullness of life and love when all will be one. But for humans it must be practiced again and again. It is not an art easily mastered. I resonate with Peter Rollins’ honesty about how difficult it is, requiring intentionality and courage. He writes:

Without equivocation or hesitation I fully and completely admit that I deny the resurrection of Christ…. I deny the resurrection of Christ every time I do not serve at the feet of the oppressed, each day that I turn my back on the poor; I deny the resurrection of Christ when I close my ears to the cries of the downtrodden and lend my support to an unjust and corrupt system.

However there are moments when I affirm that resurrection, few and far between as they are. I affirm it when I stand up for those who are forced to live on their knees, when I speak for those who have had their tongues torn out, when I cry for those who have no more tears left to shed.[12]

The paschal mystery, played out in Jesus being raised from the dead after being tortured and executed, subverts the modus operandi of the powers and principalities not only of Jesus’ day but also of our own which favors the proprietors of the dominant culture while neglecting, desecrating, or exploiting the most vulnerable for whom a reversal of fortune as expressed and experienced in the resurrection is in fact not just the good news but the greatest news.

Resurrection as the Radical Imperative of Love

The reign of God is especially oriented toward the least of these, the least protected and the most vulnerable to systemic injustice, the abuse and imbalance of power, human greed and self-interest. In the bible these persons are referred to as the anawim, those bent low by the circumstances of life and human caused oppression. They are not hard to see if one takes the time to look. They are always the ones pushed down, shoved out, rendered invisible, forgotten, or excluded. So practicing resurrection is the radical imperative to lift up, welcome, notice and behold, re-member ourselves to, and include. It is an act of resistance against any person or power where life is threatened, demeaned, or cast down.

While the Church has emphasized that the resurrection of Jesus is central to the Gospel and a core belief of the Christian faith, it has failed, by and large, to connect the event of Jesus’ resurrection to a particular vision of life and a tangible way of being in this world here and now. Rather than placating and insulting persons who are suffering needlessly on earth with thoughts of a pie-in-the-sky heaven and an afterlife where all will be wonderful and well, resurrection calls us to promote, work, and sacrifice now for a life that begins to make real the beatific life on earth as it is in heaven. We have allowed resurrection as a cause for hope later to excuse us from resurrection as a call to action here and now. It is the human practice of resurrection, the incarnation of resurrection now, not human misery and human-generated affliction, that gives people a taste and desire for resurrection for all creatures for all time.

The outstretched arms of Christ on the cross hold and take with him to death everything that is wrong in the world, everything that is awry in us, every contradiction of how things are supposed to be, every violation of our own or other person’s divinely-infused humanity, and the ungrateful disregard for and the arrogant desecration of the whole earth community. Resurrection is not the defeat of death by a more powerful form of killing, but by the transformation of death in and through the vulnerability of God, the extravagance of love incarnated by Jesus, and the audacity and graced courage that enables us to practice daily, not-so-random acts of kindness, compassion, and love.

Death is not eradicated by a bigger death any more than violence is abolished by a more forceful violence. Death is transfigured by the tender, all-encompassing embrace of infinite love like a mother holding her screaming, crying, kicking, upset child, first restraining by holding close, then communicating with her body not a more dominant force but a disarming reassurance, shushing with a deep affection, drawing out and absorbing the chaos of the little one until the now soothed child, calmed and confident in its mother’s embodied love can trust, receive, and be transformed by it. Is this not the same embrace of grace that transfigured the wayward son in the mercy arms of the prodigal father?

Conclusion

Resurrection is not a theological contrivance to evade the harsh, invasive reality of dying and death or a cheap fantasy of better days in an eternal yonder to placate the pain of those who suffer unjustly here on earth. Resurrection is the glorious mystery where the past and the future embrace in the unvarnished lived reality of the present. It is the wild pleasure of God’s imagination, the last laugh, a way of life emulated by Jesus, the final word which is the self-gift and communal enactment of agapic love.

To practice resurrection means to see the world from a divine perspective. It is a conscious, daily practice of resisting anyone or anything that desecrates human persons, other-than-human-creatures, or the good earth which through God’s grace sustains us. It is the conscious choice and the compassionate action to lift up those who have fallen or have been cruelly laid low, and to work to eliminate the causes of such unjust burdens. To practice resurrection is to entrust oneself to the audacity of Divine love, to the capacity of God to generate life from death, and to the tenacity of hope that God is making all things new.⊕

 

[1] Depending whether you count Lent from Ash Wednesday or the First Sunday of Lent to the Holy Thursday service that begins Triduum, Lent is either 40 or 44 days. Easter begins on a Sunday and ends 50 days later on the Feast of Pentecost.

[2] Mark 14: 34, Matthew 26: 38

[3] Mark 15: 34, Matthew 27: 46

[4] Luke 24: 36, John 20: 20-21

[5] Matthew 28:10

[6] Matthew 28: 20

[7] From the Latin radix, meaning root.

[8] The Active Life: A Spirituality of Work, Creativity, and Caring, p. 152.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Eschatology is the study or discourse of the last things, for example, death, judgment, an afterlife.

[11] “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front.”

[12] I’m not sure of the citation.