Ramblings on the Resurrection
By Edgar Beltrán
“Jesus thown everything off balance,” the Misfit says in Flannery O’Connor’s story A Good Man Is Hard to Find.
“If He did what He said, then it's nothing for you to do but thow away everything and follow Him, and if He didn't, then it's nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can—by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him. No pleasure but meanness."
In the Misfit’s befouled logic, he is saying the same as St. Paul in the 1st Letters to the Corinthians, “If Christ has not been raised, then empty [too] is our preaching; empty, too, your faith.”
If Jesus did what He said, namely, rising from the dead, there’s no other logical option than to follow Him. But if He’s a fraud, what matters?
—
When I started to take my faith seriously, I was 16 or 17 years old. At the time, I didn't really understand the meaning of the Resurrection. It seemed to me to be just one more miracle among many that Jesus did.
I couldn’t grasp the meaning of St. Paul’s wager in Corinthians.
But I come from Venezuela. I lived my college years in perhaps the worst times in our country in a century. I saw my mother being punched in the face to get some chicken, I had to leave class more than once because the National Guard was throwing tear gas nearby. I saw how the other professor who worked in the same school as me got noticeably thinner because they weren’t lucky enough to have family abroad that could send some money to survive. I endured a 5-day power cut—twice. My grandmother had cancer and we could not find her medicines—friends and acquaintances were tortured, beaten, and raped by National guardsmen for wanting a better country. My father, my brother, half of my extended family, and most of my friends fled the country looking for opportunities that ours didn’t give them.
I don’t want to turn this article into a political manifesto. But as my life went by, reasons for hopelessness mounted.
But the Resurrection told me otherwise.
The Resurrection transforms the world. It makes all things new. The Resurrection means that death, pain, suffering, anguish, are not the sickness unto death, as Jesus would say about Lazarus’ death (and Kierkegaard would then pick up). But, then, Kierkegaard asks, what is the sickness unto death? Despair. Which, in the end, is not to trust in God, not allowing ourselves to be transformed by Him so that finally, we can rest transparently in Him.
But the Resurrection does not take our wounds away. After all, when Christ was resurrected, He bore the wounds of the Cross. Digitum tuum huc et vide manus meas et adfer manum tuam et mitte in latus meum.
If our personal wounds lead us closer to God, and we allow them to be transfigured by Him, will we meet our Lord in heaven with them?
The Cross is not the last word. The Cross is a victory because it points toward the Resurrection. Christ has conquered death and thereby transfigured the world. All is His. “And when I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw everyone to myself” (Jn 12:32-33).
“I could only believe in a God who could dance,” Nietzsche says in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Are we conscious enough of the victory of the Resurrection to the point of spiritually dancing? And we don’t do this because our lives are simple, but because Christ is risen and dwells in us.
Through Christ, we’re called to reconcile what sin turned into a paradox: time and eternity; the sacred and the profane; Heaven and earth.
Only Christ is able to trans-significate death. It is not an ending, it is the beginning of our true calling. We are made for Heaven, but Heaven begins here with the joy of knowing we are loved, redeemed, and resurrected!
And that is what Christ won for us with the Resurrection.
Edgar Beltrán is a Venezuelan philosopher doing a master’s in the philosophy of religion at Radboud University, in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. Follow him on Twitter: @edgarjbb_