Christchurch Parish News, April 2020
What is the one thing upon which you base everything else in your life?
For example, in recent times, human rights have increasingly become the basis by which many of us try to order our lives, both as individuals and as societies.
Explaining on what grounds we hold such rights to be true, however, is no straightforward task.
The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, published in 1948, attempts to do this by stating in its very first article, ‘All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.’ From this statement flows all the subsequent rights that the declaration lists, including the right to freedom of movement, medical care and education (Articles 13, 25 & 26).
But this first article of the declaration is not itself an explanation. Rather, it is the premise which underpins all that follows. It does not, nor can it, prove itself. If asked to give justification for declaring that everybody is equal in dignity and rights, we might find ourselves echoing the founding fathers of the United States, and simply say that ‘we hold these truths to be self-evident’ (The Declaration of Independence, 1776).
That’s an example of an idea being a foundation by which to live. But that’s not the only kind of foundation to be had. For my part, the one I’m trying to learn to live by, however imperfectly, is not a concept or abstract idea at all. Instead, it’s an event: the resurrection of Jesus.
I didn’t have anything to do with the church growing up. It was only in my mid-twenties, whilst living in Japan for a couple of years, that I started to consider the foundational truths of Christianity more seriously. I was living and working with descendants of the Japanese Christians who had been persecuted by the feudal lord, Hideyoshi in the 16th century. Many of my colleagues’ ancestors— known as the hidden Christians—had chosen to die rather than deny the foundational truths of the faith. Amongst these truths, the resurrection of Jesus is pivotal. For me, it has become the fundamental. An event which, if true, changes everything.
It changes everything because, for starters, it means that what Jesus taught is true. It is, if you like, the vindication by God of everything Jesus told us about how we are to live. Living downstream of this teaching, as we do, we take it as obvious that we should care for the poor, vulnerable and marginal. But historically, and certainly in Jesus’ day, it was far from self-evident.
But Jesus’ love for those on the edge was not merely the passing aspiration of a first century carpenter. Nor was it a contingent, fleeting moment of lofty idealism when Jesus turned to his disciples and told them to ‘Love your enemies and pray for your persecutors’ (Matt 5:44). Instead, such teaching was the revelation of God, whom Jesus addressed as Father, and who called Jesus his Son.
But we have no reason to take any of this seriously or believe the teachings to be true if it were not for the event of the resurrection. Without it, these words of a thirty-something tradesman in a peripheral province of the Roman Empire would have vanished without trace. But within 300 years, the morals and ethics of that same empire had been overturned as, one by one, people found the resurrection of Jesus to be true and life-transforming.
Understood as such, the resurrection is the epicentre. From that moment, we can work backwards, paying primary attention to what is, as it were, on the other side of the coin of Jesus’ resurrection: his shameful state execution by crucifixion. Literally thousands of his compatriots were crucified by the Roman authorities in the first couple of decades of the first century AD. But we focus on Jesus’ crucifixion because it did not mark his end, contrary to the reasonable expectations of the authorities.
Instead, it turned out to be the means by which God defeated the very Powers and Principalities of this world that are opposed to His wholly good intentions for creation’s flourishing. Such claims are ludicrous to make were it not for the resurrection of Jesus on the third day.
Working back further still, we come to Jesus’ birth. If it were not for Jesus’ resurrection, we would not celebrate his birth. Without the resurrection, there would be no Christmas, for there would be no reason to believe that God is with us. In a world of such suffering and pain, then as now, the brutality of a state execution being overturned by the risen life of the one that was unjustly executed brings us the comfort and security of knowing that God is with us, both in the moment of death—however abject that moment may be—and, crucially, thereafter.
But if the resurrection did not happen, what grounds do we have for believing that God was and is with us? Discounting the resurrection, we may still say that nonetheless we feel it in our hearts, that we know that God is love and is with us. But where do these ideas come from? They come from those who were disciples of Jesus, people like John, who remembered and bore witness to what Jesus did and said. Why did they remember and hold these things to be true and of such importance? Because they had encountered the risen Christ and they knew that in the light of his resurrection everything had changed.
Moving beyond the birth of Jesus, we come to the story of Israel, for, as Robert Jenson writes, ‘God is whoever raised Jesus from the dead, having before raised Israel from Egypt.’ God is the one who always raises. Jesus is the fulfilment of the story that begins with the call of Abraham, which follows the people of Israel into slavery in Egypt, then to freedom in the promised land, and later into exile in Babylon in the 6th BC. On their return from Babylon, the Israelites wait expectantly for everything to be made right by God. Some of them start to look ahead to something they refer to as the resurrection, but it’s something they anticipate the just God of Israel will only bring about at the end of the age; and then, when it does happen, it will happen to all of creation at the same time.
But instead, with Jesus, it happens to one person in the middle of things. This event is the epicentre of space and time (and remember that when we speak of Jesus’ resurrection, it is inseparable from his crucifixion). With it, not only does the new creation begin, overlapping and interfusing with our creation, but also the crucified and resurrected Jesus is revealed to be the fulfilment of humanity.
Why does this matter? Simply put, Jesus is the One in whose image we are made. Come the resurrection of all creation at the end of the age, what we see that has happened to Jesus will happen to all of creation.
In Jesus’ resurrection, we look back and see our future.
But none of this is self-evident. Far from it! Even for those who had lived and walked with Jesus and heard his teaching and watched his healings. They did not get it. Nor did they get it when Jesus was crucified. They betrayed him and fled. They didn’t even get it when he rose from the dead. As John Behr observes, Jesus’ resurrection was not self-evident to those walking on their way to Emmaus. They didn’t realise it was him! They’d heard the stories but they didn’t understand. Nor did Paul on his way to Damascus where he was intent on persecuting Christians.
But having encountered the risen Jesus, they all came to understand, by the power of the Holy Spirit, how His resurrection changes everything. For them, for the apostles, and for all the Christians around the world across the millennia since, it became the foundation by which they lived their lives.
We can’t prove the resurrection happened, though if it didn’t, we would have to make several large leaps of faith to accept that all that occurred thereafter was based on a falsehood—including those who gave their lives willingly rather than deny Jesus’ resurrection and lordship, not to mention who cared for the poor and sick, risking their lives to save others when others wouldn’t, saying the reason why they did it was because of Jesus. They knew that, in the light of the resurrection, their lives were not limited by their deaths and, accordingly, they could live differently in the here and now.
Nor can we go deeper than the resurrection, offering up a theory which explains it satisfactorily to the passing fashions of the modern mind. As the ethicist Stanley Hauerwas says, if you need a theory to worship Jesus Christ as Lord, worship that theory, not Jesus Christ—similarly, if you need a theory to believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, believe in that theory, not the resurrection.
To return to the question I began with: what’s the one thing upon which we base everything else in our lives? We all live by something that we can’t ultimately prove. It’s simply a question of which foundation it is going to be.
As we enter the final week of Easter and beyond, I pray that guided by the Holy Spirit, the resurrection of Jesus will be our foundation.