The Disturbing Fact of the Resurrection

"The Resurrection", central panel from the Triptych of the Resurrection (c.1485-90) by Hans Memling [WikiArt.org]

The Disturbing Fact of the Resurrection | Bishop Robert Barron | CWR's The Dispatch

If Jesus was not raised from death, Christianity is a fraud and a joke; if he did rise from death, then Christianity is the fullness of God's revelation, and Jesus must be the absolute center of our lives.

The resurrection of Jesus from the dead is the be-all and the end-all of the Christian faith. If Jesus didn't rise from the dead, all bishops, priests, and Christian ministers should go home and get honest jobs, and all the Christian faithful should leave their churches immediately. As Paul himself put it: "If Jesus is not raised from the dead, our preaching is in vain and we are the most pitiable of men." It's no good, of course, trying to explain the resurrection away or rationalize it as a myth, a symbol, or an inner subjective experience. None of that does justice to the novelty and sheer strangeness of the Biblical message.

It comes down finally to this: if Jesus was not raised from death, Christianity is a fraud and a joke; if he did rise from death, then Christianity is the fullness of God's revelation, and Jesus must be the absolute center of our lives. There is no third option.

I want to explore, very briefly, a handful of lessons that follow from the disquieting fact of the Resurrection.

First, this world is not it. What I mean is that this world is not all that there is. We live our lives with the reasonable assumption that the natural world as we've come to know it through the sciences and discern it through common sense is the final framework of our lives and activities. Everything (quite literally, everything) takes place within the theater of our ordinary experience. And one of the most powerful and frightening features of the common-sense world is death. Every living thing dies and stays dead. Indeed, everything in the universe, scientists tell us, comes into being and then fades away permanently.

But what if this is not in fact the case? What if the laws of nature are not as iron-clad as we thought? What if death and dissolution did not have the final say?

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