The resurrection is, so to speak, the alpha and omega of the Christian doctrine of salvation: it stands not only at the end of our earthly life, but equally so at the beginning, in the liturgy of the baptism, considered as a first death and symbolised as such by immersion in water, and as a first entrance to true life, one of a community wedded as individuals to eternity. This cannot be emphasised too much: that it is not merely the soul that is resuscitated, but the ‘soul-body’ in its entirety; and therefore the individual. When Jesus reappears to his disciples after his death, he suggests –
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