An Early Resurrection

by Adam S. Miller

The Book of Mormon unlocks the Bible by making Christ plain.

This is what’s different about Nephite Christianity: they lived in Christ before Christ came. They lived Christ’s future in their present.

This is what the Book of Mormon makes plain: to live a Christian life is to live in Christ as if he were already present.

I have to learn how to share my life with Christ in the present.

as I worked at this, something else happened. Christ, like a thief in the night, came when I wasn’t looking (cf. 1 Thessalonians 5:2). Before I was ready, he broke into the present and claimed me as his own. Christ, the life of the world, showed up, unannounced, in the daily living of my ordinary life. I discovered Christ in the same way an old fish finally discovers water: not in a supernatural vision but in a revelation of the bare, God-given fact that I could see anything at all.

In Christ, it’s possible to die while you’re still alive. And having died early, it’s possible for your resurrection to begin before you’ve even left this world. In Christ, time’s grip loosens and things start happening out of order. This is what a Christian life looks like: you’re born, you’re buried with Christ, your resurrection begins, and then you die. If Christ has his way, we’ll all die before we’re dead and every one of us will yield our lives, here and now, to an early resurrection.

Life in Christ is like this. In Christ, the way I live—my manner of living—is changed from the inside out. Like being in love, living in Christ changes what it means to be alive. Living in Christ, I carry myself differently. I desire differently. I love differently. I greet pain and loss differently. I fail differently. I succeed differently. I part with the past differently. I respond to the present differently. I look to the future differently. In Christ, I hold time itself in a very different way.

To live a different kind of life in Christ is to live time itself in a different way. Living in Christ, I discover a new way of being in time. In Christ, I repent. The past no longer owns me, the present isn’t held at arm’s length, and the future stops undermining me. Instead of waiting for Christ, I find that Christ is already given. I wake up to discover what was true all along, that Christ is “not far from every of one of us: for in him we live, and move, and have our being” (Acts 17:27–28).

The difference between being alive and being alive in Christ is like the difference between seeing things in the light and seeing the light that lets me see things.

Christ, as the light of the world, is hidden in plain sight.

It takes root when I feel Christ in the same way I feel, without thinking, which direction is up or whether ice is cold. It happens when I feel Christ immediately, viscerally, a notch or two deeper than my mind.

Living in Christ, I become sensitive to the feel of life, to the feel of the Spirit, as it passes through my body. This feeling is both familiar and strange. It is both ordinary and divine. As Parley Pratt describes it, Spirit has just this effect. It resurrects my flesh, clears my mind, and opens my senses:

types open a door to a new way of handling time.

With the sacrament each week, we anticipate in miniature the presence of God at that great wedding feast, the messianic banquet, promised at the end of time when “in this mountain shall the Lord of hosts make unto all people a feast of fat things,” when “he will swallow up death in victory; and the Lord God will wipe away tears from off all faces” (Isaiah 25:6, 8).

Repentance, rather than being a name for how Christ was already at work in my life, already empowering and redeeming me, just felt like a form of court-mandated punishment.

Shame and fear—unlike weakness, failure, and responsibility—are not part of a life in Christ.

desire must learn to look forward to Christ as though he had already come. In Christ, I can both feel desire and be at peace. I can be alive and enter the rest of the Lord. I can live both the present and the future. When I live my desires as types of Christ, there is a perfect calm at the heart of those desires, a deep stillness at the center of my striving. This stillness isn’t afraid and it isn’t guilty. It isn’t scared about how things will turn out and it isn’t ashamed about what I lack. By fulfilling the law, Christ forever changes my relationship to the law. And by fulfilling desire, Christ forever changes my relationship to my desires.

A loveless law is a broken law. A loveless law is a law incapable of mercy or justice. A loveless law is an occasion for selfishness, pride, and hypocrisy.

Love is a useful measure for distinguishing guilt from responsibility. Guilt is about me. It centers me on myself and weakens my power to care for myself and for other people. But responsibility faces the opposite direction. Responsibility is an act of love. It recognizes wrongdoing and repents of it. But rather than acting penitent out of fear or shame, it lets those self-centered feelings be crucified with Christ. Then, alive in Christ rather than in myself, I become capable of responding—even to my own weakness—with love.

The gospel is a promise and God’s promises aren’t bound by time. Promises defy time. They bring the future into the present. Promises are a certain way of looking forward. When I promised myself to my wife, I didn’t just bind myself to her in the present. I gave her my future. Without waiting for that future to arrive, without waiting to see what sorrows or joys would come, I promised. Dressed in white, we knelt at an altar in the temple and joined hands. We were terribly young. The mirrors, set face to face, reflected endless futures at which we couldn’t guess. Still, I loved her. I gave her all those futures as a gift. And we kissed. Now, promised to each other and sealed by a holy ordinance, we live as though those futures had already come. Now, in a very real way, our futures are already given as gifts in the present. And, now, we’re empowered by those promises to love each other in the present.

Baptism is the mold into which my repentance is poured. It

The gift of the Spirit is a kind of down payment on eternal life.

“He which stablisheth us with you in Christ,” Paul says, “and hath anointed us, is God; who hath also sealed us, and given the earnest of the Spirit in our hearts” (2 Corinthians 1:21–22, emphasis added). The gift of the Spirit, Paul says, is like the “earnest” money that seals an agreement (like a down payment on a new home) and makes that promise binding. By superimposing a life in God’s presence onto these mortal bodies, the Spirit seals God’s promise and makes that promise binding. The Spirit is God’s way of giving right now what he has also promised to give later: a life with him.

It’s not easy being part of the body of Christ. Christ is vulnerable. He can be hurt. Like God, he can weep. Whatever it may mean for the Father and the Son to be all-powerful, it clearly includes the power to “shed forth their tears as the rain upon the mountains” (Moses 7:28). It includes the power to suffer, to endure loss and catastrophe and disappointment and still be God. As Christ showed Enoch—to Enoch’s astonishment—“the God of heaven looked upon the residue of the people, and he wept” (v. 28). God wept because he commanded his children that “they should love one another, and that they should choose me, their Father; but behold, they are without affection, and they hate their own blood” (v. 33). God was wounded by his love for a people that had none.

If we confess that God is all powerful, then traditional ideas about his omnipotence don’t go nearly far enough. They limit that power. They allow for God to have only one kind of power, the power to act. But they deny him what Enoch’s vision reveals: that God also possesses the power to be acted upon. Christ, empowered by love, is capable of suffering. He is capable of loss. He is capable of sorrow. He can mourn. The world thinks that this kind of power is just weakness, but they’re wrong. “The world, because of their iniquity, shall judge him to be a thing of naught; wherefore they scourge him, and he suffereth it; and they smite him, and he suffereth it. Yea, they spit upon him, and he suffereth it, because of his loving kindness and his long-suffering towards the children of men” (1 Nephi 19:9). This power to be acted upon by life and time and choice—this power to “long-suffer”—is another name for Christ’s power to care.

Let’s use the word care (echoing the Latin word caritas for “charity”) to name Christ’s way of handling time. Let’s use it to name his way of handling sickness and loss and sin and death. Care, let’s say, is a name for that pure love of Christ (cf. 1 Corinthians 13:4–8). Care suffers long, is kind, envies not, and is not puffed up. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, and endures all things. It makes justice possible. It never fails. Though everything else passes away, care continues. And it continues because care is Christ’s response to the world’s continual passing away.

It’s tempting to think that my present weakness makes me fundamentally different from Christ. And then, as a result, it’s tempting to think that such weakness must be incompatible with Christ’s divine strength. If this is true, then, to be like Christ, I would have to be untroubled by time and untouched by cares. I would have to avoid suffering rather than caring for it. But this is backwards. Christ’s strength doesn’t simply rescue me from my weakness and vulnerability. As I’ve argued, it seems clear that his strength doesn’t even save him from his own power to be acted upon. Christ is strong enough to be vulnerable. Similarly, my weakness leaves me exposed to Christ, vulnerable to his care, and open to sharing a life with him. This weakness is the ground we share. It’s the ground of life. It’s ground zero for God’s promise. Without this weakness, I wouldn’t need him. I’d be walled up, alone, inside my own perfect strength.

Christ has no interest in giving or preserving my petty flaws or moral failings. He aims—as I must—to fulfill the law. But Christ does want to both give and preserve a primal kind of vulnerability that will leave me open to life and responsive to his love.

When I accept Christ as my master, I die early and time’s polarity gets reversed. Rather than always being attracted to the future, time becomes full and the present becomes magnetic. Drawn by the pull of the present into the thick of life, I’m resurrected early. But when I’m absorbed in caring for this present world, time doesn’t go away. Goals don’t go away. Desires don’t go away. The future doesn’t go away. The law doesn’t go away. They all remain in play. In the present, I care for time, I don’t escape it. But now, rather than being idols, all these things become types. I still have goals, but I don’t put my trust in them. These goals become types. I still have desires, but I don’t put my trust in them. These desires become types. I still keep the law, but I don’t put my trust in the law. I put my trust in Christ.

Every day I ask the world to give me something that it can’t. I ask my wife to make me feel happy. I ask my work to make me feel loved. I ask my car or my house or my clothes to give me peace. I ask a movie or a football game to make life feel exciting and meaningful. I ask the church to be what I think it ought to be. And when this doesn’t work, I get bitter and go looking for something else that might have what I want. I invest some new thing with the hope that, when I get it, it could make me happy. This, though, is cruel and unfair. It’s cruel because peace and happiness aren’t even the kind of thing that the world, however willing, could give. Peace and happiness simply aren’t, at bottom, a function of the world being a certain way. They are a function of my relating to the world in a certain way. They’re a function of my caring for the world in a certain way. And when I put my trust in Christ—when I consecrate my time and treat my goals and desires as types—then I find that peace and happiness and love are already given, in plain view, in the ongoing work of caring for the world.

This is a different kind of life. In Christ, I still have goals, but, practicing care, I don’t do the work for the sake of these goals. I do the work for Christ. I do the work for its own sake. I learn to love the work. I still have goals, but these goals don’t own me. They don’t control me. They don’t master me. I don’t pin my happiness on achieving them. Christ is my master. And then, free from the tyranny of these goals, attentive to the work, the work itself improves. I become more patient and skillful, and success becomes more likely. No longer worshipping success, I’m more likely to succeed. But even if I fail—as I consistently will—the work will have been worth doing for its own sake.

This is what it means to love someone: their obvious weakness cannot stop me from seeing their present perfection.

If I’ve chosen the future over the present, then I’ll be tempted to use that future to judge the present. I’ll be tempted to use that future to decide who’s worthy of my care and attention and who isn’t. Those who get in the way of that future are my enemies. Those who can help me secure that future are my friends. But, if I’ve chosen to let my future die and, now, live in Christ, then I won’t be able to carve up the world this way. I will see only one category: those who need care. Friend or enemy, helpful to my future or not, everyone will show up as needing me to bless them and care for them.

This is the whole thing in a nutshell. This is the gospel in one sentence!!!