A Fool's Guide to Resurrection

Easter!  New Life! Spring!  But on April Fool's Day I contend that resurrection is overrated.

At first thought it seems impossible to overrate it. Doesn’t it deal with the one thing that China’s manufacturing, the US military, Microsoft, the United Nations Security Council, Apple or the International Monetary Fund cannot?  Doesn’t it deal with death? When we lay our dear ones in the dust nothing seems more important.  If only mortuaries could be replaced by Resurrection Units!

But what if. 

What if the first human being to conquer death had been Adolf Hitler, emerging victorious from the rubble of his bunker never to die again?  Or you or me?  What would we do with our newly-evident resurrection power?  Do we seriously trust our untrustworthy selves to make resurrection life a virtue?

That’s not all. What is resurrection for?  

Resurrection is not attractive if it reintroduces the resurrectee to illness or further serious injury, to more wars and violence, to other years of heartbreak and despair, to new enemies and more pollution.  A thousand years of hospital appointments has its limitations.  Globally over 100 million people seriously contemplate ending their own lives each year - the very opposite of resurrection. Life is the problem sometimes.

The resonance of Easter with returning spring is both obvious and meaningless.  Yes, the bunnies jump, the daffodils bloom, the birds sing and daylight dissolves the darkness.  But this is life again, not life transformed.

Simply put, resurrection is useless without Jesus.  It had to be him.  It had to be the rebirth of humanity, the new creation beginning on the First Day of a new week.  It had to be life with a Leader, resurrection with a Redeemer, it had to be the Way and the Truth as well as the Life. It had to be the One who could credibly promise a life that would always be worth living!

On a previous day when, one might think, Lazarus became the resurrection and the life as he meets us from his tomb Jesus said it - I AM the resurrection and the life.  And Jesus hadn’t even died yet.