I am the resurrection and the life. Anyone who believes in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing in Me will never die. Do you believe this? – Jesus (John 11:25-26)
The concept of resurrection is central to faith in Jesus Christ as the Messiah of God. We say that Jesus lived, taught God’s truth, died on the cross, and rose to life in victory over sin and death before ascending to the Father. Paul points out that just as Jesus was raised to life from death, all who believe in Him will also be raised to life after death (1 Corinthians 15:12-32). In another place, he writes that we all long “to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling” (2 Corinthians 5:4).
I’d like to hear from folks on what resurrection means to you.
- do you believe in the resurrection or not? why?
- how does Jesus’ resurrection from the dead change the way you live now and how you view death?
- if there was no resurrection, what would it mean?
Talk amongst yourselves…
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Matthew Erickson 
– Yes, nothing makes sense if you don’t believe it.
– If I believe it, I must change my life and live according to Jesus’ teachings. Death is still very freaky, but I’m not really scared of it. I’m actually more scared of not being more useful to God while I’m here on this earth. Not in a “I need to do good works” way, just a “I want to be a part of as much of His plan that I can” way.
– Everything would be different. Would Jesus’ teachings still be relevant? Are we still waiting for our savior? It’d be a mess.
This discussion reminds me of the movie “The Passion of the Christ” and its portrayal of Christ. Much of the movie is focused on his pain, and while it was a great view and helped me understand the pain, I was waiting the whole movie for the most important part. I had to resist the urge to cheer when Christ is resurrected and overcomes death. Isn’t that the point of the whole movie? We see our “hero” beaten down, persecuted, but in the end he triumphs just as predicted. And with his triumph he brings the most amazing victory party we could ever imagine. I know that movie was somber, but I walked out of there with a smile, not because of cinematic genius, but because of the awesomeness of God, the sacrifice of Jesus and what the resurrection means to us every day of our lives.
Sam, thanks for the comments. I agree with you that everything would be different and it should impact the way we live.
I especially appreciated your comments about the power and joy of the resurrection while talking about “The Passion of the Christ.” Clearly, that movie was focused on the ‘passion’ of holy week up to the resurrection. What is harder for us to understand or conceive of is the resurrection of Christ. We wonder: “is He the same or different? why do people both not recognize Him and recognize Him after the resurrection?” It’s hard to convey visibly because we have never seen anything, rather, anyone like that.
But the bottom line is that the joy and victory that Christ won should put a smile on our faces!
“The gospel is not a recommendation or command or exhortation to love people more. It is not a recommendation or command or exhortation at all. It is news, good news- the news that we are loved, not simply by this or that person (though that is always reassuring), but fundamentally loved, that the basic thing about us is that we are loved. And this news is not simply told to us as a piece of information, a theory about us we might verify; the fat of our being loved is communicated to us. This is what we mean by our having faith. To have faith is just to know that the ultimately true thing about you, the deepest irreducible fact about you is that you are loved. This is what Christians mean by believing in God. ‘I believe in God,’ for a Christian means ‘I believe that the life and death of Jesus Christ made sense.’ Let me spell that out a little.
Jesus accepted people. That’s what made him attractive to them. Of course all your friends accept you. That is what you mean by calling them friends. You can relax, be at ease in their company; no need to defend yourself against them; no need to be always impressing them; you can be liberated by their presence. Now the presence of Jesus clearly worked that way, except much more so. In his presence, in his bodily presence, people felt a depth of liberation, so profound that they called it the forgiveness of sin. They felt freed for the first time from the constriction of the sin of the world. They were liberated and able to see themselves, able to admit to being what they were. This is what we mean by the confession of sin. It is not something we do so that God will forgive us in return. It is something we do because we know that God loves us. We can risk even the truth about ourselves. Confessing your sins is really just another way of saying you believe in God. Indeed, in the earliest texts the sinner’s confession always means his or her praise and acknowledgment of the love of God.
Now the kind of acceptance Jesus offered created around him a commune of people who were liberated, able to love one another, able to accept one another. There are many things to be said about this little group, but one of the most obvious things is that it posed a threat to the established society– whether the Roman colonial set-up or the established religion. It was bound to pose a threat to any society based on less than love. This is why Jesus had to be destroyed. He was not killed by accident, nor was he murdered by a chance meeting with individually wicked men. The people who killed him, both the chief priest and the Roman colonial authorities, in their different ways had a point. He was subversive, not so much because of a theory he preached (though his preaching was deeply disrespectful especially of the priests), but because of what he had created simply by being around the place. Jesus posed a political threat not by being a politician but by making people secure, by crating a kind of relationship that couldn’t be accommodated within a society ultimately based on domination and fear…
The need to kill Jesus showed up the Palestinian society for what it was. But, more than that, it showed up the human race for what it was. For what was being offered in Jesus was not just a kind of friendship, not just a limited sort of love, but the love which is the meaning of all human existence. To believe that Jesus is of God is to believe that, in rejecting him, people are making the most ultimate kind of rejection, the final contradiction of themselves. The crucifixion is not just one more case of a particular society showing its inhumanity. It is the whole human race showing its rejection of itself. The resurrection is the Father’s refusal to accept this self-rejection of man.”
-Herbert McCabe, “God Still Matters” p175-176
Matt, thanks for sharing this extended quotation from McCabe. In it, I see the trajectory of the gospel toward creating a good community that is both revolutionary and liberating around Christ.
Wonderful words!