Hoping in Resurrection

The Easter season is all about celebrating God’s love for us displayed through Jesus’ victorious resurrection from the dead, the “firstfruits” of the resurrection that is promised to us all (1 Cor. 15.23). Reflecting on my own life, I worry too often this celebration has a hollowness to it. Resurrection sounds wonderful, but feels far off and without any clear relation to the here and now.

In a recent essay for The Atlantic, Tim Keller has described how his diagnosis with cancer transformed his ideas about dying from a distant idea to a reality felt in the heart. Suddenly, belief in resurrection didn’t seem like some far off notion, for without it his cancer really will have the last word. Keller writes, “Theoretical ideas about God’s love and the future resurrection had to become life-gripping truths, or be discarded as useless.” Too often debates about what we believe as Christians concern stale formula which have lost their concrete practicality. By re-centering our questions on hope, we have a chance to transcend the old binary of belief and action, for hope is a belief that shapes our action, an act of faith that orients our believing.

What many of us really want to know is not whether love (in the abstract) can triumph over suffering (in the abstract), but whether there is someone who loves me in the here and now that can triumph over my suffering. To put it another way, did God do something after Jesus died on the cross that gives us reasons today to believe that God will do something for us too? … Even if the resurrection remains a mystery we cannot fully comprehend or agree on the details, it is the conviction that God has triumphed in Jesus that assures us God can triumph in us. … We can believe that love triumphs because love already has. Jesus was dead and now he is risen, risen indeed! The same God who raised this Jesus from the dead will give life to our mortal bodies and our sin-broken souls.

If we’re to hope that the future will bring something other than humanity’s self-destruction, it needs to be a hope that saves us from ourselves. We need a hope that is not merely an abstraction about love, because abstractions cannot love us back or act for us. We need a hope that someone will always love us, even when we’re unlovely; and that this someone who always loves us will risk everything, even the cross, to bring us “life and life to the full” (John 10.10).

Michael Fitzpatrick welcomes comments and questions via m.c.fitzpatrick@outlook.com

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