Resurrection
He is Risen!
The other day, I watched an interview with someone who used to be an evangelical New Testament scholar who is now an agnostic/atheist New Testament scholar (Bart Erhman). He doesn’t really believe in God anymore.
The fear many people have is that there’s a slippery slope of knowledge that causes people to not believe in miracles or in God. What Ehrman explained is that for him it was the problem of suffering.
I’ve heard that a lot from people over the years. Youth struggle a lot with it, and even children stop believing in God because they cannot believe in a God who has the power to end suffering but doesn’t.
If you’ve followed my writing over the years, you know that I question just about everything. Oddly, I have rarely spent more than a few minutes here and there questioning the existence of God. This is because I always come back to the same thing: I believe in the resurrection.
Years ago, I realized that this was a choice that I made. I can’t prove the resurrection. I understand that it’s irrational and impossible.
I take it on faith and faith alone that Jesus actually died, was buried, and rose again on the third day (even though it was only two days later the way we measure days, two sunsets happened in between, so it was the third day).
Why?
In a weird way, I see resurrection almost as a law of the universe, like thermodynamics or gravity. It just is.
Once I accepted it as such, I began to see it everywhere. Not bodily resurrection, of course - I don’t see dead people or anything - but life from death.
Maybe it’s backward, but I suppose I believe that Jesus rose from the dead because I believe in a God that is always bringing forth life. I believe in a God that has power over death.
Then why do we die? Why is there suffering? Because God is not the only force at work in the world.
In my tradition (United Methodist), we refer to the “spiritual forces of wickedness” in our baptismal liturgy and for me, that’s the only way it works. We cannot have a loving, all-powerful God who is always pushing forth life that coexists with suffering unless there is also something working in opposition to that God.
We don’t like to talk about such things. I know it sounds superstitious or primitive, but why? Why is it so hard to believe that evil exists?
The story of the resurrection tells us that evil can be conquered. There is hope in the darkest suffering that God is working, even when we cannot see it, even when we may not experience it. We may die in our suffering but death is not the end, not because we will go to heaven, but because God will make all things new.