by Richard Rohr
Once I know that all suffering is both our suffering and God’s suffering, I can better endure and trust the desolations and disappointments that come my way. I can live with fewer comforts and conveniences when I see my part in global warming. I can speak with a soft and trusting voice in the public domain if doing so will help lessen human hatred and mistrust. I can stop circling the wagons around my own group, if doing so will help us recognize our common humanity.
If I can recognize that all suffering and crucifixion (divine, planetary, human, animal) is “one body” and will one day be transmuted into the “one body” of cosmic resurrection (Philippians 3:21), I can at least live without going crazy or being permanently depressed. In this same passage, Paul goes on in this verse to say that “God will do this by the same power [‘operation’ or ‘energy’] by which he is transforming the whole universe.” It is all one continuous movement for him. We must point out these almost hidden but fully corporate understandings in Paul, since most Western dualistic minds have been preconditioned to read his letters in a purely anthropocentric and individualistic way. This is neither good nor new. It is the same old story line of secular society with some religious frosting on top.
Our full “Christ Option”—and it is indeed a free choice to jump on board—offers us so much that is both good and new—a God who is in total solidarity with all of us at every stage of the journey, and who will get us all to our destination together in love.
It is no longer about being correct. It is about being connected. Being in right relationship is much, much better than just trying to be “right.”
* See Krister Stendahl, “The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West.” The Harvard Theological Review 56, no. 3 (1963): 199–215.
14
The Resurrection Journey
Everything will be all right in the end. If it’s not all right, it is not yet the end.
—The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
We’ve been talking about how suffering and sadness can take on a positive meaning when we shift to a “one-lump” view of reality. But if all of us are one in suffering, wouldn’t we also need to say that we’re one in life too? In this chapter I want to enlarge your view of resurrection—from a one-time miracle in the life of Jesus that asks for assent and belief, to a pattern of creation that has always been true, and that invites us to much more than belief in a miracle. It must be more than the private victory of one man to prove that he is God.
No preacher or teacher ever pointed this out to me, but in Paul’s discourse to the Corinthians on the nature of resurrection, he says something very different from what most of us hear or expect. Paul writes, “If there is no resurrection from death, Christ himself cannot have been raised” (1 Corinthians 15:13). He presents “resurrection” as a universal principle, but most of us only remember the following verse: “If Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless, and your faith is useless” (15:14). Verse 14 gives us a good apologetic statement about Jesus’s resurrection, but the preceding verse strongly implies that the reason we can trust Jesus’s resurrection is that we can already see resurrection happening everywhere else. Why didn’t we see that? Maybe it is because only modern science now makes it apparent?
If the universe is “Christened” from the very beginning, then of course it can never die forever.
Resurrection is just incarnation taken to its logical conclusion.
If God inhabits matter, then we can naturally believe in the “resurrection” of the body.
Most simply said, nothing truly good can die! (Trusting that is probably our real act of faith!)
Resurrection is presented by Paul as the general principle of all reality. He does not argue from a one-time anomaly and then ask us to believe in this Jesus “miracle,” which most Christians are eager to do. Instead, Paul names the cosmic pattern, and then says in many places that the “Spirit carried in our hearts” is the icon, the guarantee, the pledge, and the promise, or even the “down payment” of that universal message (see 2 Corinthians 1:21–22, Ephesians 1:14). Like I am feebly trying to do in this whole book, he is always grabbing for metaphors that will bring the universal message home.
Nothing is the same forever, says modern science. Ninety-eight percent of our bodies’ atoms are replaced every year. Geologists with good evidence over millennia can prove that no landscape is permanent. Water, fog, steam, and ice are all the same thing, but at different stages and temperatures. “Resurrection” is another word for change, but particularly positive change—which we tend to see only in the long run. In the short run, it often just looks like death. The Preface to the Catholic funeral liturgy says, “Life is not ended, it is merely changed.” Science is now giving us a very helpful language for what religion rightly intuited and imaged, albeit in mythological language. Remember, myth does not mean “not true,” which is the common misunderstanding; it actually refers to things that are always true!
God could not wait for modern science to give history hope. It was enough to believe that Jesus “was raised from the dead,” somehow planting the hope and possibility of resurrection in our deepest unconscious. Jesus’s first incarnate life, his passing over into death, and his resurrection into the ongoing Christ life is the archetypal model for the entire pattern of creation. He is the microcosm for the whole cosmos, or the map of the whole journey, in case you need or want one. Nowadays most folks do not seem to think they need that map, especially when they are young. But the vagaries and disappointments of life’s journey eventually make you long for some overall direction, purpose, or goal beyond getting through another day.
All who hold any kind of unexplainable hope believe in resurrection, whether they are formal Christians or not, and even if they don’t believe Jesus was physically raised from the dead. I have met such people from all kinds of backgrounds, religious and nonreligious. I do, however, believe in the physical resurrection of Jesus, because it affirms what the whole physical and biological universe is also saying—and grounds it as something more than a mere spiritual or miraculous belief. It must also be a fully practical and material belief! If matter is inhabited by God, then matter is somehow eternal, and when the creed says, we believe in the “resurrection of the body,” it means our bodies too and not just Jesus’s body! As in him, so also in all of us. As in all of us, so also in him. So I am quite conservative and orthodox by most standards on this important issue, although I also realize it seems to be a very different kind of embodiment from all of the resurrection accounts in the Gospels. I believe in “a new heaven and a new earth” (Isaiah 65:17, Romans 8:18–25, 2 Peter 3:13, Revelation 21:1); and I believe the resurrection of Jesus is like the icon you click on your computer to get to the right place.
Christianity’s true and unique story line has always been incarnation. If creation is “very good” (Genesis 1:34) at its very inception, how could such a divine agenda ever be undone by any human failure to fully cooperate? “Very good” sets us on a trajectory toward resurrection, it seems to me. God does not lose or fail. That is what it means to be God.
Jesus and Christ are both the CliffsNotes read on Reality for those of us who do not have time or mind to analyze the whole situation by ourselves. And who does in one small lifetime?
The Wedding Banquet
Jesus’s most consistent metaphor and image for this final state of affairs was some version of a wedding feast or banquet.*1 In all four Gospels, Jesus refers to himself as the host, or “bridegroom,” for an open and inclusive banquet, available to “good and bad alike” (Matthew 22:10). He seemed to know that people would not naturally like that, however. So there is already pushback included in the text: guests angling for a higher place at the table (Luke 14:7–11), hosts insisting that all the guests wear wedding garments (Matthew 22:11–14), or wanting to offer the wonderful event only to those “who could pay them back” while rejecting �
��the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind” (Luke 14:12–14). We have always made it hard for God to give away God—for free!
The fragile ego always wants to set a boundary, a price, an entrance requirement of some sort. Many Christians sadly prefer to read these passages from a worldview of scarcity instead of the Gospel of divine abundance, and this constant resistance to Infinite Love is revealed in the biblical text itself. The problem is tied up with the solution, as it were, the pushback included in the resolution.*2 There seems to be a necessary villain in every story line, and the villain is almost always found inside the biblical text. I know no other way to make sense of the Bible’s many obvious contradictions and inconsistencies about God.
The ungenerous mind does not like the wedding banquet. It prefers a dualistic courtroom scene as its metaphor for the end of time, which is why Matthew 25’s sheep and goats are the end-times parable that most people remember, even though they do not follow its actual message about care for the poor, and remember only the scary verdict at the end. In other words, Matthew 25:46b is allowed to trump all of Matthew 25:31–45. Scared people remember threats and do not hear invitations!
Just as the first creation of something out of nothing (creatio ex nihilo) seems impossible to the human mind, so any notion of life after death seems to demand the same huge leap of faith. Grace’s foundational definition could be “something coming from nothing,” and the human mind just does not know how to process that. Just as it does not like grace, it does not like resurrection. It is the same resistance. Resurrection, like most gifts of goodness, is also a creatio ex nihilo, which is precisely God’s core job description: God is the one “who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist” (Romans 4:17b), according to a wonderful line from Paul. Or as Walt Whitman so beautifully put it:
All goes onward and outward…and nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and much luckier.*3
“Reality with a Personality”
The central issue here is not whether Jesus did or did not physically rise from the dead, which supposedly “proves” the truth of the Christian religion if you agree, and disproves it if you disagree. No scientific proof is ever likely to be possible. Besides, our endless attempts to prove a supernatural event are misguided from the start, because neither Christ nor Jesus is outside of our natural reality in the first place.
It will really help you, Christian or not, if you can begin to see Jesus—and Christ—as coming out of Reality, naming it, giving it a face, not appearing to Reality from another world. There is no group to join here, no need to sign on the dotted line, only a generous moment of recognition that the Inner and the Outer are one and the same. Our inner meaning and Christ’s outer meaning, if you will. They mirror one another: Human anthropology matches a divine theology. How is that for one Great Ecosystem? If one’s theology (view of God) does not significantly change one’s anthropology (view of humanity), it is largely what we call a “head trip.”
Resurrection is also grace taken to its logical and full conclusion. If reality begins in grace, it of course must continue “grace upon grace” (John 1:16b) and “from this fullness we have all received” (1:16a). In such a field, we now might have the courage to join Jesus in imagining that “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30) too. That is what I mean by theology changing anthropology. If death and resurrection are just about Jesus, and not about history, the world will continue to lose interest in our story line.
The evolutionary theologian Michael Dowd loves to say that God might best be seen as “Reality with a personality.”*4 Through God, the world around us—everything that is—seems to be in dialogue with us, whether we enjoy it or not, whether we trust it or not. I hope that is as helpful to you as it is to me. Even when our lives feel meaningless, we can still trust and be confident that Someone is talking, and that Someone is also listening when we talk. To be outside of that constant interface is probably what it means to not believe. Every time you choose love or positively connect with someone or something, you are in touch with the Divine Personality. You do not even need to call it “God”—God does not seem to care at all. It is equally important to say that to negatively connect, to hate, fear, or oppose, is not to meet the Divine Personality. Thus we are strongly warned against such negativity in every way, and such things are called “sin” or even the state of “hell,” which is not really a geographical place but a very real state of consciousness. All rewards and punishments must primarily be seen as first of all now—and inherent in good and bad behavior.
It is very interesting to me that the New Testament only “sends out” those (apostolos) who can be “witnesses to resurrection” (Luke 24:48, Acts 1:22, 3:15b, 13:31), that is, witnesses to this immense inner and outer conversation that is always going on. Otherwise, we have little to say that is really helpful, and we just create unnecessary problems for people. Negative or cynical people, conspiracy theorists, and all predictors of Armageddon are the polar opposites of witnesses to resurrection. And many such people appear to be running the world and even the churches. The Christ of John’s Gospel says, “Be brave. I have overcome the world” (16:33) and its hopelessness. Courage and confidence is our message! Not threat and fear.
What Happened at Jesus’s Resurrection?
What happened at the resurrection is that Jesus was fully revealed as the eternal and deathless Christ in embodied form. Basically, one circumscribed body of Jesus morphed into ubiquitous Light. Henceforth, light is probably the best metaphor for Christ or God.
For most of the first six centuries, the moment of Jesus’s resurrection was deemed unpaintable or uncarvable. The custom for a long time was just to picture the shrine in Jerusalem where the resurrection was supposed to have happened—but never the event itself.*5 Similarly, the event is not even described as such in the New Testament. All we see are the aftermath stories—stunned guards, seated angels, and visiting women. The closest thing we have to an immediate description is indirectly given in Matthew 27:51–53, but this describes a general resurrection of tombs opening and bodies rising, and not just the raising up of Jesus. Read this verse now, and be shocked at the implications! “The tombs also were opened. And many bodies of those who had fallen asleep were raised up.”
After the resurrection stories, more followers dared to see Jesus as “the Lord”—or at least as one with the Lord, which we often translated as “Son of God.” This is a clear and dramatic leap forward, an understanding that is fully perceived only after the resurrection, although hints had been dropped throughout Jesus’s lifetime. One could say he is gradually being revealed as “Light,” which we especially see in the three accounts of the “Transfiguration” (Matthew 17:1–8, Mark 9:2–8, Luke 9:28–36). These are likely transplanted resurrection accounts, as is the story of Jesus walking on the water. Most of us, if we are listening and looking, also have such resurrection moments in the middle of our lives, when “the veil parts” now and then. “Believe in the light so that you also may become children of the light” Jesus says in John’s Gospel (12:36), letting us know that we participate in the same mystery, and he is here to aid the process.
My personal belief is that Jesus’s own human mind knew his full divine identity only after his resurrection. He had to live his life with the same faith that we must live, and also “grow in wisdom, age, and grace” (Luke 2:40), just as we do. Jesus was “not incapable of feeling our weakness with us, but has been put to the test in exactly the same way as we ourselves” (Hebrews 4:15b), and he can then well serve as our practical model and guide, the “pioneer and perfector of our faith” (Hebrew 12:2).
Back in 1967, my systematic theology professor, Fr. Cyrin Maus, OFM, told me that if a video camera had been placed in front of the tomb of Jesus, it wouldn’t have filmed a lone man emerging from a grave (which would be resuscitation more than resurrec
tion). More likely, he felt, it would’ve captured something like beams of light extending in all directions. In the resurrection, the single physical body of Jesus moved beyond all limits of space and time into a new notion of physicality and light—which includes all of us in its embodiment. Christians usually called this the “glorified body,” and it is indeed similar to what Hindus and Buddhists sometimes call the “subtle body.” Both traditions pictured this by what became the halo or aura, and Christians placed it around all “saints” to show that they already participated in the one shared Light.
This is for me a very helpful meaning for the resurrection of Jesus, which might be better described as Jesus’s “universalization,” sort of an Einsteinian warping of time and space, if you will. Jesus was always objectively the Universal Christ, but now his significance for humanity and for us was made ubiquitous, personal, and attractive for those willing to meet Reality through him. Many do meet Divine Reality without this shortcut, and we must be honest about that. I cannot prove that Jesus is the shortcut, nor does he need me to, except through the abundant lives of those who sincerely “click on the link” and “follow the prompts.” Only “by the fruits will you know,” says Jesus (Matthew 7:16–20). People who are properly aligned with Love and Light will always see in good ways that are not obvious to the rest of us, and we still call that “enlightenment.”
Such folks do not need to “prove” that Jesus is God, or Christ, or even perfect, as we see in the parents of the man born blind (John 9:18–23). They just need to look honestly at the evidence. Even the man born blind himself says, “All I know is that I was blind and now I can see” (John 9:25). People of the Light will quite simply reveal a high level of seeing, both in depth and in breadth, which allows them to include more and more and exclude less and less. That is the only proof they will ever offer us, and the only proof we should ever need.
