Tolstoy, given the stern ethical rationalist he was, had little patience with the miraculous and the irrational. Yet he wrote Resurrection (also known under the title The Awakening) and considered that to be his most significant novel. Tolstoy deems resurrection as native to the essence of life. This is something that we need to consider, if we are to do even marginal justice to the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. There is nothing about the life and ministry of Jesus Christ that does not apply to the human condition. The Resurrection of Jesus Christ would mean nothing, if it were not an inalienable ingredient in the life of individuals and societies.

As a rule, the pattern of resurrection inheres in the profoundest experiences of our species. Nehru, perhaps unknowingly, conceived the attainment of India’s freedom as a resurrection experience. “The soul of a nation long suppressed,” he said, “finds utterance”. Or, a great stone has been rolled away and the tomb of our enslaved existence as a people. Gandhi, steeped as he was in the letter and spirit of the Bible, would have said, ‘that stone was rolled away by the hand of God’. Only God had the authority to ‘break the seal of British Raj’, the counterpart of the authority of Rome in the gospel narrative.

It is beyond doubt that, but for the radical relevance of the pattern and promise of the Resurrection to the human condition, we would not have a classic like Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment or Victor Hugo’s Les Miserable or, even, Dickens’ Dombey and Son. Every radical change in human nature and predicament has the Resurrection as its archetype. Didn’t Jonah have such an experience inside the whale’s belly? And Moses in Midian? And Peter? How did he rise up from the ashes of his collapse into cowardice and stay the foremost apostle? Peter’s resurrection ‘before death’ hinges on Jesus’ resurrection after Crucifixion.  Think of Matthew the tax collector, Zacchaeus, the chief tax collector, the paralytic, the ‘woman taken in adultery’ who turned a new leaf in her life as also the woman of Samaria, the leper, the lame, the demon-possessed… Are they not, all of them, in the ambit of resurrection? Think, then, of the overpowering sadness in the plight of the ‘rich young man’ who sought from Jesus the way to eternal life, but, lacking the faith to die out of his hard-set way of life, went away ‘sorrowful’.

Or, look, for a moment, to nature. That grain of wheat the farmer is about to sow: is it not about to fall into the mysterious soil of resurrection? The bud over there, standing and dreaming on its stalk: is it not about to die to itself, to be born as a flower? How can it ever blossom forth, unless it dies as a bud? What about the mango seed lying in your courtyard? Wouldn’t it greet you, a few weeks hence, as a sapling? Hasn’t it, then, undergone the pattern of resurrection?

Or recall the trajectory of your own life, if it is anywhere similar to mine. How many times we fumbled, felt nearly wrecked, but picked up the pieces and made new beginnings? Each time we experienced God’s mercy, was it not a resurrection experience? What about forgiveness? Don’t we intuit resurrection each time we are genuinely forgiven and enabled to resume a relationship, an undertaking, anew again? What would our predicament be, if resurrection were a mere sentimental myth?

Let us return to Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov, the protagonist in Crime and Punishment. He kills two women. Begins to disintegrate under the burden of guilt. Gravitates to the brink of insanity. He too was given a second chance. The agent of his spiritual rebirth was not a priest or a prophet, but a prostitute -Sonia. Significantly, the spiritual climax of his life involves a reading together of the gospel account of Jesus raising Lazarus to life (Jn. 11). At his request, Sonia reads the 11th chapter of St. John from the very New Testament that Lisavetta, one of Raskolnikov’s victims, had gifted her. Nothing in world literature matches the poignancy of ‘the murderer and the prostitute’, as Dostoevsky writes, ‘sitting together in that poverty-stricken room reading the book of life’.

Tolstoy’s Resurrection takes another trajectory. Its central character is not a derelict university drop-out. He, Nekhlyudov, is an aristocrat. He takes advantage of his aunt’s servant-maid –Maslova- while visiting her. He is not aware of having done anything out of the way or morally catastrophic; for, after all, such flings were routine to the perks of the aristocracy Tolstoy caricatures in the novel. Circumstances force Maslova into prostitution. Eventually she happens to be accused of murder. In the trial, Nekhlyudov is one of the judges. Through this mock trial Tolstoy exposes the callousness of the criminal justice system, much like Victor Hugo exposing, via Les Miserable, the inhumanity of the prison system. Maslova is condemned and exiled to Siberia. Conscience stricken, Nekhlyudov tries to save her, but fails. He decides to make amends. Accompanies her to Siberia. Wants to marry her, but is rejected by her in the end. In the womb of that trauma, Nekhlyudov undergoes a resurrection experience. He becomes, ‘a new creation.’

If so, the conclusion is inevitable: only children of light can believe in, or hope for, resurrection. On the lips of the rest the words, “He is risen, risen indeed!” sit in shallow, unmeaning custom. Of course, we can go on ‘celebrating’ Easter; but we cannot live, or bear witness to, Resurrection. Today we are a people of Easter, but not of Resurrection; and that is the condemnation.

So, we have our versions of resurrection. One thing is missing from them: Crucifixion. It is natural to those who believe that they can serve two masters that they can improvise resurrection without crucifixion. As Reinhold Niebuhr said about the church in America, it is a church that preaches a Jesus without his Cross to a people without sin of resurrection without crucifixion.

The core spiritual challenge in these dark and difficult days is to become authentic witnesses to the Resurrection. That process would necessarily involve, as Tolstoy points out, a break with the ways of the world. In this, Tolstoy was guided by the encounter of the rich young man with Jesus. Jesus told him: ‘Go, sell all you have, give it to the poor and then come and follow me’. In simple terms, Jesus was asking him to be born again, which is possible only by dying to oneself. This involves the ‘ground’ of one’s existence.  To shift this ground from Mammon to God is to come under the sacred and imperious duty to grow, and grow to the stature of Jesus. Merely renouncing one’s material wealth, without embracing the creative and redemptive duty to grow in the mystery of Spirit leads to poverty, not to resurrection. I would commend Tolstoy’s My Confession (1882) in this connection, especially for its emphasis on the need to seek moral perfection as basic to spiritual growth.

I offer these reflections not as one who has measured the height and depth of the meaning and mystery of resurrection; but as one who sees (or thinks he does) the distant mountaintop in shimmering glimpses of bewildering incomprehension through eyes burdened by the opacity of spiritual cataract.