According to Peter, we must be ready always to provide a reason for the hope we entertain. Hoping of the spiritual kind implies the readiness to stake everything on what is hoped for. So, it is imperative that one’s hopes are not attached to what is superfluous or irrational. Hope or faith, reasonableness is a necessary condition. What is altogether irrational falls below the benchmark of hope and faith.
What sense does it make to keep affirming and reaffirming, merely verbally, one’s faith in the Resurrection? Especially when one doesn’t have the foggiest ideas as to what this involves. Can such an affirmation have any faith value? If not, what are we to do to make this liturgical prescription something more than what it is at present? Indeed, what does it mean to say, ‘I believe in the Resurrection’?
Let us begin with the obvious. It is Jesus who resurrects. And what was he? He presented himself as the Way and the Door. Both metaphors -the Way and the Door- point to the need on the part of believers to shift from where they are, and attain a state radically different. The prospect of resurrection applies only to those who have attained this new life. We belittle the meaning and integrity of the resurrection when we treat it apart from this fundamental requirement. This becomes clear enough if we regard Jesus’s exhortation to Nicodemus to be ‘born again’. Regrettably, this significant revelation, like much else that Jesus taught, has suffered much cultic deformation since then.
What is Jesus the Way to? Surely, he is the way to life in its fullness. And can life be in its fullness, if it is understood and lived in terms of the manifest and the material alone? Can life be experienced in its fullness, so long as we live as per the passing and the perishable? To Jesus, human beings do a disservice to themselves by seeking and gathering for themselves the perishable treasures of this world. We are to, instead, seek treasures imperishable.
But what are these imperishable treasures? It is accepted universally that what is merely earthly is subject to decay, and it will return to the earth. Human beings are instinct with the longing for life eternal, because we are as much metaphysical as we are physical in as much as we are invested with the breath of God. The dust of the earth denotes the tangible and the transitory. The breath of God denotes the infinite. So, to be fully human is to be animated by the Infinite or the Holy Spirit so that we become spiritual flesh, of which Jesus is the sacramental exemplar.
Seen in this light, the Resurrection of Jesus Christ is a validation of the infinite and the eternal about the human, and its triumphant celebration undeterred by the terror of death. It is the ultimate intuition that there is something about our destiny that the gates of hell cannot thwart.
This puts the spotlight of the Resurrection on the Person of Jesus. It is, after all, the Resurrection of Jesus, the Son of Man, that we believe in and celebrate. Jesus, as the Way, is clearly the Way to the Infinite, which ought not be, from a spiritual point of view, excluded from the seemingly finite human existence. It is not the finite, but the Infinite in us, that may resurrect. For that to happen, it is necessary that those who repose their faith in resurrection, as relevant to their own destiny, must also acknowledge the need to be re-oriented to the Infinite in their being. This is basic to the idea of ‘fullness of life’ that Jesus marked as the shaping goal of his spiritual mission.
We have believed traditionally that in the Resurrection of Jesus we have a ‘promise and pattern’ of our own resurrection. What such a formulation often remains impervious to is the fact that the Resurrection of Jesus is inseparable from Person of Jesus. Going by the teachings of Jesus, only lives that measure up to the benchmark of his spiritual personality -life in its fullness, or the light of life that he was- would enter the zone of resurrection. To have faith in Jesus, and to receive him, as John states in the fourth Gospel, is to abide in him and to let him abide in us. It is to be Christ-like.
To be Christ-like is clearly and emphatically to live as children of God, or as human beings who regard their earthly life in its wholeness from the perspective of God. Or, it is to have one’s will harmonize with the Will of God. Short of this, we see the scope of our life through the prism of the world and (ab)use God as a mere tool to attain worldly ends under the garb of piety. The most inexcusable offence, as Immanuel Kant said vis-a-vis human interactions, is to use human beings as tools. Somehow, we think it is all right, even pious, to use God similarly. Or, that God is not sentient enough to realize that we value him only as a tool.
Using God as a mere tool is characteristic of our fallenness. Hence the need to become the ‘new creation’ that St Paul refers to.
Yes, I believe in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. Truth to tell, it is not believing, but disbelieving the Resurrection that is the hardest thing for anyone who has even the faintest intuition of the Person Jesus was. How could a tomb hold back a soul such as he was! If there is anything harder to believe than the Resurrection of Jesus, it is this that those who to live by the means and goals of the world, making God a mere means of convenience for this perishable enterprise, will resurrect and enter eternal life, just because they parrot- ‘I believe in the resurrection of the body…’
Leave a Comment