To Be Jesus Resurrected

The death of Jesus is either the end or it is the beginning. The Jesus journey either tells humankind that love is victorious and the risk is worth taking or it chronicles a sad and meaningless walk into despair. "If Christ has not been raised then our preaching is useless and your believing it is useless... If our hope in Christ has been for this life only, we are the most unfortunate of all people" (1 Corinthians 15:15, 19).

Our faith is that the Father upheld the life of Jesus and reclaimed it as eternal. Jesus, therefore, is the really real. Or, to speak theologically, Jesus is eternal life. The resurrected Jesus is our assurance that it is okay to be human, even better to be noble, and best of all to be devoured for the sake of it.

Now as long as the cross in even its subtle forms is a scandal, then the resurrection is impossible to experience. Our faith is a choice against despair and against abandonment. Our hope is not just a hope for good fortune; it is a radical hope for God himself--that God is, in fact, who God should be--love that we can understand.

To be true to himself and to his father's love, Jesus found himself undergoing both suffering and rejection. His pain was not just the pathetic and masochistic suffering and rejection of the sinful world, but it was precisely the result of his radical decision for the kingdom and kingdom values, which are "not of this world." In other words, Jesus was not an unfortunate victim of circumstances, but he in fact designed his own death by choosing for life "and life more abundantly." To opt for the really real is to find yourself at odds with most of the world's systems, institutions, expectations--and even religions.

Jesus allowed that to happen in him--and the Father backed it up!

It is indeed difficult to lead people to believe in the "bad news" of the crucifixion. It is hard to trust death; ironically, it is even more difficult to trust the good news of resurrection. We are afraid to call upon the new power of risen life and expect it to be there. Or to put it another way, many Christians would sooner put up with death than confront it.

The resurrection of Jesus is an active assault upon the death and hopelessness of the world. Jesus stands in the midst of the fear of the upper room and turns it into Pentecost. To be Jesus Resurrected is to be a new power standing over and against the sick world. To be Jesus Resurrected is to be glorified body, new order, new world, new person; it is to be church. It seems that we cannot be the glorified body of Christ until we are first simply the body of Christ.

If not for Jesus, I think I would probably be an atheist. For I would have to admit to a God who does not care and who is not involved, and then I would not believe in God at all. I would have to settle for the functional God of other religions, who simply alleviates guilt and desire. I would have to accept a God whom we could use to solve our problems, but who does not really respect humanity or take us into the redemptive process.

We gather simply to be church; the gospel life is itself our primary apostolate; we are free to "celebrate" eucharist--all because of the meaning of resurrection. All of our doing comes from our being Jesus Resurrected: "Now you together are Christ's body" (1 Cor. 12:27).

And in that body God has destroyed death and restored life. All other religions seek to destroy death by rituals, attitudes, or moral stances. We destroy death by being and celebrating what we are--which often leads to various rituals, attitudes or moral stances. But they are not the source of the power: they are for us the result of power.

Historically, Christians have not really lived this way, but have reverted to primitive and pagan traditions. Somehow we are more comfortable as slaves than as sons and daughters. We even seem to enjoy placating angry gods more than living with the resurrected Jesus. I guess we are afraid.

But the resurrection is God's very antidote to fear. It is God's answer to our human littleness and insecurity. For to see and believe in a Jesus condemned by the laws of humanity and yet set free by the love of the Father is to be freed from the need to justify ourselves and to prove ourselves.

In the life and death of Jesus, God made salvation "common and vulgar," and available to all. He made himself the God of those who are abandoned and forsaken and failing. In Jesus, God became the God of those "condemned by God." Alleluia, Alleluia!

The good news of the resurrection is not that the poor victims of this world will finally triumph over the executioners, while the executioners will be fittingly punished. That is our petty notion of justification. It solves our momentary problems, but does not begin to reveal the love and glory of God. At that point God's love is not yet truly creative, new, or worthy of God. It is merely our finite projection.

If the resurrection is truly God's great answer and God's good news, then he is telling us that Jesus died and rose not only for the victims but also for the executioners. God is not just liberating the liberated and saving the saved. The new righteousness, the good news that is too good, is that he is somehow seeking to free the executioners too.

Alleluia! Alleluia!

Richard Rohr, OFM, was a pastoral leader of the New Jerusalem Community in Cincinnati, Ohio, when this article appeared.