The resurrection of Jesus is God’s great “and yet.”
Back to Basics
This is the writeup of the session we had on 9/7/24 as part of our series on Christian Basics. How do we express something of what we take to be the Christian faith, generously orthodox, contextualised into our time and place?
Last week we talked about Jonah. It’s such a great story, with miracles, whales, a grumpy (probably middle aged) prophets, astonishing success, storms and the presence of God at work throughout the whole thing. The God who loves us will never abandon us.
You can find the first session here: Jonah and the Good News.
Whatever the Good News is it is more like winding up on the beach covered in Whale spit than it is like sitting in an armchair pontificating about the beautiful, the true, and the good.
You can think of this as a “bottom up” approach to the gospel, rather than “top down.” We want to start right in the middle of our experience of life: all this stuff coming at us all the time – whales and storms and beaches and failures and surprising success and mysterious journeys. The sand beneath your toes, the hot sun beating against the back of your head, the surf crashing behind you, and, just out to sea, a whale looking at you, as though it is asking “So: now what?”
Provocative Question
What does Jesus have to do with the Good News?
(I’m going to pause for a moment while you come up with some sort of answer. It doesn’t have to be the best possible answer. Feel free to fly a theological kite here.)
On the night, we had a lot of different answers, as you would imagine. Jesus, we conclude, has “everything” to do with the Good News. But is it something he says or does? Or is Jesus in some sense the Good News itself?
Jesus and the Good News
Jesus Really Existed
I don’t know who needs to read this, but Jesus really did exist. I have a 4 year degree in Classical Civilisation, and I assure you that the question of whether Jesus existed never came up even once. This is not at all to say that Jesus’ resurrection, or the idea that he might be in some mysterious sense God, was accepted at the level of professional historians. But, as Christian Apologist and Ancient Historian John Dickson says of professional historians of the relevant period:
[Jesus’] teaching, fame as a healer, openness to sinners, selection of “the twelve” (apostles), prophetic actions (like cleansing the temple), clashes with elites, and, of course, and his death on a cross are all treated as beyond reasonable doubt.
You can read more about this here: Most Australians may doubt that Jesus existed, but historians don’t - ABC Religion & Ethics. I’ll leave the final word to John himself.
I will eat a page out of my Bible if someone can find a full Professor of Ancient History, Classics, or New Testament in any real university in the world who argues that Jesus never lived.
So What?
While Jesus’ existence is uncontroversial, unlike the highly controversial claim of his resurrection, they don’t really touch the sides of the bigger problem.
I remember, back when I was an undergraduate, my Evangelical Union friends telling me that when they (excitedly, earnestly) told people that Jesus had died for their sins, the most common response was something like “Why? I didn’t ask him to.”
Which might be a little bit brusque, though, then again, if a keen eyed, bushy tailed evangelist pounces on you in the student union coffee bar and insists on “sharing the Good News” with you, perhaps you could be forgiven for a degree of brusqueness.
But it is a good question: what does the life, death, and alleged resurrection, of a First Century Palestinian Jew have to do with me? It was no doubt good news for his friends and family, but how could it possibly be the (capitalized) Good News?
Bad News
For there to be Good News, there needs to be Bad News to which it is the response.
There are a lot of different ways to think about the Bad News, but I think the strongest candidate in our culture is to do with the meaning crisis. A lot of truly terrible things happened in, say, the Reformation – but they one thing they weren’t short of was meaning. Perhaps they even had a surfeit of meaning. But either way, I look at, for instance, Thomas Cranmer sticking his hand in the fire because he had used it to sign a recantation of his Protestant faith – and I’m not convinced that I could do that.
Things just don’t seem to matter that much to us today. Maybe there is a good side to that, but it also leads to the basic dilemma of our culture: that not only does nothing matter enough to die for (or to kill for) but nothing really matters enough to live for.
What philosopher Charles Taylor calls our “social imaginary” tells us that we live what he calls the “immanent frame.” That is, we only believe in the universe of things which we can see and touch and taste. That we have outgrown our childish belief in a “sky daddy”, and are bravely living in this universe as adults.
In this social imaginary, life is fundamentally meaningless, because the universe as a whole is meaningless. As the famous Atheist Richard Dawkins put it:
“The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.”[1] Richard Dawkins, A River Out Of Eden
We can see the death of Jesus of Nazareth as an example of this inherent meaninglessness of the universe. To execute a criminal might well not be a particularly moral thing to do. But you can see how a culture could get there. But for the religious and civil authorities to torture an absolutely good person to death and then to just go about their lives as though nothing had happened – how can life make sense after that?
Of course, we are very familiar with the astonishing propensity of the human race for evil: the example of Auschwitz looms very large for us. But even before that, people could see that the meaning framework of Western culture was disintegrating.
Take, for example, Edvard Munch’s picture The Scream. I recently learned that it isn’t the human figure holding their hands to their head that is screaming. It is, rather, nature that is screaming: the name of the artwork in German is “the scream of nature.” It is screaming because it no longer talks. In time gone by, it spoke of the God who had created it like a beautiful work of art, a communication, a gift of love. Sometimes stern, but always oriented towards us. However, in a disenchanted world, it is no longer any of those things. It isn’t even a machine, because a machine has a purpose. It is just a meaningless cacophony of nothingness. It used to sing; now it screams.
The human dilemma is put well by Austrian psychotherapist and Auschwitz survivor Viktor Frankl, especially in his brief, powerful book Man’s Search for Meaning. From the depths of his Auschwitz experience, he asks: how do we live in the face of the tragic triad of guilt, suffering, and death?
He proposes an existentialist approach (indeed his psychotherapeutic approach is known as existential therapy), which is well summed up by the nineteenth century (atheist, perhaps even anti-theist) philosopher Friederich Nietzsche’s famous dictum that “the one who has a ‘why’ can endure almost any ‘how’.”
He observed in the camps that the people who had something to live for – a ‘why” survived. The ones who lost their ‘why’ quickly died. There’s a lot of richness there which I can’t do justice to here. Definitely read the book.
The limitation of this approach seems to me to be that it relies on one’s own personal ability to create meaning. Frankl wanted to live to see his great work on Logotherapy published, others to see their wives again. But what if the “meaning” you are asserting is an immoral one? I hesitate to commit the “reductio Hitlerium” but the whole Nazi movement was an attempt to assert a (foul) meaning against a universe where the old fashioned virtues of Christian charity were seen as being irrelevant to the challenges of the new world. I suspect that the Nazis found their path in life deeply meaningful, and you can see that in the sheer amount of effort they spent killing Jews at significant expense to their war effort.
Of course, Frankl would not want people to find meaning in being evil. But it seems to me that the limitation of existentialism is that it relies on an unspoken assumption that what people find meaningful will be pro-social. But the history of the modern era of people asserting their violent need for meaning against a meaningless universe shows the limitations of the existentialist world.
This has taken us a long way from Jesus Christ. In fact, it has taken us as far as humanity has ever managed to get from God. The Romans executing Jesus, where the human institutions who are meant to uphold justice and the human institutions meant to be closest to God conspired together to do precisely the opposite of their ostensible aims, is the type of all human offenses against a meaningful universe.
But the difference is this: God raised Christ Jesus from the dead on the third day.
In doing this, God vindicated Jesus. What Jesus did and said, who Jesus was in his life, ministry, teaching, and death have the full weight of God brought to bear upon them.
Through Jesus, God says that the universe is, in fact, meaningful after all.
The resurrection of Jesus is God’s great “and yet.”
Even though, when God comes too close to us, we react by killing God, we cannot destroy God. In fact, God takes the worst we can do – all the weight of guilt, suffering and death, and take it into Godself.
Or, as Scripture puts it, in what seems to be one of the earliest pieces of Christian writing we still have:
[Jesus Christ] though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be exploited,
but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death—
even death on a cross.
Therefore God also highly exalted him
and gave him the name
that is above every name,
so that at the name of Jesus
every knee should bend,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue should confess
that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.
Philippians 2:6-11
There is a lot going on there, but for our purposes the point is that, in Jesus, God entered into our world of guilt, suffering, and death and overcame it. Which means that the world does, in fact have a meaning after all.
And, further, we can somehow participate in that meaningful life that Jesus has won for us – which is (part of) what it means to say that “every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the father.”
The Good News in this world of guilt, suffering, and death is this: In God’s raising of Jesus from the dead, we not only learn that the universe does have a meaning, that it has been spoken into being by God. Even more than that, each one of us is called into a meaningful relationship with Jesus, and with one another.
Which all sounds good, but what does it mean in practice? How do I experience this new life of meaning in my actual real life?
So here we stand with Jonah. The night journey of our crisis of meaning is over at some level, even if we don’t always feel like that is true. The whale slobber dripping onto the sand, we look around ourselves and ask: now what?
[1] There is a lot one could say about this. But I think it’s a good statement of our social imaginary, so we will let it stand for the moment.