Some things just dont fit, no matter how hard we try.

When starting to explain the nature of a matter with immense implications, it is sometimes helpful by starting with what it isn’t. Given the span of time from the Resurrection of Jesus to the present has allowed some accretions about it to creep in that tend to esclipse its original meaning. Much of contemporary versions of the Resurrection do not fit the witness of the Scriptures, nor the eyewitness testimonies of Jesus’ first apprenticeship school. Here is a quick list of what it is not.

First, Resurrection is not a resuscitation or mere re-animation of a corpse to the same kind of life the person had before being deceased. Though we do see this kind of miracle in the Bible, the Resurrection is VASTLY different. Even presently we hear of miracles of resuscitation like this*. Yet that can be confusing too, especially when we call miracles like this a ‘resurrection.’ If God merely wanted to demostrate that conscious life survived bodily death, these miracles would satisfy that question, if indeed this was the basis of human hope presented in the Scriptures. These miracles are wonderful, But this IS NOT the purpose of the Resurrection. These types of miracles are NO LONG-TERM solution to the blight of death upon God’s creation. Even Jesus “raised Lazarus from the dead,” among others, yet none of them are living today. What happened to Jesus is worlds apart from the ‘miracle’ class of resusitations. This is very important to note as one begins to reflect upon the Lord’s Resurrection.

Second, it is not a ‘spiritual resurrection.’ Whatever that means (I will explain better later). The idea of the Resurrection being ‘spiritual’ is alien and without precedent in the history of God’s progressive revelation in Scripture. Resurrection was, is, and will always be about a bodily form of life. These other mystical ideas would fit better in pagan mythologies, but even they knew that when people died, they stayed dead, regardless of the status of the decease. There was plenty of speculation about spiritual beings (gods and goddesses) that escorted the spirits of deceased people to Netherworld-like dimensions to be ‘holed-up’ in paradises, like ‘the Elysian Fields, for the good people, or infernal penal colonies, like ‘Tartarus,’ for the not-so-good folks. But the Resurrection is radically different from these speculations about the future for humans beyond the grave.

Similar ideas are presented in Scripture, too. Like the Old Testament idea of “Sheol,” which referred to the grave (in earth) and some nether region beween “Heaven and Earth.” Also in the New Testament, and the intertestamental period between the Old and New testaments, there was an association with similar Greek ideas, though modified by Jewish theology and expectations to fit the Scriptual data related to these ideas, and expressed in notions of “Hades,” “Paradise,” “Gehenna,” and even a few loose references to “Tartarus.” In English we kinda lump them together as ‘Heaven’ and ‘Hell.’

So whether in pagan or Sacred literature, the ideas of ‘spiritual’ survivability was nothing new. There was no need to reinvent the wheel of the ‘afterlife, and give it a flashy label like ‘resurrection,’ as resistance to the Fates ‘wheel of karma.’ It needed a solution to why things in this present “cosmos” are steeped in death and decay, when all our deepest intuitions are like a megaphone disturbing our concession to death, proclaiming, ‘This is not the way things should be… I am meant for something else… something MORE.’ The Resurrection is something so different from these ideas.

Third, which is similar to my last point, but not exactly the same, the Resurrection is not just a metaphor for mystical enlightenment by mystery knowledge (like having a mind/mood altering hallucinogenic consciousness expanding psychedelic trip) brought on by ascetic practices or neuro-chemical alterations. Or as in some New Age theosophies of spiritual and philosophical practices that seeks to experientially understand the fundamental truths of the universe and humanity’s place within it. It emphasizes the interconnectedness of all things, the universality of spiritual experience, and the existence of a hidden, ancient wisdom accessible through intuition and inner exploration. In most instances it seeks the ‘wow’ factor of becoming ‘woke’ to all the mysteries of the cosmos and experience a sense of union, but without the need for a God that is personal or has a will for us to obey. Some count this as a ‘resurrection,’ and even try to anachronistically read backward as the real meaning of the Bible’s emphasis on Resurrection.

SO, what is the Resurrection then? One thing the Bible projects about it for sure, is that IT IS BODILY. We have a tendency to have a pagan rather than a Biblical understanding of the word, ‘spiritual.’ The Hebrew/Christian Scriptures have a more ‘earthy’ view of spirituality. The pagan philosophical systems tend to believe that nature is accident (like most materialists today) of cosmic conflicts between deities. They believe that nature is not only imperfect, but impure and inferior to spiritual reality. Many of our metaphysical notions about this world and ‘heaven’ carry some of the same baggage. People talk about leaving our vile fleshly bodies and ‘the world’ for an afterlife paradise of purity and consequent bliss not having ‘earthy imperfections.’

But the Gospel flies in the face of all that, and kinda shoots a ‘bird’ at it. It insists Jesus died bodily, and yet was also raised BODILY (the Resurrection is the ultimate form of humanism!)! The amazing thing about Jesus’ new bodily Life is it interacted so well with the nature of THIS world, as His post-Resurrection appearances demonstrated. He sat down in closed spaces and had conversation with His disciples and others, took walks with folks in the countryside, invited some to go fishing, cooked a meal on a beach and had breakfast with His disciples (…did you get that? He ate fish in their presence). So, whatever happen to Jesus in His transformation made Him equally a citizen of Earth as well as Heaven.

I will not go much farther in this post. But I think it is safe to say that the way we think about cosmic reality MUST reflect the reality of Jesus’ new bodily Life. Whatever were God’s purposes for creating, Jesus has become the new poster child. In Jesus’ Resurrection God unveiled His cosmic plan as well as the truth about who He is and what He desires. Please dig deeper into its wonder.