Thinking about Resurrection

The Bible is about finitude—about this time-bound life we live here on earth. Most people come to the Bible not expecting this. They expect infinitude. They expect the Bible to be about immortal souls rather than mortal bodies, so prone as they are to failure. And of course the Bible is about this, too, but not in the way we might imagine.

I have been thinking about this in part because I just taught a class on the Garden of Eden story—again. In the Hellenistic era, the garden story began to be read as a fall story. Genesis 1 and Genesis 2-3 were mashed together. In this reading, the original good creation (Genesis 1) is spoiled by the heedless disobedience of Adam and Eve, especially Eve (Genesis 3). But this is to miss the point of the story. 

What makes the garden story interesting is that it’s not only are the first human couple, our Adam and Eve, who learning what it means to be human; Yhwh God seems also to be learning. His first creature, the human created from the primeval slime and brought to life by the divine breath, does not slot neatly into its designatede role as the caretaker of the divine garden. The human needs company. And not, as Yhwh God discovers, the company only of other animals (which my dog-loving fellow Bellinghamsters seem intent on denying) but the company of someone equal and opposite.

And not just company. Humans require or, at least, desire knowledge, the “knowledge of good and evil,” which is to say, all knowledge. But this is a dangerous thing in humans. With the capacity to know good and evil, humans will bring to the world not only what is good but unspeakable evil. They will bring the sublimity of the Bach B-minor mass and the horrors of Auschwitz. 

But knowledge is what we humans always choose. Faced with the choice in the garden, divine life or divine knowledge, we choose as Eve chose. Always. Better to have this sweet knowledge with all its perils than to live, as we would see it, a subhuman life forever. 

And so the bargain is stuck, as it were. We humans will live east of Eden, among the thorns and thistles, with all the complexities of human relationships. We will live this fraught and wonderful and sad life of ours. It’s to that existential reality that the Bible speaks. 

We come to the Bible expecting that this is not true, that the right faith will get us out of here, will show us how to get to our real life beyond this life, a life not bounded by birth and death. An infinite life. But that is not what we get. We come to the Bible expecting immortality. What we get is something quite different: resurrection.

Resurrection—biblical resurrection—is grounded in finitude. Resurrection has no meaning apart from this time-bound life that we presently live. It’s this life, not some distant divine immortality, that is raised up in resurrection. 

John 17: 3 offers us a clue. John 17 is a prayer of Jesus. The setting for the prayer is the imminent death of Jesus. In the chapters just before, Jesus has prepared his disciples for what is about to happen. Having completed his instructions, he prays for them, for himself, and, by extension, for us. In some ways it seems a sad prayer. It anticipates the hostility that the church will face as it emerges into the world. It anticipates, as well, internal divisions that will divide the church into warring factions. But before he gets to all that, Jesus prays for himself:

. . . Turning his eyes to the heavens, Jesus said, “Father, the time has come. Glorify your son so that the son may glorify you. You have given him mastery over all things flesh, so as to give to all whom you have given to him eternal life. (John 17:1-2)

Coming where it does in John’s narrative, this is in the first place a prayer for courage in the face of what Jesus must endure (though our English translations seem to want to steer us away from that interpretation). He prays that in his death he may not be shamed (by a lack of courage) but glorified. Paul prays a similar prayer in Philippians 1:20, asking that he “in no way will be shamed . . . but Christ will be exalted in [his] body.” These are prayers for physical courage, for the “mastery over all things flesh.” Jesus prays this not only for himself but his followers, so that they may have “eternal life.”

It’s here that we, trained as we are to think of “eternal life” in terms of endless life after death, read far too quickly and carelessly. And, anticipating this, the gospel writer slows us down. He interrupts the prayer to insert a note in the voice of Jesus: “Eternal life is that they may know you, the only true God, and the one you have sent, Jesus Christ.” Eternal life, the note tells us, is a kind of knowing. But how is that true? we might ask.

If we do so ask, the note has done its job. It has stopped us in our reading to ponder eternal life. And if we are making a study of the gospel of John, it may prompt us to go back to what precedes John 17 to see how the gospel uses the phrase, “eternal life.” And if we do that, we soon discover that “life” (Greek zōē), sometimes qualified as it is here with the adjective aiōnios (“eternal”) and sometimes not, is a very important theme in John’s book. 

We meet the life theme already in these lines in the prologue, right after “In the beginning was the word. . .”:

All things came to be through the word [logos];
without the word, not a single thing came to be.
What has come to be in the word is life,
and this life is light for humanity.  (John 1:3-4)

We have here the combination of life (zōē) and knowledge (light for humanity) that we met in John 17. Later in the gospel, riffing on Psalm 119, Jesus will say that “whoever follows [him] will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life” (8:12). This “light of life” is much more than direction; it’s life itself. Jesus, in the strongest sense of is, is life—is the power of life.

Very truly I say to you that anyone who hears my word [logos] and believes in the one who sent me possesses eternal life and will not come into condemnation but has passed over from death to life. Very truly I say to you that the time is coming and now is when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God and hearing will live. For as the Father has life in himself, so also he has granted the Son to have life in himself. (5:24-25)

The language here and in the following verses resonates with Ezekiel 37, the dry bones passage. The voice of the son of God calls the dead to life. But note the verb “possesses” (Greek ʾexō) in the first sentence. The power of life comes not only to the dead but to the living. Or, rather, the power of life comes to those who are dead not only physically but spiritually. To believe is to receive this life-giving power:

“As Moses raised up the serpent in the wilderness, so the son of man must be raised up so that all who believe in him may have eternal life. For God so loved the world that he gave his only son that all who believe in him may not perish but have [possess] eternal life.” (John 3:14-15)

We begin to see that “eternal life” in John is not future immortality but the Jesus life in the present and, as we shall see, for the future judgment. One of the metaphors employed by the gospel for getting this life into us is eating Jesus, a sacramental metaphor as controversial then as now:

Very truly I say to you, the one who believes possesses eternal life. I am the bread of life. Our ancestors ate manna in the wilderness and died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven so that whoever eats it may not die. I am the living bread come down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live for the coming age. The bread I will give for the life of the world is my flesh. (6:47-51)

In the paragraph above, I translated the Greek phrase, ʾeis ton ʾaiōna, as “for the coming age.” It’s often translated “forever.” The NRSV reads: “Whoever eats of this bread will live forever.” But this steers us in the wrong direction. It puts the focus on immortality, endless days, but the phrase has less to do with time than with crossing the boundary between the present age, the world in which we live, and the coming age. Whoever eats the bread of life will live not only in this age but for the age to come.

 The noun here, ʾaiōn, has a complicated and interesting history, running through Greek philosophy as well as biblical theology. I’ll get to some of that in another piece. It usually means “an age,” as does the English word derived from it, eon(sometimes spelled aeon). An ‘aiōn can be a past age, the present age, or the age to come. It can be, as in “ages and ages,” forever, not in the philosophical sense but in the sense of an indeterminate time: “as far as the eye can see.”  The phrase translated “eternal life,” which uses the adjective ‘aiōnios instead of the noun, can and often does mean the life of the age to come.

To put this as sharply as possible, we come to the Bible expecting Plato, and what we get is something altogether different: resurrection—and judgment. Let’s go back to the passage from John 5 I quoted above, where Jesus is riffing on Ezekiel 37, calling the dead bones to life. The passage goes on:

The Father has given authority to the Son to execute judgment, for he is the Son of Man. Do not let this amaze you, for the time will come when all those in the grave will hear his voice, and they will come out, those who do the good to the resurrection of life and those who practice the wrong to the resurrection of judgment. (5:27-29)

This may not sound like good news. We fear judgment. But before we get to that, to judgment, consider what this means in terms of our lives. It describes an ending, a telos, a summing up. And this summing up has no meaning unless it closes off our lives. Life ends not with death but with judgment, put, as the text tells us, in the hands of the Son of Man (see Daniel 7).

Some have tried to squeeze in a second chance after death—a time in which to get it right. The medieval concept of purgatory is one such attempt. C. S. Lewis in The Great Divorce is another. And lately we have Rob Bell’s Love Wins. But this is quite beside the point. Whether we have a second chance or not, the idea of judgment requires finality, a moment when our lives are completed, when we can no longer add to what we have done. Or, for that matter, subtract from it. As the cliché goes, it is what it is.

This is where resurrection comes in. What is raised up? In the common conception, some idealized version of ourselves: Clay Libolt, say, without his annoying opinions about biblical truth. And with a better tennis serve and an improved forehand. And without the pain in his foot that lately has slowed down his ability to get to the ball. Something like that. We quote at funerals the ending of Isaiah 40 and smile to think of our loved one running like Eric Liddell: “They shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not be faint.”

But if a superhero version of myself is raised up, what of the consolations of age? Consolations that require a sense of an ending? And what if I think differently with that small pain in my foot? Should the pain accompany me into the resurrection as the scars seem to have accompanied Jesus? And what if I have always been blind? My self is bound up with not seeing physically? If that is what I am, will I be different in a resurrection body?

This idea about resurrection, that what is raised is some paragon of ourselves, makes sense only if we deny the importance of this finite life we are presently living, for this life is contingent on aches and pains, good days and bad, birth and death—all the vagaries of earthly existence. I am who I am not in some idealized way but as I have become by living out my days. What must be raised up therefore, if resurrection is to mean anything at all, is this life, the entirety of it from birth to death. No, not just to death but to the final summing up.

To Judgment Day. And at Judgment Day, I will discover that my life falls on both sides of the equation in our text: I am both the one who works at doing good (translating freely) and the one who does things that are, well, just wrong. But this judgment is not a scale, an up or down affair. This judgment is a retelling of the story, not to tease apart the good and the bad, not fix my broken parts, but to tell the story in such a way that I, along with you, belong to what God has been doing all along. 

It’s this story—the story of what God has been doing all along—that we can already discover in the Word made flesh. The Jesus story is our story. Your story. My story. The story that will ultimately be told in the great summing up. And in this story, your story, my story, will be raised up. Resurrected. And we will discover that it was one story all along. 

There is so much more to be said, but for the moment I will leave it there. Perhaps these thoughts linger for me because I am approaching my 80^th birthday. They are not melancholy thoughts. I find it comforting that this life, this inadequately lived, mistake-filled, magical life is the very stuff of resurrection.

Clay