Believing in the Resurrection

There are times when I struggle to believe in the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. Resurrection contradicts all of my experience about the nature of life and death.
My first brush with death came in 1987, when I was ten years old and my grandfather, Joe Harwell, died of cancer. Granddaddy was very kind to me. He used to draw pictures of buses for me while I sat on his lap, and he would wind his cuckoo clock to make the bird come out and announce the hour. He was good with his hands. In 1985, when I was an eight-year-old obsessed with the coolness that was Miami Vice, he fashioned for me a shoulder holster for one of my toy pistols by tearing strips from an old pair of Grandma’s leather knee-high boots and weaving and stapling them together.
I don’t remember a whole lot about Granddaddy’s sickness and death. I remember he lost his hair from the chemotherapy. I remember it was a sad time for my family. And looking back over the past twenty-four years, I wish that he could have been around. But that’s not how death works. He died, and that’s the end of it. Resurrection was not a part of the story.
Many people that I have known and cared about have died since then, and in each case, death has been the end. No one I have known has ever been raised from the dead. It just doesn’t happen in real life, one might say.
And I look around, not simply at my own experience, but at the workings of the world in general, and it seems death, not resurrection, is the ultimate reality. I see a devastating earthquake in Haiti, a cataclysmal tsunami in Japan, and disastrous tornados in Alabama. In each instance, many people lost their lives in mere moments. If television programming is any indication, ours is a culture obsessed with death. Popular crime dramas revolve around death. Our mass media overrepresents violent crime, compared with official statistics. And only a few days ago, jubilant crowds gathered in the streets to worship the idols of violence and death, celebrating the demise of a person who was loved by God with as little mindfulness and sobriety as they would if their team had won a sporting event.
Every dollar spent on the insatiable military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned against in his farewell address constitutes an offering to death. War, it seems, has become a way of life, and there is alarmingly little resistance to the notion that war is the way to peace. The annual military budget, including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, is about $725 billion. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. warned that, “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” Sometimes I wonder whether we are already there.
Social forms of death, such as racism, addiction, homelessness, generational poverty, loneliness, and abuse continue to plague our world. Economics based on greed and exploitation of other people seem to be the norm. Interfaith dialogue is too often characterized by ignorance, fear, and hatred. A lifestyle of limitless consumption is wreaking tremendous ecological damage. Meanwhile 30,000 children die every day from malnutrition, lack of access to clean water, and preventable diseases.
Arcane criminal justice policies promote death, both literal and social. More people are serving longer sentences for victimless crimes, such as drug possession. In the United States, 2.5 million people are incarcerated. That’s about the population of the city of Houston. They are dehumanized and warehoused away from their spouses, children, parents, and friends. If and when they are released, they will forever be stigmatized, as they cannot vote, do not qualify for public housing, and must check “felon” on every job application they ever fill out, even though they have technically paid their debt to society. And although the death penalty has been shown to cost more than a life sentence while not functioning well as a deterrent, we stubbornly persist in giving our government the power to kill its own citizens. Death is the final moral and practical sanction of the State, which we might say holds a monopoly on dolling out death, under a guise of legitimacy. Death is, as Lee Camp has suggested, the biggest weapon in the arsenal of the fallen powers.
Given the ubiquitous power of death at work in the world, the passage from Micah about people streaming to God’s holy mountain to learn His ways, of refashioning weapons of warfare into gardening tools, of everyone having enough and living without fear, just seems unrealistic, like a fairy tale, an opiate of the naïve masses, perhaps, but not something that can reasonably be believed in.
So I struggle at times to believe in resurrection. Thankfully, I am not alone in my struggle. The gospel reading indicates that the disciples, standing in the presence of the risen Lord, were frightened and had doubts. Death was as real for them as it was for us, and they had seen Jesus crushed by the power of death, wielded, as usual, by the State. To help them believe, Jesus showed them his flesh and his bones, his hands and feet. He invited them to touch his body. But the disciples, though joyful, were still wondering and disbelieving. So he offers them an unlikely sign of resurrection. He takes a piece of broiled fish and eats it in their presence. And Luke to help with our disbelief, records for us this token of the resurrection, a keepsake, as it were. The risen Lord ate a piece of broiled fish.
That piece of fish isn’t exactly definitive proof that Jesus was raised from the dead. I don’t recall the piece of fish being mentioned in my Christian Evidences class during my junior year at Lipscomb. I doubt it would convince someone who understands the resurrection to be a metaphor, a parable told by the early church. But for me, it is a precious keepsake that death is not the ultimate moral reality in the universe.
Perhaps, as important as it is for the church to perceive the power of death at work where others see only success or progress or business as usual, it is even more important for the church to discern the keepsakes of resurrection, the remarkable signs of resurrection that appear in unlikely places.
I think about the peaceful end of apartheid in South Africa and the release of Nelson Mandela from prison. I think about Ken, whom we all met a few weeks ago, of the years he spent alone on the streets, and of his terminal cancer. But the love, acceptance, and dignity he has received from Lindsey and Scott and others speak to me of the reality of resurrection. I think about the Confessing Church in Germany that bravely resisted the power of death incarnate in Nazi totalitarianism. I think about the women of Magdalene House, who joined us last week. The lives of these women had been dominated by death. Yet like weeds breaking through cracked pavement, new life has broken forth. Keepsakes such as these remind me that new life is possible, that another world is possible, is coming, and is among us, that, as William Stringfellow might say, it is possible to live humanly in the midst of fallen Creation.
In the reading from Acts, we see Peter, who not long before stood in disbelief while Jesus at that piece of fish, boldly proclaiming the resurrection of Jesus from the dead to the rulers, elders, scribes, and high-priestly family that had him and John arrested. In the face of death, he proclaimed the One who confronted and was given authority over death. In the middle of chaos, he celebrated the Word of God. Amidst babel, he acted humanly; he told the truth.
And so I believe in the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. It follows that I believe that death was not the end of my grandfather. I believe that God’s will for love, justice, and peace can be and is being done on earth as it is in heaven. I believe that the powers of violence and death, in all their forms, can be resisted because when Jesus was raised, they were overcome. And when my doubts return, there is a piece of broiled fish, a compelling prophetic vision, an impassioned apostolic speech to the religious elite, and countless other keepsakes of resurrection to strengthen my imperfect belief. In the words of Henri Nouwen, “While many question whether the resurrection really took place, I wonder if it doesn’t take place every day if we have the eyes to see and the ears to hear.”