Resurrection Power
Easter 2002

Week of Monday, April 1, 2002

This week the church around the world celebrates its conviction that after his crucifixion, death, and burial, God raised Jesus from the dead, and that in doing so, He vanquished the powers of sin, death, and darkness that are so evident in our world and in our own personal lives. “Christ is risen!” proclaims the liturgist. “He is risen indeed!” the people respond.

Jesus had repeatedly told his followers in advance that his journey to Jerusalem would end in persecution, death and then resurrection on the third day, but “the disciples did not understand any of this” (Luke 18:31–34). Perhaps, then, it is not so surprising that when the resurrection did occur, they not only did not understand it, they did not even believe it. If you think about it, their initial disbelief is an entirely human, normal response. Have you ever seen someone raised from the dead? What I find amazing is that the early Christian writers would include such a self-incriminating admission in documents that were supposed to advance their cause.

Since the disciples had fled, the women who supported Jesus—Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, Salome, Joanna and others—were the first people to witness his empty tomb. At first, “they said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid.” Fear, trembling, bewilderment, but filled with joy, the Gospel writers tell us (Matthew 28:8, 16–17; Mark 16:8). When the women told the eleven disciples, “they did not believe the women, because their words seemed like nonsense” (Luke 24:11). Even after the Lord appeared in person to them, “they still did not believe” (Luke 24:41). Matthew puts it only slightly more positively, writing that when Jesus appeared to the eleven, “they worshipped him; but some doubted” (Matthew 28:16–17). Thomas, of course, was obstinate in his doubt (John 20:24–31).

Most people today don't believe in the resurrection. As with the initial response of the eleven disciples, such words sound like nonsense. We must admit, there are alternate explanations. One “widely circulated” (Matthew 28:15) proposal right after his death was that the disciples stole the body and created the fiction of Christ's resurrection. Others argue that the life and teachings of Jesus are what is “immortal,” in the sense of being sublime or intensely inspirational, much like we might describe the literature of Shakespeare or the music of Mozart. Others suggest that the spirit of Jesus lives on in us as a powerful memory and presence, like the spirit of Ghandi or a favorite uncle who deeply impacted us when he was alive.¹

What these alternative explanations have in common is the idea that the resurrection accounts are more myth and metaphor than history, more like religious poetry than narrative prose, something to be taken figuratively but not literally. I don't find the alternate explanations compelling, and even if I did, they would certainly not make we want to be a Christian in the sense that they construe that term. Nor is this what the early believers came to believe, not by a long shot. To them, Jesus was truly and literally raised from the dead, and even if they could not fully understand, describe or explain that, if that were not so they freely admitted that their “gospel” was a sham and that they were liars (1 Corinthians 15:1–28).

For the early Christians, following the risen Jesus meant “to know him and the power of His resurrection” (Philippians 3:10). When Paul prayed for the believers at Ephesus, he prayed that they would know God's “incomparably great power toward us who believe. That power is like the working of his mighty strength, which he exerted in Christ when he raised him from the dead” (Ephesians 1:19–20). But what does this mean, not only to say that you believe in the resurrection of Jesus, but to experience its power?

Some Christians teach that resurrection power offers us immunity from the slings and arrows of life, or that if one is so unfortunate as to experience them, then surely resurrection power makes available to us deliverance, healing, health and wholeness. It is yours to name and claim. I find it disturbing that variations of this teaching, in stronger and milder versions, find such a receptive audience among Christians when everything about our human experiences refutes it. When Paul is asked to prove his apostolic credentials, he freely admits that his experience of God's mighty power somehow, paradoxically, co-exists within the extremities of human weakness brought about by suffering, hardship and mental anguish—hard pressed, perplexed, persecuted, struck down, imprisonments, floggings, beatings, stonings, shipwrecks, labors, toils, insomnia, hunger and thirst (2 Corinthians 4:7–12, 6:4–10). Paul tells us that he “boasts” about these many weaknesses and even “delights” in them. Why? So that it becomes clear to all that “God's power is made perfect in weakness” and that His grace is sufficient to keep us in the midst of them (2 Corinthians 12:7–10). True, in writing to the Philippians Paul says that he wants to experience the power of Christ's resurrection, but in the last half of that sentence he also writes that he wants to know “the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to his death.”

Rather than outward manifestations of great power to ameliorate unpleasant external circumstances, Paul writes that where we most experience Christ's resurrection power is in our inner transformation. Despite all the adverse tribulations he experienced, Paul insists, “We do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day” (2 Corinthians 4:16). For the Ephesians he prays that they would be “strengthened with power in your inner being.” Why? That they would “grasp the immensity of God's love” (Ephesians 3:16–19). Resurrection power, it would seem, is not brute force, but the experience of an immense and life-transforming love.

I am sure that we have all known people whose inner lives, whose very selves, have been radically transformed by the power of God's love. Sometimes these stories are so drastic that they are hard to believe, like that of the former Catholic priest Brennan Manning. For most of us the inner transformation, if we sense it at all, comes in fits and starts. Three steps forward, two steps back. But bit by bit, as we look across the years, by God's grace we discover that despite many failures mixed with limited successes, we are heading in the right direction.

Scripture makes it plain that, this side of heaven, the experience of God's resurrection power and inner transformation should find a significant commencement, something that is real, true, and discernible. But it is only an inauguration and not a culmination, a partial beginning rather than a total fulfillment. Paul uses two metaphors to make this point, one from farming and one from finance. In this life we experience but the “first fruits” of the Spirit's power and presence, not the full harvest, and as a result, in much of life we can but only “groan inwardly” (Romans 8:23). Or again, to date we know only a partial down payment of God's full resurrection power, but this partial deposit guarantees our full redemption in the future (2 Corinthians 1:22, 55, Ephesians 1:13–14).

We make a significant start, but there is more, much more, to come.

There is deliverance, to use that beautiful old word, and Christians are people who through such now-and-then, here-and-there visions as they've had, through Christ, have been delivered just enough to know that there's more where that came from, and whose experience of the little deliverance that has already happened inside themselves and whose faith in the deliverance still to happen is what sees them through the night.²

Christ is risen, and by God's grace may we experience in the depths of our being the power of His life-transforming love.