Resurrection, The Killer App.

I know priests who don’t believe in a physical resurrection; two thousand years of Platonism have done for that. They should call themselves “pratons” perhaps, not priests! All the energy of the New Testament is in the cross and resurrection, both together and inseparable.

You can’t overcome the catastrophe of the cross in a “spiritual” way. It has to be a real physical reversal. That’s the only intelligible explanation for the first-century Christian movement.

Even in formal doctrine the resurrection remains seriously underrated. According to Anthony Kelly the Resurrection is the poor cousin of Christian themes. It’s always subordinate to the grand idea of the Incarnation, of Jesus as God. But if you think about it the way it’s meant to be, in human terms, then it becomes suddenly explosive in meaning.

It means a real human being has overcome the physical drag and philosophical doom of death. It means that the actual constitution of the cosmos at some point in its surface and depth is now fully and irreversibly turned to life. Because we have been taught to think Platonically we were told that Jesus’ resurrected body went “to heaven,” where in fact it is indistinguishable from all that heavenly stuff and has nothing to do with the earth. The opposite is the case.

If Jesus triumphed over violence and death he did it in the human order of reality and not somewhere else. That’s why his disciples could meet him on the road, in a garden, on the shore of a lake cooking breakfast. And the more you think about it this has some really marvelous implications.

Jesus’ withdrawal from his disciples after forty days was not “to go to heaven” but in order to let the resurrection as meaning sink into human consciousness (rather than simply remain an amazing miracle). The truth of resurrection has to be received freely, but as a matter of fact because of the resurrection all material reality is bent round to immortality. And time as we know it has come to a stop.

Because the thought of Jesus’ resurrection has entered human consciousness then little by little all the fantastic stupidity of life as we lead it at the moment is shown for what it is, fantastically stupid. All the greed, the lies, the hate, the pride, the violence. Instead there is another life, one based on inexhaustible love, a love that never dies. And so the time of violence which has ruled all our timepieces since the beginning—the forward march of nations and empires, the glory of Rome, the British empire on which the sun never set, the irresistible “spread of democracy” (a.k.a. capitalism) throughout the world, all of this has slowly congealed on itself and shown itself literally to have no future. Not simply because the planet cannot bear the weight of the violence but because in the depth of the human heart we know all this is pointless, false and wrong. Because of the resurrection.

My son has a smartphone. He shows me what he calls “apps” or applications. For example, one in which he can google any place on earth and then add in a three-d sketch of new buildings. Right there on his phone. Now every marketer is looking for the “killer app,” the one that everyone will want, so useful that no one could be without it.

Well, that’s the resurrection. Somewhere in the universe, which means right here in your room, death and violence are done, defeated, put to death. You can’t see it on your Blackberry, but you can with your heart. You can click on the new time of peace and forgiveness and all the old ways of doing things seem like Pony Express. Moreover this application is not going to go down because there is a power cut, or a cyber attack, or even because someone drops a nuclear bomb. It is irreversible in the material order. You can always trust it.

This is why Christians say “Alleluia” at Eastertide, and really anytime. A new time has come into our world, and we laugh at the old time as it melts horribly into itself on all the old media screens of the planet. Death and violence are the most tried and most tired of applications. Try Resurrection instead!

Tony