Don’t limit resurrection to single event

Tomorrow is Easter Sunday. All around the world, millions of Christian congregations will celebrate the Resurrection (with a capital R) of Jesus of Nazareth.

It is the single biggest religious celebration in the world — bigger than Islam’s hajj or Hinduism’s mela, which garner much greater media attention. So how could I avoid writing about it?

You know the story — Jesus went to Jerusalem, upset the local authorities, was arrested, tried, tortured, and was put to death. As the historic Apostles’ Creed puts it, he “was crucified, died, and was buried; he descended to the dead. On the third day he rose again…”

In the majority of Christian congregations, the preacher will treat the Resurrection as a literal, physical, honest-to-gawd fact. It happened exactly as the Bible says — even though the Bible itself offers at least four variations on the story.

The narratives were intended to offer legal evidence — under Jewish law, two eyewitnesses were considered sufficient proof. The Bible offers dozens of witnesses; thousands, according to Paul.

Even in a modern court, a host of eye-witness accounts can override testimony by scientific experts.

Legal proof does not equal scientific proof. In science, the results of an experiment can only be considered valid if they can be replicated. One-shot results are either accidents, or frauds. Remember “cold fusion”? Clearly, the Easter Resurrection is a onetime-only event.

Neither embalming nor cryonic freezing has ever restored a dead human body to life. Cloning can perpetuate a donor’s DNA, but it cannot resurrect Dolly the sheep.

Science doesn’t actually say that resurrection can never happen. You cannot prove a negative — you can only argue that it has never happened yet, that the laws of physics and chemistry as we currently know them preclude such a thing happening.

A few preachers will attempt to reconcile traditional Christian beliefs with modern science. They’ll argue that the Resurrection was a spiritual and/or emotional event, that the eye-witness stories were devised later to explain the powerful conviction that Jesus was not gone, was not dead, was still with his followers in ways they couldn’t explain.

I once challenged my minister, a thinking man, to preach on the Resurrection. He said pretty much what I said above: “Something happened. We don’t know what, but it changed people’s lives, and it is still changing lives.”

Some scholars make a distinction between Jesus the person, and the Christ who lives on.

So what really happened? As Yul Brunner mused in The King And I, “Is a puzzlement!”

I grew up with the stories of the Resurrection. Those stories shaped the lenses through which I view the world.

I doubt if the students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida would cite the Resurrection as a rationale for their opposition to U.S. gun culture. But, they confirm my conviction that out of death, new life is possible.

I see dozens of other resurrections. The movement to abolish slavery in the late 1800s. The civil rights movement of the 1960s. Today’s #MeToo revolution. The rising of Canada’s indigenous peoples…

To me, limiting resurrection to a single incident trivializes it. I see the Resurrection as part of a larger story.

It’s well known that Jesus taught in parables, stories that invited people to work out the point for themselves. It’s also widely accepted that his recurring theme was what he called the Kingdom of God — the way God wants the world to work.

In a couple of my books, I applied that “Kingdom” metaphor. And I imagined Jesus’ life itself as an enacted parable.

I wrote, “Once there was a ruler who believed that life and society could be fair, and just. To make sure that all was in order, he decided to test it for himself.

“So he disguised himself as a poor peasant, one who had no status or authority. Then he went around the country and was wrongly arrested.

“He had so much faith in the ultimate justice of his kingdom that he refused to reveal his true identity. He wouldn’t even defend himself against false charges. Not even when he was sentenced, not even when he was being executed, did he stop believing that justice would triumph in the end.”

If the parable ends there, I noted, we would have to conclude that his faith was misplaced. He did not receive the justice he expected.

But if the parable ends not on Good Friday but on Easter morning, then he was blindingly, blazingly, right. Your choice. Jim Taylor is an Okanagan Centre author and freelance journalist. He can be reached at rewrite@shaw.ca. This column appears Saturdays.