Resurrection translated
Resurrection is, surely, one of the hardest elements of the Christian story to convey? People relate readily to the story of a baby being born at Christmas time, everyone has some experience of suffering, and few are strangers to death and mourning. Resurrection, however, is altogether outside our experience?
It is for this reason that I have always looked to translate the resurrection into Christian experience, where people are defying the odds through their resurrection faith. This is what Karl Barth described as the ‘defiant nevertheless’ of Christian belief.
The little piece of lace below has travelled with me to many venues and been used for many Easter talks. It was presented to me by a friend in Serbia who was suffering at the time with a particularly acute form of multiple sclerosis. She could not stand up straight, and handed it to me with hands which the pain had turned almost into claws. However, in better days she had made it with those same hands and she wanted my family to have it as a reminder of her prayers for us. The elusive reality of the resurrection is seen in circumstances such as these, where the weak are made strong and the faith of the broken stays intact.
Resurrection is only outside our experience if we push it back into the past or forward to ‘life after death’. See Harry Williams ‘True Resurrection’.
But if we think about resurrection in the here and now, then we are all in need of ‘resurrection’ in our spiritual, moral, and religious lives, and many of us have experienced it, when something that seemed dead and finished came back to life through the grace of God. Trouble is, to get to resurrection you have to go through death first – and most of us would rather not do that
Pingback: The Preachers' Blog · In other words