2
This
has not been a simple set of lessons
in my life
. I am guessing your own brushes
with resurrection’s mystery have not been simple either.
We Christians come to the joy, the elation of our Easter Sundays by the hardest of
roads
—
the road
that teaches us of
harsh
injustice, of a terrifying kind of suffering
—
the kind that feels like it could be the thief of any semblance of hope we have left,
the kind that
seems to mock
God’s promises of redemption
, the kind that makes
real
joy seem like a stranger to us
.
We cannot rise up to the vivid truth of Easter without abiding first in the shadows of
the cruelty and injustice that this world seems to doll out with horrible consistency.
If someone asked you why you are a Christian, where would Resurrection come in
to
your answer?
And what about joy? Where have you seen dry, brittle bones come to
life? Where have you seen the Lord?
Resurrection has never been settled doctrine
. Its mysterious power and truth have
always taken a variety of forms and answered a ran
ge of life’s hardest questions.
And it has always been something that calls each person into a profound journey of
discovery of inner resources we would not otherwise know we had.
R
esurrection is not an idea unique to Christians either.
In Jewish writing later in the exilic period and post exile, we begin to see flirtations
with
concepts of
resurrection. It was most often an answer to the profound
quandary of why divine justice seems such a stranger to the way life here on earth
actually
works.
This disconnect, this dissonance
—
this repetitive reality that tells us again and again
that the wicked prosper, that innocent people suffer, that lives can be cut short by
th
e cruelest of turns, that
people
too often
use their power to do great ha
rm, can
become to
o
much to bear. And the human question cries out “how long” “why”?
And so mythic stories began to emerge
in later Jewish antiquity
with a variety of
ways to understand resurrection’s purpose: vindication, reward or punishment, and
ways t
o redeem a battered nation.
Ezekiel’s experience of the valley of dry bones coming to life was a message to the
people of Israel
—
deportees, those oppressed and violated by the powers and
principalities
—
your despair will be transformed. Nothing stands out
side God’s
power and capability.