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What Is The Resurrection, Really?

Posted May 8th, 2011 by Greg Mayers

We are enthralled by death. It is what gave us awareness, then consciousness, then a sense of self, according to Rene Girard. Our “animal” attention was drawn to the death of an “other”, fixed on it. This happen not once, but repeatedly over thousands of years until enough development took place that attention evolved into awareness which is the foundation for consciousness (focused awareness), which in turn registers the “other”, which paradoxically returns to me as a sense of self different enough from the other out there while possessing enough similarities. There is no little self or big self outside of our social context. As one of Girard’s followers and collaborators puts it, we are interdividuals, not individuals. (Thus the importance of the Trinity: God cannot known himself outside the “social” context of the other – indeed cannot “be” outside the social context.) (Is the Buddhist experience of “no-self” a retreat from the human social context? And if so, is this retreat an evolution or a devolution?)

Things don’t go so well when we are conscious of an “other”. Eventually that consciousness transmute into an obstacle for us, for we learn from the other how and what to desire, want, value. (Cf. empirical research on “mirror neurons” in the brain which shows that we are hard wired to imitate others). And that shows us what we are lacking, or think we are lacking. It can be anything: love, recognition, value in and of ourselves. Because we learnt desire from what the “other” desired, and because we see the “other” as possessing what we want, we conclude that all that is necessary is to remove the other in order to get what we want. Our dis-ease is misinterpreted as caused by the “other” having what they want and we lacking what we want, a desirability we learned from the same other, but never knew that we learned it that way for that learning pattern is lost in the pre-history of the human race. To resolve this crisis all that is necessary is to remove the cause of the crisis, which is mis-identified as the “other”. This leads to the foundational murder that becomes the origin of religion, sacred sacrifice, the glue of the social order and the sense of a self that is different from that bothersome “other” who causes such problems for all of “us”. See the Cain and Abel myth.
 
The resulting death of the other has an unexpected calming effect on us (all of “us”). The dis-ease and chaos that preceded the murder, suddenly disappears. The obstacle to the object of desire is gone as well. Nothing stands in our way to what we want. Except that without the other we cannot know what to want, much less know what we do want. Egoism leaps to the forefront of human evolution. That peace in the wake of murder lasts for awhile, until the whole pattern of learning desire from the desire of the other repeats itself in the unfolding of human and personal history.
 
The death of Jesus, who is the face of God, the enfleshment of God, and his resurrection breaks our enthrallment with death and thus smashes our identity, an identity formed precisely by death. No wonder the apostles were frightened when the Risen Jesus appears to them! It was the end of them as they knew themselves. It is interesting that the Risen Jesus appears with the wounds of Calvary still fresh in his body. God didn’t just “cure” Jesus of death and return him to his life, as if he came back after a long weekend holiday, to take up where he left off. The Risen Jesus bears the marks of his own death precisely to show us that it is also our death that he carries and tramples down by his death. It is also interesting that Jesus doesn’t rise from the dead to take vengeance on his murders, or to scold his followers for their lack of faith and their betrayal of him. Rather the message is clear: the abundance of God’s gratuitous love and life is yours already and the Risen Jesus is the evidence for that. Not only is there no need to sacrifice anyone or anything again to get what you want, but we no longer need to be enthralled by death of any kind. Death ceases to define us. Eternal life, meaning boundless life is our birthright, life uncoupled from death. Furthermore, that boundless life, the risen life, has already begun in us, for we are given the same spirit that animates the Risen Jesus. The transformation from being held hostage to death, to the freedom of the children of God is already happening in us and as us. Our rivalry for life as an object to acquire by removing the obstacles to that acquisition is transmuted into indebtedness to and gratitude for the Risen Jesus, who continually sets us free. Sin is undone in us. The knot choking the life out of being is loosened. Life abounds.
 
The pattern of life to death is broken in Jesus risen from the dead, and it is being smashed in us too. The old sense of self defined by death cannot possibly grasp what the new sense of self given by the Resurrection, means. We must die to the old Adam and rise in the New Adam, putting off the old man and putting on the new. Biological death is a major concern to the old Adam trapped in his binary dance with death; but a non issue for the New Adam. The old Adam cannot imagine any “Other” without the necessity of death about it. (See the repeated temple sacrifices in Jerusalem). The New Adam cannot imagine death as a concern at all: whether alive or dead, we are the Lord’s. This means that we are in the process of becoming the face of God as Jesus is the face of God. And to be the face of God is to act gratuitously always and everywhere in favor of the other as God continually does with us, His “others”, until the “his others” are no longer “other”; instead of in rivalry with the other.
 
It is the Incarnation, Death and Resurrection of Jesus that shows us that God identifies with us, easing out our otherness while honoring our uniqueness. We are no threat to God. But God is a threat to us, to our sense of self, a mortal threat that we can relax into for to do so is to rise to boundless life that is God himself.
 
That is the message of the Resurrection which to this very day, 2000 years later, still mostly goes unheeded, contorted and dismissed, perhaps more by those who claim it than by those who disbelieve it.