What the Resurrection Means

Several years ago I was writing the occasional column for a nearby newspaper. Most of the time the column was in response to a question submitted by a reader. However, on a few occasions I wrote a column that was not in response to a question. Here is one such column. Given our time in the liturgical calendar and the pandemic we are experiencing, I thought it might be appropriate to post the article again.

I was recently interviewed by a reporter from another newspaper who was working on a column devoted to the topic of Easter and the Easter message. He began by asking me whether I thought “the resurrection had actually happened.”

The reporter’s question is a thoroughly modern question. Ever since the European “enlightenment” of the 18th-19th centuries, we in the West have been increasingly led to desire and expect objective, clear, and certain knowledge. We have come to believe that true knowledge consists in knowing the “facts” together with theories that help to tie those facts together and explain them.

In the words of Marcus Borg — a contemporary theologian whose works I greatly admire — we have identified truth with “facticity.”

And so the reporter’s question was not surprising. We want to know “Did the resurrection really, actually happen?” And for many of us that means “Is it factual?”

But — and here’s where I risk offending by sharing some of my own personal views — such questions make the mistake of trying to make mythological language fit the category and requirements of logical language. It’s as if we assume that only factual language can be true and so we try to fit the round peg of myth into the square hole of logic.

The truth of the matter is that truth is not confined to “facticity.” Mythological language – like poetic language – expresses truths that cannot be expressed by logical language or language too narrowly bound by reason.

Borg has pointed out that when studying and reflecting upon biblical events it is frequently less important and less interesting to ask whether the event “actually happened” than it is to ask what the event and its report means.

After I had explained some of this to my interviewer, he put me on the spot and asked me, “Well, then, what does the Easter event mean?”

I was momentarily silenced, but then began to find the words to express what Easter meant to me.

It means, I said, that despite the worst that humans can conceive and do — and certainly the execution of Jesus falls into that category — God’s purposes cannot be finally thwarted. It means that despite the greatest evil we can commit or despite the greatest tragedy we can suffer God is able to salvage something and to create good out of that evil or tragedy.

This does not require us to say — when something evil happens — that God planned it or that it was “God’s will.” After all, we are unfortunately all too capable of creating the evil ourselves. But God can and does frequently bring something marvelously good out of evil events.

Such a conviction cannot be expressed in language that asks whether something “actually happened.” It can however be expressed in biblical and mythological language as we do when we affirm that God raised Jesus from the dead.

That, I told the reporter, is the Easter message for me.