I Believe in the Resurrection

I believe in the Resurrection.

Next to the mystery of a Triune God, this is what defines Christianity. It is the End, and the Beginning, of the narrative. But after four Gospels and 2000 years of reflection, the fact of the Resurrection can easily become rote – “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.” It’s easy to recite this on Sunday and return to the weekly routine on Monday, untouched by the encounter.

But lately I have been wrestling with the Resurrection. Like many people in an historical moment of great duress, I have felt called to go back to basics with my faith. The result is a kind of blessing, of seeing with fresh eyes. Re-reading Mark recently – really it doesn’t get more basic than this spare, unsettling account, in which not a word is wasted – I have tried to encounter the Resurrection from the perspective of the women in the narrative, who alone remain to the very end, after the fair-weather faithful and blustering male companions have melted away. As readers, for whom the Gospel narrative is so deeply ingrained, our response to these women is inevitably colored by how the other three evangelists end the story: Jesus appears in the garden, on the road, in the upper room, on the seaside – he even makes breakfast! Everything is neatly resolved. It’s all going to be fine.

But in Mark, there is no resolution. The Resurrection isn’t a neat and tidy endpoint. There is no moment of encounter, no blessing from Christ risen and restored. The tomb is empty, and these women have just witnessed an incomprehensible act of violence, evil of such magnitude: the banal evil of the mob that just as easily shouts “crucify” as they do “Hosanna”; the calculated evil of men with power who will do anything to retain it; the raw evil that takes pleasure in the spectacle of torture, pain, and death. How must it have been for them to go on living in a world where this can happen? How did they even get out of bed at the crack of dawn, to ritually anoint the body of Christ, which suffered such savagery? There is an answer at the empty tomb, but it’s not an easy one: “He has been raised. He is not here.” In their encounter with the Resurrection, these women – Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome – are beside themselves. The last sentence of Mark, dropping the later additions that attempt to soften it, is the epitome of the cliffhanger: “they told no one, for they were afraid.”

To believe in the Resurrection is to embrace this ekstasis – this “being beside oneself” – that the women experienced. It is accepting that God’s redemption of a world marred by evil is not neat and tidy, that there is no clear resolution while history continues to unfurl. Before the garden and the upper room, the seaside and the meal shared amongst friends, it is the silence of the empty tomb. All one can do is stand and witness it.