What is the Resurrection?
While it is not yet easter and we are still moving towards the observance of Good Friday, I figured that as a way to get our minds reeling for tonight’s podcast, I would inclue a quote that I stumbled upon on a particular post on Ben’s blog. It is a quote from Rowan Williams’ book called Ressurection: Interpreting the Easter Gospel. Here he is talking about the Ressurection in relation to history:
“Jesus’ life is historical, describable…. But there is a sense in which the raising of Jesus … does not and cannot belong to history: it is not an event, with a before and after, occupying a bit of time between Friday and Sunday. God’s act in uniting Jesus’ life with his eludes us: we can speak of it only as the necessary condition for our living as we live. And as a divine act it cannot be tied to place and time in any simple way. It is, indeed, an ‘eternal’ act: it is an aspect of the eternal will by which God determines how he shall be, his will to be the Father of the Son…. The event of resurrection, then, cannot but be hidden in God’s eternal act, his eternal ‘being himself’; however early we run to the tomb, God has been there ahead of us” (Ressurection: Interpreting the Easter Gospel, pp. 89-90).
Some good questions for reflection:
- If Jesus’ resurrection is grounded in a logic that is simply comprehendable by human beings does that not make the Gospel a human invention? Said differently, must not the resurrection be necessarily incomprehensable in order for it to not become a simple formula that we proscribe in nature (Ie. Death = Resurrection)?
- What might it mean to say that Jesus’ resurrection was a “history creating” event, as opposed to “an event” within history?
Thoughts?