In this episode of Christian Mythbusters, Father Jared continues to break some of the myths about the resurrection of Christ which we celebrate during Eastertide. This week, he turns to the question of why the resurrection is an important part of Christian belief. You can hear Christian Mythbusters in the Grand Haven area on 92.1 WGHN, on Wednesdays at 10:30 am and Sundays at 8:50 am. You can also subscribe to the podcast on Apple here.

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The transcript of the episode is below, or you can listen to the audio at the bottom of the post.

This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith. 

Last week, as we continue walking through the Great Fifty Days of Easter, I sought to break some of the myths surrounding the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Specifically, I tried to speak to the theological principal that Jesus was bodily raised. I talked about how this was more than resuscitation of a corpse—that his resurrected body was different than a normal mortal body—but that the idea that he was still raised bodily is indeed a core tenet of the Christian faith, both Scripturally and theologically. 

But I should probably be clear this week that I didn’t answer one of the key questions you might have… why? Why is the truth of the bodily resurrection so important? Why do people like author John Updike, whose poem “Seven Stanzas at Easter” I shared last week, say things like, “Make no mistake: if he rose at all, it was as His body; if the cell’s dissolution did not reverse, the molecule reknit, the amino acids rekindle, the Church will fall.” Will it really?

The “why” question is important, and so this week I’d like to try to break the myth that some people have who think that believing in the resurrection probably isn’t an essential part of the Christian faith. 

I talked last week about the essentiality of the bodily resurrection of Christ in the Scriptural witness. In particular, I highlighted the words from the Apostle John in his First Epistle, “We declare to you what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life.”

The Apostle Paul spoke to this as well, in the fifteenth chapter of his First Epistle to the Corinthians, where he said, “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have died in Christ have perished. If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.”

 So, clearly the apostles and the early church believed the truth of the bodily resurrection… but the question remains… why? Why does it matter?

To be clear, the church has spent the better part of two thousand years exploring this question and there is no way I could summarize all those theological arguments in the next two and a half minutes I have. That said, there are two reasons for the essentiality bodily resurrection that I, personally, find particularly persuasive. 

The bodily resurrection is essential for the same reason that the incarnation is essential—because in Christ God chose to be one of us, to take on our nature, to experience all the delight, pain, and struggle of mortality. All of the pain and struggle, the guilt and doubt, that has plagued you as a human, in Christ God chose to take all of that on… and God was not overcome. And so because of the bodily resurrection, we can trust that our own mortal existence will not be the end, but that in the end it will be transformed and made new by God’s love… but it will be made new still embodied, that all of the goodness of what it means to be an embodied person will finally be made perfect because of the work of God in Christ. 

The second point is made quite well by our former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, “The resurrection is in part about the sheer toughness and persistence of God’s love. When we have done our worst, God remains God — and remains committed to being our God. God was God even while God in human flesh was dying in anguish on the cross; God is God now in the new life of Jesus raised from death.”

I’ve made this same point another way in conversations, if God cannot raise humans from the dead, if that is beyond God’s power, then how is God truly anything more than a nice thought? But if God can raise the dead—and if God did so in Jesus Christ—then this makes an important point about the persistence of God’s love, how even the worst in humanity (even the worst in you and the worst in me) cannot stop the love of God in Jesus Christ. 

I know, neither of those might be particularly appealing or persuasive for you. And that’s fine. I think we all come to God with different needs, different struggles, and different theological truths that help draw us into faith. 

But what I hope you do know is this: you are not alone in your lived existence as a human being, even if it might feel that way sometimes. And God, in Christ, chose to share that existence and, through divine love, to go to the very dark, scary, end of it… but not let that be the end. But through God’s love to redeem and transform human existence

And that means something important, it means God’s love can transform your own life as well, no matter how dark and scary it might get. God’s love can still raise it up, if you’re willing to give yourself to it. 

 Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember, protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today. 

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