Searching for God # 93

 Is there some ‘energy’ that nudges one’s thoughts, instincts, intuition and curiosity to dig into one of the most gordion of knots of Christian theology on St. Patrick’s Day 2026, The Resurrection?

Sure to tell, historians have documented how the Irish preserved civilization in and through their monks transcribing volumes in candle-light as an integral part of their discipline. That’s a metaphor for resurrection, isn’t it?

Every traditional Irish folk-song and dance brings new hope and energy to all who perform and all who listen and watch.

Surely, James Joyce, dependent as he was for much of his life on alcohol, contributed new life to Western literary cannon through his Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and his epic, Ulysses.

The Titanic was supposed to be the first ‘unsinkable’ ocean vessel in history, and like Icarus, it sank on its own hubris.

Irish wakes are sometimes interpreted as a living cycle, in which stories and songs serve as a form of resurrection of the deceased’s person and memory and life.

There really is an Anglican Church of the Resurrection in  Blarney, County Cork, dedicated to the Resurrection of Jesus.

On a personal, non-scholarly note, this scribe has for decades adopted something of an ambivalent approach to the subject of the Resurrection. On the one hand, I have consistently intuited that ‘new life’ in all of its multiple iterations lies at the heart or core of nature, of the imagination, of the unspoken and imagined fantasies and dreams and ambitions of each one of us. These perceptions, attitudes, intuitions and even ‘hopes and aspirations ‘seemed’ to be grounded in the earth, the water, the sky and the hopes and aspirations of all mankind, in every historic epoch.  And my ‘take’ was never tied to or dependent on a religious conviction, nor a cognitively held piece of historic data. Easter Sunday services, whether at sunrise on an adjacent hill, or within a sanctuary, seemed ‘larger than life’ and somehow ‘enhanced’ out of the ordinary, especially to my pre-adult sensibilities and naivety.

To a field education prof in seminary who counselled, “The question, ‘Is it life giving?’ has served as my criterion for making many of my life decisions, I silently and repeatedly added, “And that question concurs with everything I hold dear about God and theology, including the Resurrection.”

Rising from death and the Crucifixion into New Life, as the Sunday school teachers tried to explain the Christian ‘story’ as their ‘belief’ never failed to leave me wondering, ‘What does it mean ‘to believe’? Does it mean that ‘I believe the events of both the Crucifixion and the Resurrection actually, literally, historically really happened?’ Does it mean something different, such as, ‘God’s message and story are all about loving and forgiving everyone in our darkest moments and through grace lifting us up out of our despond, despair, shame, guilt and worthlessness’? Or is there something about a metaphoric ‘dying’ of my sinful will that cannot resist temptation in order to come to a place of ‘acceptance’ of Jesus Christ, Resurrected, as my personal Saviour, in which state, and through His grace, I will be more enabled to resist the temptations of things like carnal lust?

Underlying even the most prosaic of these questions is the notion of new life following some ‘form’ of death, with the ultimate meaning and purpose of that symbol, from a literal, fundamental Christian pulpit and Sunday School classes, an afterlife in Heaven, promised to the ‘saved.’ And, of course, in the binary form of this theology, the alternative is the promise of an eternal life in Hell, of fire, or ice or indifference, yet characterized by punishment for those who are not saved.

All or at least most of these ‘speculations’ have been gurgling around in my consciousness, and undoubtedly in my unconscious as well for nigh onto 8 decades. More recently, while rummaging through some more recent scholarship, I stumbled upon a title, from an author named James Alison, ‘The Joy of Being Wrong,’ to which I was instantly drawn. Having considered myself the ‘archetype of being wrong,’ as a sinner, and one cast as ‘no good’ from my family of origin, and one who seemed to have a ‘nack’ of self-sabotaging if the least likely opportunity surfaced, I wondered whether Alison had anything to say that might be enlightening.

I found these words:

The resurrection of Jesus was not a miraculous event within a pre-existing framework of understand of God, but the event by which God recast the possibility of human understanding of God. For this to happen God simultaneously made use of and blew apart the understanding of  God that had developed over the centuries among the Jewish people. God did this in the person of Jesus, through his life and teaching, leading up to and including his death. There is a first step to this recasting of God through the resurrection of the crucified Jesus, and this is the demonstration that death itself is a matter of indifference to God. Jesus had already taught exactly this in his answer to the Sadducees in Mark 12:18-27, a teaching which must have seemed mysterious at the time because it showed that in Jesus’ perception of God, as opposed to that of his interlocutors, there was already before Jesus’ death, a clear awareness that an understanding structured by death cannot begin to speak adequately about God….This marks a decisive change in the understanding of God, one which had been a long time in the making, since if God ahs nothing to do with death, if God is indifferent to death, then our representations of God, all of which are marked by a human culture in which death appears as, at the very least, inevitable, are wrong, as Jesus remarked to the Sadducees: ‘You are greatly mistaken.’ The resurrection of Jesus, at the same time as it showed the unimagined strength of divine love for a particular human being and therefore revealed the loving proximity of God, also marked a final and definitive sundering of God from any human representational capacity. (Alison op. cit. p.115-116)

Alison continues:

It is not only that our representation of God is contrary to the understanding of God which God wishes to make known. That is to say that the death of this man Jesus showed that death is not merely a biological reality, but it is also a sinful reality. To put it another way,  it is not just that death is a human reality and not a divine one, but as a human reality it is a sinful reality. God, in raising Jesus, was not merely showing that death has no power over him, but also revealing that the putting to death of Jesus showed humans as actively involved in death. In human reality, death and sin are intertwined: the necessity of human death is itself a necessity born of sin. In us, death is not merely a passive reality but an active one, not something we merely receive but one we deal out….The third step in the recasting of God and the recasting of sin is that God raised up this man who had been killed in this way for us. The victim of human iniquity was raised up as forgiveness; in fact the resurrection was the raising up of the victim as forgiveness. This it was which permitted the recasting of God as love. It was not just that God loved his son and so raised him up, but that the giving of the son and his raising up revealed God as love for us….If the third step reveals God as forgiving us (and the presence of the crucified and risen victim was exactly this revelation), then it also simultaneously reveals that death is not only a human reality, and one inflicted by sin, but that the human reality of death itself is capable of being forgiven…..That is to say, the forgiveness which flows from the resurrection affects not only such acts as we may have carried out, but, much more importantly, what we had hitherto imagined to be our very natures. If death is something that can be forgiven us, we were not only wrong about God, but we were fundamentally wrong about ourselves. (Ibid, p.117-118)

Cutting through some obvious and highly noxious and nefarious stereotypes that have ‘polluted’ and ‘infected’ the ethos, the air, the arguments about and the fears and demons that have taken up residence in the Christian consciousness for centuries, Alison, offers a challenging perspective and insight into a very unique exegesis of sin, death and resurrection.

Instead of separating God from man, Alison separates God from death, as a human reality and removes both the horror, terror, fear and even the culpability, if needed. There is a risk that Alison might be considered to be playing God, although his analysis seems securely grounded in his reading of scripture. The conclusion that Jesus was a willing sacrificial victim to the unjust violence by which he was victimized, in favour of relationality, as Alison concludes, shines as a spiritual, religious, moral and ethical beacon for the ‘inner rescuer’ to which such exegesis speaks.

Tolstoy, in his ‘The Kingdom of God is Within You,’ would remind us that it is in and through our non-violent opposition to evil (consciousness of which is innately available to everyone) with force, the both underlies and emphasizes a position which Alison may or may not be consciously echoing all these decades later.

The daily menu of humans inflicting death on innocent children, men and women, unjustly, unjustifiably, illegally, immorally, unethically, and unacceptably, while we all seem and feel powerless to bring about its cessation, offers a unique historic moment in which, in this Lent of 2026. We are mere weeks away from another Christian celebration of the liturgies and rituals of Maundy Thursday,  Good Friday, Easter Sunday and both our having been steeped, like luke-warm (and worn) tea in the traditional ‘version’ of this season. Doubtless, our human innate search for ‘new life’ as that phrase applies to each of us individually, finds opportunity to revisit a thesis like the one James Alison offers.