Practice resurrection

By Tyler Tankersley

One of my favorite writers is Flannery O'Connor. Her disturbing, Southern Gothic stories tend to include characters who offer pure, unfiltered, and often disturbing truth. In one of her stories, titled "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," O'Connor presents a character called the Misfit. He is a truly awful person. In fact, he spends the entire story orchestrating the murder of six members of a single family. But at one point in the story, amid all the killing, the Misfit makes this powerfully insightful comment: "Jesus was the only One that ever raised from the dead and He shouldn't have done it. He thrown everything off balance."

The Misfit is right. The event we celebrate on Easter morning throws everything off balance. All the ways the world is supposed to work are twisted around spinning on their heads.

It can be too much to take. In fact, in the Apostle Paul's first letter to the Christians in Corinth it is clear that many of them were unwilling to fully embrace the concept of Jesus's literal resurrection. The sophisticated Corinthians thought such an idea was embarrassing and crass. However, Paul reminds them that faith in Jesus' resurrection is an essential part of Christian discipleship: "If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins" (1 Corinthians 15:17).

We too can struggle with the disruption that accompanies the resurrection. Many Christians are much more comfortable putting their focus on the cross than on the empty tomb. The cross is something that we can at least attempt to understand because we are in a culture inundated with the myth of redemptive violence. But, like the Misfit, we are thrown off balance by the empty tomb because it is a bombastic event that destroys our preconceived notions and ideas of justice. The Benedictine nun Joan Chittister says it well: "The image of Christianity as bearer of hope has often disappeared under the emphasis of the cross rather than being heightened by the image of the empty tomb."

Maybe crosses are just easier to construct than empty tombs, but I think it goes much deeper than that. Church historians tell us that the early church did not utilize the cross as a symbol of their faith. They instead used two dominant images for their faith: the Icthys ("Jesus fish") and the Empty Tomb of Christ.

This Easter, let's allow ourselves to be disrupted and thrown off balance by the empty tomb. Wendell Berry ends his magnificent poem "The Mad Farmer Liberation Manifesto" with this formidable line: "Practice resurrection." Berry captures well the meaning of Easter: for those of us who seek to follow Christ as his disciples, we continue to live out the power of the resurrection. We recognize that the cycles of death, injustice, and selfishness in this world will not have the last word and they will be overpowered by God's new life, new neighborliness, and new love. That is indeed a disruption, but then again, some things are worth disrupting.

He is risen.

He is risen indeed.