The Resurrection as the Only Answer

Today's Reading

Read 1 Corinthians 15:12-19 — Paul's argument from the negative. If Christ has not been raised, "your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied."

Read 1 Corinthians 15:20-28 — the positive: "But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep... For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive."

Read 1 Corinthians 15:50-58 — the climax: "Behold! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed... 'Death is swallowed up in victory.' 'O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?'"

Read Romans 8:18: "For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us."

Read John 20:24-29 — Thomas, the patron saint of every reader who needs the resurrection to be real before he can believe anything else. Notice that Jesus does not rebuke him for the demand. He gives Thomas the wounds.

Reflection

For nine days this plan has tried to do the hard, slow work of taking the question of suffering seriously. We have sat with Habakkuk and the Psalms of complaint. We have watched Job's friends fail and Job himself argue with God. We have followed God's non-answer out of the whirlwind. We have read Augustine on evil as privation, surveyed the free will defense and named its limits, listened to Paul and James on what suffering can produce, learned from Luther that God is found under the appearance of his opposite, and knelt with Christ in Gethsemane.

All of that is real, and all of it matters. None of it is the answer.

The Christian answer to the problem of evil is not finally an argument. It is an event. It is the empty tomb on Sunday morning.

Paul is unembarrassed about this. 1 Corinthians 15 is the most concentrated theological chapter in the New Testament, and it is staked, openly and absolutely, on the historical claim that Jesus of Nazareth, having been crucified and buried, was on the third day raised from the dead — bodily, publicly, verifiably. "If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain... If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied." Paul is not building a fallback. He is not saying and even if Christ has not been raised, the values are still good. He is saying: take this away, and Christianity is the most pathetic religion on earth, because it has staked everything on a corpse it claims is alive. If the corpse is not alive, take down the building. If it is, change everything.

N.T. Wright, who has spent his life on the historical and theological case for the resurrection, has been the most articulate modern voice on what the resurrection actually claims. "The bodily resurrection of Jesus is the foundation event for the Christian worldview. Without it, Christianity falls. With it, the world is to be understood as the world in which the Creator God has begun his great act of new creation." Two phrases there matter. Foundation event: not foundation idea, not foundation symbol — event, in space and time, in first-century Palestine, with witnesses. And new creation: the resurrection is not the resuscitation of a corpse, returning Jesus to the world he had been in before. It is the beginning of a different kind of world — God's promised remaking of everything that is.

This is what changes the conversation about suffering. If the resurrection is true, then the question of evil is not a question to be answered by an argument; it is a question that has already begun to be answered by an event. Christ has gone down into the deepest place suffering can take you — death itself, abandonment by God himself — and come out the other side. The grave was not, after all, the end. The torture was not, after all, the last word. The cross was not, after all, the final scene. There is a third day, and on the third day the man whose body had been beaten and pierced and unmade walks out of his own tomb, eats fish on the seashore, shows his wounds to a doubting friend, and tells the women in the garden to go and announce to his frightened brothers that he is alive.

Wright says it directly: "Easter is not the conclusion to the story of Jesus; it is the opening chapter of the story of the world." This is a radical claim, and it changes how Christians read everything else. The world we live in — the world of cancer and war and silence — is not the world as it was meant to be, and not the world as it will be. It is the world in between: the world after Adam's fall and after Christ's resurrection, in which the new creation has been started but not finished, in which the firstfruits are visible but the harvest is not yet. We are living, the New Testament keeps insisting, in the days between Easter Sunday and the day when what happened to Jesus' body will happen to everything.

Tim Keller, having watched his wife battle cancer and then dying of pancreatic cancer himself, said the resurrection's promise is not what most people think. "The Biblical view of things is resurrection — not a future that is just consolation for the life we never had but a restoration of the life you always wanted. This means that every horrible thing that ever happened will not only be undone and repaired but will in some way make the eventual glory and joy even greater." Read that twice. The resurrection is not, in the Christian view, a compensation for a life lost. It is the recovery and amplification of the life that was lost. Not just you will be okay in heaven but the body that died will be raised, the relationships that ended will be restored in a deeper form, the goods that were ruined will be remade more beautifully than they originally were. This is why Paul can say, in Romans 8:18, that "the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us." Not that the sufferings are small. Not that they did not happen. But that the weight of glory on the other side of them is so great that, when it is finally seen, the comparison will become absurd.

Notice what this does and does not do for the sufferer.

It does not explain why God permitted the suffering. The resurrection does not solve the philosophical problem of evil. It does not tell you why your particular grief was allowed. It does not give the kind of reason that a philosophy of religion seminar wants. Anyone who treats the resurrection as a clever argument has misunderstood it.

What it does is more important. It tells you that your suffering, however meaningless it has felt, will not get the last word. It tells you that the death you fear, the death you have already grieved in someone you loved, is not final. It tells you that the body that has betrayed you with its cancer, its chronic pain, its slow degeneration, will be raised — not abandoned, not exchanged for a ghost, but raised, transformed, glorified. The Christian hope is not the immortality of the soul; it is the resurrection of the body. The same body. The body that hurt. The body that wept. The body that is in the ground.

Tim Keller, again: "If Jesus has been raised from the dead, then your future is so beautiful and secure that you can face anything in life." The point is not that the present is no longer painful. The point is that the future is so secure that the present — even when it is unbearable — does not have the metaphysical weight you thought it had. Suffering is not minimized. Its grip is broken. It can no longer claim to be the last word.

Atheism, by contrast, gives suffering the last word. The atheist does not need to explain why suffering happens; on his view, no explanation is owed. He also does not get any future on which to hang the hope that suffering will be undone. Suffering happens, suffering ends in death, death is forever. The conclusion is consistent. It is also, for almost every human being who has actually lost a child or buried a spouse, intolerable. Christianity does not promise that the suffering was reasonable. It promises that it was not the end.

Thomas in John 20 is the patron saint of every Christian who has needed this to be true and not just preached. He will not believe unless he sees. Jesus comes a week later and gives him exactly what he asked for. Reach out your finger; reach out your hand. Do not disbelieve, but believe. The risen Christ has the wounds. He is the same Jesus who was crucified. The body that died is the body that lives. This is not a metaphor. This is the foundation of the only Christian answer to the problem of evil that is finally an answer: the empty tomb.

If you are walking through suffering today, the most important thing you can know is not that someone, somewhere, has worked out the philosophy. The most important thing you can know is that on a Sunday morning two thousand years ago, the stone was rolled away, the body was gone, the angels said he is not here, he is risen, and a man whose hands and side still carried the marks of crucifixion stepped out into a garden and ate breakfast with his friends. Everything Christianity has ever said about suffering rests on whether that happened. If it did, your suffering is real and not the last word. If it did not, no theodicy in the world can save you.

It did. He is risen. He is alive. And the new creation, of which his risen body is the firstfruits, is coming.

Going Deeper

Read 1 Corinthians 15 in one sitting if you can. The whole chapter. Notice that Paul, the most theologically sophisticated mind in the New Testament, does not give you a philosophical argument. He gives you a list of witnesses, a logical demonstration of what is at stake, and a vision of what the future will be. The chapter ends with one of the most defiant lines in Scripture: "Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain." If the resurrection is real, your labor is not in vain. Even your suffering is not in vain. It will be raised with you.