Jay McCarl

Jesus is alive.

Too many saw Him, met with and touched Him after His tomb was found vacated to deny something cataclysmic occurred. Too many of them died savagely with that testimony on their lips. Still, for many, the resurrection remains beyond belief—a thought that lurks beyond any ability to cope. Even so, people strive with this—the most colossal, improbable, shattering incident in human history.

A character in Kurt Vonnegut’s science fiction classic, The Sirens of Titan—set millions of years in the future—condensed all global history to a single, simple statement,  “Following the death of Jesus Christ, there was a period of readjustment that lasted for approximately one million years…” Fiction indeed, but brilliant.

How could today’s sophisticated world of rational people embrace such an implausible, seismic event? Here’s one man’s shining thoughts on it…

“How can you cope with the end of a world and the beginning of another one?  How can you put an earthquake into a test-tube or the sea into a bottle? How can you live with the terrifying thought that the hurricane has become human, that fire has become flesh; that Life itself came to life and walked in our midst?

“How can you cope with the concept that mankind tried to kill the God but He lived and now is our judge? How can a person come to Easter services and not be profoundly transformed by the fact that once in the history of humanity a truly innocent man died in our place and rose to life never to die again and he offers us eternal life?

“Christianity either means all of that, or it means nothing. It is either the most profound and devastating disclosure of the deepest reality in the world, or it’s a sham, a nonsense and just deceitful acting. Most of us, unable to cope with saying either of those things, condemn ourselves to live in the shallow world in between. We may not be content there, but we don’t know how to escape until we are personally transformed by the resurrected Jesus Christ—from observers to worshippers of the living God.”

—Adapted from NT Wright, For All God’s Worth

He is risen indeed.

—j