Resurrection Reflections- part 30

It’s been great the last few weeks to spend some time, in sermons and blogs, considering what the Bible has to say about our future.  The hope is blindingly brilliant, but grounded in fact and revelation rather than theory and wishful thinking.  Guest blogger John Pearson is a post-doc in Neuroscience at Duke University and a member of our West Club campus.  He’s got this to say about the hope of the Resurrection:

I study nerve cells for a living.  Before that, I studied fundamental particles- protons, electrons, taus, neutrinos.  In both cases, my subjects were too small to be seen by the naked eye, but their existence and properties have long ago been established through rigorous experiments.

Yet, it wasn’t until a few months ago, listening to the sound of the human brain being piped through speakers in a Duke operating room, that the neuron became fully real to me.  As I watched the PA extend the patient’s limbs, crackling burst through the speakers’ white noise in time to the motion, and I experienced firsthand the connection between an intellectual belief and a sensory fact.  I deal with neurons every day, but there is a difference, as the Apostle Paul writes, between seeing through a mirror dimly and knowing face to face.

“If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead,”  the apostle Paul wrote in Romans 10:9, “you will be saved.”  And so we affirm.  But while the first part is straightforward enough- to be a Christian, you must swear allegiance to Jesus- the phrasing of the second often causes us trouble.  Too often, our tendency in sharing the good news may bay be to offer it to those we care about like a favorite story, a fairy tale capable of alleviating our sense of guilt.  ”If you only believe in this,” we might seem to be saying, “it will become true in your life.”

But this is not at all what the apostles had in mind.  As the early church understood, when the apostles said that Jesus had been raised from the dead, they did not mean that he was somehow spiritually alive while his body decayed, or that through his death they had arrived at a new and rejuvinated understanding of God.  Rather, they meant that while Jesus had died just as surely as they themselves expected to die, on the third day after this death, he returned to physical walking, talking, eating life.  What Peter meant was not that his hearers would be saved if they wished very hard for this story to be true, but that salvation came from accepting his testimony to a real, objective fact.

The same holds today.  My faith in Jesus isn’t grounded between my ears- in my wishes and longings, however important they are- but in an event that took place in space and time, in the world of senses and facts.  Like the neurons I cannot see, its existence must be inferred from evidence, but an inference is very different from make-believe. “If Christ has not been raised,” Paul writes to the Corinthians, “your faith is futile and you are still in your sins.”  That Jesus was indeed raised is the good news we celebrate at during Resurrection Sunday.  My believing doesn’t make it true, but my belief in its truth transforms my life.