In a recent novel, two characters were talking about Christianity and one asked, “Which do you prefer: the gospels or Paul?” To which the other replied, “Both, because the Gospels represent God’s faith in our imagination, and Paul because more often than not we are too [stubborn] to use it.”1 The good news of Easter is talked about many places in the New Testament, including several times in the letters of Paul. But invariably we choose a reading from the gospels for Easter, because it is those descriptions that fire our imaginations. Listen again to the details in the first verse of Luke 24:On the first day of the week (a time for a new beginnings), at early dawn (a time of shadows and silence while all the world slept), the women came to the tomb taking the spices they had prepared(you can picture the sad, vulnerable women walking to the cemetery and almost smell the fragrant spices they cradle in their arms). It’s a vivid description captured in only a few words. And it doesn’t stop there. Soon they find the stone rolled away, an empty tomb, and two dazzling figures right before them whose first words are “Why look for the living among the dead?” Why? Because the one they were looking for was dead and tombs are where the dead are located. That’s how things are in this world – you live, you die, you’re buried; people bring spices to the tomb, weep over their loss and then retrace their steps back home. That’s the way of the world. Until Easter, that is. Easter changed everything.
But let’s remove Easter from the conversation for the moment. Reason tells us that our time on earth is a brief one. All creatures live; all creatures die. But something within us is dissatisfied with this answer. We don’t want the story of our life to end with such finality. We want to know what comes next. Reason tries to comfort us and tells us that we live on in the memories of our loved ones, that our work in this life continues to bear fruit for generations to come. But we agree with Woody Allen who once said, “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.” We are seldom satisfied with what we are told about life after death because invariably those answers are wrapped up in poetic language or vague abstractions. We want precise answers; we want to be certain. Again as Woody Allen said, “If only God would give me some clear sign! Like making a large deposit in my name in a Swiss bank.”
Reason tells us that the end of life is like a horizon, a distant point beyond which we cannot see. Atheists and skeptics argue that there is nothing at all to see beyond that point. Agnostics contend that we simply cannot know what is beyond that point, so it need not concern us now. But those answers fall flat and bring no comfort. And so once again our imagination enters into the conversation. Like a child, whose view is blocked by the wall of adults, strains to see the parade passing by before her, we imaginatively stretch ourselves as high as we can to see just beyond the horizon of death.
William Penn once said, “Death is only a horizon, and a horizon is nothing save the limit of our sight.” Imagination longs to see over that horizon, and to assist in that task, imagination joins hands with faith.
It is fascinating to consider the different ways faith has dealt with the question of life after death. Hinduism, the oldest religious tradition, answered this question with its doctrine of reincarnation – that life doesn’t end but simply repeats itself over and over again until we get it right. Buddhism developed out of Hinduism and emphasized that the goal of this repetitiveness was to become one with the spirit of the universe; to lose ourselves in a great, vague Nirvana. Judaism was always much more pragmatic. The Old Testament people believed that the time for faith was when you were alive. Follow the commandments today and the Lord will bless you in the here and now. For much of Jewish history, there was almost no talk about heaven or eternal life. Those who died went to Sheol, the place of the dead – not a good place or a bad place; just a fairly non-descript place, sort of like Cleveland. But once the Jews encountered other religions when they were taken into Babylonian exile in the 6th century B.C., as well as when the Greek empire controlled Palestine from the 4th to 2nd century B.C., Judaism began to re-consider whether human beings have a soul that survives after death. Some Jews, like the Sadducees, did not believe in resurrection life; others, like the Pharisees, looked to stories like Ezekiel’s description of the valley of dry bones coming back to life and believed such movement from death to life was truly possible.
Here’s what was happening in those years just before the birth of Jesus Christ: The Pharisees and other faithful Jews of Jesus’ time were trying to put into words something that they sensed on a gut level to be true: that life cannot simply be over once we reach the horizon of death. There has to be something more, something beyond that horizon. It is like something said in Thorton Wilder’s play,Our Town, when the stage manager talks about this subject near the start of Act III: There are some things we all know but we don’t take‘m out and look at’m very often. We all know something is eternal. And it ain’t houses and it ain’t earth and it ain’t even the stars…Everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings. All the greatest people ever lived have been telling us that for five thousand years and yet you’d be surprised how people are always losing hold of it. There’s something way down deep that’s eternal about every human being.2
Here’s the great news: Eternity wasn’t a word that people took to heart or thought of in a personal way until that Easter day when that word finally, emphatically entered into our faith vocabulary. Use your imagination again. The women approaching the tomb in the dawn light of Easter morning found their world had been turned upside-down. They were in the place of the dead to pay homage to one who was dead. But they found the stone had been rolled away and were confronted with the topsy-turvy question, “Why do you look for the living among the dead?” The living?, they wondered. Who’s alive?
Then the messengers said, “Remember! Jesus told you that the Son of Man would be handed over to sinners, crucified, and on the third day rise again.” And sure enough, they did remember. They didn’t fully understand. And when they told the others, they didn’t understand. Goodness, they didn’t even believe them. But for them and for us, in that moment an old word was given new meaning. Eternity was no longer just an abstract concept, a subject for speculation. It now had a face, a reality. At last we had seen over that horizon of death and knew that someone was there – resurrectionlife was there. To quote an old Roman philosopher, the day which we fear as our last is but the birthday of eternity.3
It takes faith, reason and imagination to get us to this point. Reason says that there must be something beyond this life, something grounded in the order of nature and the eternal laws of the universe. Imagination says that it must be something surprising, full of beauty and wonder like an Easter dawn. Faith says, “Yes, he is risen.” Reason says these stories from the gospel could not have been composed out of thin air, and they have been professed by martyrs and saints for so many centuries that they have to be true. Imagination pictures resurrection and eternal life to be fundamentally relational, because how ever we picture life beyond death’s horizon, it always involves reunions. Faith says, the one crucified was raised to life. The one who hosted the Last Supper wants to join us again for a meal. The one who died is the one who goes before us, as he said, to prepare a place for us so that where he is we too shall be.
You know the old phrase “hope springs eternal”? We often say it whimsically such as when a little boy shoots and shoots at a high basketball hoop, missing time after time, causing us to smile and say, “Hope springs eternal.” The words were written by a British poet named Alexander Pope back in the 1700s. Pope said these words: Hope humbly then: with trembling pinions soar; wait the great teacher Death, and God adore! What future bliss, [God] gives not thee to know, but gives that Hope to be thy blessing now. Hope springs eternal in the human breast: Man never Is, but always to be blest. As lovely as this is, the hope described here is too flimsy for me – too wistful and ethereal. I want to reverse Pope’s famous phrase. When those heavenly messengers confronted the women near the garden tomb, they were neither poetic nor ambivalent in their remarks. “Jesus is not here. He has risen.” The women weren’t just given hope, something to hang onto in their grief. They were given eternity – the promise of resurrection, of life beyond death – and in that eternity they would find real hope.
Jump to the end of the story. After the women hear the good news, Jesus appears to two disciples on the road to Emmaus and then appears to all the disciples as he joined them at a meal table. He says these final words: It is written that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations…You are witnesses of these things. A new word has been entered into your vocabulary because of Easter. Eternity is now part of your human experience and from that promise springs real hope. Real love. Real forgiveness and joy. Now, go forth and as Jesus said, be witnesses of these things!
Amen