Quotes about Resurrection

The full Christian story is saying that Jesus died, and Christ "arose"—yes, still as Jesus, but now also as the Corporate Personality who includes and reveals all of creation in its full purpose and goal.

If the universe is "Christened" from the very beginning, then of course it can never die forever. Resurrection is just incarnation taken to its logical conclusion. If God inhabits matter, then we can naturally believe in the "resurrection" of the body. Most simply said, nothing truly good can die!

Perhaps the True Self—and the full Christ Mystery (not the same as organized Christianity)—will always live in the backwaters of any empire and the deep mines of any religion. Some will think I am arrogantly talking about being "personally divine" and eagerly dismiss this way of talking about resurrection as heresy, arrogance, or pantheism.

All who hold any kind of unexplainable hope believe in resurrection, whether they are formal Christians or not, and even if they don't believe Jesus was physically raised from the dead.

If matter is inhabited by God, then matter is somehow eternal, and when the creed says we believe in the "resurrection of the body," it means our bodies too and not just Jesus's body! As in him, so also in all of us. As in all of us, so also in him.

Christianity's true and unique story line has always been incarnation. If creation is "very good" (Genesis 1:31) at its very inception, how could such a divine agenda ever be undone by any human failure to fully cooperate? "Very good" sets us on a trajectory toward resurrection, it seems to me. God does not lose or fail. That is what it means to be God.

We are glad when someone survives, and that surely took some courage and effort. But what are you going to do with your now resurrected life? That is the heroic question.

Jesus the Christ, in his crucifixion and resurrection, "recapitulated all things in himself, everything in heaven and everything on earth" (Ephesians 1:10). This one verse is the summary of Franciscan Christology. Jesus agreed to carry the mystery of universal suffering. He allowed it to change him ("Resurrection") and—it is to be hoped—us, so that we would be freed from the endless cycle of projecting our pain elsewhere or remaining trapped inside of it.

Incarnation did not just happen two thousand years ago. It has been working throughout the entire arc of time, and will continue. This is expressed in the common phrase the "Second Coming of Christ," which was unfortunately read as a threat ("Wait till your Dad gets home!"), whereas it should more accurately be spoken of as the "Forever Coming of Christ," which is anything but a threat. In fact, it is the ongoing promise of eternal resurrection.

If Christ represents the resurrected state, then Jesus represents the crucified/resurrecting path of getting there. If Christ is the source and goal, then Jesus is the path from that source toward the goal of divine unity with all things.

Resurrection is incarnation coming to its logical conclusion. If God is already in everything, then everything is from glory and unto glory. We're all saved by mercy, without exception. We're all saved by grace, so there's no point in distinguishing degrees of worthiness because God alone is all good and everything else in creation participates, to varying degrees, in that one, universal goodness.

Resurrection is about the whole of creation, it is about history, it is about every human who has ever been conceived, sinned, suffered, and died, every animal that has lived and died a tortured death, every element that has changed from solid, to liquid, to ether, over great expanses of time. It is about you and it is about me. It is about everything. The "Christ journey" is indeed another name for every thing.