Resurrection and true social progress

What is the deeper meaning of Jesus’s death and resurrection? How does it serve his message? What is the importance of his Gospel message for our contemporary world? Is it still relevant?

The Gospel never invites us to pity. We read, rather “Feed the hungry, quench the thirsty, welcome the stranger, clothe the naked, visit the sick and the prisoner”. We are invited to active involvement. The Gospel is in sharp contrast with our present-day culture which encourages people to “have a good cry”, for easy emotional indulgence without costly involvement on behalf of others. This culture manipulates our emotions without challenging us to change things. Our involvement in the suffering of others is what leads us to change things.

If an event is simply past it is not possible for us to be involved in it. The same is true of the passion of Jesus. This is not an event isolated from the rest of human history. 

It will never be understood unless placed within our ongoing reality. It is only if we understand it in continuity with all the suffering of the world that we can be properly involved in the passion of Jesus. It follows that the path to proper involvement in the passion of Jesus is openness to deeper involvement in the suffering of our world now.

It is not over yet. How, then, thus the passion of Jesus related to the ongoing story of human and sub-human suffering? The proclamation and praxis of the Kingdom were experienced as destructive and even blasphemous by others. It led to his death. But Jesus died as he had lived. He did not change. He refused to return evil for evil. He persisted in doing good and opposing evil and suffering to the end. 

His death is what clinches the unconditional character of his proclamation and lifestyle: the Kingdom of God is at hand and there is only one way to live now. He did not swerve from living out the truth of God for us in the face of hatred and violence: his death suffered through and for others, asserts the unconditional validity of loving as God loves, the God whose sun shines on all alike, whose care for people cannot be affected by their response.

Because of this consistency, the death of Jesus is the climax of his witness to the God of the coming Kingdom. All his living had been a claim to be acting as God acts; it was through the creative “Finger of God” that he did what he did for suffering people. Fidelity to the Kingdom of God had brought him unavoidably to this place. 

Therefore, in his dying we have the fullest historical expression of who God is, It is, of course, we who brought Jesus to the cross but nothing we did could make him betray the truth of the Father for us. He died loving, not hating. He experienced, as his deepest suffering, the eclipse of God, God- forsakenness, and accepted that too, for us and our well-being.

The ‘Kingdom of God’ is the metaphor of definitive salvation seen as a society of brothers and sisters, freed from all oppression and exploitation, where every tear is wiped away.

Resurrection faith is not a matter of dreaming. It is waking from our dream of reality to the reality in the dream. It is a way of living which proclaims the truth of the Risen One to the world. And the shape of this way of living is simply a continuation of the way Jesus responded to ordinary people in this sense of the God of the Kingdom.

Resurrection faith is shown in our engagement with the people God loves wherever their dignity and life are being threatened. The resurrection of Jesus cannot be separated from his career and death. In the New Testament, the new thing that God the Father does for Jesus is understood, first and foremost, as recognition of the intrinsic and irrevocable significance of his lived proclamation of the Kingdom. He was right about God. It follows that the primary witness today to the truth of his resurrection lies in the quality of commitment and hope displayed in the lives of Christians for the sake of everybody. Jesus lived and died for the well-being of the whole of humanity.

To let God Easter in us involves a break with our fixed roots in the socially-induced unquestioning sense of  ‘the way things are’. We need to go beyond ourselves in a way that is not flight or evasion but rather a discovery of the possibilities of transformation of the everyday world.

The resurrection of Christ is also the restoration of the values he stood for. With the resurrection of Christ, what he stood for was also resurrected; peace, mercy, wisdom, clemency, humility, honesty, sensitivity, faith, hope, compassion, endurance, flexibility, harmony, justice, truth, empathy, healing, forgiveness, wholeness, etc.

To build a better world, we need people like Jesus. The more ‘Jesuses’ there are, the better for the true progress of a society. What Jesus stood for until his death is what humanity needs most. Nothing could defeat what he stood for. Resurrection is the sure guarantee that in the end good will triumph over evil.