Thank goodness God can transcend syllogism.
If Christians are to think literally and purely logically on this Easter weekend, we would wonder what makes the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus so special.
After all, neither his execution nor his return to life were unique. The Bible and church tradition tell us that the physical suffering of Jesus of Nazareth was matched by countless martyrs who also were crucified or burned at the stake or fed to lions or otherwise tortured unto death. Indeed, if there are gradations of physical suffering, it probably was worse for the apostle Peter, crucified head down, than for Jesus, head up.
For that matter, apart from the context of faith, so many tens of millions have died from deliberate torture — the millions ordered by Joseph Stalin were particularly horrific — as to make one ask why Jesus’s agony should earn any extra degree of sympathy. Jesus was dead within three hours, whereas Russian communists often subjected their victims to weeks or months of excruciating terrors.
And as for resurrection — well, hadn’t Jesus already performed that trick? All three Synoptic Gospels tell of Jesus raising from the dead the daughter of a synagogue leader named Jairus. The Gospel of Luke includes the account of Jesus raising from the dead the son of a widow in the town of Nain. And the Gospel of John memorably recounts how Jesus raised his friend Lazarus from a tomb four days after Lazarus had died.
Therefore, if Jesus is far from the only person to have been tortured to death without cause and was the fourth person in just three years who rose from the dead, well, what’s the big deal about Good Friday and Easter?
Of course theologians and church catechisms have addressed these questions for centuries. The Catholic catechism, for example, explains it thus: “Christ’s Resurrection was not a return to earthly life, as was the case with the raisings from the dead that he had performed before Easter. … [T]he persons miraculously raised returned by Jesus’ power to ordinary earthly life. At some particular moment [the others] would die again. Christ’s Resurrection is essentially different. In his risen body he passes from the state of death to another life beyond time and space.”
Meanwhile, Jesus’s suffering is said to be unique both because he was entirely sinless (unlike all other humans) and because in his particular crucifixion, he took on himself an expiation of the sins of the whole world and all the attendant sufferings stemming from them.
This column, though, is not an exercise in theology. The question, in this age when cynicism and science make secular gods of literalness and logic, is why we should pay attention to what sounds like mumbo-jumbo about sinlessness and salvation.
Especially if the events described in the Gospel appear not to have been unique.
The theological answer is something along the lines of showing that suffering can have redemptive significance — if, Christians say, we accept this particular sufferer as lord and savior.
For all of us, though, believer and nonbeliever alike, there is more. There is the actual record of what Jesus’s event inspired in a way no other suffering or reputed resurrection has done. There is the record of nearly 2,000 years of how many millions of lives were turned around, how many people found hope, how many acts of charity were performed, how many acts of mercy enabled, all because the story of one man’s death and its aftermath moved people through two millennia to find their better selves and help make this world more loving.
As the famous verse begins, “For God so loved the world…”
This Easter weekend, and evermore, may we too love the world He gave us.
