We All Believe in Resurrection

I believe the header for this reflection is accurate. I haven't thought of any exceptions, at any rate.

For starters, and all the more obviously so as Easter approaches rapidly, you've got your Christians. We celebrate the resurrection of Jesus in a few days, and believe his fate is a good harbinger of what lies ahead for us: hope beyond the grave.

Now I confess I'm placing a rather large portion of humanity into the bucket of Other, but then we have those who do not believe Jesus rose from the dead. That's a rather motley crew, not easily described. But for sake of brevity I'll focus on the vast majority of them (and as of recent months, the largest religious group in America): those not affiliated with any religion.

Those who fall into this bucket are not by any stretch all atheists. Probably most of them have some sense of God and spirituality. But if you don't believe Jesus rose from the dead, it's a fair guess you don't believe anyone rose from the dead, ever.

And here's where I beg to differ with that accepted (I think) assumption. I contest that it's not been adequately examined.

We all believe in some sort of resurrection. All of us. The fact is, we're here. Alive. A planet teeming with life. And before I go on, let me point out that we all also have our priests. Those unaffiliated with any religion, for example, often treat the priesthood of science with great reverence. Yes, scientists can be priests, too. (I respect science myself, for the record!) But to return to our planet bursting with life, our lab-coated priests inform us that Earth was rather quiet about 5 billion years ago. Not a spot of life. Nothing. A lot of landscape, yes, and plenty of ocean, too.

But no life. None.

So another priesthood rears its sagacious head. Logic raises an eyebrow and notes calmly, "Well, somewhere roundabouts between then and now, something that was previously lifeless came to life."

Well said.

So no one completely denies resurrection, loosely speaking. Christians believe that it's happened before on several occasions. Atheists believe that it happened exactly once, more or less.

My sagacious logician, having spoken his calm sentence, promptly went back to sleep, but I think he would have agreed that this is a category sort of thing. If the well and truly dead cannot come to life, then it can't happen to a decaying human body *or* to a bunch of inert molecules slopping around. If one is prepared to think that primordial soup suddenly takes on an interest in reproduction, that's no less of a miracle in my mind than a body dead for three days deciding to do the same.

So here's to the foolish disciples of Jesus Christ. We believe not only that God brought life to this world eons ago, but also that this same God thought to give us a taste of what else he can do.

And will do.