Arrested by the Resurrection

The first time I learned about “the resurrection” was in school at 9yrs old. I wasn’t a Christian. I learned a fact about a thing that apparently happened to a man one day that sounded weird. I drew a shoddy picture of an angelic-ish stickman surrounded by glowing lights and a very questionable halo. The picture was quite accurate to how unreal this event was to me. It seemed like something you were supposed to believe but didn’t really have to because it made no difference either way. After the picture was drawn, I went out to the playground all the same. Everything stayed the same.

The second time I learned about “the resurrection”, I had already been a Christian for several years. By that time, I’d studied theology and even preached sermons about that stickman from the picture. I believed in and “defended” the resurrection. But there was one moment when I found myself “arrested” by it, as though understanding its implications in a way I’d never felt before.

I was working at a coffee shop at the time, walking through the city centre to start my shift, jostling past all the people walking and talking; phones strapped to the sides of faces; hands overflowing with yet more bags of stuff; all of these people seemed to be living entirely normal untranscendent lives. Lives full of things. On my headphones I was listening to a sermon about the resurrection set to music. It was inconceivable to me that in the midst of all that ordinary “normal” life, a set of words in my ears could put me in tears. But they did, and I was, and it was embarrassing.

Finally arriving through the glass doors to start my busy shift, cups chinking, steam-arms, hissing, beans grinding, customers bleating, it was hard to hold myself together. It remained embarrassing. But there seemed little I could do about it. For the first 10 minutes of my shift, those words I heard made me a relative wreck of a barista. If I gave you the wrong drink that day, I’m sincerely sorry. But at the same time, blame Jesus. He was the reason I couldn’t hold it together. He was the reason things could no longer feel “normal”.

When you’re arrested by the resurrection, you suddenly realise something about your life, about the life of the person next to you, about your job, about your phone, about that shop, about that show, and about every other human being who has ever walked the earth. It’s not as though none of this earthy stuff matters anymore—it actually matters more, strangely—but none of it means the same anymore. You realise that everything’s changed now, everything’s different.

The playground no longer looks or feels the same anymore, nor do the hopes and dreams of your life. Because now you know there really is something to live and die for. Now you know we’re no longer guessing, no longer looking up wondering what on earth all this “life” was ever really for. That thing which humans have worried about for thousands of years—that “death” thing, that what’s-it-all-for thing, that what-happens-next thing—that’s it, right there, done: an empty tomb.

That tomb—and those who proclaimed the One who escaped it—still speaks today. And it’s alarmingly easy to forget. When you’re arrested by the resurrection (whether for the first or the thousandth time) it’s as if the stickman jumps right off the page and looks you straight in the eye, and suddenly you find that it’s you who has the questionable halo. And yet he’s right there, hand outstretched, calling you into eternity. He’s actually done it. He’s made a way for you and me, if we’ll only turn from death and follow him into life. And it’s not just any old life. It’s the life that keeps on living, that never ends, and never dies. Not even ever.

You try making a vanilla latte after realising that…