What is the Resurrection?

The Newsweek/Washington Post site On Faith tackles the resurrection. There you'll find posts by Bp. Tom Wright, Chuck Colson, Dom Crossan, and more. Of the posts I read, and with most I could kind of figure things out by the title, this one by former editor of America, Jesuit Priest Thomas Reese, was the most interesting -- in part because it didn't get hung up on physical versus metaphorical, but went beyond that debate to the cosmic dimension.

Rev. Thomas J. Reese, senior fellow Woodstock Theological Center, Jesuit priest

Is the Resurrection the Next Step in Evolution?

Christ’s Resurrection is something more than simply the miracle of a corpse returning to life. It is something more, something different.

“If we may borrow the language of the theory of evolution,” said Pope Benedict XVI in his Easter homily last year, “it is the greatest ‘mutation’, absolutely the most
crucial leap into a totally new dimension that there has ever been in the long history of life and its development: a leap into a completely new order which does concern us, and concerns the whole of history.”

He goes on to say, the resurrection “is a qualitative leap in the history of ‘evolution’ and of life in general towards a new future life, towards a new world which, starting from Christ, already continuously permeates this world of ours, transforms it and draws it to itself.”

The Jesuit anthropologist Teilhard de Chardin said something similar in his writings, which were suppressed during his lifetime by church authorities. He saw evolution moving forward until all the universe was united in the cosmic Christ. As Benedict said last Easter, “The Resurrection is a cosmic event, which includes heaven and earth and links them together.”

We participate in this evolution when we can say with St. Paul, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Gal 2:20). The more we love, the more we are united to the cosmic Christ because that is what the resurrection is all about: the victory of love over death. The more we love, the more we open ourselves to the power of the Spirit. We must remember that “God is love.”

St. Paul and other New Testament writers are much more interested in describing the impact that the resurrection should have on the Christian community than in describing the impact of the resurrection on Jesus’ molecules and DNA.

The resurrection is life changing. “It ushered in a new dimension of being,” said Benedict, “a new dimension of life in which, in a transformed way, matter too was integrated and through which a new world emerges.”