Changing the rules: Easter thoughts on science and resurrection

            Easter has always been my favorite holiday. Always. Even well before I really knew what Easter was about. Yes, Christmas was great, but Easter had candy and trumpets, loud music and the Easter bunny. What a day! Then as I grew older, I realized Easter had something else that makes it so uniquely special: resurrection.

            There are virtually no examples of resurrection in our day-to-day lives. The fact that death contributes to new life does very little to make dead things any less dead. We might use the word “resurrection” to describe a comeback story or a near-death experience, but that’s not exactly the kind of resurrection we celebrate today. Christ didn’t have a near death experience, he didn’t fall off his horse and need to find his way again, he didn’t have a big comeback tour. No, he was resurrected—quite dead (three days’ worth of dead) and then very much alive.

            How can this be? our modern sensibilities ask. Nothing that is dead comes back to life; the definition of dead is that which has no life in it.

            This is the great clash of our age—between what is natural and what is supernatural, what is normal and what is exceptional; between what is explicable and inexplicable. We live in a time in history where more and more myth is being examined by science and found lacking. The case is being made day after day that the miraculous is either that which has yet to be explained by scientific theory, or a lie. More and more of what was mysterious is now becoming theory.

            The world of a few hundred years ago was frightening and random, now our world has become logical and explainable. Nowadays, we tend to believe that everything that happens in the universe can be understood with relatively simple rules. This is the basis for the scientific method. It is also the impetus behind Newton’s third law of motion: For every reaction there is an equal and opposite reaction. And in just about every case this is true. The beauty of science is that it does not tolerate opinions, it seeks to test the way things work, and in doing so it assumes that things work the same every time.

            And that works for us—almost all the time—until we wander over to Jesus’ tomb and find the stone rolled away. Uh-oh. You see, God likes the game to have very standard rules, God likes that the world goes round in very straightforward ways. He has written very simple rules for the game. In fact, God rather likes that the rules of the game are so strict, because if the rules weren’t strict, if dead people occasionally did come back to life, then what happened to Jesus could just be chance—a big comeback, but not resurrection. Instead, in this one instance—this one miraculous moment—God takes those old, staid rules and turns them on their head. Resurrection does not trump science; instead, at this most crucial juncture it turns the rulebook upside down.

            This is part of the reason why I cringe at well-meaning Christians who bash various scientific pursuits, as if the Christian cause is a continual war on science. Nothing could be further from the truth. For resurrection to be something important—something that ultimately saves us—it must be something counter to the way that everything in the world generally works. Science promotes this kind of thinking. There is no scientific theory of resurrection; there never will be. It is a different game entirely.

            Look at the disciple Thomas, who couldn’t believe until he put his fingers in the holes in Jesus’ hands. He was being a good scientist, waiting on observation and experimentation; he was trying to make resurrection fit into the rules of the game. But when he finally met Jesus face-to-face the need for proof became immaterial. He doesn’t even need to put his fingers in the wrists.

Resurrection has that effect on people.

Resurrection is the miracle that goes with us in our daily lives. Any small miracle you experience, any small response to prayer that you receive, will be a resurrection miracle—God changing the rules of the game, in a smaller way, for your good. I believe that these kinds of miracles happen, but I also believe that they pale in comparison to the one that we celebrate today; they are reflections of the resurrection miracle not proofs. We have faith in God not because of any particular moment when God answered our prayers or did miraculous things in our lives. We have faith in God because on the third day Christ rose from the grave. The miracle of all miracles is the resurrection, and from this miracle we receive a promise of what awaits us on the other side of death. Today, we celebrate God changing the rules. Status quo, meet resurrection! Death, meet new life!

            So, today, after your Easter meals, Easter candy and Easter bunnies you are going to eventually return to a normal way of life that has little to do with resurrection; a way of life dominated by the ideology that things always work the same way. 1+1=2, objects in motion stay in motion, the only certainties in life are death and taxes—you know that way of life; this is what you spend most of your life thinking and worrying about it. And that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. We should live as if the big questions of “how?” and “why?” matter. We should marvel at gravity, the age of the universe, the distance of the stars. We should be fascinated with ecosystems and biomes, geology and geo-physics. We should embrace all manner of scientific explanations with enthusiasm, because this is how we experience the wonder of life day by day. Then, having delved deeply into the nature of things, having experienced the stark realities of life and death, the old nature of scientific laws, and the fascinating space and time in which we live, should we come back to the tomb and find it empty, the stone rolled away, and with Mary Magdalene exclaim, “I have seen the Lord.”

            Today, the rules of the game have changed.