Eastertide: From Death to Life

Practicing the Resurrection Life

Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed—in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet…the dead will be raised imperishable, [For] death has been swallowed up in victory.

Where, O death, is your victory?
Where, O death, is your sting?

1 Corinthians 15:51-55

I recently read this poem by Luci Shaw. My immediate reflection on the line led me to think first of physical death. But as I sat with it in the context of Easter, of resurrection, I realized afresh that I need to love the destination of death to self so that I can have the full experience of Resurrection Life.

It takes more than a dressed-up morning to commemorate resurrection.

The Season of Easter is the name given to the extended celebration of the resurrection of Jesus. Eastertide, as it is also called, is the 50-day period between Easter and Pentecost. It is a yearly spiritual practice that invites us into the lived reality of resurrection.

Something changed 2,000 years ago. When someone rises from the dead, the world becomes full of unfathomable mystery and new possibilities. This is especially true when the one rising from the dead is the Messiah, the Christ, the Son of God.

The resurrection of Jesus did not just change the size, shape, or duration of human life. It was a re-creative moment in which a new kind of life—life with the qualities and characteristics of eternity—burst upon earth. The undying realm of God was loosed among humanity in a new way. When we see this, when we get it, we wonder: What does it mean to live in a world in which Jesus has been raised from the dead?

The Defeat of Death Means Robust Life

The New Testament presents a vision for Resurrection Life and its effects on persons and communities. This is the place to start:

Resurrection Life is not just the final, decisive word against death, it is the pivotal, generative word on living.

A significant paradox is at play here: Resurrection Life begins with following Jesus into death—death to our old self. This is what Jesus is describing when he says: Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me (Luke 9:23). Jesus was the prime model of the powerful effect of self-denial: I have come down from heaven not to do my will but to do the will of him who sent me (John 6:38).

Prioritizing the will of God is a fundamental way to die to self, to lay down an inferior life in order to receive a new and superior one – eternal life. When Jesus says God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life (John 3:16), he is describing not just unending life (quantity), but new life in him—a qualitatively different kind of life that begins now as we enter the kingdom of God.

When the Apostle Paul sought to explain the superiority of new life in Jesus via justification by faith, he begins with death: I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me (Galatians 2:20).

Paul’s testimony was “the risen Christ is alive—alive in me!” Nothing in biology is analogous to the interjection of new, eternal life into a mortal body, a body that will someday change because the dead will be raised imperishable (1 Corinthians 15:51-52; 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18). The metamorphosis of bullfrogs and butterflies can’t tell this whole story. There is no analog to “the life of the Son of God is alive in me, being carried around in my existing body!”

Paul tried hard to explain the reception of new life: We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body ruled by sin might be done away with and that we should no longer be slaves to sin (Romans 6:6). A part of resurrection life is that there is a new freedom ruling the Body of Christ and thus our bodies—and our souls, hearts, wills, emotions, thoughts, and social selves.

Peter strained to describe resurrection life, too: Jesus bore our sins in his body on the cross, so that we might die to sin and live to righteousness (1 Peter 2:24).

From a narrative point of view, Resurrection Life goes like this:

Eastertide is my annual checkup in this regard. It reminds me to not just believe the right things about the resurrection, but to practice the new life resurrection imparts.