More than a conjuring trick with bones

In the film The Princess Bride,  confronted with a dead Westley (the hero) and told that he is dead, Miracle Max (played by Billy Crystal) says in a delicious NY accent "Look who knows so much about dead ...  it so happens your friend is only *mostly* dead. And mostly dead is a little bit *alive*" and then goes on to administer a restorative which resuscitates Westley so he can go on to finish the plot. I mention it because a lot of us think about resurrection as if it is a kind of resuscitation. A zombie Jesus only mostly dead somehow revived but fundamentally still restricted to the normal laws of time and space, decay and entropy.

Well, it's not like that with Jesus on Holy Saturday /Easter Eve: he's dead, really dead. Dead as the proverbial doornail. Not mostly dead; truly dead. Brain activity: zero. He's gone, passed away, flower food, he is an ex-messiah. More: his soul doesn't go marching on, there's no ghost hanging around fretting about his life's work being unfinished and agonising over his friends' and relatives' grief.

He's as dead as, well,

we are dead when we die. That's it. The end. Finished. Kaput. The long sleep: no awareness because there's nothing to be aware: we're gone; no longer exist, so no wake up call. Oblivion.

And Jesus has to be as dead as that else there's no help for us.

If Jesus does not truly die, then our dying remains the last word.

Jesus has to enter into our death: where there is nothing beyond. Just absence, nonexistence, uncontinuance.

Well, not quite. For, as it is getting popular to say that someone who has died lives on in our memory; that as long as we remember them, they live in us. In some ways that's the democratised version of especially skilled or favoured people wishing to live on in their accomplishments. "I want to achieve immortality through my art". Well, I agree with Woody Allen "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work, I want to achieve immortality through not dying."

The problem with 'living on' in someone's remembrance is that 'I' don't really live on. Again as Woody Allen put it "Someone once asked me if my dream was to live on in the hearts of people, and I said I would prefer to live on in my apartment."

Living on in someone's memory seems not to involve me enjoying the world, relationships or, well, life. Some other 'I' gets to do that while borrowing some of what they know of me to interpret their experience*.

So, while living on in remembrance may console the bereaved, it doesn't help us to live on in our apartments**.

And in any case, those who remember themselves die and with them whatever is left of us in their memory.

But there is one who remembers eternally. In fact, to say 'remembers eternally' may not be so different to saying 'knows always', or even foreknew. The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is the God "not of the dead but of the living; for to him all of them are alive" . And that's the point. The remembrance/knowing by the Everliving, the Creator, is who we are. God ever-livingly and ever-lovingly re-members us. Our knowing and remembering each other is a shadow of that fullest knowing-remembrance. While something truly does live on in human remembrances, we truly live on in God's knowing-remembrance for that remembrance is the Source of all living and in loving us, the source and ground and upholding of our being 'us'. In God's remembrance/knowing and creativity 'we' truly are us. God is our continuity of existence.

So, when Jesus enters into our kind of death, becomes one with our finality, the only hope beyond that is that God is the God of the living, not the dead; that God really does know-remember him. The Resurrection is no 'conjuring trick with bones', it is not a resuscitation. God re-members Jesus***. it is a paradigm of New Creation: the New takes up and transfigures the former; creation is caught up into re-creation. Jesus is remembered into Life: the seed of the new creation is planted in the soil of the old order of sin and death. in the words of the liturgy: Jesus 'reveals the resurrection'.

Death is not, after all, the last word. The Last Word is the last word, just as he was the First.

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This post is a re-working of my Easter sermon into a written form and with some further reflection.It's a preliminary set of thoughts heading towards the *** note below. There is a need also to think further about the primacy of Jesus' resurrection.

*I realise that there's a lot more to explore about what 'I' might be. But I don't think elaborating on that discussion doesn't seem to me to take away from my basic pint here. And while I remain indebted to Douglas Hofstadter's exploration, even his 'expansion' of human consciousness doesn't address this fundamental loss of I-ness.

**Putting me in mind of "in my Father's house there are many apartments, and i go to prepare a place for you."

***The relationship of Father and Spirit with the Son is remembered by them. The Resurrection grows out of Trinitarian perichoresis. I would like to explore this further it due course.