Resurrection gives meaning to Christianity

Their valued pastor dies. The leaders decide they desire him back. They rally the congregation to activities that destroy death and establish his return.

The congregation commits itself to fervent prayer, fasting and devotional chants invoking his resurrection.

The challenge of faith is always finding the resonance point between God’s power and God’s will. So, with no favourable result, some maintain that while God had the power to resurrect their pastor, it was not His will in this instance.

But what if it actually happened? What if the departed had returned? The church would have been flocked with hearses as relatives of the departed go to seek this life-breathing service. The queues would be long since it would take different combinations of prayer and fasting to yield one resurrection.

Numerous vendors

Then of course there would suddenly emerge numerous vendors with creative pre- and post-resurrection products.

People do not want to die. They want to live. Even those who commit suicide are attracted less by death and more by a desire for an easier life. This is what Christianity promises, life – an undyingness.

The fountain of this Christian promise is reenacted in Easter. Easter’s big three are the cross, the grave and the empty tomb from which emerge three critical claims.

First, a complicated doctrinal equation affirms that Jesus is God. Second, that the death of Jesus is an open door for a handshake between a drunken human race and a God willing to restore to it the rightful balance. The third is most controversial because it announces that Jesus raised Himself from the dead.

Resurrection is medically impossible as, once death happens, it is irreversible. Yet it is on this impossibility that the Church finds its possibility.

The mission of the Church and its Christianity is to demonstrate the reality of this resurrection through effecting significant life-bringing acts to individuals, institutions and nations.

The resurrection, though a mystery, is a lifeline whose philosophy opens a critical door to a country of justice, equity, joy and goodness that runs on a willing and undying divine energy.

The Christian resurrection directly mirrors the more historical Jewish Exodus that marked the end of centuries of slavery.

The operation “Let My People Go” was unique in that it was engineered and executed by Yahweh, the God of Israel. The freedom was not cheap. It was preceded by an intense duel between the God of the slaves and the god of the masters.

Even when the masters were giving up, the God of the slaves insisted on battling some more as if to unforgettably emboss in the history books of the mighty masters that once they wrestled with the great God of the slaves and lost.

The acts of Yahweh’s sword fighting for the slaves points an accusing finger to all oppressive structures.

On the night of their great exit, God asked the slaves to have a meal. The ingredients of the meal were symbolic – indicating the bitterness left behind and the haste of departure telling of the urgency to arrive at the newness ahead.

This meal tradition has expanded to the Christian faith, reminding the church of the suffering and refreshing granted by the Christ and the task of creating a new community where joy is the staple experience.

Christianity, too, is a freedom granting movement. It shoulders a big claim – the power to kill death. This resurrection claim presents the Church and its priests as symbols of a non-disappointing hope. The Church must be the hub of life-giving creativity in a community full of manipulative promises.

Therefore, Christianity crafts its own irrelevance when it looks on as ill-willed leaders enslave citizens in death traps of poverty. The church mocks its resurrecting claims when houses of prayer become casinos and priests prey on vulnerable souls.

Woe unto Christianity and its Church if, even after staging the unequalled resurrection claim, they become symbols of inaction and death.

The writer is a Nairobi-based theologian and youth pastor