Resurrection Storylines

Image: Icon of the Resurrection by the Ukrainian icon writer Ivanka Demchuk.

We live in a time when competing stories about who we are—and whose lives matter—press in on us from every direction. Perhaps that is why the question of which story we inhabit has never felt more urgent.

Those of us who might be described as more than a little nerdy when it comes to theology tend to gravitate toward particular ways of framing it. My own inclination is toward a narrative theological perspective.

Narrative theology begins with a simple observation: human beings are storytelling creatures. We make sense of our lives—and our world—through the stories we construct to interpret our experience. Viewed through this lens, the Bible is not a single, flat account of divine truth, but a long and complex composition in which human writers, across time, attempt to give an account of God’s dynamic engagement within the flow of human history. These stories always emerge from and speak to particular contexts—cultural, spiritual, economic, and political. (See my Palm Sunday sermon, Contested Storylines.)

What is striking is that the biblical tradition makes no attempt to iron out the tensions between these storylines. Critics often point to this as a weakness, even a disqualification of Scripture’s authority. Yet I would argue that this is precisely its strength. The Bible reflects the complexity of human experience of God rather than reducing it to a single, controlled narrative. After all, there is always more than one way to tell a story, because the story lives in the voice of the one who tells it.

From the beginning of Holy Week, the trajectory toward the cross carries a sense of inevitability. When Jesus rides into Jerusalem, he is propelled by a new story—God’s story—of universal redemption. Yet the crowds who greet him remain shaped by an older story, one rooted in ethnic longing and the hope for national restoration. They are looking for a Messiah who will secure their future by freeing them from foreign domination.

These competing expectations—universal redemption and selective national liberation—are bound to clash. And both, in different ways, inevitably collide with a third storyline: that of empire, which maintains its version of peace through violence and order through domination. As the week unfolds, this collision becomes unavoidable, carrying Jesus toward his death on the cross.

By the third day after his burial, the tomb is discovered empty. From this moment, we can discern two resurrection storylines emerging. They tell, in essence, the same story—but lead us toward very different conclusions.

The first is the one we know by heart. It moves swiftly from Good Friday to Easter morning—from execution to resurrection. A man is killed, his body taken down, wrapped, and sealed in a tomb. On the third day, the tomb is found empty.

It is a story that unfolds quickly—almost too quickly.

And just as quickly, we move on. The flowers fade, the cupcakes are eaten, and the Easter chocolate disappears. In this familiar telling, Christ stands radiant and triumphant, having completed God’s work alone. The resurrection becomes something finished—“done and dusted”—even as we continue to debate its meaning.

In this version, the resurrection is understood primarily as something that happened to Jesus. It is, in effect, individualized.

And yet we rarely pause over the strangeness at its heart. Why did it happen? What does it mean that it happened to this particular body, executed by this particular empire, for what was essentially a political crime? Beneath the surface lies a deeper, often unasked question: what—and who—is the resurrection for?

The familiar storyline does not encourage us to linger there. Instead, it tends to reduce the matter to a binary choice: accept or reject, believe or disbelieve.

But there is another resurrection storyline.

We see it in the icon on the front of our Easter bulletin, written by the contemporary Ukrainian iconographer Ivanka Demchuk. Here, Christ is not depicted as rising alone. His arms are extended outward in connection, grasping the hands of Adam and Eve and pulling them up from their graves.

In this telling, Christ does not rise alone. The first man and the first woman rise with him—and they stand as archetypes for all humanity.

This image resists any individualistic interpretation of resurrection. It does not point toward a private victory or a personal afterlife secured. Instead, it gestures toward something far more expansive, and far more demanding: that resurrection is a collective reality.

As the theologian Tripp Fuller puts it, “What happened to Jesus is happening to everyone.”

This represents a profound shift. Resurrection is no longer a one-time event confined to Jesus, nor something to be admired from a distance. It becomes an ongoing process—a movement that is already enveloping all of us together.

In Demchuk’s icon, the old order lies shattered beneath Christ’s feet. The resurrection does not simply follow the world as it is; it interrupts it. And though not immediately visible at first glance, the wounds remain. The marks of crucifixion have not been erased.

This detail matters. Why carry the evidence of imperial execution into resurrection? Why not leave the wounds behind?

Because resurrection is not only about life beyond death. It is also God’s judgment on the world that made such a death inevitable.

The values of empire—violence, hierarchy, and the quiet assumption that might is always right—are not relics of the past. They persist wherever order is secured by exclusion, wherever peace depends upon the suffering of others, and wherever we learn, slowly and almost without noticing, to call such arrangements normal.

The wounds remain because the story is not finished. Empire has not disappeared, and the forces that converged in that first Holy Week continue to shape our world.

Nor has the temptation to accommodate them.

It rarely comes dramatically. More often, it arrives in small permissions—in what we overlook, what we excuse, what we come to accept as simply the way things are. And over time, we find that we have made our peace with what once would have troubled us.

Against this, the resurrection stands as God’s refusal to leave the world unchallenged. It is the quiet insistence that another reality is already taking hold—one not governed by the logic of domination, and not contained by it.

And that reality is not limited to Jesus.

It is unfolding among us.

Resurrection is not only a mysterious past event, no longer just a future hope. It is also present -time reality. For we are now living in the resurrection age – the time between the historical resurrection of Jesus and the final resurrection of all of creation, in which we know that despite the persistence of the story of empire, it no longer has the last word.

This is why the icon matters so deeply. Christ does not stand apart. He does not rise alone. He reaches out, grasping humanity and drawing it upward. This is not a story about individual readiness or worthiness. It is a story about shared destiny.

Which is why the Church gathers.

Not simply to remember, and not merely to reassure ourselves, but to participate in this shared destiny with God through Christ. At the table, we do not come as isolated individuals. We come together, carrying our uncertainties, our divisions, and our entanglement in competing storylines.

Here, we are given bread—broken, a body that still bears the marks of violence. We are given wine—poured out, a life that has passed through death and is no longer held by it.

In receiving these gifts, we are not simply remembering Jesus. We are being drawn into him—into his life, his death, and his resurrection.

This is what the resurrection is for. Indeed, we are who resurrection is for.

It is not a reward, nor something to be earned, nor a distant promise deferred. It is an invitation into a new creation already breaking into the world—a reality in which no one rises alone, where wounds are not erased but transfigured, and where the powers that once seemed ultimate are revealed not to have the final word.

So we come—not because we have resolved all our doubts, nor because we have fully left the old story behind, but because we recognize that something new is already happening.

Christ is still reaching. Still drawing. Still raising.

The question is not whether we are worthy.

The question is whether we are willing to take his hand—and allow ourselves to be raised, together.

April 5, 2026 0

Imprinted by Faith

Image: Icon of the Resurrection by the Ukrainian icon writer Ivanka Demchuk. Unlike Western iconography of the resurrection, which portrays it as a Jesus-alone event, Orthodox iconography of the resurrection portrays Jesus raising Adam and Eve, symbolizing the general resurrection of the dead.

In her New York Times essay, The Prophetic, subtitled What American Literature’s Prophetic Voices Tell Us About Ourselves, the renowned writer Ayana Mathis in her first installment, titled Imprinted by Faith, recalls her childhood memories of growing up in a Black revivalist Christian tradition. She writes that:

the God of my revival childhood was all-powerful and relatively benevolent, but had a great many rules about what we should do (go to church 3x a week, live by the Word of God, literally interpreted) and what we shouldn’t do (listen to secular music, play cards, watch movies, drink). These commitments and privations would be rewarded with God’s love, palpable, like a bird alighting on a shoulder.

She describes leaving this world behind with the memorable image of plunging into the world on the other side of the stained-glass window. Mathis views the beginnings of her adult journey as one of growing beyond her conservative Christian origins to become an artist. Her journey was a learning how to disbelieve while still being imprinted by belief.

How to disbelieve while remaining imprinted by belief struck a deep chord in me. Mathis asserts that American literature –and by extension mainstream American culture – remains imprinted by belief, freighted by ideas about morality, justice, and standards for living. Her assertion is that whatever the condition of our belief at the personal level – as in do we, or don’t we? – the cultural impact of belief remains imprinted on us. That, despite many manifold wrongs and derelictions, the literary and cultural landscape of America remains deeply imprinted by the nation’s historically Christian heritage.

She notes that this Christian imprint has both good and not-so-beneficial consequences –in her phrase, it strikes a paradox. The Christian imprint on American society has often been used to perpetrate great evil. Christian Nationalism’s distortion of the Christian tradition is today still being used to justify racism’s doctrine of white supremacy, oppression of women and a multiplicity of other phobic responses to people of difference. Yet, at best, the Christian imprint continues to inspire decency and generosity, acting as a hedge against oversimplistic notions of society and the individual. Mathis’ assertion is that our Christian legacy asks us to truck in paradox, requiring us to wrangle with contradictory realities in mind and heart, discovering the sustenance and insight to be gained in the wrangling.

Bracketing her personal references to a revivalist upbringing, Mathis nevertheless speaks for many of us – I suspect- here in this church on this Easter morning. As good-aspiring, middle-class, over-educated, professionally successful, and predominantly white Episcopalians, few of us would pass the orthodox belief and devotional piety smell test. Yet here we are on Easter Day. Some among us may be a little surprised to find ourselves sitting in these pews. Yet, nevertheless, we’re here, despite being unable to give a full account for why we have been drawn here.

Perhaps we’re being drawn by memories of an earlier phase of family life as children or as parents of young children? Maybe it’s the influence of friends drawing us here? Perhaps – and this is the best reason of all – we’re drawn here by cultural tradition – tradition as the imprint of belief upon our personal struggle with disbelief? Deep down, being here reflects a questioning of certainties -once easily taken or rejected at face value, but alas no longer so. Many of us have lost confidence in the belief that Jesus being raised from the dead means all is right in our lives and our world.

We wrangle with disbelief while remaining mysteriously imprinted by belief as we reach for a fingerhold—to say a foothold here would be to overstate our confidence – on what it means to live well with a hope that, at times, aspires to the level of real courage – a tentative purchase on what it means to live well with a love demonstrated through generous concern for others. In short, we long for lives of generous toleration and concern for our neighbor while seeking to grasp after something ineffable.

If faith is an imprint we absorb from the shape of the culture around us, then belief is neither something we can possess nor something we can lose. It’s like ebb tide in the morning, only to return with evening’s flow. Belief is the expression not so much of objective faith in a collection of doctrinal propositions but a heartfelt experience of being deeply imprinted by a story capable of fostering meaning and purpose in our lives. A large and expansive narrative capable of adjusting our orientation to the world in all its evil as well as its glory. Faith is the practice of wrangling contradictory realities in mind and on heart and finding in the wrangling sustenance and insight for living well.

As an example of wrangling paradox, many today reject institutional Christianity for deeply Christian reasons. They reject the institutional Church for failing to live up to the expectations set out in Jesus’ teaching and the Christian culture it has spawned. Often citing the teachings of Jesus, secular humanism rightly judges the Church for its hypocrisy, its love of earthly power, and its manifold human abuses.

Wrangling with paradox is further illustrated in the debate between Tom Holland, a British historian of classical antiquity and author of Dominion: How the Crucifixion Shaped the Values of the Modern World, and AC Grayling, Master of the New College of Humanities in London and a well-known humanist philosopher.

The central contention between them relates to the origin of our contemporary definition of human dignity and personhood. AC Grayling, in his militant rejection of Christianity, contends that the values of modern humanism – ideas about human dignity, social justice and inclusive standards for living – emerge from the Enlightenment’s rejection of religion. There is a wonderful exchange where Holland challenges him, saying that the humanist values we cherish today are not simply remnants of pre-Christian classical antiquity, lying around neglected until rediscovered in the Enlightenment at the end of the 17^{th century.} Our contemporary humanist values – aspiring to do good; valuing ethical action; protection of the individual especially the weak against the strong; the cherishing of vulnerability as a strength and not simply a weakness to be crushed by the powerful; the belief that might is not right – are all the direct product of the Christian revolution in the first centuries of the current era. Holland – with the historical evidence to support him – asserts our contemporary definition of what it means to be a human being flows directly from the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. He contends that modern humanist values are nowhere to be found in classical antiquity – a world where might was always right, where the weak were fair game for the strong, and where the only individuals with any rights were freeborn men – everyone else existing within various degrees of servitude and enslavement – in societies imprinted by not by faith but the crude transactional practice of calculated cruelty.

On Palm Sunday at the beginning of Holy Week while exploring the clash of competing storylines intersecting with dire consequences for Jesus’ during his last week in Jerusalem, I predicted that we would eventually arrive at a new and more expansive storyline – that of God’s dream for the renewal of creation. As Christian believers, we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus as the Christ, the longed-for promised one who came to change everything. But whether we pass the belief smell test or not, at the very least we celebrate a story that revolutionized the ancient world and ushered in a new and vastly more compassionate understanding of what it means to be human.

This morning, I’m not interested in forensically deconstructing the evidence for or against the resurrection to ascertain in an arid attempt to prove it did or did not happen. All human meaning and purpose are narrative in origin—in other words, we only ever have the stories we construct to make sense of our experience in the world. The crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus is a story that fundamentally changed our understanding of what being human looks like.

The crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus introduced a new storyline in the collective consciousness of the West and among all who have come to the Christian faith—a more expansive story that continues to imprint itself upon our cultural experience regardless of whether we believe in its literal truth or not. In this sense, secular humanism is not the antidote to Christianity but its natural heir.

Despite many manifold wrongs and derelictions, the literary and cultural landscape of America remains deeply imprinted by the nation’s historically Christian heritage. This heritage struggles with a view of humanity shaped by Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection – forcing us, in Mathis’ words, to truck in paradox – requiring us to wrangle with contradictory realities in mind and heart, discovering the sustenance and insight to be gained in the wrangling.

The imprint of Christian faith shapes a cultural landscape where human dignity and Christian love, expressed as justice, are enshrined in the protections of the rule of law. The imprint of Christian faith, whether as cultural legacy or principled belief, empowers us to call out and resist the cyclic embrace of calculated cruelty as a transactional means to political ends – whether as remembered history or experienced within the flow of present-time current events.

But on Easter Day in 2025, you might want to ask, what about Jesus’s bodily resurrection? Well, there you have it—a curious paradox: Jesus died on the cross, but Christ was born in an empty tomb. To disbelieve while being imprinted by belief is the best description I can find for living with the paradox at the heart of our cultural landscape. Wrangling to disbelieve while still imprinted by faith, we should be careful not to rule anything out.

April 20, 2025 0