Resurrection

“…that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures.” 1 Co 15:4

The seventeen-year-old boy with long dark hair was charged with the responsibility of pushing the bottom that sent his mother’s body to be cremated, which he did with the greatest sadness and reluctance. I walked away from the scene quietly to avoid witnessing the inevitable. It was so final and cruel.

My dad wasn’t there, even though his body was still there in the main room of our country home. I was exhausted when I got home after twenty plus hours of flying and hardly had enough emotional energy to deal with all the things involved in the Buddhist funeral. Nothing was more final than the final moment when the workers lowered my father’s casket and covered it with fresh dirt.

Death takes a thousands forms but its color and texture are always the same. It’s so dark and dense that we hardly can look at it without having a sense of oppression and repulsiveness. I just wanted the whole thing to end while I was there, but it would never end. The ritual was over in a day or two and the sorrow might have sunk to the bottom of one’s heart, but that’s where it would remain forever.

“Jesus wept.” The shortest verse in the Scriptures resonates in our hearts a lot louder and longer than all the other verses. Resurrection was never a doubt for Christ, but the agonizing process of death still caused the Son of God to weep openly. There was no need to weep over the dead man’s death since he was going to raise him up moments later, was there?

Death is death and any effort to beautify it is laughable and unnecessary. Why do we coin it as a “celebration of life,” not a “mourning for the dead?” What is there to celebrate? I wonder. We may be trying to “rejoice always” so hard that we have forgotten how to mourn and, consequently, we do neither very well.

That particular burial wasn’t final at all. In fact, that was the only burial in human history that wasn’t final. He was wrapped from head to toe and was placed in a cave and nobody, even his closest disciples, was expecting Christ would come back to life again. It was all good and interesting when the issue of resurrection was brought up and discussed casually in their small circle, but not a single one of them believed it in practice or in reality. I am afraid we may fare no better compared to all of them. Fantasy and reality will always collide if we consider our belief merely fantastic, which may be the case in many ways.

I sometimes think about the two babies that we lost in miscarriages and wonder whether we will get to see them someday. Unfortunately I have found it very difficult negotiating between theology and reality, theory and practice.