We all know people who say that they just can't imagine the resurrection of the dead. For them this life is all there is and because that is so they try to make the best of it, whatever that may mean for each of them.

Others speak of the resurrection, except the word resurrection is a bit ‘churchy’ and for them heaven is a more generic term. And so they speak of people going to heaven after they die. This heaven is inclusive and pretty much everyone gets to go there. It is a comfort when contemplating death and it is what they tell their children, even if they lack roots that are nurtured in the soil of the Christian tradition. This heaven isn’t much different from our life on earth, except that it is commonly assumed that we won’t be weighed down by our bodies, which seems to forget that all our joys in this life are mediated by our body. But that we will be all spirit is really a way of saying that no one will be sick in heaven. But how our spirit will be healed they don’t know.

Anything we have not seen or experienced is difficult to imagine, for our imagination always draws on that which we know. Yet the nature of the resurrection is precisely that it is unlike anything we could imagine, which is probably why we tend to paint eternal life so much in the colours of this life.
But there is a way to expand our imagination. We do so by reading the scriptures and in doing so, claiming the experience of Israel and of the Apostles. We do so by being part of the community of the church.  Why the church? Because Jesus promised to be present in the Church as he promised his disciples, I am with you always to the end of the age. (Matthew 28) And if we want to know what heaven is like we must stay close to where Jesus promised to be. Catherine of Siena said, All the way to heaven is heaven because Jesus says ‘I am the Way’.

If we find we lack the imagination to know what heaven or what the resurrection are like, we are in good company. The disciples constantly tried to fit Jesus into their expectations, using the horizon of their own experience and knowledge, just like we do today. Their idea of heaven was pretty much a continuation of what they knew on earth.
But what is most disturbing about the resurrection is that it stands in discontinuity to all we know. And in that the resurrection is like conversion.  And conversion is the breaking in of God into our life. That can happen as it did to Paul on the road to Damascus (Acts 22), or it can happen gently and quietly, but it always involves the experience that St Paul describes like this: ...It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. (Gal 2:20) The breaking in of God into our life can happen every day, which is what the season of Lent is all about: The active inviting of the God who gave Himself, to make us new, starting today.

Christ is risen.
He is risen indeed. Alleluia.

Yours,

Pr Christoph