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Resurrection reveals God's choice for love and joy [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2025-09-07

A friendly note to all Daily Kos readers. This essay was posted to Street Prophets, a progressive religious community on Daily Kos. As a blogger there, I am a progressive like you, only from a Christian perspective. In support of progressivism, I am trying to articulate a progressive Christian political vision. After all, no progressive leaders will be elected without the progressive religious vote. As I argue for progress from a Christian perspective, I am in no way asserting the superiority of faith to atheism, or Christianity to any other worldview. I am just trying to advance humanity from my own particular perspective. I think that God prefers kind atheists to mean Christians. My hope is that we can all cooperate across worldviews to create a more just, inclusive, and peaceful world. Thank you.

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God is love that experiences hatred by others but remains love. If Jesus’s story ended with the crucifixion, it would be an abject tragedy: hate would have defeated love, suffering would have defeated joy, cruelty would have defeated mercy. All the powers of darkness would reign victorious on earth. Instead, God announces the divine decision for life over death through the resurrection:

On the first day of the week, at the first sign of dawn, the women came to the tomb bringing the spices they had prepared. They found the stone rolled back from the tomb, but when they entered, they did not find the body of Jesus. While they were still at a loss over what to think, two figures in dazzling garments stood beside them. Terrified, the women bowed to the ground. The two said to them, “Why do you search for the Living One among the dead? Jesus is not here; Christ has risen!” (Luke 24:1–5a)

Existential vitality demands experiential texture, and the choice of the living God is to be absolutely alive. Made in God’s image, we are offered God’s vitality. Since God elects life over death, joy over suffering, and hope over despair, the crucifixion must yield to the resurrection.

Crucifixion alone would repudiate the divine will. Crucifixion offends God, who responds by raising us to life, just as a mother lifts her infant to the breast (Isaiah 49:15). Human suffering invokes divine healing. So, Jesus was raised from the dead by love that defeats hatred.

His resurrection was not the act of an individual; it was communion celebrating itself and declaring victory over division. The crucifixion acknowledges that suffering is; the resurrection promises that joy will be. As the soul of the universe, God feels all that the universe feels, but unclouded by fear or despair, because God has ensured that every crucifixion will be defeated by its very own resurrection.

Julian of Norwich (c. 1343–c. 1416) was an English theologian and mystic. As a female in the Middle Ages, she knew suffering, having lived through the Black Death, Peasants’ Revolt, and a life-threatening illness. During this illness she received visions of Christ. In one vision, on the brink of death, Jesus assures her, “Since I have brought good out of the worst-ever evil, I want you to know by this; that I shall bring good out of all lesser evils, too.”

In this revelation to Julian, the crucifixion and resurrection are not distant historical events; they are the deep pattern within creation, an ever present promise that illness will yield to health, woundedness to healing, and death to life.

The incarnation, ministry, crucifixion, and resurrection tell a sacred story. We have the freedom to live with the grain of the universe or against it. When choosing greed, hatred, and domination instead of generosity, love, and community, we choose against God and create suffering for ourselves and others.

The crucifixion exposes the ongoing horror of our choice against God. In the crucifixion, corrupt power believed that it could defeat divine truth. But the spirit of the universe could not be defeated by the spirit against the universe. Even Roman nails cannot tear the divine fabric.

In our narrative, Christ became human as God always intended. From the moment that the Trinity conceives creation, Christ chooses to enter creation. The Artists must celebrate their art; the Playwrights must perform their play. Yet these Creatives are not smarmy, shallow romantics. Instead, they acknowledge our exposure to the soaring and searing spectrum of experience that they sustain. They know that we are susceptible to an inexhaustible range of events and their resultant feelings, yet they affirm the varieties of embodied experience by undergoing embodied experience.

Through his love of life, Jesus exemplifies the human call to enjoy God forever, a call that opens us to the world. Since God is loving everything into being at every moment, awareness of God broadens our love to all things at all times. To see what this love looks like, we look to Jesus who is all that a human can be.

Christ’s life is communion itself, while Christ’s preaching resists those forces that impede communion. Christ heals, restoring the soul’s communion with the body. Christ loves, exemplifying interpersonal communion. Christ preaches, demanding that society become communion. Christ includes, broadening our practice of communion. Christ speaks truth, those words that invite our minds into communion. And in preaching the kingdom of God Christ offers hope, which is communion with time.

Christ reveals the fundamental harmony from which we come, within which we live, and to which we will return. For this reason, he is the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last (Revelation 22:13). For this reason, Jesus is our window onto God. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 44-146)

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For further reading, please see:

Julian of Norwich. In Love Enclosed: More Daily Readings with Julian of Norwich. Edited by Robert Llewelyn. Translated by Sheila Upjohn. 3rd ed. London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2004.

Zizioulas, John. Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church. Contemporary Greek Theologians vol. 4. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985.

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