Human resurrection is desirable but impossible

When the festivals come round, coverage and commentaries on Christmas and Easter are great newspaper favourites.
Going through some of the pieces of last week, I was struck by how an established myth endures, even in an age that understands better than any other age how ‘fake news’ and ‘alternative facts’ can be generated and spread to serve a mission.
For instance, Sunday Monitor’s Zuurah Karungi sounded out six Ugandans with the question: “If Jesus came back today, how would he find you?”
If she did not edit out the sceptics, all her respondents gave answers indicating that they really believed such a return was possible; and they had been praying, fasting and generally cleaning up their lives in readiness for this event.
If I had been asked the same question, I would have been in a minority of one, because Jesus is definitely not coming back, whether soon or ever.

However, I can internalise some aspects of his wisdom. And in the sense that this is one way we keep the dead ‘alive’ in our thoughts and actions, Jesus can be resurrected any time of day as a presence in my consciousness, or as an intrusive influence the power of civilisation imposes on me. This is liberating. It is a critical encounter, not an embrace.
Timothy Kalyegira’s “Christ’s resurrection and the meaning of life” also caught my attention.
Mr Kalyegira argues that so harsh and prolonged was the persecution of the disciples after Jesus’ death, that self-preservation would have made them abandon the narrative of a resurrection, if it had been an outright lie or just a myth.
Yes and no.

Yes, if seen through the calmness of a non-fanatical believer working at his computer keyboard in 2017AD.
No, if you were among the utterly committed circle immersed in the cult of the Saviour (or Messiah), and you believed that Jesus had not only fainted on the cross, but had died, and you had seen his punctured hands a few days after the crucifixion; and if you believed that there was heaven and hell up and out there; and that you could reap eternal joy or burn in a terrible fire, and it all depended on your loyalty to (or betrayal of) the departed and risen leader.
Being persecuted on earth because of him could actually improve your chances of joy after death! The Jihadist even chooses suicide.

Remember, the idea of going to heaven was not new. The disciples knew about Elijah; part wizard or illusionist who dealt in fire, mass murderer and great prophet. Elijah had at his end stormed Heaven in a chariot of fire, drawn by horses of fire.
In 30 or 40 AD, it was easy for people to believe that such things literally happened.
Mr Kalyegira also argues that man’s suffering on earth is so great that he cannot be compensated by anything short of a resurrection.
In the biblical narrative, pain, suffering and death are explained in terms of (Adam’s) sin. Clearly, a mythological account.

Physical pain is essential to our preservation in a dangerous world. The leper directly understands what happens when the ability to feel pain is lost. And because it reproduces, our species has no use for eternal life.
These are peculiarities of living things in an otherwise indifferent universe. If man, as tormentor, inflicts pain, it means nothing to the universe.
The numbers relating to the universe are mind-boggling.
Our galaxy is called the Milky Way. The distance from earth to the massive black hole at the centre of our galaxy is 153 quadrillion miles. Light is the fastest sprinter in the universe. It takes 970,000 years for light to travel from earth to the centre of just our galaxy.

Vast as our Milky Way is, there are millions of other, some bigger, galaxies, each with billions of suns (stars), and billions of other celestial objects.
The sheer scale! You have to be truly spiritual to believe that for His pet project, the Maker of these things chose the tribal people around Palestine, or even mankind as a whole.

To be continued next Sunday

Mr Tacca is a novelist, socio-political commentator.

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