Resurrection Life
Last night I dreamed about
Karen. It’s been more than three years
since she died. I’ve been married—happily—to
Sarah for more than a year. The dream
didn’t grow out of dissatisfaction with my situation.
Admittedly, I don’t remember many of
my dreams, so it’s possible I dream about Karen often. But I don’t think so. When I woke up I realized this dream
illustrates an interesting philosophical/theological question.
In the dream some small animal—a dog?
cat? gopher?—somehow found a bit of Karen’s body and used that bit to reconstitute
Karen. (Bizarre? Sure.
It was a dream.) She was alive
again, Karen just as she was fourteen months before her death! (Another weird feature of dreams; somehow I
knew it was fourteen months, not a year.)
Karen was reading something; my “Last
Walk” essays perhaps. So Karen in the
dream knew she was dying, knew when the doctor would tell her she was dying,
and knew when she would die. At the same
stage in real life Karen knew none of that.
Back in 2015, fourteen months before she died, Karen’s doctors were
pretty confident.
So there she was—a resuscitated Karen,
with more than a year to live. But
dream-Karen was unhappy. I asked her:
Didn’t she want to live? Her answer: No,
not like this.
And there’s the question. What do we want—what do Christians hope for—in
the afterlife?
In my dream, the magic happened by
means of the little animal. Dog, cat, or
wombat doesn’t matter. If you like, you
can exchange the animal for a mad scientist, an extraterrestrial invader, or an
angel. In the TV series Stargate, the aliens had a sarcophagus machine
that could restore dead bodies. I’m not
worried about the means; I’m interested in the results. What do we want in an afterlife, if there is one?
Christian theologians and Bible
scholars insist that real Christian hope centers on resurrection. The same power that raised Jesus from the grave
can give life to our bodies too. Of
course, we will be changed; we will
have “spiritual” bodies. (See 1
Corinthians 15.)
And that’s the problem with dream-Karen. She was resuscitated, not resurrected. Somehow the animal or magic had rebuilt her
body as she was fourteen months before her death, cancer and all. She was not changed. She had to live her dying months all over
again—only worse this time, since in the dream she knew what was going to happen.
When I hope for resurrection, I hope
for new life. Not just “new life” in the
abstract; I want to live. I want to live with others, people I have
known and especially Christ himself—I want community. So, somehow, I hope that the real me, along
with real others, will live again. But I
do not hope for resuscitation, a kind of bare-bones new life. I want something better.
The New Testament promises a new
heaven and a new earth. The community is
symbolized as a city, the New Jerusalem.
Since God is an infinite being, I imagine we will be learning forever;
our fellowship will be always deepening.
Dream-Karen was right to reject
resuscitation, even if she were to be resuscitated over and over. Don’t misunderstand my point. I am not saying our life now is
valueless. The life God has given us
here and now in this world is a wonderful thing. But Christian hope is not just for more
years. We would not be satisfied if alien
machines or magic animals gave us an unlimited number of do-overs. We want true resurrection, in which the power
of God translates us into a new kind of life.
