This is a somber day for me, a pause for reflection before two overpowering events: the great tragedy of Good Friday, when Christ sacrificed himself, in pain and suffering, for all of us; and Easter, with the great miracle of his resurrection. 

Death, even sacrificial death, is something we can understand, for death comes to us all. But resurrection? 

This is indeed the miracle of miracles—and it is something we have to believe in if we are to call ourselves Christians. It is part of the job description. But as human beings so many of us have such a hard time wholeheartedly believing in it, being constant in our faith in it. We wobble back and forth between skepticism and faith, and at no time could most of us say: I believe in this with all my heart and always have. 

The way we have been taught to think betrays us. All modern Western thought, which is our way of thought, rests on the foundation laid by the ancient Greeks. They taught the world logic, analysis, and scientific method; they were the fathers of science. And science and logic loudly insist that people simply do not come back from the dead. Ever.

So, resurrection in general is difficult enough for us Greek thinkers to swallow—and now God goes and adds something that makes it even tougher. He demands that not only do we believe that Christ was raised from the dead, but that he was raised in a transformed state. 

By contrast, Lazarus returned to life as the man he’d always been. His friends and relatives recognized him instantly as such. In good time he died a mortal death. Jesus Christ’s return could not have been more different. His own disciples, walking the road to Emmaus, didn’t recognize him until he made himself known. Neither did Mary Magdalene, who thought he was a gardener. Thomas recognized him but could not believe what he saw until he put his hand in the wound in Christ’s side. I have to think that this is because he returned as an immortal, here only briefly, and that he was covered in the kind of new glory that made him a different being from the one they knew.

So—we are to believe, against all science, not only that someone dead can live again, but that he can be resurrected as someone more than mortal. The miracle, then, is a double miracle, and we have enough trouble believing in just one of them.

I’ve wrestled with this for years. Agreeing to do this talk, I had to confront my own wobbly, incomplete belief all over again. Suddenly, it struck me: death and resurrection have always been part of our own human lives, all the time. When we see and acknowledge this, is it so impossible to believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ? In the course of living don’t we all suffer our own little deaths? And, if we are fortunate, are we not resurrected from them as changed people?

Some of us lose our jobs and, with that little death, we may lose self-esteem and even a sense of identity. We lose those we love—a friend, a spouse, a child—and those deaths are our deaths too. We suffer the death of relationships in divorce and alienation from a friend. We die a little in retirement, when we are separated from our community of work and begin to doubt our usefulness; I have been out of the newspaper business for ten years and although I don’t miss the work, I still keenly miss my co-workers and the sense of shared mission we had. Finally, we all have or will experience the diminishments that age brings, in illness and disability. 

We can react in three ways, it seems to me. Often, we get stuck—stuck in endless mourning, endless bitterness, endless longing for what we don’t have anymore. We may get angry with God, and spend the rest of our lives shaking a fist at him and asking, over and over, Why? 

Or we may suck it up, as a good soldier should. Calling on our human resources alone, we tell ourselves to get on with life and through force of will we bury the grief and anger and longing that torment us. On the surface we appear normal. Beneath, what we have buried simmers in our souls and breaks out at inopportune moments. We live in constant tension, because what we have buried never really dies. 

Finally, if we are fortunate, we may experience our own little resurrections. We may emerge from our trials not only healed, but as wiser, better, stronger people than we were before. In a small way, transformed people. 

How do we achieve this?

I have known people in all three of the above categories, and have been in each of them myself. For fifty years I was stuck in mourning for a brother who died at the age of four. At another time, in my work, I tried to bury my anger at an editor I felt had done me wrong, and soldier on. (As it developed, I was the one who was wrong. He gave me the best job I ever had and we eventually became respectful and mutually supportive colleagues.)

From my own experience and that of others, I ‘m convinced that a two-step process occurs in the hearts of those who undergo resurrection. First, they embrace humility. They accept the idea that they do not have the power to heal their own wounds, fill their own needs. Then, at some deep and perhaps unconscious level, they surrender. In effect, they say, ‘I’m hurting and I can’t handle this myself. Help me.’ And, as He always does to those who ask out of humility, the Help of the Helpless comes to them and brings them out of their spiritual pain.

All of this takes place in the larger context of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, events we mark again this week. We are tiny figures dwarfed by these great events, but we can still be more than spectators. We can honor the sacrifice made for us by making the most of the little deaths all of us suffer in life—by embracing humility, by surrendering ourselves to His care, and by receiving with gratitude and prayer the little resurrections that come to us when we do. And, when we experience these for what they are, we may discover that  the greater resurrection, the one overshadowing all, is not so hard to believe in after all.