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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
April 24, 2011
Rise
A medical doctor has told me that I am not the same person I was 50 years ago. This I already suspected, on subjective grounds. But by his more objective, scientific account, every cell in my body south of my brain has been replaced, some many times over, in the time since I was a child. How he can know that is a puzzle to me. By his own account there may be 100 trillion cells in a human body: male or female; rich or poor; smart or stupid; old or young. All are specialized, and most are hard to get at. How to be sure we have checked every one?The argument against Easter is similar to this. We simply infer that if something is very unlikely, it has never happened. We do not carefully review 100 trillion possible exceptions. Human bodies, once dead, tend to stay that way, and indeed the exceptions are so rare that not a single case is known to medical science. There are cases of resuscitation from quite morbid conditions, when the patient gives standard indications of death. He may for instance lack a pulse, and not be breathing; nor stirring in any other way. Doctors in the old Westminster Hospital in London provided me with an anecdote or two; and some rich, dark humour on the associated condition of "brain death." By the biblical account, the Resurrection we celebrate at Easter was not entirely unprecedented. Consider the case of Lazarus of Bethany, restored to life, according to the Gospel of John, after four days in the tomb. An important detail is provided: the body was actually stinking with decay, when the tomb was opened. Christ called Lazarus forth, and he emerged, in his grave swaddling. That chapter, John 11, contains several memorable phrases, echoed through every language that Christianity has touched. One is, "I am the Resurrection and the Life," with what follows, in which Jesus unambiguously states that he can, in effect, do anything; and that all who believe in Him will, in the consummation of time, be themselves resurrected. Another is the famous shortest verse in the Bible, at least in the King James Version. It is: "Jesus wept." Put those two statements together and one comes to an important theological inference. It is that God Himself hates death. And this in itself is a mystery worth puzzling upon, when we take Him for the author of a world, in which death and life seem inseparably paired. In what the late pope, John Paul, called "the culture of death," the fact of death is final. To "live on in the memory of others" is all very well: but they will die, too. In the alternative, atheist view of the world, everything comes in the end to nothing. It is the precise opposite to the universe we perceive, in which everything apparently came from nothing, and exists triumphantly in the face of the "nothing" that would be, had the uni-verse been designed instead by, say, Jean-Paul Sartre. Lazarus, according to Church Tradition, preserved to this day both West and East (i.e. by both Catholics and Orthodox), went on to die again. Indeed, I'm aware of two distinctly ancient subsequent tombs: one in France, one in Cyprus. The two traditions, which generally agree on matters of substance, vary on this point. Whereas, on the Resurrection of Christ, there is total and precise agreement, East and West, Catholic and Protestant. And while modern scholars (and non-scholars) of little or no faith, seek to present the received account of the Resurrection as "myth" -as a source of vague uplift to the first Christians; as a poetical means to express their "feelings" -they must override the plain meaning of biblical texts to do so. I place no confidence whatever in the opinions of men who, nearly 20 centuries after the fact, and on the basis of their own, often fatuous speculations, claim to know what really happened. Who contradict what was witnessed by men of quite obviously powerful mind and sharp sanity; men who themselves were perfectly aware that their claim to have met the Resurrected Christ flew in the face of all conventional understanding, and would get them mocked. For that ancient Greek and Roman world was no more inclined to believe "Osiris stories" than our post-modern one. The societies into which Christianity first came were no less jaded than the ones we live within today. Background conditions of life change little. The original apostles were men who, in each and every case, were willing to die rather than deny what they had seen with their own eyes. They were men who, as much historical evidence attests, were actually put to death because they refused to deny it; and suffered their martyrdoms willingly. I find the testimony of such men more plausible than the testimony of the smug and unchallenged. There was nothing comfortable about the Crucifixion. There was nothing slight about the Resurrection. And on this Easter morning they stand triumphantly in the face of everything that is comfortable and glib and convenient and proceeding towards ... nothing. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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