Crucifixion and Resurrection: Beyond Reason and Science

Crucifixion and Resurrection: Beyond Reason and Science

reflections on Easter by Troy Cady

What grips me about the Easter weekend is that it proclaims a message that still speaks today, nearly two thousand years later. It reminds me that natural human moral reasoning and science are sufficient only to a point. The story, the history, we remember and re-enact this weekend goes far beyond what common sense and nature dictate. Indeed, the story of Easter confounds reason and science.

Moral reason breaks down by the challenge of Jesus who loved his enemies so much that he gave up his life for them. He loved his ENEMIES. What rational paradigm would ever support such an act? None that I can think of. None that I or anyone else could ever imagine.

And the dictates of science break down in this story, too. Who has ever found a way to bring someone back from the dead? Someone might say, “Hey, that just happened with pigs last week!” But the Easter story is not talking about a resurrection that’s merely temporary. Jesus claims to give ETERNAL life to those who place their faith in him.

Many people today feel that “religion” is irrelevant. They observe that we really don’t need it anymore to make sense of reality and we don’t even need it to serve as a moral compass. Who doesn’t know that murder and theft are bad? We don’t need religion to tell us what it means to be a good person. We also don’t need the healing miracles of religion anymore because modern medicine does a pretty good job of healing on its own. In the past, humanity might have needed the idea of a God who intervenes to account for certain things we couldn’t explain but we really don’t need such an idea anymore.

To be sure, there is some truth in this: human reason, including moral reasoning, can tell us a lot about right and wrong. Immanuel Kant did a pretty good job demonstrating the rationality of categorical imperatives outside the bounds of religion. What’s more, science has told us a lot about the world and through science we are now able to help people in ways we had never imagined before.

But reason and science still cannot explain how Jesus models and gives to us the moral strength it takes to love an enemy. Science cannot adequately account for categories like joy, love, and hope. It can try, but at the end of the day such an accounting would still require faith. And science certainly has yet to find a permanent cure…for death.

Christianity isn’t about the laws of the universe. It’s about the Source from which all the laws spring. It’s an acknowledgment of humility before such a Source, an acknowledgment we will never know it all, never be the masters we imagine ourselves to be. It’s about our contingency, meek dependence on Someone greater.

And Christianity isn’t ultimately about “being a good person.” Anyone can do that. Christianity is about becoming more than just “a good person.” It’s about God doing in us what we could never do on our own. It’s about a God who is eager to do that in us—so eager, all he’s looking for is a tiny seed of childlike faith. Christianity confounds reason and nature—and it still does so today. Because of Easter, I continue to gladly give my heart to the mystery and wonder of Jesus, whom I still can’t quite figure out—but whom I will always place all my trust.   

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*Photo: “Cross Cutout Décor” by James L W via Unsplash. Creative Commons.

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