The Anchor · The life we receive, the life we share · Essay one
What grounds our hope that death and injustice do not have the final word?
The world does not hand out its outcomes according to what people deserve. A person can live generously and die before their work is finished. Someone can be faithful and be betrayed, speak truth and be silenced, love a child and be unable to keep that child alive.
Scripture says this without flinching. Ecclesiastes: “there is a just man that perisheth in his righteousness, and there is a wicked man that prolongeth his life in his wickedness.” Jesus says it twice. Of God’s gifts: “he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.” And of disaster: he refuses to treat the deaths of eighteen people under the tower in Siloam as proof that they were guiltier than everyone else in Jerusalem. He calls the living to repent, while refusing that judgment of the dead. Sun, rain, and falling towers do not sort the good from the bad. Ecclesiastes 7:15; Matthew 5:45; Luke 13:1–5.
That is where the question of hope begins. If the accounts are not settled within a lifetime, are they settled at all? When a good life ends in defeat, is defeat the truth about it? Any hope worth our attention has to answer from inside that fact, without pretending the world is fairer than it is.
Second Humanity begins with the conviction that life and love are received from God. We look to Jesus for the shape of that life. Yet Jesus was killed. Before we speak about following him, we need to face what his death asks of the hope we place in him. What does it mean to trust a way of love when the person who embodies it can be destroyed?
The earliest surviving proclamation answers that God raised Jesus from the dead. It says more than that his teaching lived on, and more than that his followers found their courage again. It says that something happened to Jesus himself: the one who was killed was raised. And through him it speaks of what awaits others who have died. 1 Corinthians 15:12–28.
This is one of the founding questions behind our work. It asks what we can honestly hope for, what the sources actually say, and where conviction reaches beyond what historical inquiry can establish. Some readers will arrive with faith; others with grief, suspicion, or an account of the resurrection they can no longer believe. There should be room here to read carefully from any of those places.
The Anchor takes its direction from the invitation in 1 Peter to give a reason for the hope within us. The same passage asks that we answer “with meekness and fear.” Those belong to the manner of the inquiry. We want to explain what sustains our hope in language that can withstand examination and leave another person free to consider it. 1 Peter 3:15–16.
Three convictions give this collection its shape: God raised Jesus from the dead; new life is received from God through him; and the life we receive calls us to love embodied among our neighbors. This essay explores the hope. Born from Above follows how new life is received and lived. The Life We Share asks what it requires of us together.
Throughout this inquiry, we distinguish the words of the sources, the judgments of named scholars, and Second Humanity’s own interpretation. The section “What history can establish and what faith affirms” gathers the questions about evidence and its limits. The narrative begins with people for whom those questions mattered because lives had been taken.
In brief
The world does not reward people according to what they deserve, and hope has to begin from that fact. Resurrection hope took particular force among Jews who saw the faithful die unvindicated and asked whether violence had settled the matter. Jesus announced God’s kingdom, spoke of his own rising, and was crucified under Pontius Pilate. Before Paul wrote his letters, followers were proclaiming that God had raised Jesus; Paul received that proclamation and handed it on. The Gospels tell the story differently from one another, and all four place women at the beginning of their tomb narratives. The first generation expected the end soon, and the New Testament keeps the strain of waiting. The risen life is described as bodily and transformed; its precise manner remains a question. History can show how early the conviction was. Faith affirms that it is true. We hold that God raised Jesus, and that the worth of a life is not measured by what the world manages to do to it.
When justice reaches beyond a lifetime
A mother watches seven sons die in a single day. The story is told in Second Maccabees, of the persecution under the Seleucid king Antiochus IV in the 160s before Christ. Each brother is tortured for refusing to abandon God’s law. One says, “the King of the world shall raise us up, who have died for his laws, unto everlasting life.” Another holds out his hands to be cut off: “These I had from heaven … and from him I hope to receive them again.” Their mother encourages them. She does not know how they came to be in her womb, she says, but “the Creator of the world … will also of his own mercy give you breath and life again.” 2 Maccabees 7.
The question in that scene is older than Christianity, and it is a question about justice. If a person is killed for remaining faithful to God, what becomes of God’s faithfulness to that person? If the persecutor lives and the victim dies, has violence settled the matter?
The book of Daniel, from the same crisis, answers with a vision. “Many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. And they that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament.” Deliverance is joined to judgment. The visible outcome of persecution is refused as the last word about those who endured it. An older line in Isaiah had already said, “Thy dead men shall live.” Daniel 12:1–3; Isaiah 26:19.
Jewish belief was not uniform. John Collins notes that Daniel pictures the wise shining like stars, while Second Maccabees expects hands restored, a resurrection of “distinctly physical character.” The Wisdom of Solomon speaks differently again: “the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God.” The Sadducees, the book of Acts reports, “say that there is no resurrection,” and Josephus says they held that “souls die with the bodies.” Jesus and his followers inherited a world in which resurrection could be affirmed, disputed, or understood in more than one way. Collins, A Short Introduction to the Hebrew Bible, pp. 369, 375; Wisdom of Solomon 3:1–4; Acts 23:6–8; Josephus, Antiquities 18.1.3–5.
For Second Humanity, the question of justice gives resurrection its human weight. Learning to live with mortality can be a profound achievement. But the person murdered, the child whose life was cut short, and the victim whose suffering went unacknowledged raise a further question. What becomes of them? Their worth cannot depend on their having reached inward peace before they died. We read resurrection hope as reaching toward those lives. The hoped-for victory concerns the reality of death and the unfinished claims of justice.
The life that was put to death
Within that world, Jesus comes into Galilee saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand.” Mark follows the announcement with people being called, healed, and freed. The kingdom is God’s reign: a claim about whose authority governs life, with consequences for bodies, relationships, and loyalties. Mark 1:14–34.
Mark also gives him three predictions of his death and rising. In the first, Jesus tells his disciples that the Son of man must be killed “and after three days rise again.” The second and third repeat the promise; the disciples struggle to understand. Coming down from the mountain they keep the saying to themselves, “questioning one with another what the rising from the dead should mean.” Their puzzlement is part of the record. Mark 8:31; 9:9–10, 31; 10:33–34.
When Sadducees test him with a riddle about marriage in the life to come, he refuses their picture of it. Those who rise “are as the angels which are in heaven.” Then he grounds the hope in who God is: the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob “is not the God of the dead, but the God of the living.” Renewed life, for Jesus, is a matter of God’s power and fidelity, and it need not repeat the arrangements of the present. Mark 12:18–27.
John brings the teaching into a family’s grief. Martha meets Jesus after her brother Lazarus has died. “I know that he shall rise again in the resurrection at the last day,” she says. Jesus answers, “I am the resurrection, and the life.” Later, seeing Mary and those with her weeping, he is troubled. Before they reach the tomb, “Jesus wept.” The one who speaks the promise grieves the death. Hope and tears stand in the same account. John 11:20–38.
Then he was killed. Mark narrates a Roman crucifixion authorized by Pilate, with soldiers mocking and a placard over the cross: “THE KING OF THE JEWS.” The Roman historian Tacitus, writing in the early second century and hostile to Christians, also records Jesus’ execution under Pontius Pilate during Tiberius’ reign. This is testimony to the execution from outside the Christian movement. The one who announced God’s reign appeared defeated, in public, by the power that could enforce its judgment by killing. Mark 15:1–39; Tacitus, Annals 15.44, Loeb translation.
Mark preserves his cry from the cross: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” It is the first line of Psalm 22. The psalm moves from abandonment to answered prayer and praise: God “hath not despised nor abhorred the affliction of the afflicted … but when he cried unto him, he heard.” The Gospel lets the cry stand without softening it. Whoever has prayed and heard nothing has company at the center of this story. Mark 15:34; Psalm 22.
His disciples had fled; Mark says so in six words: “they all forsook him, and fled.” He also names who stayed. “There were also women looking on afar off,” among them Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome. Two of them watch where the body is laid. These are the people who will come to the tomb. Mark 14:50; Mark 15:40–47.
From the earliest tradition the death was also interpreted. Paul hands on that “Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures.” Mark has Jesus say he came “to give his life a ransom for many.” Christians have understood in different ways how that death reconciles and frees. Those questions deserve their own inquiry. 1 Corinthians 15:3; Mark 10:42–45.
For this inquiry one connection is decisive. The question the martyrs raised is now asked of Jesus himself: has violence settled the matter? The proclamation answers by naming the crucified person as the one God raised. Resurrection is God’s judgment about this life and this death, the vindication of someone whose defeat could otherwise seem to discredit everything he announced.
That does not make suffering a good to seek or impose. The hope that God can vindicate someone who suffers gives no one permission to prolong another person’s pain. Second Humanity looks to Jesus because the life proclaimed as vindicated is a life of fidelity, service, and love. We are asking whether the violence that ended it also established the final truth about it.
The proclamation Paul received
Our earliest surviving Christian writings are letters. They address communities already praying, arguing, and grieving in the conviction that Jesus is risen. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, usually dated to the mid-50s, is earlier than any of the four Gospels. Yale Bible Study, introduction to 1 Corinthians.
In its fifteenth chapter Paul reminds them of what he had handed on: “I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures; and that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures: and that he was seen of Cephas, then of the twelve.” The list goes on: more than five hundred at once, “of whom the greater part remain unto this present”; then James; then all the apostles; “and last of all he was seen of me also.” 1 Corinthians 15:1–11.
Paul says he received this. The proclamation is older than the letter, and it is already interpreted: death and rising are read “according to the scriptures.” He does not say which. Hosea offers one possible scriptural echo for the third day: “in the third day he will raise us up, and we shall live in his sight.” Hosea 6:2.
He also tells us where he stood. He had persecuted the community he later joined. Three years after his calling he went to Jerusalem, stayed fifteen days with Peter, and met James, the Lord’s brother. He belongs to a movement whose beginnings he did not claim to invent. Galatians 1:13–24.
His own encounter he describes sparingly. “Have I not seen Jesus Christ our Lord?” he asks. He uses the same verb, “was seen,” for himself as for Peter and the rest. In Galatians he says it pleased God “to reveal his Son in me.” The light and the voice on the Damascus road belong to the later telling in Acts. Paul’s own words establish what he claimed and leave its sensory details undescribed. 1 Corinthians 9:1; Galatians 1:15–16; Acts 9:1–19.
Paul then says why the raising of one person concerns everyone else. Christ is “the firstfruits of them that slept,” the first sheaf of a harvest still to come. “As in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.” The last enemy to be destroyed is death. The proclamation is more than a report of something extraordinary. It places the dead within a promise that has begun in Jesus and still lies ahead for them. 1 Corinthians 15:20–28.
How the Gospel witnesses tell the story
The Gospels give narrative form to what Paul mostly names. All four place women at the beginning of their tomb narratives. Mark has already followed women from the crucifixion to the burial; at the start of the next chapter they return to the place where Jesus was laid.
In Mark, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome come to the tomb at sunrise. In Matthew the women meet Jesus on the road and hold him by the feet. In Luke they bring the news to the apostles, “and their words seemed to them as idle tales, and they believed them not.” In John, Mary Magdalene stands weeping, mistakes him for the gardener, and knows him when he says her name. Paul’s list names no women, though that does not tell us who belonged to every group he mentions. The Gospels give women the first discovery at the tomb. Mark’s short ending narrates no appearance of the risen Jesus, and Luke later reports an appearance to Simon. The women’s prominence is clear without making all four accounts tell the same sequence. Mark 16:1–8; Matthew 28:1–10; Luke 24:1–11, 34; John 20:1–18.
The accounts differ after that. Mark’s short ending promises a meeting in Galilee. Matthew narrates one there. Luke sets his encounters in and around Jerusalem and has the disciples told to stay in the city. John tells of Mary, the gathered disciples, Thomas, and a later morning beside the Sea of Tiberias. Fitting every scene into one itinerary requires decisions the texts do not make. Read separately, each shows its own concerns: fear, recognition, disbelief, commission, forgiveness.
The written Gospels come later than Paul. Mark is usually placed around the year 70, and Matthew and Luke are widely understood to have used Mark, so their agreement with him is not independent confirmation. Some scholars see the fuller detail of the later accounts as development. Others hold that they preserve early memory Paul had no occasion to narrate. The date of a book does not settle the date of everything in it.
John says openly that understanding came afterward. “When therefore he was risen from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this unto them.” The Gospels are the work of people trying to speak about a life they believe God has vindicated, using memory, Scripture, and story. A claim does not become true because its witnesses agree, or false because they tell it differently. John 2:22; 12:16.
The promise at the end of Mark
Many readers first meet a difficulty here, in a footnote: some early manuscripts lack the last twelve verses of Mark. The natural worry is that the resurrection was added later.
The evidence allows a more exact statement. Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus, two fourth-century Greek manuscripts preserving the whole Gospel, end Mark at chapter 16, verse 8. Before that ending the women find the tomb open. A young man tells them, “he is risen; he is not here,” and that Jesus goes before the disciples into Galilee: “there shall ye see him.” The women flee, “for they were afraid.” The appearance is promised and is left untold. The resurrection is announced. Mark 16:1–8; Codex Sinaiticus, the manuscript page.
Verses 9 to 20, the familiar longer ending, are widely judged a later addition, though an ancient one: Irenaeus quotes verse 19 around the year 180. Eusebius, in the fourth century, discusses copies that end at verse 8, and Jerome’s later account follows his closely. Whether Mark meant to stop at verse 8 or a continuation was lost is still debated. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.10.5; Eusebius, To Marinus 1; James Kelhoffer’s study of the ancient discussion.
Paul had handed on the resurrection and the appearances before Mark was written. An ending attached to Mark later cannot explain where the belief came from.
We offer one reading of the short ending, without claiming to know Mark’s intention. At verse 8 the promised meeting still lies ahead. The reader is left with the announcement, the fear, and the question of whether to trust the promise. That is where most of us stand. Paul gives us language for hope whose fulfillment is still unseen: “hope that is seen is not hope: for what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope for?” Romans 8:24–25.
The urgency of the first generation
The believers at Thessalonica were grieving. Some of their number had died, and Paul reassures them that the dead will share in what God is about to do. He writes so that they will not sorrow “even as others which have no hope.” In consoling them he includes himself in the language of the living: “we which are alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord.” To the Corinthians he writes that “the time is short” and “the fashion of this world passeth away.” A strong historical reading is that Paul expected God’s decisive act soon and pictured himself alive to see it. 1 Thessalonians 4:13–18; 1 Corinthians 7:29–31.
He also weighs his own death. In Philippians, “to die is gain,” and he desires “to depart, and to be with Christ.” Urgency and the possibility of dying sit together in his letters. Paul Foster and Simon Gathercole weigh the language of expectation differently; neither the consoling purpose of Thessalonians nor Paul’s willingness to die should disappear from our reading. Philippians 1:20–26; Foster’s study; Gathercole’s alternative reading.
Mark gives Jesus words with a similar urgency. Some standing with him will not taste death before seeing God’s kingdom come with power. Later, in the temple discourse, “this generation shall not pass, till all these things be done.” These are related sayings in different settings. Their interpretation depends on what events they promise. Four influential readings recur in the discussion. Mark 9:1–9; 13:24–32.
- The Transfiguration. All three Synoptic Gospels place it immediately after the saying about some not tasting death. Three disciples see Jesus in glory. Origen reports this reading in the third century. Origen, Commentary on Matthew 12.31.
- Resurrection and the gift of the Spirit. Romans connects resurrection with power; Acts connects the coming Spirit with power. This interpretation reads Mark’s promise alongside those texts. Romans 1:4; Acts 1:6–8.
- The fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE. It occurs within the lifetime of some hearers and relates more directly to the temple discourse than to the saying in Mark 9.
- An expectation that was not fulfilled as anticipated. On this reading, Jesus expected the close of the age within a generation. Albert Schweitzer gave an influential account of this interpretation. Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus.
Second Humanity does not make any one of these a condition of belonging. The first generation died while death and injustice continued. The question is how the promised events relate to that history. Jesus’ saying that no one knows the day or hour, “neither the Son,” does not by itself resolve the generational language.
The New Testament keeps the strain of waiting in view. John corrects a rumor that the beloved disciple would not die. Second Peter answers people asking, “Where is the promise of his coming?” Beside the waiting stands a presence: Jesus speaks of God’s kingdom already reaching people through his work, and Paul describes the Spirit already given while believers await bodily redemption. John 21:20–23; 2 Peter 3:3–9; Luke 11:20; Romans 8:18–25.
We live in that interval. We inherit testimony to a beginning, in a world where death and injustice continue. An honest hope says so, and does not manufacture another timetable.
What kind of life is raised
Paul gives voice to an obvious question: “How are the dead raised up? and with what body do they come?” His answer begins with a seed. What is sown and what grows are connected, yet their forms differ. “It is sown in corruption; it is raised in incorruption … It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body.” Even the living will be changed, “in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye.” 1 Corinthians 15:35–54.
Two things are held together. There is continuity: the hope concerns the person who died. And there is transformation: the life raised exceeds the mortal conditions of the life that ended. Paul’s image lets us speak of both while leaving questions about how that continuity is accomplished.
“Spiritual body” needs care. In modern speech, spiritual can mean intangible. Paul’s phrase keeps the word body. N. T. Wright understands it primarily through what animates the body: God’s Spirit. Dale Martin reads Paul against ancient accounts of spirit as a refined kind of substance. Their disagreement concerns the constitution of risen life, and the accounts should not be blended. Both show why a simple opposition between a material body and an entirely immaterial existence can mislead a modern reader. Wright on spirit, soul, and body; Martin, Yale lecture on the Pauline body.
Paul writes that “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God,” immediately linking the statement with corruption and incorruption. In Luke, the risen Jesus says, “handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have,” and eats broiled fish. Paul emphasizes transformation beyond mortality; Luke emphasizes that the disciples encounter Jesus himself rather than a spirit. Their different language raises real questions about how they conceive bodily life. Reading each in its argument keeps those questions visible without assuming that Paul has abandoned the body he is trying to describe. 1 Corinthians 15:50–54; Luke 24:36–43.
The Gospel scenes join bodily recognition with extraordinary features. In Matthew the women hold Jesus’ feet. In John he shows his wounds, yet appears among the disciples when the doors are shut. On the road to Emmaus he walks unrecognized and then vanishes. John does not explain how he entered the room or say that Thomas accepted the invitation to touch. These accounts bring the reader before someone recognizable as the crucified Jesus, living in a manner they do not fully explain. Matthew 28:9; Luke 24:13–31; John 20:19–29.
The Spirit belongs within that hope. Paul calls the last Adam “a quickening spirit”; John narrates Jesus breathing the Spirit upon his disciples. In John, however, Jesus has already appeared and shown his wounds before giving the Spirit. The gift flows from the risen Jesus. The scene does not identify resurrection simply with the disciples receiving a new spiritual presence. 1 Corinthians 15:45; John 20:19–22.
He is shown with his wounds. We read that detail as carrying something of the justice this essay began with: what was done to him has not been erased from the account of the person now encountered alive. The life vindicated is the life that suffered. That reading gives hope a responsibility toward the history of those who have been harmed, without supplying a prediction about the future condition of every wounded body.
We hold that God raised Jesus, and we understand that hope to include bodily life and the renewal of creation. The texts describe continuity and transformation without giving us a complete account of the manner. Paul extends the horizon further still: “the whole creation groaneth,” awaiting release from decay. The hope takes in the dead and the world in which bodily life belongs. Romans 8:11, 18–23.
We draw one consequence for the present. A hope of bodily renewal is a reason to honor bodily life now: its dependence, its dignity, its need for care. No vulnerable person’s life can be treated as disposable while we celebrate an imagined escape from vulnerability.
Dying before death
The language of resurrection also speaks to change within a life. A person may describe a former self ending: a compulsive need to be admired, a belief that safety requires control. The change can feel like receiving life again, and the New Testament has words for it. Paul speaks of being buried with Christ in baptism and walking “in newness of life.” Romans 6:3–4.
That present beginning is the subject of Born from Above: What New Life Asks of Us. Here we mark one boundary. Release from a defended self can be one way of sharing in new life now. It is not the whole of what these sources mean by God’s victory over death. Paul grieves people who have died and argues that they will be raised. The mother in Second Maccabees hopes for her sons’ lives to be restored. The promise rests on God’s faithfulness, and it does not depend on anyone’s success at reaching a particular state of mind.
What history can establish and what faith affirms
The resurrection claim concerns a person who lived and died, so history has work to do. Here, gathered in one place, is what that work can and cannot show.
What can be established. Jesus was crucified under Pontius Pilate. By the time Paul wrote in the 50s, followers were already proclaiming that God had raised Jesus and that he had appeared to them. Paul presents that proclamation as something received and previously handed on. Paul knew that proclamation, knew some of the people named in it, and claimed an encounter of his own. The conviction predates the surviving letters that attest it.
Where the evidence is limited. Paul reports that more than five hundred saw Jesus, and we have that report only from Paul. He names appearances and tells no story of a tomb; his silence cannot show that he knew of none. The Gospels do tell of the tomb, and they depend on one another in ways that make counting them as separate witnesses unsafe. The prominence of women also requires interpretation. Josephus excludes women’s testimony in his account of Jewish law; that does not establish a uniform rule for every ancient setting or prove what a storyteller would have invented. Josephus, Antiquities 4.8.15.
What conviction cannot prove. Early testimony, willingness to suffer, and a lasting movement tell us that people were convinced. They do not by themselves establish that what they believed is true.
How the belief arose. Proposed explanations include an act of God, experiences understood as meetings with Jesus, the reading of Scripture, and the growth of memory into narrative. These need not exclude one another. An account of how someone interpreted an experience does not settle what caused it.
Scholars who know the evidence well still divide. Dale Allison takes the reports seriously while distinguishing what the evidence supports from the further judgment that God raised Jesus. N. T. Wright argues more strongly that the empty tomb and encounters with Jesus bodily alive supply the best historical explanation for the rise of early Christianity. Their disagreement concerns what historical reasoning may conclude, and both have read the same texts. Allison on his investigation; Wright responding to critics.
To say that God raised Jesus is a theological judgment: a claim about who God is and what God has done. It should stay answerable to evidence. It also includes commitments the evidence does not force on every reader. Saying so allows conviction to be offered honestly.
This matters for trust. A person should be able to discover a disputed manuscript, a difference between accounts, or an unmet expectation without feeling that the subject was presented under false assurances. We would sooner the difficulties were heard from us.
The hope Second Humanity holds
We hold that God raised Jesus from the dead. We understand this as God’s faithfulness to the one who was crucified, with a horizon that includes the dead and the renewal of creation. We offer that conviction with the open questions this essay has named.
The reason for the hope is more particular than a wish that something survives. It is bound to Jesus: the life he lived, the death he underwent, and the early testimony that God raised him. It is bound to the God of the martyrs, whose faithfulness is not measured by who survives the violence of history. We read these sources together as a promise that the worth of a life is not exhausted by what the world manages to do to it.
This does not answer every loss. A future hope does not return a person to the room where they are missed. It does not explain why one child lived and another died, and it gives no one the right to call a catastrophe necessary for someone else’s growth. Hope can keep company with grief without claiming to know why the suffering came.
It does give a reason to refuse loss as the final measure. Someone’s love is not worthless because it failed to prevent a death. Fidelity is not foolish because it was punished. People whose names vanished from the record have not lost their claim on justice. Within this hope, their lives remain God’s concern.
The waiting is real. We have not arrived at a world beyond death or domination, and the sources themselves preserve lament, disagreement, and expectation deferred. We welcome readers who are still working out what they can affirm about the Resurrection. A community can be clear about its hope and gentle with those who cannot yet share it.
Resurrection also changes the weight of the present. Paul ends his long argument with an instruction: “be ye stedfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labour is not in vain.” We take from that a reason to keep caring, to repair what we can, and to stop assuming that only successful love was worth offering. 1 Corinthians 15:58.
There is freedom here for people used to proving their worth. The value of a life need not rest on its visibility, its output, or its power to secure itself. We receive life, and we entrust its fulfillment to God.
So we return to where we began. The sun still rises on the evil and on the good. Good people still die with their work unfinished, and the tower still falls on people no worse than their neighbors. The hope we hold denies none of it. It says that violence has not settled the matter, that the one who was crucified was raised, and that the God who raised him has not finished. The last book of the Bible pictures the end of that work: “God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying.” Revelation 21:4.
First Peter joins hope and beginning in one sentence: God “hath begotten us again unto a lively hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.” Its present beginning is the question to which we now turn. 1 Peter 1:3–5.
Continue with Born from Above: What New Life Asks of Us.
Sources and further inquiry
Scripture quotations and direct Scripture links use the King James Version, including its Apocrypha for Second Maccabees and the Wisdom of Solomon. Those books belong to Catholic and Orthodox biblical traditions and also provide evidence for Jewish thought before Christianity for readers whose canon does not include them.
On resurrection in Jewish thought: John J. Collins, A Short Introduction to the Hebrew Bible, 3rd ed. (Fortress, 2018); C. D. Elledge, Resurrection of the Dead in Early Judaism, 200 BCE–CE 200 (Oxford, 2017).
On Paul’s expectation: Paul Foster, 2011; Simon Gathercole, 2024 and 2025.
On the ending of Mark: James A. Kelhoffer, “The Witness of Eusebius’ ad Marinum and Other Christian Writings to Text-Critical Debates concerning the Original Conclusion to Mark’s Gospel,” Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft 92 (2001), 78–112. His publication page identifies the study. The companion guide to Mark’s endings and the Gospel sources follows the manuscripts more closely.
On history and the resurrection: Dale C. Allison, The Resurrection of Jesus: Apologetics, Polemics, History; N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God.
Continue the collection with Born from Above: What New Life Asks of Us and The Life We Share: Jesus and the Meaning of the Feast.