RECORDING SCRIPT — Does Death Have the Last Word?

Prepared from the approved narration script. It has not been checked word for word against the recording and may differ from what is heard.

Second Humanity. Does death have the last word? A person can live generously and die before their work is finished. Someone can tell the truth and be silenced. Love a child and be unable to keep that child alive. Remain faithful, and still be betrayed. We know this. The world does not hand out its outcomes according to what people deserve. And any hope worth speaking about has to begin there. With the life that ended before there was time. With the good that was done and never acknowledged. With the person whose name has disappeared from the account everyone else gives of what happened. What becomes of them? This is one of the questions I have carried myself. It helped bring Second Humanity into being. Because if we are going to speak about receiving life from God, and learning to love through the life of Jesus, we have to face something at the center of that account. Jesus was killed. The person we look to for the shape of love was subjected to violence, humiliated, and put to death. Did the people who killed him establish the final truth about his life? And what does our answer mean for everyone else whose life has ended unjustly? This is What Are You Seeking. The show takes a question every other Thursday, and that rhythm continues. Today is a special edition, the first of three connected conversations about the questions beneath Second Humanity. Together they are called The life we receive, the life we share. There are three convictions to explore. That God raised Jesus from the dead. That new life is received from God through him. And that the life we receive calls us to love the people around us. Today we stay with the first. What grounds the hope? These are questions I have needed to examine, and the Anchor makes that examination available. The written essay carries the references and the fuller discussion. Here, I want to follow that question through the lives of the people in these accounts. You may come with faith. You may come with a loss. You may come because an answer that once sustained you no longer does. There is room to listen from any of those places. First Peter asks us to be ready to give a reason for the hope within us, “with meekness and fear.” I hear a responsibility in that. To know what we are saying. To say it without making another person's uncertainty an offense. And to let the answer be examined. Here is the conviction this conversation will arrive at, so you know where I stand. We hold that God raised Jesus. We understand that hope to include transformed bodily life, while leaving its precise manner open. The worth of the person is not exhausted by what the world managed to do to them. Now let us go back to a mother and her sons. Their story is told in Second Maccabees, a Jewish book set in the persecution under Antiochus, long before the time of Jesus. Seven brothers are being tortured for refusing to abandon God's law. Their mother watches. The account says that all seven die within a single day. One brother speaks of the ruler of the world raising them to life. Another holds out his hands and says, “These I had from heaven.” And then, “from him I hope to receive them again.” Stay with the hands. Something is being done to a body. The hope reaches that body. It reaches the life being taken from this person. Their mother connects the promise with their beginning. She did not make the breath that brought them to life. The Creator who gave that life can give it again. She tells them that he “will also of his own mercy give you breath and life again.” That is a mother's hope in a story of terrible loss. And it asks a question about justice. If the persecutor remains alive and the faithful person is killed, has violence settled the matter? Does the power to end a life also confer the power to say what that life was worth? Daniel speaks from the same period of crisis. Those sleeping in the dust awaken. Some to everlasting life. Others to shame. The wise shine. There is judgment in the vision, because what people have done to one another matters. There is deliverance, because the visible outcome of persecution is refused as the final account. Jewish people did not all understand the future in the same way. Some affirmed resurrection. Others denied it. Some spoke of souls held by God. We are entering an argument already alive when Jesus begins to teach. And the question that gives it weight is still recognizable. Learning to accept our mortality can be a profound achievement. But what about the person murdered? What about the child whose life was cut short? What about the person whose suffering was never acknowledged? Their worth cannot depend on whether they found peace before they died. The hope we are following reaches toward those lives. It asks whether God's faithfulness extends beyond the point at which human power can silence them. Into that world, Mark brings Jesus announcing that God's kingdom is at hand. People are called. People are healed. Lives begin to change. God's reign concerns bodies, relationships, and the powers under which people live. Mark also gives Jesus three predictions of his own death and rising. In the first, he says the Son of man must be killed “and after three days rise again.” Peter resists. Later, the promise returns, and the disciples still struggle to understand. Coming down from the mountain, they question among themselves “what the rising from the dead should mean.” The Gospel leaves their puzzlement in the story. The people closest to Jesus do not move through it with everything already clear. When the Sadducees bring him a riddle about marriage after resurrection, he challenges the picture they have constructed. Life raised by God need not reproduce every arrangement of the present. He speaks of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and says, “He is not the God of the dead, but the God of the living.” The hope rests on who God is. On God's power, and God's relation to people whose earthly lives have ended. John brings that teaching into a family's grief. Lazarus has died. Martha goes out to meet Jesus. “Lord, if thou hadst been here, my brother had not died.” There is a whole relationship inside that sentence. Trust, and the terrible fact that the person she trusted was absent when her brother died. Jesus tells her that her brother will rise. Martha says she knows he will rise in the resurrection at the last day. Then Jesus answers, “I am the resurrection, and the life.” Later, Mary comes to him weeping. The people with her are weeping too. He is troubled. He asks where they have laid Lazarus. And before they reach the tomb, John gives us two words. “Jesus wept.” The one who speaks the promise grieves the death. He has spoken about life, and still there are tears. I think we need to let those things remain together. A person can hope and grieve in the same breath. Knowing the words of a promise does not make the absence small. You do not have to stop missing someone in order to take hope seriously. Then the one who speaks of resurrection is himself killed. Mark describes Pilate authorizing a Roman crucifixion. Soldiers mock Jesus. Above him is the title, “THE KING OF THE JEWS.” The person announcing God's reign appears defeated by the authority that can end his life. The execution is also recorded outside the Christian movement. Tacitus, a Roman historian writing in the early second century, names Pilate and the reign of Tiberius. He writes with hostility toward Christians. This is later testimony to the execution from someone outside their community. In Mark, the cry from the cross is, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” Those words begin Psalm twenty-two. The psalm moves from abandonment toward answered prayer and praise. But Mark lets the cry be heard. We should let it be heard too. The connection with the psalm does not give us permission to hurry past the abandonment. Whoever has prayed and heard nothing has company at the center of this story. Earlier, Mark has said of the disciples, “they all forsook him, and fled.” He also tells us who is watching from a distance. Women. Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome. Two of the women see where the body is laid. They will return to the tomb. From the beginning of the surviving proclamation, this death also receives an interpretation. Paul says that Christ died for our sins, according to the scriptures. Mark speaks of Jesus giving his life as a ransom for many. The Christian understanding of how his death saves has a history of its own. Here, one connection matters immediately. The question we heard in the story of the mother and her sons is now asked of Jesus. Has violence settled the matter? The resurrection proclamation answers by naming the person who was crucified as the person God raised. The authorities' judgment was not the final judgment about his life. That hope gives us no reason to seek suffering, or to impose it. The life being harmed is precious. It is precious before anyone can tell a story about what the suffering might accomplish. The earliest surviving Christian writings are letters. Before we reach the Gospel narratives of the tomb, we hear communities already praying, arguing, and grieving in the conviction that Jesus is risen. Paul writes to Corinth in the middle of the first century. In the passage we now call First Corinthians fifteen, he reminds them of something he had received and handed on. Christ died. He was buried. He was raised. He appeared. Paul names Peter, whom he calls Cephas, then the twelve. He names a gathering of more than five hundred, James, all the apostles, and finally himself. Received, and handed on. The proclamation is older than the letter that preserves it. It is already understood through scripture. Paul says both the death and the rising occurred “according to the scriptures.” The meaning is part of what he passes on. Paul also tells us that he once persecuted this movement. In Galatians, he describes visiting Peter and meeting James, the Lord's brother. He belongs to a community whose beginnings he did not claim to invent. His own encounter is described sparingly. He asks, “Have I not seen Jesus Christ our Lord?” He includes himself in the appearances. He speaks of God revealing the Son in him. The light and the voice on the Damascus road belong to the later narrative in Acts. Paul's own words tell us what he claimed, without giving us a detailed description of what he saw or how it happened. Then he explains why the raising of one person concerns others. Christ is “the firstfruits of them that slept.” The first part of a harvest still to come. The last enemy to be destroyed is death. That is the reach of the claim. Something has begun in Jesus, and the people who have died belong within its future. The Gospels give narrative form to what Paul mostly names. And all four place women at the beginning of their accounts of the tomb. In Mark, the women come at sunrise. In Matthew, they encounter Jesus and hold him by the feet. In Luke, they bring news to the apostles and are not believed. John gives us Mary Magdalene weeping, mistaking Jesus for the gardener, and recognizing him when he speaks her name. “Mary.” Paul's list names no women, although we cannot identify everyone included in his groups. The Gospel narratives give women a place we should hear clearly. They come to the tomb. They receive news. In Matthew and John, they encounter Jesus. Luke also reports an appearance to Simon, and Mark's short ending stops before any appearance is narrated. The accounts have their own sequences. We do not have to make them identical in order to hear the women within them. It is worth staying with Luke's detail. The women speak, and the apostles regard their words as idle tales. The story includes a failure to hear the people carrying the news. There are other differences. Matthew takes the eleven to Galilee. Luke's closing encounters take place in and around Jerusalem. John includes the gathered disciples, Thomas, and a later morning beside the Sea of Tiberias. These are accounts shaped by memory, scripture, and the conviction that God has raised Jesus. John says openly that the disciples understood some earlier things after the resurrection. The Gospel tells us that later understanding changed how they remembered what had happened. That brings us to a footnote many readers find unsettling. Some early copies of Mark stop sooner than the ending in a familiar Bible. What does that mean? Two fourth-century Greek manuscripts end at chapter sixteen, verse eight. Before they stop, the women have found the tomb open. A young man tells them, “he is risen; he is not here.” He says Jesus is going before the disciples into Galilee. “There shall ye see him.” The women flee in fear. Resurrection has been announced. A meeting has been promised. The meeting is left untold. Scholars widely regard the longer ending as a later addition. It is ancient too: Irenaeus quotes a verse from it around the year one hundred and eighty. Readers in antiquity were already discussing the different endings. Whether Mark meant to stop so abruptly, or a continuation was lost, remains a question. But we know the order of two things. Paul's letter already handed on resurrection and appearances before Mark was written. An ending attached to Mark afterward cannot be where resurrection belief began. There is a way I read the surviving short ending. The promised encounter still lies ahead. The reader is left with an announcement, fear, and the question of whether to trust the promise. That is a recognizable place from which to hope. Paul gives it words: “hope that is seen is not hope: for what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope for?” We can hope while something remains unseen. Waiting is already part of the earliest letters. In Thessalonica, people are grieving members of their community who have died. Paul writes to reassure them that the dead will share in what God is about to do. He wants them to know a hope that can accompany their sorrow. And he speaks urgently. “We which are alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord.” Elsewhere he says that time is short, that the present form of the world is passing away. A strong historical reading is that Paul expected God's decisive intervention soon and imagined being alive to see it. He also contemplates his death. In Philippians, he speaks of departing and being with Christ. Both things belong to his letters. The expectation that fulfillment is near, and the possibility that he will die before it arrives. Jesus' sayings raise a related difficulty. In Mark, some standing with him will not taste death before they see God's kingdom come with power. Later, in the discourse about the temple and the coming Son of Man, he says that this generation will not pass before these things happen. Readers have understood these sayings in different ways. The promise about some not tasting death is immediately followed by the Transfiguration, where three disciples see Jesus in glory. That has been one reading from ancient times. Other Christians connect the promise with resurrection and the gift of the Spirit. Jerusalem's destruction is another interpretation, especially for the temple discourse. And some historians understand Jesus as expecting the close of the age within a generation, an expectation whose anticipated outcome did not arrive. These are different readings. No single one is a condition of belonging here. But the words deserve to be heard. Saying that no one knows the day or the hour does not, by itself, resolve the reference to a generation. The New Testament keeps the strain of waiting. John corrects a rumor that the beloved disciple would never die. Second Peter answers people asking what has become of the promised coming. And alongside the waiting are accounts of God's reign already reaching people, of the Spirit already given, of a beginning already made. We live with that distance too. We inherit testimony to a beginning, in a world where people still suffer and die. An honest hope can acknowledge the waiting without inventing a new timetable. What kind of life, then, is being promised? Paul puts the question into words. “How are the dead raised up? and with what body do they come?” He begins with a seed. What is planted and what grows are connected, and their forms differ. Then he speaks of what is sown in corruption being raised in incorruption. What is sown in weakness being raised in power. A natural body, and a spiritual body. Spiritual body. In ordinary speech, spiritual can sound like the opposite of bodily. But Paul keeps the word body. He is describing transformation. Life beyond the mortality and decay that presently govern it. Scholars disagree about how to understand that transformation. N. T. Wright places the emphasis on what animates the body: God's Spirit. Dale Martin reads Paul through ancient accounts in which spirit could itself be understood as a refined kind of substance. Those are different explanations. Both ask us to take Paul's bodily language seriously. Then Paul says, “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God.” In the same passage, he speaks of corruption giving way to incorruption. Luke gives us a risen Jesus who invites the disciples to examine his hands and feet, says he has flesh and bones, and eats fish. The words can sound at odds. Paul is pressing the change beyond mortality. Luke is pressing the recognition of Jesus himself, rather than a spirit. We can listen to both without claiming they have supplied one complete explanation of what a risen body is. The other encounters also join recognition with strangeness. The women hold Jesus' feet in Matthew. John presents his wounds and an appearance when the doors are shut. At Emmaus, recognition comes after a journey, and Jesus vanishes from sight. The person encountered is the one who died. The manner of his life exceeds what the stories explain. John also has Jesus breathe the Spirit upon his disciples. But the sequence matters. Jesus has already appeared and shown his wounds before he gives the Spirit. The gift comes from the risen Jesus. Receiving the Spirit does not replace the account of his resurrection. So this is where Second Humanity stands. Transformed bodily life is the claim. Its precise manner remains open. We hold that God raised Jesus, with a future that reaches the dead and the creation in which our bodily lives belong. We cannot describe that future in all its detail. Paul's own language asks us to think beyond the conditions we presently know. And there are the wounds. John shows them to us. I read that detail as a reason to remember that what happened to this person has not been erased. The life encountered alive is the life that suffered. That matters when hope is spoken in the presence of someone harmed. We do not get to make their history disappear because we are eager to arrive at a happy ending. Their life matters, including the truth of what was done to them. Paul extends the hope to the whole creation, groaning and awaiting release from decay. The future he describes gives us a reason to honor bodily life now. The body that needs rest. The body that needs help. The body whose dependence is sometimes treated as an inconvenience. These lives belong within the hope. There is also a new life that can begin before we die. Paul speaks of being buried with Christ in baptism and walking “in newness of life.” A person can become less governed by the need to control, to be admired, or to secure their worth at another's expense. That change matters. It is part of what we explore in the next conversation. But here we need to keep the people who have died within the question. Paul is asking about them. The mother in Second Maccabees hopes for her sons to live. The promise cannot depend on someone's success at achieving a particular state of mind before death came. Present renewal belongs within this hope. The hope reaches further than present renewal. We are close now to the question of what we can honestly say. How much does the evidence establish, and where does faith enter? Historical inquiry can examine the sources. It can place Paul's letters before the Gospels and show that he was handing on a proclamation already received. It can ask what witnesses claimed, how accounts relate, and which explanations fit the surviving record. It also has limits. Paul tells us about more than five hundred people. We have his report, rather than five hundred separate statements. Matthew and Luke use Mark, so agreement among them cannot simply be counted as independent confirmation. And a sincere conviction, even one for which people suffer, is not by itself proof that the conviction is true. Scholars who know these texts still disagree about what follows. Dale Allison takes the testimony seriously while distinguishing what the evidence supports from the further judgment that God raised Jesus. N. T. Wright argues more strongly that resurrection provides the best historical explanation. The written essay follows their arguments. We should be able to examine the differences without pretending that our preferred conclusion is the only one an attentive reader could reach. To say that God raised Jesus is also to say something about God. About God's character, faithfulness, and action. That judgment should remain answerable to evidence. The evidence does not compel every person who examines it to share the judgment. I think that distinction is part of trust. You should be able to encounter a disputed manuscript, a difference between the Gospels, or an expectation whose fulfillment is questioned, without discovering that the whole subject was presented to you under false assurances. Those difficulties belong in the inquiry. And after hearing them, a conviction can still be spoken clearly. We hold that God raised Jesus from the dead. We receive that as God's faithfulness to the person who was crucified. We understand it as hope for the dead, and for a creation still waiting to be made new. What does that give someone who is grieving tonight? It does not put the person back in the room. It does not explain why one child lived and another died. It does not tell you how soon your sorrow ought to become manageable. A future promise cannot be used to make the present absence seem smaller than it is. Jesus wept. We should remember that before asking anyone else to stop. What this hope does give is a reason to refuse loss as the final measure of a life. Someone's love was not worthless because it could not prevent a death. Fidelity was not foolish because it was punished. A person whose name vanished from the record has not thereby lost their claim upon justice. Within the hope we hold, those lives remain God's concern. And that changes something about the life still before us. Near the end of his argument, Paul tells the Corinthians that their labor in the Lord is not in vain. The future he has described becomes a reason to continue. To care. To repair what can be repaired. To tell the truth when its outcome cannot be secured. We cannot make every act of love succeed. We can refuse to believe that only successful love was worth offering. There is freedom here for people who have learned to measure their existence by what they can prove. Your visibility is a poor measure of your worth. So is your output. So is your ability to leave the world with everything settled. We receive life. We do what care asks of us within it. And we entrust its fulfillment to God. The next special edition, Born from Above, will ask how that new life begins among people still living within history. For tonight, stay with the hope. The sun still rises on the evil and on the good. Good people still die with their work unfinished. Disaster still strikes people no guiltier than their neighbors. We have not explained those things away. We have followed a claim that violence has not settled the matter. That the one who was crucified was raised. That the God who raised him has not finished. The last book of the Bible gives the hope an image. “God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying.” Until then, tears and hope can remain together. The person we miss matters. The life cut short matters. The love whose work was left unfinished matters. That is the hope we hold. Second Humanity. What Are You Seeking.