Re-Membering: Resurrection after Gaza
A strange kind of cognitive dissonance accompanies Easter Sunday this year. I can’t help but feel conflicted about the way my morning will be spent today: gathering together with my congregation, singing songs of praise, celebrating the resurrection of Jesus, all while a genocide is unfolding in real time on the other side of the world. For some, though (many, even), there’s no conflict here at all. The resurrection and the political state of this world are completely different realities that never intersect with one another, nor do they need to. After all, the resurrection speaks, not to a perfection of this world, but another world entirely; one that will emerge upon the annihilation of this world—or at least that’s how I interpret much of American Christianity’s more conservative end-times theology.
However, the promise of a future, otherworldly, metaphysical kingdom that will come to supplant this one is not only extra-biblical, but it’s also a concept that’s been used to justify oppression throughout history. How many times do you think it was told to the slaves of antebellum America that they need not worry about this life, and instead just look forward to the next one? To be sure, the concept of a conscious afterlife isn’t necessarily the problem here, as much as it is the complete destruction and rejection of the world we currently occupy. At the very least, it should force us to confront some pointed questions: Can God destroy something God previously created and called “good?” If so, then what’s to stop God from doing the same to us? Can God’s divine justice actually be executed and made manifest if the world in which injustice was perpetuated is merely tossed aside to make room for a new one? Or does it require that this very world, riddled as it is with injustice, oppression, and pain, be redeemed? That the land on which injustice was committed be redeemed? That history itself be redeemed?
Now, all of the above questions don’t exist in a vacuum. They carry with them a legion of assumptions about God’s divine nature, the way God has and continues to interact with the world, and others. That all being said, though, these are questions that may arise when discussing how redemption originates and flows from the event of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. And they’re questions we should especially be asking in light of our current historical moment. As of this writing, it’s estimated that 32,000 Palestinians have been slaughtered at the hands of the Israeli Defense Forces, with nearly a third of them being children — a far cry from Israel’s claim of self-defense.
This Easter, as we sit in our churches and hear the good news that Christ has defeated death, we should—we must—be asking ourselves what that could possibly mean to our Palestinian siblings at this moment. When your child has been blown apart; when your spouse has been gunned down; when your family is starving to death for lack of food; what meaning is there in the idea that the grave is empty? If you were to stand in the middle of Gaza (or what’s left of it) and ask, “Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?” (1 Cor. 15:55), what would you possibly expect the response to be? Given that even Jesus himself cried out, both from the garden and the cross, for reprieve from the violence of the cross, it seems unreasonable to demand that the Palestinians merely “have faith” or “believe in the resurrection” in the face of unspeakable, genocidal horrors.
For some, the problem of trying to reconcile the existence of evil with the existence of a loving God—or “theodicy”—is just a bridge too far, and that’s completely understandable. I never judge anyone who has walked away from the Christian faith, let alone someone who has walked away because they’ve witnessed and carry with them an exorbitant amount of pain. But for those of us who have elected to stay within the boundaries of Christianity, we’re obligated to think ever anew about the basic tenets of our faith in every new age. The dream of a static, immutable theology that is applicable and relevant in every time and place is exactly that—a dream. To do so would be an act of idolatry; after all, it’s not a specific theological system at the center of our faith, but a living God. And it’s that God who has come to us in the person of Jesys who is the same “yesterday and today and forever” (Heb. 13:8), not our theology. If that’s true, then, we must continue to think anew about the resurrection and what it means for us today.
As I struggled with these questions in my own faith, I eventually found an explanation that resonated. While a lowly masters student at Princeton Theological Seminary, I was lucky enough to learn from Dr. Mark Lewis Taylor who wrote an incredible book called The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America. In it, he talks about a “politics of remembrance.” He speaks about it like this:
What the politics of remembrance of Jesus’ torture and death yields is a mode of remembering and living after Jesus’ death that takes place, indeed, in social and political practices…It is the social sites of these practices of re-membering of Jesus that generate new life and emancipatory power for change. [1]
For Taylor, the concept of remembrance isn’t merely contained to one’s cerebral memory. Rather, it deals with how the past is continually negotiated and reformed in the present. Again, with Taylor:
As the hyphenated form of the term “re-membering” stresses, in remembering there is, again, a reconstituting, a reworking and reconstructing of past events in light of the present. The “members” taken as past—bodies and limbs, lives broken and struggling to be whole, persons speaking and acting, fragmentary or gathered into various forms—all these “members” of the past always require a kind of re-membering in the present. [2]
So, when put into the context of Christianity, we need not look far to realize that most—if not all—of our practices and theological formulations are merely the result of re-membering the life of Jesus and the early Christianity communities. Sacraments, scripture, the church calendar — they’re all results of re-membering the origins of our faith. And as we re-member, we must do so in light of what’s happening in the world right now.
This Easter, as we recall the discovery of the empty tomb and the women who were the first to preach that Christ has defied the death sentence of empire, we must not forget all the others who are the victims of imperial power. We must re-member the countless other slaughtered bodies, strewn across our history and our present, for what they were: instances of Christ’s perpetual coming into the world; the presence of the crucified Nazarene eternally here-and-now in the bodies, minds, and hearts of those crushed by a world unable to see beyond its own shadow.
Since October 7, 2023, Christ has been executed again and again; over 32,000 times in the Gaza-bound bodies of babies, children, women, and men yearning for freedom and self-determination. Our faith demands that they be re-membered in our prayers, our preaching, and the way we inhabit the world around us.
Yes, the tomb is empty. But maybe we need to ask why the tomb was necessary in the first place. Once we can answer that question correctly, we can then begin re-membering the divine resistance that is the resurrection.
[1] Mark Lewis Taylor, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America, (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015), 19.
[2] Ibid., 23.
