the Reality of Death and Resurrection

The language of Scripture is often jarring.

Our state before salvation is death, and Christ pulls us out of the grave of sin and death to new life. He reaches into our tombs, our graves, our coffins, and drags our rotted maggoty corpses into the light of day where He can begin the work of transformation.

It's a morbid metaphor, this journey out of death called redemption. The corollary idea, that we are born a second time, is no less grisly, but somehow less awful. Christ builds His Church from a pile of corpses, a pile of bodies incapable of their own rescue or animation, incapable of anything but to reek and bleed and decompose.

Imagine the hand of God, the divine grave-robber, reaching through the mud of cemetaries to pluck unclean bodies from where they lay. Now imagine all those recently recovered bodies staring at one another, not as on zombies or fiends, but as brothers and sisters washed in the blood and water and fire of baptism. We are those resurrected bodies, once full of worms, now full of the Holy Spirit who could only find us suitable habitations after Christ's purifying crucible made us so.

We seldom speak of our salvation in the proper terms. Our limpid words evoke happiness and cloudless skies, which surely are wonderful, but which devalue the magnitude of the change Christ's gift accomplishes in us. We go from fully dead to fully alive, from vile to redeemed.

This unwillingness (or inability) to be honest about our comparative states inhibits our ability to spread the Gospel as earnestly and forthrightly as we ought. If we truly understood salvation as a matter of literal life and death, would we be so reticent? would we not forget about telling people anything extraneous, and lead them persistently to the only true source of life?

Yet we avoid the strength of metaphor and in its place emphasize only the effects of redemption, and not the horror that necessitates it. Only a return to the language of God's Word can lead to a return of the preaching of the true Gospel, and we must not only not worry if people are horrified at times, we must expect and want them to be horrified, confronted as they will be by the hopelessness of their situation, by the grotesque and desperate death to which they're bound.