Resurrecting Jesus From Religion

Easter unsettles people. Being at the heart of the Christian story, it tends to polarise us: you either roll your eyes at its claims or feel deeply moved by them. There’s not much in between. Unless you count the chocolate, in which case there’s a whole aisle of middle ground in your local supermarket. But once you’ve eaten your fill of vaguely egg-shaped marshmallows, you’re still left with an uncomfortable claim: Jesus didn’t stay dead.

Which is, to be fair, not a very reasonable thing to believe. But then again, none of this has ever been about reason. It’s about resurrection. And that’s something else entirely.

Of course, in the hands of Evangelicalism, even resurrection has been domesticated. What was once an earth-shattering rupture in the order of violence has become an afterlife insurance plan. Jesus rose from the dead, so now you can go to heaven—provided you’ve said the magic words, repented properly, believed the right things, and invited Jesus into your heart. (It’s never quite clear what that last one involves. A small guest room, perhaps. Scatter cushions. Scented candle.)

But Jesus never once asked to be invited into your heart. That wasn’t the point. The point wasn’t individual salvation, or eternal destination, or even personal moral improvement. The point was—and remains—an entirely different kind of world.

“Very truly I tell you,” Jesus says to Nicodemus under cover of darkness, “no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again.” And from that moment, we’ve been misunderstanding him. We thought he meant a religious transaction, a new label, a spiritual upgrade. But what if he meant something much stranger, and far more dangerous?

What if to be born again is not to become a better version of yourself, but to let go of the self you were trained to be? What if it means dying to the frameworks that gave your ego its strength—tribe, certainty, control, dominance—and rising into a different kind of being altogether?

Easter is not about Jesus coming back to offer a gentle encouragement to be nice and try harder. It’s about him tearing down the whole system that crucified him in the first place. It’s about God showing up not to avenge his son’s death, but to forgive the murderers and feed the deserters breakfast on a beach. It’s about love refusing to stay dead, no matter how thoroughly we try to bury it.

And if that’s what resurrection is, then maybe being born again isn’t about getting in line for heaven. Maybe it’s about learning, finally, how to live in a world no longer ruled by death. A world in which the last are first, the meek inherit, the merciful triumph, and enemies eat at the same table.

This rebirth doesn’t come through doctrinal assent or moral striving. It comes when the scales fall from your eyes and you realise that the whole way you saw God — God as judge, as punisher, a vindicator who swoops in to smite the wicked and transport the righteous to eternal bliss —was never true. That the only God there is, is the one who hangs on a cross, forgives his killers, and walks out of a tomb not with vengeance, but with wounds still open. As if to say: this is how you know it’s me. I’m not above your suffering. I’m inside it.

To be born again is to stop projecting our fears and rivalries onto God and calling it holiness. It’s to finally see that love is not a Meg Ryan movie (I am giving away my age here), where you finally find your soulmate and kiss in the rain, but the scandal at the centre of the universe. It’s to admit that we were wrong—about God, about others, about what really matters—and then let ourselves be remade.

But that’s the hard part, isn’t it? We don’t want to be born again. We want to be vindicated. We want to be right. We want the resurrection to be proof that we picked the correct team. But resurrection doesn’t play favourites. It undoes all our tidy conclusions. It opens tombs we’ve sealed shut. It refuses to stay inside our doctrines, our systems, even our fears.

And maybe that’s why Jesus tells us we need new eyes to see the kingdom. Because the kingdom isn’t something we build, or conquer, or impose. It’s something we notice, suddenly, when the power games stop working. It’s what remains when love survives the cross.

So here’s the uncomfortable truth of Easter: resurrection is not about going to heaven. It’s about heaven coming here. And being born again is not about escaping this world. It’s about entering it, finally, with eyes that can see.

And if that sounds like bad news to those who prefer the world as terror—who need God to be an enforcer, who crave certainty more than grace, who find comfort in the neat lines of who’s in and who’s out—then so be it. Because love offends. It always has. It doesn’t play by the rules of exclusion and reward. It keeps opening doors we locked. It keeps forgiving people we’d rather see punished. It keeps rising.

So this Easter, forget the hollow prayers and the hollow chocolate. Look for the places where love refuses to die. And if it finds you—even in the garden of your own grief—don’t be afraid. Everything is being born again.