Beholding and Living Resurrection: The Easter Mission of The Carver Project
By Mike Farley
As we continue through the annual season of Eastertide, the church celebrates the resurrection of the world that has begun in the resurrection of Jesus. All the patterns and powers of corruption and injustice that led to Jesus’ death are still active in the world, and yet Christian worship on the first day of the week and during the annual season of Easter reminds us that we live in this Good Friday world as an Easter people. This can be a helpful way of framing the mission of The Carver Project, for reflecting on Jesus’ resurrection and its impact on the disciples can help us see how the resurrection both grounds and sustains The Carver Project’s purpose.
What made Jesus’ first disciples into an Easter people? What changed them so markedly? It was a vision of the risen Christ. In the New Testament, people who see the resurrected Jesus like Mary, Peter, Thomas, Stephen, and Paul are remarkably transformed. If we compare all of these biblical narratives, we can see that encountering the risen Jesus is a transforming vision for a couple of reasons. First, it is a vision that enables Jesus’ followers to see Christ as the center of all things, as both the source and summit of life, the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the telos of creation. When two disciples on the road to Emmaus meet Jesus (Luke 24:13-35), he walks through the whole story of the Scriptures from the beginning to explain how all of history moves toward him and finds its fulfillment in his death and resurrection (Luke 24:27). In every encounter, the disciples see the reality of Jesus’ living presence in the present and the new possibilities of life that his transformed presence and powers makes possible for those who trust him. In the Upper Room discourse (John 13-17) and in his ascension (Acts 1:1-11), Jesus gives them assurance about the future that begins in his resurrection, a future in which we bear fruit through him (John 15:1-17) until he fully overcomes the curse of sin (John 16:33) and he returns to enable us to enjoy the place he has prepared for us (John 14:1-4).
Second, the resurrection not only gives a transforming vision of Christ himself but also a vision of everything in relation to him. The light of Jesus’ resurrection helps us to see the rest of creation and history in a whole new light. As C. S. Lewis once wrote, “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”¹ Indeed, all of the rest of the New Testament and all of the Christian tradition can be seen as a working out of the implications of Jesus’ resurrection for every area of life.
In these ways, the resurrection provides a framework for understanding the mission of The Carver Project. Carver has been charged with a mission to be an Easter group of faculty and students in a Good Friday world, discerning and beholding the risen Christ and calling others to come and see him and all of life in his light in the specific vocations of scholarship and teaching. That happens in two different ways. First, the Carver Project lives out a calling to see and help others to see how all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden in Christ (Colossians 2:3). All knowledge and truth have their ultimate source and ground in the personal, triune God, and thus Christian scholars can see in the light of Christ a greater depth and unity to the work of scholarship than any purely humanistic perspective. This call was illustrated so masterfully (and quite literally) in John Hendrix’s talk commemorating his promotion as the Kenneth E. Hudson Professor of Art. Hendrix showed how Christ illumines the world and thus animates the imagination, curiosity, and wonder that are at the heart of the vocations of scholarship and teaching at their very best. The resurrection of Jesus inspires that vision because it affords a perspective of both the ruin of the world and its glory and hope for transformation. Second, The Carver Project’s calling is to see and help others see a vision of Christ not only in ideas but in the flesh, in a community of people living and working together in relationships that manifest the life and love of Christ.
If The Carver Project’s mission can be understood as beholding and living out the resurrection and its implications, then it will provide the same transforming impact that animated and sustained the first Christians. There are four specific effects of beholding the risen Christ that we can discern in the New Testament narratives about the early Christians.
First, beholding the resurrection creates courage. The first Christians defied Jewish and Roman authorities and risked the loss of friendships and reputation for the sake of bearing witness to the Christ they had seen. This is a necessary virtue for the Carver community, too, because it can take courage to identify with The Carver Project. It takes courage to make what sounds to others like an audacious claim to have insight into the transcendent ground and the purpose of the university, a purpose that it no longer remembers or acknowledges. It takes courage to initiate dialogue that others do not want to have. That courage can be sustained by cultivating a constant vision of the resurrected Christ.
Second, beholding the resurrection creates community. In the disciples’ encounters with the resurrected Jesus, he creates community around himself, gathering and sending disciples together. This, too, is fundamental to The Carver Project’s mission, for the way that the risen, ascended Christ makes himself visible to the world is through his people. The fragmented nature and functioning of the university can be isolating, and The Carver Project can offer a taste of real, loving community by being an Easter people united by a common vision of the risen Christ and a common relationship with him that pulls people together across every barrier that fragments the world.
Third, beholding the resurrection creates hope. Jesus’ resurrection shows that the darkness of death is not ultimate, not victorious, and not the end. It offers real hope that God’s goodness and life transcend and triumph over even the worst of evil. This is important for The Carver Project because the university can be an especially critical place. In the competitive world of an elite university, one is constantly tempted to prove oneself by critique of others. Indeed, it is often easier to live in that critical posture because so much scholarly analysis of our world sees and documents its evil and the brokenness more readily and clearly than it can discern any hope for its healing. How much of the energy and anger in the increasingly strident moral critique of our society is fueled by frustrated longings for real hope for the world? Insofar as The Carver Project functions as an Easter people, it can offer the world a real hope for the future that also provides a foundation for patience and peace in the present while we await that blessed hope with confidence.
Finally, beholding the resurrection creates joy. Encountering the risen Christ brought joy to his people, a joy that endured and sustained God’s people even through tremendous suffering. As The Carver Project centers itself in the resurrection, it can provide the university and the church a real and deep joy that is greater than every hardship. Joy can be hard to sustain in a university world of frenetic, overwhelming workloads combined with the critical gaze of constant analysis and a faltering trust in strategies for reform that depend solely on human technology, strategies, and resources. Jesus’ resurrection tells us that there is divine life, hope, and joy beyond all of this, and so The Carver Project can offer a tangible taste of the reality of Easter simply by cultivating joy in its life and work together.
Beholding the risen Christ changes everything, and what The Carver Project offers Washington University and St. Louis is nothing less than a personal and communal witness of the reality and hope of God’s eternal life that created, illumines, sustains, and redeems the world that the university studies. May The Carver Project continue to seek the Lord’s grace and help to maintain a relentless focus on seeing and living the cosmic implications of Jesus’ resurrection so that it can be an Easter people within a Good Friday world, sustained with all the courage, hope, and joy that comes from beholding Christ together.
¹This is the concluding line of Lewis’s 1945 address to the Oxford Socratic Club titled “Is Theology Poetry?”.