The first Christians proclaimed that the crucified Jesus was raised to life and exalted into the realm of God. For them, this equals salvation. This affirms both the beliefs that Jesus lives on in the faith of the community as well as God acting in behalf of Jesus thus He is alive. Furthermore, they believed that His resurrection is not a return to life in this world but it is rather a passage into another world, an assumption into the sphere of the ultimate and absolute reality who is God and who, as Creator, is other than creation. What occurred in His resurrection points to another reality that transcends this world because it is God's realm. Exaltation surfaces from this, which s ...view middle of the document...
A historical event is an analogous event that could be compared with others. It is something repeatable. However, Jesus' resurrection is something unique and it cannot be explained by reference to context or by analogy with the rest of reality.Thus the risen Lord is the resurrection and the life, whose story continues in the story of the Christ-become-the-Church. The risen life of Christ is present in the gathering of the people who recall before God the promise that God will call on them again but the fact is God has actually gone ahead and is already coming to meet them. Jesus is life and the story of Jesus actually constitutes salvation. And the resurrection is viewed to be a part of everyone's story who becomes a part of Jesus' story by sharing His identity or by entering the Church through Baptism. Thus, the story of Jesus is but the start of a story, which constitutes in the multitude of life stories that make up the life of Christ-become-the-Church. Christian selfhood is a story whose telos (variety of ends and goals) is the life of Christ in his/her own time and place, repeating its infinity to finitude. In other words, it is a non-identical repetition of Jesus' life that changes everything and everyone it meets thus renewing the world. Christ is then repeated perfectly only in and through each non-identical (imperfect) repetition. Christ is given over to the stories that aim to tell His life in theirs so that His life is fully told only in the telling of every life that is part of the Church.
