The Things That Won’t Compute: Practicing Resurrection in a Measured World

Modern life has become very good at telling us what things are worth.

We can measure productivity, growth, efficiency, engagement, return on investment, life expectancy, market value, retirement readiness, creditworthiness, caloric intake, sleep quality, steps taken, hours worked, miles driven, dollars raised, children educated, customers acquired.

There’s hardly anything left that can’t be turned into a number and placed beside another number.

We call this knowledge.

And much of it is.

The trouble begins when we quietly make a second claim: that what can be measured is what matters.

Then the world begins to flatten.

A forest becomes timber. A house becomes equity. A university becomes earning potential. Friendship becomes networking. A human body becomes productive capacity. Time becomes a resource. Rest becomes recovery so that we can work again. Even generosity develops metrics.

Nothing needs to be hated. It only needs to be priced.

That may be one of the strangest achievements of modern life. We’ve learned how to destroy the meaning of things without destroying the things themselves.

The tree is still there.

We simply stop seeing a tree.

Christianity begins somewhere else.

It begins with gift.

Creation exists because God desired something other than God to exist. None of it had to be here. The dirt beneath our feet, the child asleep upstairs, the body growing older in the mirror, the person across the table whose habits have been irritating us for twenty years: all of it is unnecessary in the strictest sense.

Which is another way of saying that all of it is grace.

The world doesn’t begin in usefulness.

It begins in generosity.

And if that’s true, then some of the most important things we do will always look slightly irrational to anyone who believes usefulness is the final measure of reality.

You forgive someone who can’t repay what he took from you.

You have a child who’ll cost far more than she’ll ever produce for you.

You remain faithful to a spouse through years no one would describe as efficient.

You sit beside an old man who won’t remember tomorrow that you came.

You give money away.

You pray for someone who hates you.

You bury the dead.

You plant trees whose shade will fall across the faces of people you’ll never meet.

None of this computes very well.

That’s part of its glory.

We shouldn’t romanticize uselessness. Bad stewardship doesn’t become holy because it’s inefficient. Waste is still waste. Prudence matters. Budgets matter. Competence matters. Jesus Himself tells us to count the cost.

But counting the cost and making cost the measure of value are two very different things.

Love counts the cost and sometimes pays it anyway.

That’s the distinction.

We often imagine that the opposite of faith is unbelief. Sometimes it is. But faith has another enemy that looks much more respectable: control.

Control wants to know the return before it gives.

It wants guarantees before obedience.

It wants the future itemized.

It wants to know whether the apology will repair the relationship before offering it, whether generosity will be appreciated before giving, whether the child will succeed before sacrificing, whether the parish will grow before serving, whether the prayer will be answered before praying.

Control says: Show me what this will accomplish.

Faith sometimes answers: I don’t know.

And acts anyway.

There’s a kind of holy foolishness in that.

Not stupidity. Not carelessness. Something harder.

Trust.

The Christian plants because planting is good.

Loves because love is commanded.

Tells the truth because truth is real.

Keeps vigil beside the dying because no human being should die alone.

Raises children without knowing who they’ll become.

Builds churches knowing the roof will someday leak.

Teaches students who may forget almost everything.

Prays prayers whose consequences may remain entirely invisible.

The world calls these things investments when it can identify the return.

Christianity sometimes calls them faithfulness when it can’t.

Perhaps this is why Jesus spends so much time talking about seeds.

Seeds disappear.

That’s what they do.

You put something living into darkness and cover it with dirt.

For a while there’s no evidence that anything has happened.

Anyone who insisted on immediate measurable results would dig it back up to check.

Which, of course, would kill it.

Much of the Christian life happens there, beneath the surface of visible consequence.

A father apologizes to his son and nothing appears to change.

A woman refuses to pass an old bitterness into the next generation.

A priest continues praying for people who seem indifferent.

Someone goes to confession again with the same humiliating weakness.

A marriage survives another hard year.

A person gives secretly.

Someone chooses not to say the cruel thing.

Nothing trends upward on the dashboard.

But something has been planted.

We’re impatient with this because we’re creatures who live inside time and want proof before harvest.

God appears considerably less anxious.

He seems willing to work slowly.

Painfully slowly, sometimes.

Forests.

Children.

Saints.

Human beings who spend thirty years becoming capable of a single act of surrender.

The Kingdom of God itself arrives this way. Mustard seed. Leaven. Grain in the earth. A child in a womb. A carpenter in Nazareth. Twelve unimpressive men wandering around Galilee with very little apparent strategic clarity.

Then a cross.

If you’d stood on Calvary and evaluated Christianity by visible results, you would’ve concluded that the project had failed.

Three years of ministry.

Crowds gone.

Followers scattered.

Leader executed.

Assets minimal.

Succession plan questionable.

By every ordinary measure, catastrophe.

Christianity makes its most astonishing claim precisely there.

Wait.

The story isn’t finished.

This is what Christian hope refuses to surrender: the possibility that reality contains consequences we can’t yet see because God isn’t trapped inside the horizon of what presently appears possible.

Resurrection means more than that things can get better.

Sometimes they don’t.

People die.

Marriages fail.

Children wander.

Institutions collapse.

Bodies weaken.

Prayers seem to vanish into silence.

Christian hope isn’t optimism with religious vocabulary. Optimism predicts favorable outcomes from the available evidence.

Resurrection begins after the available evidence has run out.

That changes how a person lives.

If death is final, then preservation makes enormous sense. Protect yourself. Secure what you can. Accumulate enough. Avoid unnecessary sacrifice. Minimize exposure. Love carefully. Don’t give away too much.

But if Christ is risen, the arithmetic changes.

What’s given may not be lost.

What dies may not be finished.

What looks barren may be waiting.

What appears wasted may have entered a mystery larger than usefulness.

Suddenly the strangest Christian commands begin to acquire their own terrible coherence.

Love your enemies.

Forgive seventy times seven.

Lose your life to find it.

Give without expecting repayment.

Become like a child.

Take up your cross.

None of this is sensible if survival and self-possession are the highest goods.

It becomes sensible only if resurrection is true.

And perhaps that’s what the world still finds most difficult about Christianity. Not that Christians believe unusual things about what happened to Jesus two thousand years ago, but that those beliefs, if taken seriously, produce people who become difficult to calculate.

People who can’t be completely governed by fear of loss.

People who know that wealth is useful but temporary.

People who can suffer without calling suffering good.

People who can enjoy the world without needing to possess it.

People who can plant what someone else will harvest.

People who can love without first determining whether the recipient deserves it.

People who’ve considered death and are nevertheless capable of joy.

Such people are dangerous to every system built on the assumption that fear and appetite are sufficient to explain human behavior.

They may still have mortgages.

They may still check their retirement accounts.

They may still complain about traffic and forget passwords and worry about their children.

Resurrection doesn’t make anyone less human.

It simply means the final fact about a human being is no longer the grave.

So plant something.

Make the apology.

Have the child.

Forgive the debt you’re secretly enjoying.

Give away something you could’ve kept.

Pray when nothing appears to be happening.

Sit beside the person who can do nothing for you.

Do some good whose harvest you’ll never live to see.

Not because consequences don’t matter.

Because there are consequences you can’t yet see.

The Christian life has always contained this quiet madness.

A seed disappears into the earth.

A man walks toward a cross.

A stone is rolled across a tomb.

For a while, nothing happens.

Then morning.