"I wanna be able to live."  So said a cancer patient recently interviewed on the television news program Sixty Minutes.  Considering that this patient unfortunately died shortly after this interview, her remarks are particularly poignant.  This person knew very well that this is our only life, and when it's over, it's over.
     Not so, comes the seemingly facile religious response:  there's another life, another life to follow.  True enough.  But this doesn't negate the fact of death and the abject sense of helplessness that accompanies it.  Whether or not we live again, we will still die. It's the ultimate affirmation of future security amidst present insecurity.
     That's why trusting the resurrection can be so difficult.  Initially, the early apostles couldn't believe that Jesus rose, and neither can countless others around the globe today. If we live in insecurity, the insecurity of a finite existence, we find believing in a secure existence, the fact of an eternal existence, outside of all of our epistemological categories.  It doesn't fit.
     Quite true.  It doesn't.  But maybe that's the point.  The resurrection is indeed an anomaly.  It doesn't fit into what we presently know.  Why would it?  On the other hand, maybe that's why the resurrection is anything but an anomaly.  The resurrection really only make sense if life makes sense, and life only makes sense if all of it--beginning, middle, and end--makes sense, too.  Otherwise, why should it even begin?