Why Resurrection Matters To Me More Than Ever

And why I prefer J.R.R. Tolkien's approach to the topic to George R.R. Martin's

A quick note before today’s essay: over the past few months I’ve had Summer Rottinger edit longer pieces like this one. I’ve greatly benefitted from her work and wanted to give her a shout-out for all her help! Every piece she’s edited has greatly benefitted from her input. She’s looking for additional editing opportunities, so if you are interested you can get in touch with her via her Instagram.

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Credit: New Line Cinema

Why Resurrection Matters To Me More Than Ever

Last year at Easter I couldn’t think of resurrection without heartache, the relatively fresh wounds from the death of my brother flaring with pain every time the topic crossed my mind. Because while resurrection is one of the great hopes Easter promises to Christians, resurrection life requires a prior death. As Jon Foreman sings in his song “My Coffin,” “Resurrection comes / But death comes first.”

I wrote the following in a personal reflection on the season last year:

How I wish with everything that I have that I could rush to the joy of Easter, of resurrection, of new life, like Peter and John rushing to the empty tomb. But honestly, even the triumphant cries and celebration of Easter were more painful than encouraging at this point in my grief for my brother, Joey.

It’s difficult to cry out “O Death, where is your sting?” triumphantly when I feel the sting of my brother’s death every single day.

Another Easter has come and gone and the wounds still ache. Perhaps they cannot be wholly cured. Joey is still my first thought when talk of the empty tomb comes around. But it doesn’t crowd out all other thoughts like it did last year. And what I’m struck by this year is how much more I yearn for the story that Easter proclaims — there is an empty tomb, there is a living Savior, and therefore death is ultimately defeated — to be true. I feel acutely what Tolkien wrote about the gospel in his “On Fairy-Stories” essay: “There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true.” For Tolkien, the Resurrection of Christ was a revelation about the fundamental nature of reality and a promise of what is to come. It is a “glimpse of the truth…a glimpse that is actually a ray of light through the very chinks of the universe about us” (Letter 89).

If the resurrection really happened, if there is a power that called Jesus of Nazareth out of the grave and if that power exists to do the same for us today, it achieves two things. Firstly, it reveals that death is not the inescapable end. It is not an unconquerable foe. And second, it reveals that every resurrection in fiction is ultimately an echo of this truth at the bedrock of reality. Gandalf the Grey’s triumphant return is not a direct allegory of Christ’s Resurrection, but the joy and triumph we experience from that revelation points to the greater joy found through belief in the ultimate eucatastrophe.

If the resurrection did not really happen, then the idea is either a form of escapism via happy but naïve stories or at best a temporary delay of the inevitable: death. In considering this alternative, I’m reminded of the contrast that George R.R. Martin’s work serves to Tolkien’s, both generally and specifically on the topic of resurrection.

Resurrection in Westeros Versus in Middle-earth

Martin ended up creating a world that was in many ways a reaction to and subversion of the common tropes of fantasy that Tolkien helped to establish in the first place. And one of the clear examples of this is on the topic of resurrection.

In a podcast interview from 2011, Martin had this to say about Gandalf’s resurrection:

I always felt like Gandalf should have stayed dead. That was such an incredible sequence in Fellowship of the Ring when he faces the Balrog on the Khazad-dûm and he falls into the gulf, and his last words are, ‘Fly, you fools.’ What power that had, how that grabbed me. And then he comes back as Gandalf the White, and if anything he's sort of improved. I never liked Gandalf the White as much as Gandalf the Grey, and I never liked him coming back. I think it would have been an even stronger story if Tolkien had left him dead.

Martin’s world is infamously one where no one is “safe” just because they fit the mold of the stereotypical protagonist. There is no “plot armor” to be found for the main characters in A Game of Thrones and the other entries in his A Song of Ice and Fire saga. If anything, characters in Martin’s works are more likely to die because they are characters we expect will be safe from such a thing. And for the most part, Martin leaves the characters that die permanently dead.

I say “for the most part” because Martin does have a kind of resurrection in his A Song of Ice and Fire novels. But the characters who return from the dead do not come back “sort of improved” like Gandalf the Grey returning as Gandalf the White. Instead, they return from the grave as grim shadows of themselves. He continues:

My characters who come back from death are worse for wear. In some ways, they’re not even the same characters anymore. The body may be moving, but some aspect of the spirit is changed or transformed, and they’ve lost something. One of the characters who has come back repeatedly from death is Beric Dondarrion, The Lightning Lord. Each time he’s revived he loses a little more of himself. He was sent on a mission before his first death. He was sent on a mission to do something, and it’s like, that’s what he’s clinging to. He’s forgetting other things, he’s forgetting who he is, or where he lived. He’s forgotten the woman who he was once supposed to marry. Bits of his humanity are lost every time he comes back from death; he remembers that mission. His flesh is falling away from him, but this one thing, this purpose that he had is part of what’s animating him and bringing him back to death. I think you see echoes of that with some of the other characters who have come back from death.

This view of resurrection centers the power of death. Even a power that can bring a person back from the grave in his created land of Westeros is not strong enough to conquer the grave. At best it can only reverse some of the effects (though not all). 

A Fate Worse Than Death

A few years ago I read The Testament of Mary by Colm Tóibín, a story that retells some of the stories found in the New Testament Gospels from Mary’s perspective. But this is no familiar Mary, the mother of Jesus readers of the Bible may be accustomed to. Instead, this Mary is a bitter and cynical woman who does not believe her son was the Messiah or that he rose from the grave. Her version of events from the Gospels are not miraculous but rather mundane. For example, Jesus did not turn water to wine at the wedding in Cana from John chapter 2: the guests were simply confused and mistaken.

But of all the scenes from The Testament of Mary, the one that has always stayed with me is its version of the resurrection of Lazarus. Jesus does indeed call Lazarus from the grave after four days of being dead. But instead of it being a triumph where Lazarus is fully restored and life returns to normal for him and his family, Lazarus’ resurrection is a horror.

Lazarus has been transformed by his time in the grave. He reacts first with puzzlement to being alive again. Then he makes low noises like whimpers or cries before beginning to weep and then howl as his sisters hurry him inside their house. He recovers in a darkened room, unable to keep even water and bread down as he is tended to by his sisters.

Resurrection like this is a fate worse than death. And Mary says as much, prefacing the story of Lazarus with her belief that “no one should tamper with the fullness that is death. Death needs time and silence. The dead must be left alone with their new gift or their new freedom from affliction.”

Again we see the centering of the power of death. Any attempt to change it is a tampering. Death cannot be reversed, at least not fully.

So which portrayal of resurrection is more realistic? Which story is stronger and more true to the world in which we find ourselves? Is death the affliction we need to be freed from or is it what gives freedom from affliction?

The Great Escape

Is belief in the power of resurrection, in the possibility of death’s defeat, mere ‘escapism’ or wishful thinking? 

Tolkien would say that it is indeed escapism but that there is nothing mere about it. “Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories,” he writes in “On Fairy-Stories” (79). “Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?” This escape is from not just the trivial aspects of modern life we may not care for,¹ but also from things “grim and terrible to fly from” such as “hunger, thirst, poverty, pain, sorrow, injustice, death” (83).

This last escape is “the oldest and deepest desire, the Great Escape: the Escape from Death” (85). 

A “eucatastrophe”² such as escape from death “does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief” (86).

So yes, fairy-stories of resurrection in general and the gospel story in particular are a kind of Escape. But that is by no means a derogatory term. It is in fact a primary function of these stories to point to the essential truths outside the walls of this world. It is because things are so dark here and because of the sorrow and failure we experience that this joy is such good news.

For Martin and Tóibín, both lapsed Catholics, death is the end. It is not defeated. It can at best be delayed because its victory is sure. But for Tolkien, fairy-stories serve the crucial function of denying that “universal final defeat” and proclaim that, on the contrary, Death is the defeated one!

Tolkien believed that an instance of resurrection such as Gandalf’s return as Gandalf the White resonates with such power because it reflects one of the deep patterns written into the universe by the Author of the story himself. It’s not just one ‘happy ending’ among many others. It is the Reality that all other happy endings point to and are based on. Death can and will be reversed. It already has been and will be again.

It would therefore make no sense for Tolkien to have written the fate of Gandalf according to Martin’s philosophy where death has the final say. What could be a stronger, more beautiful, and more realistic story than one that echoes the greatest Story there ever was?

As pastor and author Tim Keller summarized in the conclusion of his book King Jesus, “If we disbelieve the gospel, we may weep for joy at the happy ending of some other inspiring story, but the enchantment will quickly fade, because our minds will tell us ‘life is not really like that.’ But if we believe the gospel, then our hearts slowly heal even as we face the darkest times because we know that, because of Jesus, life is like that” (Keller, King Jesus, 229).

Spring — not Winter — is Coming

I don’t know about you, there is no tale ever told that I would rather find was true than that of the Resurrection. I long for the power of death to not have the final word. I need the promise that I will see Joey again.

The Resurrection of Christ is the down payment of that promise that resurrection is coming for all who believe.

It has been a long time since this promise came into effect. More than 2,000 years have passed while we await its fulfillment. Does that not call into question its validity?

Tolkien’s longtime friend C.S. Lewis did not believe so. In God in the Dock he shared the (appropriately Narnian) analogy of the promise of Spring amidst the remaining traces of Winter.

To be sure, it feels wintry enough still: but often in the very early spring it feels like that. Two thousand years are only a day or two by this scale. A man really ought to say, ‘The Resurrection happened two thousand years ago’ in the same spirit in which he says, ‘I saw a crocus yesterday.’ Because we know what is coming behind the crocus. The spring comes slowly down this way; but the great thing is that the corner has been turned. There is, of course, this difference, that in the natural spring the crocus cannot choose whether it will respond or not. We can. We have the power either of withstanding the spring, and sinking back into the cosmic winter, or of going on into those ‘high mid-summer pomps’ in which our Leader, the Son of man, already dwells, and to which He is calling us. It remains with us to follow or not, to die in this winter, or to go on into that spring and that summer (“The Grand Miracle,” God in the Dock).

As Lewis would say elsewhere, “Aslan is on the move.” Yes, death lingers, but the corner has been turned. Spring — not Winter — is coming, bringing resurrection and new life with it.

There and Back Again

Wherein I share highlights from previous years of Jokien with Tolkien

This time last year I put together a short introduction to Jokien with Tolkien and also answered some reader questions about traveling in Middle-earth, orc origins, and what to read next if you like LOTR:

What Is Jokien with Tolkien All About?

Waking in Middle-earth, Orc Origins, and What to Read if You Like LOTR

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1. Tolkien’s personal examples are “the electric steam lamp” (80) and “the noise, stench, ruthlessness, and extravagance of the internal-combustion engine” (83).

2. The “joy of the happy ending” or “the sudden joyous ‘turn’” in a fairy-story.