Jonathan Johnson-Swagel

Reframing Easter not as fulfillment but as eschatological aperture, I’ll expand the theological method of Holy Saturday as divine refusal by developing resurrection as a non-teleological rupture. It is not the reversal of death but the suspension of redemptive sequence. The risen body is not proof of divine power but the surplus of divine withdrawal. Using Jean-Yves Lacoste, Karen Bray, Mark C. Taylor, Paul Ricoeur, Giorgio Agamben, and Jacques Derrida, this essay explores resurrection not as an event within time but as a tear in theological intelligibility itself. It constructs a metaphysics of departure that undermines triumphalist ecclesiology and opens space for a non-sovereign ethics of scatter. Resurrection becomes theological only when it refuses to resolve suffering, to complete narrative, or to return meaning to the site of devastation. In this framework, Easter is not a destination but a diffraction, an eschatological aperture that holds space for witnessing without possession.

Christian theology traditionally locates its center in the dialectic of cross and resurrection. This sequence, however, preserves a narrative integrity that masks the radical theological disturbance of resurrection. Crucifixion and resurrection are not successive moments. They do not form a clean arc. Resurrection does not follow death. It undoes the logic of succession altogether. The tomb is not an interval. It is an implosion. In the empty tomb, sequence fails. Meaning fails. The story is no longer held together by time. It is dispersed.

The risen body is not a return to life but a departure from legibility. Christ appears without recognition. He vanishes without conclusion. He is touched but cannot be held. These narrative features are not anomalies. They are theological method. The resurrection body is not restoration. It is interruption. It is that which the theological imagination cannot reduce to continuity. The risen Christ does not return to reign. He departs without closure.

Jean-Yves Lacoste’s liturgical theology reframes presence as abandonment. God is not encountered through nearness but through distance, not in experience but in dispossession. The liturgical moment is not theophany but withdrawal. Applied to resurrection, this means the event cannot be seized. It can only be approached through absence. The empty tomb is not revelation. It is the collapse of revelation’s grammar. Lacoste’s notion of adoration in abandonment helps us see that Easter does not bring clarity. It deepens unknowability.

Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutic of suspicion and hope further sharpens this ambiguity. Ricoeur cautions against the closure of narrative, arguing that resurrection must be narrated without being resolved. It must be proclaimed in parable, not assertion. The Emmaus account in Luke 24 enacts this method. Christ walks with them. He breaks bread. He disappears. The recognition comes too late. The risen Christ is not received. He is remembered. Resurrection, then, is not a moment of empirical clarity but an excess that retroactively reconfigures experience. It does not conclude the story. It reopens it.

Karen Bray’s critique of necropolitical theology reveals the danger of rendering resurrection a form of metaphysical compensation. In necroliberal logics, trauma becomes transaction. Suffering becomes the price of divine return. Resurrection becomes a payoff. But the tomb cannot be emptied into a ledger. It cannot be audited. Bray’s insight presses us to read resurrection not as the resolution of death but as the persistence of its wound. The scars remain. The absence remains. Resurrection cannot be a system of return. It must be a disavowal of accounting itself.

Mark C. Taylor’s theopoetic method provides the formal response. Theology after resurrection cannot rely on dogmatic coherence. It must fragment. It must tremble. Taylor’s insistence that God is not a being but a becoming allows us to understand resurrection not as divine presence restored but as divine difference unbound. Theopoetics is not merely style. It is survival. The grammar of faith must become errant. It must refuse mastery. It must allow the aperture to remain open.

The Johannine account of Mary Magdalene at the tomb reinforces this suspension. She does not recognize him. He speaks her name. She reaches out. He forbids touch. “Do not hold on to me.” Theologically, this moment performs the ethics of scatter. Christ refuses to be possessed. He does not return to community. He disrupts it. He moves ahead. The community that forms in his wake cannot be one of possession. It must be one of following what always exceeds it.

To speak of an ethics of scatter is to confront the collapse of ecclesial stasis. The post-resurrection church is not built on certainty. It is built on absence. On the refusal to fix Christ in space or sacrament. It gathers not because it has seen but because it has been ruptured. Its ethical task is not the proclamation of presence but the protection of the aperture. Its sacrament is not containment. It is remembrance. A remembrance that never arrests the absence but honors it. Eucharist becomes a praxis of diffraction. It does not restore but recalls what is irreducibly gone. Anamnesis here becomes fidelity to loss.

Shelly Rambo’s trauma-informed theology deepens this ethical turn. Resurrection is not triumph. It is survival. It is the insistence of life within the very field of devastation. Rambo refuses to move past the wound. She reads the Spirit as the breath that remains when all else has collapsed. Resurrection here becomes pneumatological persistence. Not return but residue. Not dominion but trace. The ethics of scatter, then, is the refusal to close the wound. It is the liturgical act of breathing in the ruin.

Catherine Keller’s apophatic entanglement locates the divine not in presence but in undoing. God is densest where coherence fails. The tomb is not empty. It is knotted. It holds what cannot be resolved. It preserves the messianic suspension of time. Theological method must therefore mirror this entanglement. It must speak in paradox, dwell in tension, remain in what Keller calls planetary unknowing. The resurrection is not proof of God. It is the failure of God to appear on demand. It is the refusal of theology to claim finality.

Giorgio Agamben’s concept of the remnant and Jacques Derrida’s circumfession animate the grammar of this witness. The risen body is a remainder that will not be signified. Resurrection becomes grammatological. It is not what is said but what destabilizes all saying. It is not a presence that grounds meaning but an event that deconstructs it. The Christ who rises is not a subject to be grasped. He is the trace that writes theology in fragments. The remnant is not what is left. It is what cannot be included. It is what resists inclusion.

To name resurrection as eschatological aperture is to risk theology itself. It is to say that the end of the story is the refusal of the story to end. It is not narrative closure. It is eschatological disruption. The aperture does not heal. It holds open. It allows what cannot be said to resonate. It allows what cannot be possessed to be followed. It is the place where theology becomes witness, not because it understands, but because it does not.

To follow the risen Christ is not to recover meaning. It is to scatter. It is to be sent not with a message but with a wound. Not with authority but with absence. Not with resolution but with rupture. This is not the denial of resurrection. It is its transfiguration. Resurrection does not end the refusal. It extends it. It carries the silence forward. It lets theology remain in what cannot be closed.

The tomb opened. Christ departed. And we remain with the aperture.

This is not failure. It is fidelity.

Bibliography

Agamben, Giorgio. The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans. Stanford University Press, 2005.

Bray, Karen. Grief as Sacred Work: Constructing a Political Theology of Grief in the Age of Neoliberalism. Fordham University Press, 2023.

Derrida, Jacques. Circumfession. University of Chicago Press, 1993.

Keller, Catherine. Cloud of the Impossible: Negative Theology and Planetary Entanglement. Columbia University Press, 2014.

Lacoste, Jean-Yves. Experience and the Absolute: Disputed Questions on the Humanity of Man. Fordham University Press, 2004.

Rambo, Shelly. Spirit and Trauma: A Theology of Remaining. Westminster John Knox Press, 2010.

Ricoeur, Paul. Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination. Fortress Press, 1995.

Taylor, Mark C. After God. University of Chicago Press, 2007.