Okay, so here's the thing about Easter: Though the gospels are replete with instances where the big J tells his homies that He's going to die and come back to life, the followers of Jesus are still stupefied by the Resurrection.
Now, we might chalk this up to the fact that the gospels are retrospective, but there's another angle, a story telling angle, I want to consider. In the previous chapter, Jesus lost. As far as man could understand, it had all fallen apart. The promised Messiah was dead; God's plan had failed.
That was as far as man could understand, as far as the audience could understand. The thing is, the Resurrection was writ large in Jesus's teachings, was foretold in the Scriptures, and, as Andrew Klavan says in his latest book, The Truth and Beauty, "The gospel is the underlying reality of reality and would be murkily apparent in the interplay of nature and our imagination even if it had not been revealed clearly in history and Scripture." It was there, but we just couldn't believe it.
"The end of a thing is better than its beginning," says the Preacher in Ecclesiastes. Setting aside the good news of salvation and forgiveness for all mankind, I think the ending of the gospels has a lot to tell us about telling a story. Jesus claims not just to be the main character of all of reality, but to be the very pattern or logic that creation is running on; or, to put it in another way, Jesus is the main theme of the story for which all else is a variation.
When the theme is destroyed—when the central truth that the story is trying to convey is made false—the whole story falls apart. When you kill the truth, you don't have a story, you are just left Waiting for Godot.
But here's the thing about truth: when it really is the truth, it won't stay dead, and if your story really is a true story, I think a good writer challenges that truth to the utmost. A good story will kill the truth just to prove that it is true, to prove that the theme can't be killed.
Well, that's theory. I am less sure about practice. Perhaps writing isn't the place to challenge the idea; maybe you challenge the truth in your imagination before you write. I know that I don't set out to destroy a theme or challenge a truth, at least not consciously. I don't think about themes or some great truth that I'm trying to preach. The process of creation, for me, is far better encapsulated in the quote (by Michelangelo, I think), "I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free." If I do follow the pattern of the gospels, it is because the pattern is inescapable.
