Meaning of Life, Part 38

When Jesus was crucified, his followers saw that he could never carry to fulfillment the mission of the Jewish people as they conceived it....He was not the messiah they had expected, and, so far as they could see, he was no messiah at all. The depth of devotion and the glory of the vision they had possessed made their disillusionment all the more bitter and devastating....They reached that depth of despair which comes when all that seems to give hope to human existence is seen to be an illusion....

After about the third day, however, when the numbness of the shock had worn away, something happened. The life-transforming creativity previously known only in fellowship with Jesus began again to work in the fellowship of the disciples. It was risen from the dead....What rose from the dead was not the man Jesus; it was creative power. It was the living God that works in time.

--Henry Nelson Wieman (quoted in Gordon D. Kaufman's, Jesus and Creativity)