When Resurrection Becomes a Drug (Abridged)
There is a promise that keeps returning in modern life. It is not the promise that suffering will someday be redeemed, but that suffering can be ended now. Not endured, not worked through, not transformed over time—but stopped. This promise appears in substances, in technology, in optimization culture, and even in religion itself. It is this promise that Midnight Mass places at the center of its story.
The show is often described as a critique of religious extremism. But that reading misses its deeper insight. Midnight Mass is not primarily about belief taken too far; it is about what happens when one of Christianity’s most demanding hopes—resurrection—loses patience and becomes immediate. The horror does not come from faith as such, but from faith transformed into a technique.
In the New Testament, resurrection is not a metaphor. For Paul, it is the cornerstone of everything. “If there is no resurrection of the dead,” he writes, “then not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile” (1 Corinthians 15:13–17). Resurrection is not about the soul drifting free of the body, nor about memory or moral influence living on. It is bodily. Paul insists that “what is sown perishable is raised imperishable… it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body” (1 Corinthians 15:42–44).
Paul’s image is concrete and grounded. He compares resurrection to a seed: “What you sow does not come to life unless it dies… God gives it a body as he has chosen” (1 Corinthians 15:36–38). The point is not instant relief but transformation over time. Resurrection is promised, but it is not available on demand. It arrives as God’s act, not as a human achievement.
That delay matters. As long as resurrection is not immediate, human life remains ethically charged. When relief is immediate, responsibility disappears. When pain is erased, meaning collapses. When resurrection is available now, there is no reason to endure, forgive, or care. This is why Paul concludes his long discussion of resurrection not with escape, but with endurance: “Therefore, my beloved, be steadfast, immovable… knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:58). Because resurrection is real but not yet, our actions still matter.
Over time, however, Western culture struggled to live with this waiting. The longing for transformation did not disappear, but patience weakened. We wanted healing without delay, new life without the long road through suffering. This longing did not vanish when belief declined; it went underground.
Carl Jung noticed this long before addiction became a modern epidemic. He observed that medieval alchemy was not primarily about turning lead into gold. It was about transformation—of matter and of the human being together. Alchemists imagined that what was broken, dark, or impure could be slowly changed into something whole. Their work required heat, time, failure, and endurance. Jung’s key insight was that alchemy functioned as an underground continuation of Christianity’s unfinished work. Where Christianity proclaimed resurrection as promise, alchemy later tried to realize through long, laborious process.
The longing for transformation never left Western culture. Only its language changed.
This is why Dracula remains so instructive. Dracula offers eternal life—but as a shortcut. No aging, no suffering, no death, but also no ordinary human bonds. It is immortality without transformation, life without daylight. In Stoker’s world, this shortcut is clearly evil. It must be resisted so that human life, with all its limits, can continue.
Midnight Mass asks a more disturbing question. What if the shortcut works? What if it heals? What if it looks exactly like the promise Paul describes—but without the waiting?
In the show, the central figure called an “angel” restores youth, heals paralysis, and raises the dead. Belief is no longer required. The effects arrive biologically. Communion becomes blood ingestion. The sacrament becomes a delivery system. Resurrection is no longer a promise that gives meaning to endurance; it becomes an effect—repeatable, measurable, immediate.
This is resurrection stripped of transcendence and time. What Paul insisted must remain God’s act becomes a human-accessible procedure. What Paul described as “the last enemy” to be destroyed—death itself (1 Corinthians 15:26)—is not defeated through judgment and transformation, but managed through technique. The church becomes a laboratory. The chalice becomes the next dose.
At this point, the connection to addiction becomes unmistakable. Addiction promises exactly this kind of resurrection: immediate relief, escape from pain, a new self without the long labor of change. It does not deny suffering; it ends it chemically. And for a moment, it feels like salvation.
But the cost is devastating. When relief is immediate, responsibility disappears. When pain is erased, meaning collapses. When resurrection is available now, there is no reason to endure, forgive, or remain present to others. Addiction is not simply a personal failure; it is a cultural symptom. It emerges where a society can no longer tolerate waiting, but still cannot live without hope.
This is why only one character in Midnight Mass truly understands what is happening. Riley, a recovering alcoholic, recognizes the pattern immediately. He does not reject resurrection because he despises life. He rejects it because he knows it is false. He has already lived through the promise of relief without truth, escape without responsibility. His refusal mirrors Paul’s insistence that without true resurrection, everything else becomes hollow.
His final act – choosing death rather than this counterfeit resurrection – is not despair. It is courage. It is the refusal to take the shortcut that destroys what makes life human. He chooses to stay awake. He chooses to stay finite. He chooses not to pass the cost onto others.
The end of addiction will not come from better chemistry or stronger techniques alone. It will come from recovering something far more difficult: the capacity to endure without guarantees or consolation. Paul’s resurrection was never meant to cancel human responsibility; it was meant to give it weight, depth. Jung’s alchemy was never about magic; it was about transformation that takes time. Even Dracula warned us about eternal life without suffering.
Midnight Mass shows what happens when those warnings are ignored.
Addiction is not the opposite of faith. It is faith without patience. And the way forward is not backward—to belief, magic, or purity—but forward into a form of life that can wait, suffer, stay conscious, and refuse false resurrections.
That task is not easy. But it may be the most human one left.
Brenton L. Delp MFT
Leave a Reply