The Resurrection of Christ

I want to see if I can put some thoughts in order about the resurrection of Jesus.

Firstly, I was surprised recently to discover that there is substantial unanimity among historians about the Resurrection.  It is apparently one of the best-documented of historical events, with more extant evidence for it than for other historical events that we accept without question.  Of course, since people are not returned to life every day, it is a story that can be very hard to swallow.

But whether you believe or not that Jesus actually returned from the dead, it is certainly clear that something extraordinary has to have happened, something that fell outside the normal categories of thought and experience in first-century Palestine.  How we account for this extraordinary experience will depend, surely, on whether or not we accept the a priori possibility of miracles, and on whether or not we are predisposed to believe the eyewitness testimony handed down to us.

There seems to be no doubt that the tomb was found empty on Sunday morning.  Nobody disputes that; what they disagree on is the reason for the tomb’s being empty. And what they really disagree about is the stories of Jesus’ appearances to various people, beginning with the female disciples who make a point of hurrying over to the tomb before work on Sunday morning to finish off the burial preparations that had had to be curtailed on Friday afternoon because of the approaching Sabbath.

If we believe the stories, however, the disciples initially found the empty tomb just as hard to accept as anyone else.  Because the first people to discover the absence of the body were women, who were not considered reliable witnesses in those days, the male disciples have to go check it out themselves.  It is interesting, therefore, that the first people actually to experience the risen Lord were those very women.  (The story of Mary Magdalene’s encounter, related in the twentieth chapter of John's Gospel, is particularly poignant.  Mary quite naturally mistakes Jesus for the gardener, and has to be convinced that it is really Jesus.)

Likewise, the other people who encounter Jesus in these accounts all have a hard time recognizing him.  They are downcast and disheartened by the death of the teacher in whom they all had such great hopes, and the last thing they expect is to see him again, after having watched his execution.  This makes the transformation in those people, when they finally realize whom they are talking with, all the more remarkable.  They go from hopelessness and dejection to enthusiastic energy.  A case in point is the couple who fall in with Jesus on the way from Jerusalem to Emmaus.  They are so downhearted that the trip there takes them quite a while, but once they recognize Jesus, it is hardly an effort for them to hurry back to Jerusalem with the good news.

So what did seeing the risen Lord mean for the disciples?  Firstly, it appears to have been an extraordinarily vivid experience.  The Gospel accounts are make it clear that the witnesses are certain that they are not having a vision or a hallucination, that they are not seeing a ghost or a projection of Jesus’ spirit (the New Testament calls such a projection of someone’s spirit his or her “angel”), and that these visits are not wishful thinking on their part.  Once they adjust their mental framework to accept that this is really Jesus in the flesh, they have no further doubt in the reality of the experience.

Second, the implications of the Resurrection seem to have transformative power.  For one thing, and most importantly, it means that Jesus actually is the Messiah.  (A dead Messiah is no Messiah, after all.)  It also means that God has taken a hand in bringing an end to Israel’s long exile and that the long-awaited general resurrection of the dead is at hand.  Jesus’ return to life shows, beyond all hope, that he is indeed the long-awaited figure who will restore Israel’s relationship with God.  In fact, after some further theological reflection, the disciples realize that the Crucifixion and Resurrection have restored not just Israel’s, but all humanity’s relationship with God.

The Resurrection is also a key experience in causing the disciples to reevaluate their understanding of just who Jesus really was.  Thomas is the first to articulate the new understanding, when he encounters the risen Jesus and falls to his knees exclaiming, “My lord and my God!”  This is an extraordinary utterance for a monotheistic Jew to make, but it articulates a sense that in Jesus of Nazareth we see God made manifest, that he is not just a prophet, not just the Messiah, but in some mysterious but very real sense, God present among us.  (This realization, combined with the experience of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, is what the doctrine of the Trinity tries to account for.)

Third, the risen Christ is alive in a new way; this resurrection is different in kind from the restoration to life that Jesus wrought for Lazarus and the daughter of the synagogue leader.  They were restored to life in their original bodies and were still subject to eventual death.  Jesus, however, is given a new body that is, as Saint Paul puts it, as different from our normal bodies as a wheat plant is from a wheat seed.  What is more, Christ’s resurrection is the harbinger of something we will all experience at the time of the general resurrection of the dead, the time when we will all be brought into new life as God’s servants, through our Saviour Jesus Christ.

Lastly, the resurrection of our Lord is the beginning of the transformation of the entire world.  Many Jews at the time of Christ believed that there would be, at the end of time, a general resurrection of all believers, and this belief has been carried into Christianity.  So Jesus’ resurrection is a foretaste, the “first fruits,” as Saint Paul calls it, of something that will happen to all of us when the Kingdom of God is fully and finally established here on earth.

The upshot is that in Christ God has wrought a new thing in human history, and we are all living in a world that is very different from what it was before the Resurrection.  It is the supreme act that has restored our broken humanity and reconciled us with our Creator, and that presages the ultimate transformation of the world.  Surely that is cause for great joy, and surely it explains how the disciples, forlorn and dejected after the Crucifixion, were able to joyfully go out into the world to tell this good news to everyone.

“Alleluia, Christ is risen!  The Lord is risen indeed!”