What do we actually believe about the Resurrection? As Christians, we know that it is central to our faith. Without the Resurrection there would be no Christianity. St. Paul knew that, when he wrote to the Corinthians (1 Co 15.13-19) that if Christ did not rise from the dead, Christians, more than any, were to be pitied. Their faith was a delusion. Without the Resurrection there could have been no faith in the Incarnation, because for the Church it was the Resurrection that revealed Jesus as the Son of God. No Resurrection, no Christ; no Christ, no Church, no faith.
We know that the Resurrection is not discardable. We might get by without the Virgin Birth, the miracle of the feeding of the five thousand, even the Transfiguration; but not without the Resurrection. So we defer to this most implausible belief and think of it perhaps in rather vague terms, as the spirit of Jesus returning to his followers, or in literal terms, as Jesus bodily restored to the world. But neither view really expresses the uniqueness of the event, or why it has stood as the foundation of Christian faith and life for two thousand years.
Starting from God
Whatever else it may be, the Resurrection is an act of God; and it helps to have some idea of what that means. It does not mean that God acts like a puppet-master on the events of the world, thrusts in a hand to rescue his Son from the normal course of mortality. Such a model is in fact pagan, based on the way that the ancient world thought of the actions of gods. It makes God another being among beings, interfering on occasions, ignoring us on others.
But God is not a being among beings, or even above beings. God is what all being comes from. When God ‘acts’, being is open to the source of all being. And this opening is never-ceasing. That is the meaning of creation: the eternal openness of being to its source.
So somewhere in the Resurrection this openness must be apparent. In his rising, the time-and-space being whom we know as Jesus became fully open to the source of his being and ours, to God.
What was it for Jesus?
It might help to risk a few thoughts on what the Resurrection meant to Jesus. We know that Jesus approached his death with trepidation, to say the least. We know, too, that this death was a real death: Jesus, as Pilate took the trouble to find out on that Friday afternoon (Jn 19.33), was really dead, as dead as any of us will be. This was not the play-acting of a semi-divine figure who knew that he was immune to death.
What Jesus feared, what he asked his father to spare him, was the nullification of his life: of his physical being, but also of the faith that had fired him, because if his death really were what we all fear death to be, then his faith was empty and futile. No lingering memory or example, no teaching, no fondly devoted group of followers keeping his message alive, would change that. If his death were what every death appears to be—final, total, nullifying—then his gospel, that God offered all the life of the Kingdom, would have been delusion.
Nor could he know that things were otherwise. He had debated life after death with the Sadducees (Lk 20, 27-38); but who was to say that these aristocratic disbelievers were wrong? After all, they spoke for the older traditions of Judaism. What Jesus believed at that moment of his dying was probably as irrelevant to him as it will be to us. We will not be shuffling metaphysical alternatives, looking for the best option. Instead Jesus did the only thing left to him: he trusted God. He trusted God that his whole life—being, teaching, acting, loving—would not be brought to nothing by death. After the Resurrection, his words and deeds showed his disciples that this trust had been well founded.
What happened?
So far, so (piously?) good. But what actually happened? It is sensible (and easier) to start with what did not happen. The gospels at least make that fairly clear.
Firstly, Jesus was not reanimated, as Lazarus had been (Jn 11, 43-4). The dead body did not come back to life. Whatever happened to the corpse, that was not the body that could disregard doors and walls (Jn 20, 19), that appeared and disappeared to those on the road to Emmaus (Lk 24, 31).
Secondly, it was not the immortal spirit or soul of Jesus that appeared to his followers. Jesus himself rejects the idea of ghostly survival (Lk 24, 39). Jesus did not survive death in the ‘death is nothing at all’ sense. Survival relies on some part of the human that is immune to death. But to be immune to death is not Resurrection.
Thirdly, what happened was not a solitary or group delusion. That it was not a private vision of some individual unbalanced by grief is shown by the fact—attested first by St. Paul (1 Co 15, 3-8)—that the appearances were mostly to groups. That it was not some group hysteria is suggested by the record of appearances to individuals, to the two disciples on the road to Emmaus. Whatever the appearances were, they were robust enough to take place in a striking variety of circumstances.
If not these, then what? We do not have the event of the Resurrection, but only accounts of the event. If we had been there we would have given our own account, and it would have been different. But what it would have been, we cannot know. We deceive ourselves if we think that—from two thousand years later and a wholly different world—we can get behind the gospel accounts to know what actually happened.
What can we know?
Yet the accounts make certain things very clear.
Firstly, the gospel records make it plain that for the disciples the Resurrection came from God. It was declared to them by God: that was what angels—the white figures at the tomb—were for, to carry God’s declaration. God had made it plain to them that the life of Jesus had not been nullified by death. The faith that Jesus had shared with the disciples was vindicated in the test of death.
Secondly, the records make it clear that the disciples experienced the presence of Jesus. Not in a vague, prayer-meeting sense, but with a vivid awareness that they could only talk of as appearance. Not the thought or memory of Jesus; not his spirit living on in them (as the Soviets used to say the spirit of Lenin lived on); but that actual man actually in the room.
Thirdly, this all centred on that most immediate moment of human contact, recognition. The resurrected Jesus could be recognised by his followers as the one they knew, when he spoke Mary’s name in the garden (Jn 20, 16), when he broke bread at Emmaus and by the lake (Jn 21, 12-13). At such moments no one had to ask him who he was; it was simply and directly obvious.
Fourthly, this recognition was associated on at least two occasions with the breaking of bread. God’s declaration and Jesus’s presence were Eucharistic, experienced by the Church sacramentally. It was in the breaking of bread, the giving of himself, that the Lord could be recognised.
How does it apply to us?
Declaration, presence, recognition, held within the Eucharistic life of the Church: that, for us, is the location of the Resurrection.
But what about our own deaths? Jesus, in his dying, trusted himself to God, trusted that his living would not come to nothing. He did not trust in his immortal soul. He did not trust in accounts of near-death experiences or spiritualist séances. He could not trust in the memories of his followers, as their behaviour showed. He trusted in God, that He would deliver him; and his trust was not betrayed. His being opened to its source, and that source sustained him.
Jesus knew that, in the terms of this world, there are no guarantees. In this world there is nothing to suggest that death is other than it appears to be. We know that it is not walking into another room. That is why we fear it, as we do, as Jesus did. But the Resurrection shows that in trust—the meaning of the Greek word for faith—we open ourselves to the God who is the source of our being, and whose faithfulness will ensure that death does not bring us to nothing. We should pray for that trust, which we know is possible because Jesus trusted, through torture and torment and through the darkest moments of loneliness and desolation. To his despairing cry from the cross the Resurrection declared God’s answer.
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