Resurrection

To non-Christians, and even many Christians, the Resurrection is the most implausible of beliefs. How can a man killed in a military execution reappear, meet with his friends, even eat with them?

Some things the Resurrection plainly was not. It was not recovery from an apparent or sham death. Roman executioners could be relied on to do their job. It was not the resuscitation of a corpse. Jesus did not ‘come back to life’ like Lazarus, to live a few more years and then die when his time came. Jesus was not raised to a life this side of death.

Nor was the Resurrection ‘natural’ immortality. What the disciples met was not Jesus’ immortal soul. Jews of the time believed that the surviving spirit was a shadow, a poor reflection of what had been in life. But the disciples saw Jesus in his completeness; recognisable, and with all his living power.

So what can we say? The Creed does not altogether help us: ‘on the third day he rose again from the dead.’ This suggests that the Resurrection was Jesus’s doing; having been dead for a while, he decided to rise. But if he could do that, how was he dead?

The New Testament insists that (Acts 5, 30) “the God of our fathers raised Jesus from the dead”). This was nothing natural; it was unexpected, unprecedented, the act of God himself. And that act vindicated Jesus. In it, God kept faith with him, justified him before the world; not just his cause or his ideas, but Jesus himself, in his full being.

This is why the appearance stories emphasise physicality and the continuity of this raised one with the Jesus the disciples had known. This recognizable identity amazed them almost as much as seeing him alive. Nor was his return a private, mystical, event—‘somehow I feel that he is still with me’—but public, sharable, able to reunite a scattered community.

We can’t explain the Resurrection, because it is unique. There is nothing to liken it to. But for Paul it was the key to our destiny. Raised in this unimaginable way, Christ was the ‘first fruit’, the promise of our own victory over death—not by our nature, or immortality; still less by virtue. But by being taken up in this act of a God who is faithful to all that he loves, even in death.