What was the Resurrection?

When he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him. Luke 24, 30-1.


What kind of event was the Resurrection? When I knew I was preaching on Easter Day, I went back to the gospels, and read all the passages that deal with Christ’s rising from the dead (you can read them all in less than half an hour). It was an interesting experience, and I noticed several things I hadn't noticed before. There are, altogether, eighteen distinct episodes; one might even call them anecdotes. Some appear in more than one gospel, so that if you discount repetitions, you are left with nine different stories, of which seven speak of Christ’s appearances. They fall into three groups. The first group, shared by all the gospel writers, deals with the events at the tomb. The second, in three of the four, describes Christ’s appearances to the eleven disciples; and then there is a smaller group concerning the appearances in Galilee. The person mentioned most often as seeing the risen Jesus is Mary Magdalene. In all the gospels, it is the women disciples who are first aware of the Resurrection.

If you ask what all the gospel writers are agreed upon, you might come up with something like this: that the Resurrection was announced to the women disciples before Jesus had appeared to anyone at all; that he appeared first to certain individuals (Mary Magdalene and Peter) who told the group; that he then appeared to the whole group in Jerusalem; and that he appeared later to some outside of Jerusalem, perhaps in Galilee. That sequence fits reasonably well with the earliest account of the Resurrection, which is not in the gospels but in 1 Corinthians 15, written twenty years earlier (in the early 50s) by St Paul, when he reports what the disciples told him after his conversion twenty years before that. He says to the church in Corinth, ‘I handed on to you what I had received; … that Christ … was raised on the third day … that he appeared to Cephas (Peter), then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive … Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all … he appeared also to me.’

Paul’s account probably derives from a visit he made to Jerusalem in 35AD, when he met Peter and James; so it takes us back to within five or six years of the events themselves. But enough of the lecture. The history, and the textual analysis, is fascinating; but my point this evening is to address my first question, ‘what kind of event was the Resurrection?’ What is there to notice about these stories that helps toward an answer?

Three points. First: most of the stories show the disciples as surprised or even fearful. When the women arrive at the tomb, they are surprised to find the stone moved and fearful when the angels speak to them. When Jesus appears to the gathered disciples they are ‘startled and terrified’ because they think they are seeing a ghost. When the two disciples recognise Jesus at Emmaus they are so surprised that they immediately set off to walk the seven miles back to Jerusalem to tell the others. Mary Magdalene, in the garden, is surprised when Jesus speaks her name. The Resurrection was surprising and unexpected; it was not the fulfilment of any expectation on the part of the disciples.

Second: there is often a recognition problem. Those to whom Jesus appears do not, immediately, know who he is. Mary Magdalene mistakes him for the gardener. The two on the Emmaus road walk alongside him for some miles and do not know him. When, in John's gospel, Jesus appears to the disciples by the Sea of Tiberias, it is a while before Peter recognises him. Generally people recognise Jesus not by sight but by what he does: in Emmaus, his breaking of the bread, in the garden, his speaking Mary’s name. The gathered disciples know him by the marks of his suffering. They would not have said, ‘I knew straightaway it was him’; they knew him by the way he related to them.

Third: the Resurrection changed the disciples’ understanding of what Jesus was about. Cleopas, on the road to Emmaus, says, ‘we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel’. This is probably what the rest of the disciples had also hoped. Jesus was going to be the liberator of his nation, and the crucifixion meant that, as Messiah, he had failed. But now things looked different again; the Resurrection forced a rethink about who Jesus was and what he meant to his people. Out of that new understanding, the first preaching of the first Pentecost grew.

Surprise, non-recognition, a change of understanding: the impression conveyed by the Easter stories is one of discontinuity with what had gone before. Jesus had not returned to carry on where he had left off; the Resurrection was not business as usual. The disciples had to take on board something unexpected, difficult, beyond the bounds of what they had thought possible. In that the Resurrection is very unlike the familiar immortalising of a hero or a leader. Think of Lenin. When the Soviets said ‘the spirit of Lenin will live for ever’, their point was that Lenin should go on being Lenin. Despite his death, what he had been was to be perpetuated. But the disciples were not perpetuating the failed teacher of Galilee. They were coming to terms with something they had at best fleetingly understood during Jesus’s lifetime: the Christ, the Son of God.

If they were not immortalising a dead leader, what did they think was going on? It is striking that none of the gospel writers proposes an explanation. Some false explanations for the Resurrection are rejected (that the disciples had stolen the body, that they had met Jesus’s ghost); but no positive explanation is ever offered in the terms that were available to them. They do not say that an immortal spirit had returned (they do not see him as spirit at all). They do not say that ‘his spirit was with them'. They never relate Christ’s Resurrection to his raising of Lazarus, though that might seem an obvious link to make. They do not try to explain how a man whom they had seen die could talk and walk and eat fish.

Instead they offer the events, plain and uncommented. It is as if these happenings are so far beyond explanation that the gospel writers see the pointlessness of even attempting it. The only hint of an explanation is itself, perhaps, the key to this silence. In the gospels of Mark and Matthew, the angels at the tomb simply say, ‘he has been raised.’ How, we do not know. By whom? There is only one candidate. Jesus has been raised by God and for that we can give no natural explanation.

So: to go back to my first question, ‘what kind of event was the resurrection?’ The answer has to be that it was no kind of event at all. There is no class of events into which we can place it. Intuitively, the gospel writers seem to have understood that. There was no point in looking for similar events because there could be none. This happening did not grow out of nature. Jesus was not evidencing a general human immortality. Nor was he a magically reanimated corpse. More relevant for our time, his resurrection was not any kind of metaphor: it was not a symbol for renewal, spiritual recovery, or the natural cycle of death and rebirth. It was God’s act, an act which the gospel writers saw in these bald, untranslatable, inexplicable events.

But where does that leave us? Go back for a moment to the point I made earlier, about recognition. The two disciples walking to Emmaus fail to recognize Jesus, even though he is alongside them. It is only when he takes the bread and blesses it and breaks it and gives it to them that they know him. What they recognize is not a face, or a voice, or his clothes, or the colour of his hair, but an action, the action that defines and identifies Jesus, not only for them, but for all time: his breaking and giving of himself. That is unmistakable; at that point, there can be no doubt. Their eyes, which had been closed, are opened. Perhaps our eyes are also closed. Perhaps we are failing to see those moments in our lives when grace is freely given, when the broken bread is offered to us. This is Christ’s action in every age; and if we can recognize his action with open eyes, then the risen Jesus is not far from us; then we, too, can sit at that Emmaus table and know the Lord. Amen.