The relevance of the resurrection
The most outrageous of all Christian claims is that Jesus Christ rose from the dead. It strains our credulity to the limit. Human beings have used all their ingenuity to defy or deny death. But only Christ has claimed to conquer it – to defeat it in his own experience and deprive it of its power over others. ‘I am the resurrection and the life,’ he declared. ‘The one who believes in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing in me will never die.’ Again, ‘I am the Living One; I was dead, and now look, I am alive for ever and ever! And I hold the keys of [i.e. have authority over] death and Hades.’
The very first Christians already shared this confidence. This is clear both from their brave, and even joyful, readiness to die for Christ, and from the earliest preaching of the apostles. Soon after Pentecost Luke tells us that the Jewish authorities in Jerusalem ‘were greatly disturbed because the apostles were . . . proclaiming in Jesus the resurrection of the dead’. The heart of their sermons follows the same pattern: ‘you killed him, God raised him, and we are witnesses.’ And Paul did not deviate from this, so that the Athenian philosophers, listening to him in the market-place, concluded that he was advocating two foreign deities, because they heard his repeated references to Iēsous (Jesus) and anastasis (resurrection). When Paul came to pass on to the Corinthians an outline of the original gospel he had himself received, he concentrated, ‘as of first importance’, on the death, burial, resurrection and appearances of Jesus. Those earliest followers of Jesus seem to have been both clear and confident about his resurrection.
Three major questions are raised by the claim that Jesus rose (or was raised) from the dead. First, what does it mean (a question of semantics)? Second, did it really happen (a question of history)? Third, is it important (a question of relevance)?
What does the resurrection mean?
Before we decide whether the resurrection of Jesus was a real historical event, we need to be sure we agree what is meant by ‘resurrection’. David Jenkins, a former Bishop of Durham, for example, claimed to believe in the resurrection. ‘I do believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead,’ he told his Diocesan Synod. ‘Anyone who says that I do not believe in the resurrection . . . is a liar.’ But what he understood by resurrection was very different from the understanding of the New Testament. For Dr Jenkins did not believe that the resurrection involved the transformation of the body of Jesus. Indeed, he caricatured this view as ‘a conjuring trick with bones’.
What is meant in the Creed by the resurrection of Jesus Christ? How should we think of the risen Lord? It may be helpful if we clarify what we do not believe, before coming on to affirm what we do.
First, the risen Lord is not just a surviving influence. We are not to think of him as merely surviving death, like a ghost. ‘Look at my hands and my feet,’ he said. ‘It is I myself! Touch me and see; a ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have.’ Neither does ‘resurrection’ mean the mere survival of an influence. Many leaders, who during their lifetime captured the hearts of their contemporaries, live on after death in the sense that the memory of their example is a continuing inspiration.
This was certainly true of Che Guevara. He had an extraordinary following. Sartre once described him as ‘the most complete man of his age’. In his thirty-nine years (before he was killed in the jungle) he had been a doctor, an author, an economist, a banker, a political theorist and a guerrilla fighter. He became a legend during his lifetime, a folk hero. In every Cuban classroom the children would chant, ‘We will be like Che.’ And after his death his influence became greater still. He provided Marxists with the image of a secular saint and martyr. For years the walls of Latin American student buildings were chalked with the words, ‘Che lives!’
It was the same when Archbishop Makarios of Cyprus died in August 1977. His followers spray-painted public buildings with the words, ‘Makarios lives!’
Is this all Christians mean when they say that ‘Jesus lives’? Some people seem to be saying little more than this, namely that Jesus continues to exert his power and spread his love in the world. Others are affirming some kind of continuing, personal existence for Jesus, so that ‘he walks with me and talks with me along life’s narrow way’. Yet the grand affirmation of the New Testament is not ‘he lives’, but that ‘he is risen’. The resurrection becomes an experience for us only because it was first an event that actually introduced a new order of reality.
Second, the risen Lord is not a resuscitated corpse. To ‘resuscitate’ can mean either to revive a patient who has gone into a coma or to bring someone back to life who has been pronounced clinically dead. In this second sense Jesus performed three resuscitations during his public ministry. He ‘raised from death’ (i.e. restored to this life) the daughter of Jairus, the son of the widow of Nain, and Lazarus. Each of these three was dead, but was brought back to this life by Jesus. One understands the sympathy that C. S. Lewis expressed for Lazarus: ‘To be brought back and have all one’s dying to do again was rather hard.’
But Jesus’ own resurrection was not a resuscitation in either sense. On the one hand, he was not revived from a swoon or coma, for he had been dead for about thirty-six hours. On the other hand, he was not brought back to this life with the need to die again. Yet it is popularly supposed that this is what Christians believe about ‘resurrection’, namely that the body is miraculously reconstituted out of the identical particles of which it is at present composed, and that it then resumes this vulnerable and mortal life. But, no, Jesus was raised to a new plane of existence, in which he was now no longer mortal but ‘alive for ever and ever’. Whatever popular notions some people may have entertained, the faith of the church has never seen the risen Lord either as a rather ethereal ghostly influence or as a resuscitated corpse.
Third, the risen Lord is not a revived faith in the experience of his disciples. This was the ‘demythologized’ reconstruction of Rudolf Bultmann, the New Testament scholar. He began by declaring that the resurrection of Jesus was ‘obviously . . . not an event of past history’. Why was this so obvious to him? Because ‘an historical fact which involves a resurrection from the dead is utterly inconceivable’. But since the church in every age seems to have had little difficulty in conceiving what Bultmann pronounced inconceivable, what was his problem? It lay in the ‘incredibility of a mythical event like the resuscitation of a corpse – for that is what the resurrection means’. What is truly incredible, however, is not the resurrection of Jesus, but the misunderstanding of Bultmann who confused it with a resuscitation.
How then did Bultmann interpret the ‘myth’ of Jesus’ resurrection? In this way: ‘if the event of Easter Day is in any sense an historical event additional to the event of the cross, it is nothing else than the rise of faith in the risen Lord . . . All that historical criticism can establish is the fact that the first disciples came to believe in the resurrection.’ In other words, Easter was not an event, but an experience; not the objective, historical resurrection of Jesus from the dead, but a subjective, personal recovery of faith in the hearts and minds of his followers.
Fourth, the risen Lord is not just an expanded personality. This seems to express what David Jenkins believes. He wrote, ‘The resurrection means that God acted to establish Jesus in his person, in his achievements and in his continuing effect.’ Declaring his conviction that Jesus ‘rose from the dead’, he explained this by saying that ‘the very life and power and purpose and personality which was in him was actually continuing . . . in the sphere of history, so that he was a risen and living presence and possibility’. Elsewhere, Jenkins has spoken of the resurrection as an ‘explosion’ of the personality of Jesus. So the resurrection was a kind of event, even though it did not involve his body. Dr Jenkins believes in the ‘risenness’ and ‘livingness’ of Jesus, though his personality is not now embodied (except in the church).
Fifth, the risen Lord is not merely a living experience of the Spirit. In his book The Structure of Resurrection Belief, Peter Carnley, the former Anglican Archbishop of Perth, Western Australia, says we should think of the resurrection as a present experience rather than a past event. We should think of it as an experience of the Spirit. In his opening chapter he makes plain his sceptical stance. He asserts that Paul nowhere alludes to the empty tomb, even in 1 Corinthians 15:3–8, and that the so-called appearances were not objective. He argues that ōphthē (‘he appeared’) means not so much perception through sight (a visible appearance) as the reception of a new revelation (an intellectual apprehension), or at most a mixture of the two, with the emphasis on the second.
Next come three long chapters in which Archbishop Carnley urges that there was, in fact, no after-death event. The real Easter event was the disciples’ coming to faith. Consequently, from chapter 5 onwards he refers no longer to ‘the resurrection’ (an event) but to ‘the raised Christ’ (an experience). For the Easter faith ‘involves a post-mortem experience of encounter with the raised Christ’, who is known as the Spirit. And the way we come to recognize the true Spirit of Jesus is that he continues to manifest in the Christian fellowship the same self-giving love which he displayed on the cross. But, ingenious as this reconstruction is, it does not do justice to the data of the New Testament, as we shall see.
Sixth, and in contrast to the previous five proposals, the risen Lord is a transformed person. The evidence presented in the Gospels is that Jesus is the same person with the same identity before and after the resurrection. ‘It is I myself,’ he says in Luke 24:39. But the resurrection gave him a transformed, transfigured, glorified body. The resurrection was a dramatic act of God by which he stopped the natural process of decay and decomposition, rescued Jesus out of the realm of death, and changed his body into a new vehicle for his personality, endowed with new powers and possessing immortality.
Belief in resurrection means belief in bodily resurrection. This is the message of 1 Corinthians 15. This great chapter is in two parts, the first relating to the fact of the resurrection (verses 1–34), and the second to the nature of the resurrection (verses 35–58). In the first part the resurrection appearances of Jesus appear to be physical, but in the second part the body is said to be ‘sown a natural body’ (or ‘physical body’, rsv) and ‘raised a spiritual body’ (verse 44). How, then, are we to harmonize the two halves of 1 Corinthians 15 with each other? Some scholars seize on the expression ‘a spiritual body’ and insist that the resurrection appearances of verses 5–8 must be understood in the light of this term. But in the light of the New Testament as a whole, we should approach the issue the other way round. In other words, the nature of the ‘spiritual body’ must be interpreted in a way that does not contradict the evidence that the resurrected Jesus had a physical body. This evidence for this is found not only in the Gospel narratives of the empty tomb, but in the first sermons of Peter and in the early verses of 1 Corinthians 15. I will focus on the latter.
In Paul’s statement of the gospel, which he claims to be both the original gospel (which he had himself ‘received’, verse 3) and the universal gospel (which they and he all believed, verse 11), he made four affirmations, namely that ‘Christ died . . . that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day . . . and that he appeared.’ Two aspects of the resurrection of Jesus are clear from this.
First, it was an objective, historical event. Indeed, it was datable: it happened ‘on the third day’. David Jenkins has called it ‘not an event, but a series of experiences’. But no, it became a series of experiences only because it was first an event. The words ‘on the third day’ witness to the historicity of Jesus’ resurrection, much as the words ‘under Pontius Pilate’ in the Apostles’ Creed witness to the historicity of his sufferings and death.
Second, the resurrection was a physical event. It involved his body. The four verbs (died, was buried, was raised, appeared) all have the same subject, namely ‘Christ’, as a historical, physical person. This is beyond question in the case of the first two. It was his body that died and his body that was buried. The natural presumption, then, is that the very same historical, physical Christ is the subject of the third and fourth verbs, namely that he was raised and then appeared. It would take a high degree of mental gymnastics to claim that, without warning, the subject changes in the middle of the sentence, that although his body died and was buried, only his personality was raised and seen, so that he was raised while still remaining buried. No, since it was his body that was buried, it must have been his body that was raised. This probably explains the mention of his burial in some of the early apostolic sermons. It is entirely gratuitous, in the light of this, to maintain that the apostle Paul was ignorant of the empty tomb.
It is true that when the dead and buried body of Jesus was ‘raised’, it was changed in the process. We are envisaging neither a resuscitation (in which he was raised bodily, but not changed), nor a survival (in which he was changed into a ghost, but not raised bodily at all), but a resurrection (in which he was both raised and changed simultaneously).
Did the resurrection really happen?
Let us grant that the apostles, including Paul, did believe in a literal, datable, physical resurrection and transformation of Jesus. Were they correct? Can we, who live in the sophisticated, contemporary world of astrophysics, microbiology and computer science, also believe in the resurrection? Yes, we can and we should. Many millions do.
Several books have been written to marshal the evidence for the resurrection. This is an important part of Christian apologetics. All I can attempt here is a straightforward summary of the main lines of evidence.
First, there is the disappearance of the body. Everybody agrees that Joseph’s tomb was empty, even those who deny the Gospel writers’ stories. The rumours of resurrection could never have gained credence if people could have visited the tomb and found the body still in position. So the body had gone. The question has always been, ‘What became of it?’ No satisfactory explanation has been given of its disappearance, except for the resurrection.
We cannot accept that Jesus only fainted on the cross, then revived in the tomb, and subsequently came out of it by himself. For one thing, both the centurion and then Pilate assured themselves that Jesus was dead. For another, when he did emerge, he gave people the impression that he had conquered death, not that he had almost been conquered by it and was now a seriously sick man in need of hospital treatment.
So did the authorities (Roman or Jewish) deliberately remove the body, in order to prevent the disciples from spreading the rumour that he had risen? It is hard to believe this, since, when the apostles began to proclaim ‘Jesus and the resurrection’, the authorities could have immediately scotched the new movement by producing the body, instead of which they resorted to violence.
In this case, did the disciples steal the body as part of a hoax, in order to deceive people into thinking that he had risen? That is an impossible theory, for they were prepared to suffer and die for the gospel, and people are not willing to become martyrs for a lie that they have themselves perpetrated.
No explanation of the empty tomb holds water except that God had raised Jesus from the dead.
Second, there is the reappearance of the Lord. Not only did Jesus’ body disappear from the tomb, but Jesus then kept reappearing during a period of nearly six weeks. He is said to have showed himself to certain individuals (e.g. Mary Magdalene, Peter and James), to the Twelve, both with and without Thomas, and on one occasion ‘to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time’, most of whom were still alive when Paul wrote about this in about ad 54, and could therefore have been cross-examined.
These resurrection appearances cannot be dismissed as inventions, since it is plain beyond doubt that the apostles really believed that Jesus had risen. The stories had not been made up. But nor were they hallucinations. Tough fishermen like Peter, James and John are not the kind of personalities who might be susceptible to such symptoms of mental disorder. Furthermore, the variety of times, places, moods and people in regard to the appearances, together with people’s initial reaction of unbelief, make the theory of wishful thinking untenable. The only alternative to inventions and hallucinations is valid, objective appearances.
Third, there is the emergence of the church. Something happened to change the apostles and to send them out on their mission to the world. When Jesus died, they were heartbroken, confused and frightened. But within less than two months they came out of hiding, full of joy, confidence and courage. What can account for this dramatic transformation? Only the resurrection, together with Pentecost which followed soon afterwards. From that bunch of disillusioned nobodies has grown a universal community numbering one third of the population of the world. It would take a lot of credulity, even of cynicism, to believe that the whole Christian edifice had been built on the lie of a resurrection that never happened.
The disappearance of the body, the reappearance of the Lord and the emergence of the church together constitute a solid foundation for believing in the resurrection.
Why is the resurrection important?
What we have to ask about the resurrection is not only whether or not it happened, but whether it really matters that it happened. For if it happened, it happened nearly 2,000 years ago. How can an event that took place so long ago have any great importance for us today? Why on earth do Christians make such a song and dance about it? Is it not irrelevant? No, I believe the resurrection resonates with our human condition. It speaks to our needs as no other distant event does or could. It is the mainstay of Christian assurance.
First, the resurrection of Jesus assures us of God’s forgiveness. We have already seen that forgiveness is one of our most basic needs and one of God’s best gifts. The head of a large English mental hospital has been quoted as saying, ‘I could dismiss half my patients tomorrow if they could be assured of forgiveness.’ We all have a skeleton or two in some dark cupboard, memories of things of which in our better moments we are thoroughly ashamed. Our conscience nags, condemns, torments us.
Several times during his public ministry, Jesus spoke words of forgiveness and peace. In the upper room he described the communion cup as his ‘blood of the covenant . . . poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins’. Thus, he linked our forgiveness with his death. And since throughout Scripture death is always welded to sin as its just desert (‘the wages of sin is death’), he can have meant only that he was going to die the death that we deserved, to die in our place, in order that we might be spared and forgiven.
That is what he said. But how can we know that he was right, that he achieved by his death what he said he would achieve? How can we know that God accepted his death in our place as ‘a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction, for the sins of the whole world’ (as the Book of Common Prayer puts it)? The answer is that, if he had remained dead, if he had not been visibly and publicly raised from death, we would never have known. Indeed, without the resurrection we would have to conclude that his death was a failure. The apostle Paul saw this logic clearly: ‘If Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith.’ Again, ‘if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost.’ The terrible consequences of no resurrection would be that the apostles are false witnesses, believers are unforgiven, and the Christian dead have perished. But in fact, Paul continued, Christ was raised from the dead. And by raising him, God has assured us that he approves of his sin-bearing death, that he did not die in vain, and that those who trust in him receive a full and free forgiveness. The resurrection validates the cross.
Second, the resurrection of Jesus assures us of God’s power. For we need God’s power in the present as well as his forgiveness of the past. Is God really able to change human nature, which appears to be so intractable? Can he really make cruel people kind, selfish people unselfish, immoral people self-controlled, and bitter people sweet? Is he able to take people who are dead to spiritual reality, and make them alive in Christ? Yes, he really is! He is able to give life to the spiritually dead, and to transform us into the likeness of Christ.
But these are great claims. Can they be substantiated? Only because of the resurrection. Paul prays that the eyes of our heart may be enlightened, so that we may know ‘his incomparably great power for us who believe’. And to help us grasp the measure of this power, not only does God give us an inward illumination by his Spirit, but he has given us an outward, public, objective demonstration of it in the resurrection. For the power available for us today is the very power which ‘he exerted when he raised Christ from the dead’. In this way the resurrection is portrayed as the supreme evidence in history of the creative power of God.
We are always in danger of trivializing the gospel, of minimizing what God is able to do for us and in us. We speak of becoming a Christian as if it were no more than turning over a new leaf, making a few superficial adjustments to our usual patterns of behaviour, and becoming a bit more religious. Then scratch the surface, crack the veneer, and behold, underneath we are still the same old pagans, unredeemed and unchanged. But no, becoming and being a Christian according to the New Testament is something much more radical than this. It is a decisive act of God. It is nothing less than a resurrection from the death of alienation and self-centredness, and the beginning of a new and liberated life. In a word, the same God of supernatural power who raised Jesus from physical death can raise us from spiritual death. And we know he can raise us because we know he raised him.
Third, the resurrection of Jesus assures us of God’s ultimate triumph. One of the major differences between the religions and ideologies of the world lies in their vision of the future. Some offer no hope, but sink into existential despair. Bertrand Russell, when still a young man of thirty, expressed his conviction that
no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins.
Others think of history more in circular than in linear terms, as an endless cycle of reincarnations, with no release but the non-existence of nirvana. Marxists continue to promise Utopia on earth, but the vision has lost credibility. Secular humanists dream of taking control of their own evolution. But insofar as this involves genetic manipulation, the dream degenerates into a nightmare.
Christians, on the other hand, are confident about the future, and our Christian ‘hope’ (which is a sure expectation) is both individual and cosmic. Individually, apart from Christ, the fear of personal death and dissolution is almost universal. The comedian and film-maker Woody Allen typifies this terror. It has been an obsession with him. True, he can still joke about it. ‘It’s not that I’m afraid to die,’ he once quipped; ‘I just don’t want to be there when it happens.’ But mostly he is filled with dread. In an article in Esquire he said, ‘The fundamental thing behind all motivation and all activity is the constant struggle against annihilation and against death. It’s absolutely stupefying in its terror, and it renders anyone’s accomplishments meaningless.’
Jesus Christ, however, rescues his disciples from this horror. We will not only survive death, but be raised from it. We are to be given new bodies like his resurrection body, with new and undreamed-of powers. For he is called both the ‘firstfruits’ of the harvest and ‘the firstborn from the dead’. Both metaphors give the same assurance. He was the first to rise; all his people will follow. We will have a body like his. ‘Just as we have borne the likeness of the earthly man [Adam] so shall we bear the likeness of the man from heaven [Christ].’
Our hope for the future, however, is also cosmic. We believe that Jesus Christ is going to return in spectacular glory to bring history to its fulfilment in eternity. He will not only raise the dead, but regenerate the universe. He will make all things new. The whole creation is going to be set free from its present bondage to decay and death. The groans of nature are the labour pains which promise the birth of a new world. There is going to be a new heaven and a new earth, which will be the home of righteousness.
So the living hope of the New Testament is impressively ‘material’ for both the individual and the cosmos. The individual believer is promised not just survival, not even immortality, but a resurrected, transformed body. And the destiny of the cosmos is not an ethereal ‘heaven’, but a re-created universe.
Is there any evidence, however, for this amazing assertion that both we and our world are to be totally renewed? Yes, the resurrection of Jesus is the basis of both expectations. It provides solid, visible, tangible, public evidence of God’s purpose to complete what he has begun, to redeem nature, to give us new bodies in a new world. As Peter expressed it, God ‘has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead’. For the resurrection of Jesus was the beginning of God’s new creation. It is not enough to believe that the personality, presence and power of Jesus live on. We need to know that his body was raised. For the resurrection body of Jesus was the first bit of the material order to be redeemed and transfigured. It is the divine pledge that one day the rest will be redeemed and transfigured.
Thus the resurrection of Jesus assures us of God’s forgiveness, power and ultimate triumph. It enables us
The resurrection, precisely because it was a decisive, public, visible act of God within the material order, brings us firm assurance in an otherwise insecure world.