Christ is Risen! Really?

 

Christ is Risen! Really?

April 7, 2021

 

It’s the first week of Easter. Few people perhaps know that there is more than one day of Easter, but there is. In the Christian calendar Easter is a season. It lasts from Easter Sunday until Pentecost. So my not getting this written for Easter Sunday doesn’t matter, or so I tell myself. In any event, here it is either on time or late. Whatever.

Christianity is resurrection faith. Christians confess that on the Sunday after his crucifixion on a Friday Jesus Christ was raised from the dead. He wasn’t resuscitated like Lazarus is in the Gospel of John. He was resurrected, which isn’t the same thing. For my purposes here however the difference between those two things doesn’t matter. What matters is that we Christians confess that Jesus of Nazareth was well and truly dead, and then he wasn’t. Christ’s resurrection makes all the difference for Christianity. St. Paul wrote that “if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain.” 1 Corinthians 15:14 NRSV. Easter Sunday is the day of the Christian year dedicated especially to celebrating Christ’s resurrection. On that day Christians around the world proclaim, “Christ is risen! He is risen indeed!”

Which is all very well and good, but how do we know? How much do we know? We know because the New Testament tells us so. How much we know is a thornier issue. We have four Gospel accounts of Christ’s resurrection, and they aren’t all the same. Here’s a table that shows what those four accounts have in common and what they don’t:

 

	Mark	Matthew	Luke	John
Stone rolled away	x	x	x	x
Empty tomb	x	x	x	x
Mary Magdalene	x	x	x	x
Two women	x	x
Three or more women			x
Women come with spices	x		x
One “man” in the tomb	x
Women told Jesus has risen	x	x
Women told to tell the men/disciples	x	x	x	x
Women flee from the tomb	x
Women say nothing	x
Earthquake at the tomb		x
Guards at the tomb		x
Angel descending from heaven at tomb		x
Jesus speaks to women/woman		x		x
Two “men” in the tomb			x
Peter goes to the bomb			x	x
The disciple whom Jesus loved goes to the tomb				x
Two angels at the tomb		x	x	x
Women tell the disciples he has risen		x	x	x

 

We see that the only things these four accounts have in common are that Mary Magdalene either goes to the tomb alone or is one of the women who go to the tomb, that the stone that had sealed the tomb is rolled away, the tomb is empty, and some figure tells the women to tell the men that Christ has risen. The other details differ in the four accounts.

What are we to make of the fact that the four accounts of Christ’s resurrection are so different? We are to understand, I think, that we can’t take those accounts at face value. We can understand that each of these accounts tries to convey a sense of something that happened that it’s nearly impossible to talk about with ordinary words. They are stories told to tell people that Jesus’ death was not the end for him. Something impossible had happened. It looked to all the world like the Romans had killed Jesus. They executed him as a political criminal. To the world that was the end of him. To the eyes of faith it wasn’t.

Let me suggest that you look at the resurrection of Christ this way. Clearly Jesus had created a popular movement in Galilee. A significant number of people followed him as a new kind of teacher and healer. At least some of the participants in that movement believed that he was the long anticipated messiah. There had been other messianic movements in Galilee before Jesus. There would be others after Jesus. The Romans killed at least the leaders of those movements, and the movements died out.[1] It is an undeniable historical fact that the Jesus movement did not die out after the Romans killed Jesus. Rather, within a relatively few years it had become a religious movement that spread across the Roman Empire. How did that happen?

The explanation of how it happened that makes sense to me  is that the Jesus movement didn’t die out when Jesus died because Jesus’ followers had some kind of powerful experience of his continuing presence with them after his death. That experience energized them. It emboldened them. It gave them courage it seems they otherwise would not have had. Just what was that experience? I don’t think we can know. Several early Christians tried to convey that experience by writing stories of an empty tomb, of a missing body, and of witnesses being told by heavenly messengers that he had been raised from the grave. Writing stories is how the people of the first century CE conveyed deep truth. That’s why we have gospels they wrote and not theological essays. We don’t know the historical details of what happened. We do know that something profound, something life changing, must have happened. If it hadn’t happened the Jesus movement would have died out, and we would never have heard of him. After all, how many of us have heard of Judas the Galilean (not Judas the disciple who betrayed Jesus)? He led a violent popular movement in Galilee that the Romans crushed in 4 BCE. If Jesus’ followers had not had an empowering experience of Jesus with them after his death surely the Jesus movement would be as obscure to us as Judas the Galilean is.

So we quite appropriately proclaim, “Christ is risen! He is risen indeed!” We don’t need to know the details. Even without the details we can proclaim with our first century siblings in the faith that death couldn’t hold him, the grave couldn’t keep him, God saw to it that crucifixion was not the end of him. Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Thanks be to God!

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[1] John Dominic Crossan contends that if a popular movement the Romans didn’t like was nonviolent the Romans killed only the movement’s leader. That’s why the Romans didn’t immediately come after Jesus’ followers after they had killed Jesus. If the movement was violent the Romans killed everyone they could get their hands on who had been part of the movement. That they didn’t do that to the Jesus movement is one way we know that the movement was nonviolent.