On the Significance of Jesus’ Resurrection

Q. What is the significance of Jesus' resurrection?

A. By his resurrection, Jesus overcame death and opened for us the way of eternal life.

In combination with the question that precedes it, that dealing with Jesus’ suffering and death, we arrive at the core of the Gospel. As attested in Paul’s exposition of the resurrection to the church at Corinth, the good news that he proclaimed was “that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures,” and then that he appeared to an expanding circle of people starting with the twelve apostles (1st Corinthians 15:3-8). The Gospels as literary genre and treatment of Jesus’ ministry and birth in addition to his death and resurrection would have grown out of this original nucleus as we can see from Mark, assuming it is the earliest written Gospel, hangs the ministry of Jesus like an extended scene-setting for his passion narrative. It was then only in light of an established conviction about the centrality of the death and resurrection of Jesus that his life and teaching became significant for those who worshiped him as Lord in light of their experience of his conquering death.

Even though we can conceptually distinguish the death, descent among the dead (to be handled in the next post), and resurrection as distinct moments, they are, as emphasized by the liturgical unity of the Pascal Triduum, the high point of the liturgical year from the evening of Maundy Thursday through the end of Easter Sunday, a single event. The death and resurrection as theologically significant events mutually determine each other. Without the death, there would be no resurrection. At the same time, without the resurrection, the death, far from being an indication of God’s victory over Sin, would have served as a tragic end for a failed messianic movement. Similarly, without the resurrection, liberation form the guilt and power of Sin, being brought back into right relationship with God, would seem an empty and impotent gesture were God not to also free us from the power of Sin that is death, opening the capacity for everlasting enjoyment of God that is our ultimate purpose. Yet without the possibility of restored relationship with God and forgiveness of Sin, without Christ’s having “made us worthy to stand before [God],” we could not enter into the new life and New Creation, into God’s Reign, made possible by Christ’s resurrection (Book of Common Prayer, 368).

In a certain beautiful irony, just as the resurrection joins with the crucifixion to form the essential core of the Gospel, the center of the Christian’s faith and hope, it also stands as a concept eluding precise and detailed analysis and exposition. Just as the precise mechanics of atonement remain veiled in mystery, so too does the precise character of resurrection life remain unknown, and, perhaps this side of experiencing it in it’s fullness, unknowable. Sketching a defined picture of resurrection life can only every be an exercise in what theologian David Kelsey calls “theological science fantasy” and at best can serve as a way of spurring us to look at conceptual issues from a new perspective; such vignettes, however, should not be confused for likely portraits of the way things will “actually” be in the New Creation (Eccentric Existence, 541).

However, to say that the lived specifics of the resurrection remain behind the veil of divine mystery, or, to put it in Paul’s language in 1st Corinthians 13, to say that we now only “see in a mirror, dimly,” does not mean that we must simply stand in awed silence before Christ’s resurrection (although doing so would probably not hurt us). Rather what we can offer something like Robert Calhoun’s “buoys that mark the channels of the deep,” a loose outline of what can be affirmed and what cannot be affirmed about the mystery (quoted in Eccentric Existence, 565).

We begin with the affirmation that Jesus overcame death in his resurrection. Perhaps we would be better served had the Catechism used the capital-D “Death.” That is to say, Jesus conquers not only the death in the sense of the end of physical life processes—Jesus conquers Death as the power of disintegration of life in all its physical and spiritual senses, of Death as the forces in opposition to God, of Death as the wages of Sin spoken of by Paul in Romans 6:23. Death is here described as the distortion of the goodness of creation such that the created order is turned away from God and set at cross purposes with God and with its own created purposes. What this means is that the new life Jesus is raised to, and which we are offered through participation in his death and resurrection in baptism, is not merely a resuscitation. It is not merely the restoration of bodily life processes, of a reversal of three days of postmortem decay. Jesus’ bodily “stuff” is transformed into something else, something that cannot decay, something that seems unconstrained by the physical laws of space and time of the current order.

And yet neither is defeat of death less than the undoing of the cessation of physical processes. Even as Jesus seems to live in the new space and time of the New Creation, a reality that intrudes into the current order eagerly awaiting recreation, a new order described in the paradoxical terms of “spiritual body,” he does still have a body. He is still in some way an individual center of will and consciousness, a person who is identifiably such by the senses of other humans in their interaction with him. He still speaks and eats and looks like a person (even if he can be mistaken for a gardener and thus does not have exactly the same physical appearance). To say that our bodily existence is transformed and that the overcoming of death is not merely the restoration of physical life processes does not mean it is less than the overcoming of the cessation of physical life processes. Resurrection is not merely a soul escaping the body in order to ascend to a purely spiritual realm; it is not merely a metaphor for remembrance by the living. This seems driven home not only by John’s extensive theological glossing of the post-resurrection appearances but also by Paul’s insistence on so many post-resurrection appearances. Jesus was not only remembered by the community—he actually appeared to them.

And it is out of this that we have our hope: A hope that we too will be able to share in the undying transformed life that is in Christ after our own deaths; a hope that those things that caused us pain or sorrow or suffering will be done away with; a hope that the forces that oppose God and the true purpose and flourishing of creation will be fully destroyed. We do not have a full picture of what exactly this will be like and we do well not to try to sketch it too clearly, but what we can be assured of is that it is incomparably better than the current state of affairs that we find ourselves in now, that it will not lack any of the goods that mark our current existence insofar as they are goods associated with our ultimate good, which is the worship, contemplation, and enjoyment of God forever.

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