After all this time, can we say that we have truly come to terms with, truly absorbed the message of Easter and the full reality of the resurrection? Have we allowed it to transform our outlook on life?
“Can there really only ever be what there has always been? Can there not be something unexpected, something unimaginable, something new?” —Pope Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth, Part II
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The Resurrection, which we commemorate every Easter as well as every Sunday, is a mystery so immense that we have hardly come to terms with it, nearly 2000 years on. We pay lip service to the Resurrection in the Creed and at Eastertime, but for how many of us it the motivating mystery of our entire lives? St. Paul is clear on the matter: If Christ was not raised, our faith is in vain. The Resurrection is the mystery of the Christian faith. As Pope Benedict XVI has written, “The Christian faith stands or falls with the truth of the testimony that Christ is risen from the dead.”
But what was the Resurrection? It is so easy to allow our faith to go on auto-pilot, to coast on the familiar theological phrases and creedal formulas without any deeper reflection on what they mean, in their historical context and embodied reality. While I do not vouch for the fact, I have read claims that one third of Catholics do not believe in a bodily resurrection. This just as disturbing as (and not unrelated to) the widespread disbelief in the Real Presence. One can go to Sunday Mass, receive the sacrament of penance, pray the rosary and meditate on scripture on a regular basis—in short, do all the things that make for a healthy spiritual life—and yet still have an imperfect understanding of key truths.
It would appear that many believers persist in a vague fog about what the central mystery of our faith actually meant when it happened and means today. Once we get clear about what the Resurrection is, it will be an animating source of hope and joy that fills our entire life, becoming our very reason for being. Getting the resurrection right affects our entire worldview and the way we live our lives.
One of the chief mistakes we make vis a vis the resurrection is thinking that it is equivalent to “life after death.” The resurrection is something much richer and more particular than this. In his brilliant book History and Eschatology: Jesus and the Promise of Natural Theology, the theologian N. T. Wright observes that we all too often look at the objects of our Christian faith with glasses borrowed from much later eras. As Western thought evolved, it continued to pay lip service to Christianity while accommodating itself to other, quite foreign, ways of thinking. Wright convincingly shows that much of what we take to be the “modern” worldview is not modern at all, but merely a revived version of ancient philosophies. The consequences are astonishing, for in fact what we have is not so much a clash between the Judeo-Christian worldview and “modernity” but a clash between different ancient worldviews. As these philosophies filtered down into the popular consciousness, they began to influence and color believers’ perceptions of their Christian faith. We should not delude ourselves in thinking that the world of faith remains in an airtight container, unaffected by the surrounding culture.
This is not a Catholic/Protestant polemic, nor a polemic about the Eastern versus the Western church. Neither is it a contrast between “liberal” and “conservative” versions of the faith. The contrast I am drawing is a different one: that between orthodox and popular beliefs.
We all know what orthodox belief is. We find it expressed in catechisms and Creeds, in papal pronouncements, in theological and scriptural commentaries. But the faith is also articulated in various ways on the popular level, through prayers and sermons and devotions. The language we use to articulate our faith in turns shapes our perceptions of it through time. It is not difficult to let ourselves slide by degrees into other frames of mind and frames of reference, to thought-forms shaped by Platonism, Epicureanism, or even modern secularism.
I have long thought of Catholicism as the marriage of the three cultures, Jewish, Greek, and Roman. We are a fusion of Jewish religious and ethical consciousness, Greek philosophical reasoning, and Roman administrative and organizational genius. But the Jewish element is the cornerstone, for without it we have no faith as such. A Christian is essentially a Judaized Gentile (assuming he is not actually of Jewish background, like the first Christians). He remains close to the heart of the faith, close to Jesus, the more he immerses himself in Jesus’ own world.
If we want to understand the Christian faith, we need to try to think as 1st-century Jews thought. By entering the earthy, deeply embodied heart of ancient Judaism, we will find the earthy, deeply embodied core of the Catholic and Christian faith. We will discover Jesus in the concrete particulars of history and culture—the concrete particularities of his history and culture.
Then, as gentiles re-informed with the spirit of 1st-century Judaism, we can proceed to express our faith in the philosophical categories and styles handed down from our Greco-Roman heritage, which can only complement and never obscure the Jewish styles of prophecy and parable as used by Jesus himself. The result will be a perfect marriage of the cultures.
What the Resurrection Meant
So how did the disciples of Jesus understand his resurrection? Some of the best theological teachers of our day act as guides in grasping the answer to this question. I am indebted to the aforementioned Bishop Wright, to our beloved Pope Benedict XVI, and to Fr. William J. Slattery, whose stunning new book Enchanted by Eternity: Recapturing the Wonder of the Catholic Worldview has brightened my reading hours. The modern school of biblical scholarship sometimes called the Second Temple Judaism school (whose best-known representative in the Catholic world is probably Dr. Scott Hahn) is helping us see our faith with new/old lenses by going back to sources on 1st-century Jewish culture.
Few people in the ancient world believed that death meant annihilation. Most people—Jews, Greeks, Romans—believed in some kind of survival after death. The difference is between a spiritual survival (usually conceived as a shadowy disembodied existence, like the Greek Hades) and a resurrection, which was inherently understood as a bodily event.
We read in the gospels that the Sadducees, uniquely among Jewish groups, disbelieved in the resurrection; what they disbelieved in was the bodily event, not “life after death” as such. Every Jew believed in a survival after death, and most believed that God would raise up the bodies of the righteous at the end of time. The Sadducees (like the Greeks and most of the pagan world) did not believe in the possibility of resurrection. Jesus insisted that the Sadducees were in error about this, driving home the point that because God is the God of the living, he would therefore raise the bodies of his faithful ones at the end of time.
Given that the belief in bodily resurrection was well established in Judaism before Jesus came, why did the disciples not understand what Jesus’ references to his “rising from the dead” meant? Because they did not expect such an event to happen in the present and to one individual in particular, instead of at the end of time to all God’s faithful. The singularity of Jesus’ resurrection was that God raised this person in these circumstances—as the stunning rebuttal to a brutal death by crucifixion. Pope Benedict explains:
Jewish faith did indeed know of a resurrection of the dead at the end of time. New life was linked to the inbreaking of a new world and thus made complete sense. […] But a resurrection into definitive otherness in the midst of the continuing old world was not foreseen and therefore made no sense. So the promise of resurrection remained initially unintelligible to the disciples.
In the eyes of the disciples, Jesus’ rising from the dead confirmed his divinity and showed that the kingdom of God had now been launched. God’s future had come to meet us in the present, giving us a foretaste of what was in store at the end of time and setting in motion a new reality that would change everything.
This means that the resurrection is an inherently eschatological event, one that points to the end of time, understood not as destruction (the debased popular sense of “the end of the world”) but as the fulfillment of God’s plans for the cosmos. The kingdom of God, in the early Christian understanding, would be a state in which God would enact universal justice and all humanity would acknowledge his reign. It was inherently “this-worldly,” with the understanding that the “worlds” of heaven and earth were ultimately to come together. (When Jesus told Pilate that his kingdom is “not of this world,” he was pointing to the fallen dimension of earthly life.)
And Jesus’ resurrection was unequivocally a bodily phenomenon—Jesus made this clear by eating a meal of fish in his disciples’ presence. And indeed, the Jews would not have understood resurrection in any other way. Yet Jesus’ body was clearly raised to a higher power, with a mobility unknown to man in his natural state.
All this is worth emphasizing in view of this fact: some believers seem to be under the impression that our faith teaches an ultimate annihilation of the natural (material) world. I myself vaguely assumed this until quite recently, but it is a gross error; orthodox faith, rooted in the resurrection, teaches not the destruction but the renewal and restoration of all created reality.
I wonder whether this vague belief in annihilation is a result of scientistic thinking, a confusion between the religious idea of the End of Times and data provided by scientists about a destruction of the natural world. Such natural events are an entirely different thing from eschatological events in history. And God can intervene at any point to effect something new and different; we are not ruled by inexorable scientific laws, but by God’s grace and providence. We read that God looked at this creation and saw that it was “very good.” God does not discard what he made, but elevates and perfects it.
In short, we have become very good at conceiving of life as a process of “getting to heaven,” but we have lost a sense of heaven, God’s realm, as erupting into our realm—of a new reality coming to us. This was the feeling that was vivid at the first Easter, and it is precisely what we need to recover.
To do so, we need to remove certain modern blinders from our eyes and enter the ancient Jewish view of reality. The ancient Jews held a notably holistic, unified view of things. This wholeness of outlook has disintegrated into a series of “splits” in modern thought. First, the revival of Epicurean and Platonic philosophy led to the idea of a split-level universe in which heaven and earth are far apart and radically separate. Second came the spirit/matter split as foreshadowed in the philosophy of Descartes (the human soul as the “ghost in the machine”), breaking up a sense of the unity of the human person. Finally, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment brought a consciousness of a radical break with the past, as opposed to ancient Judaism’s sense of continuity across time.
Because of our changing language and cultural assumptions, a number of problems and misunderstandings get in the way when we hear the classic texts of scripture. Today when we hear Jesus refer to the “kingdom of heaven” in Matthew’s Gospel, we tend to assume that he means something in the future after we die. This is a misconception. When Jesus and the apostles speak of “heaven” (Ouranos in the Greek) they do not mean a place we go after we die, but rather God’s realm or dimension that intersects with our earthly dimension of space, time, and matter. The phrase “kingdom of heaven” is nothing but a reverent circumlocution for “kingdom of God.” When we pray in the Our Father “thy kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven” we are praying that the state of affairs on earth will conform to a God-centered order.
Similarly, when St. Paul speaks of our being “citizens of heaven,” he does not mean that our allegiance is to a place beyond death but rather that our allegiance is to a God-centered ideal in the present. And when Paul says in 1 Corinthians that our “natural body” (sometimes translated “physical body”) will be replaced by a “spiritual body,” he is not contrasting a body with a disembodied soul. The contrast is rather between a body under the rule of purely natural processes, the law of decay and death, and a body filled with the spirit of God, the resurrection body that is immortal and raised to a new level of nature. This is the kind of body that Christ manifested after his resurrection—a body that is a transformation, not a replacement, of the natural body we currently have. As in all things, God builds upon and transforms his creation.
Arguably, the “body/soul” antithesis we commonly use in our religious language does not line up perfectly with scriptural usage. In the Bible, “soul” (the Hebrew nefesh) does not denote an immaterial part of us, but rather the “whole person” in its material, moral, and psychological dimensions. N. T. Wright reminds us that “we are saved not as souls, but as wholes.” Jesus offered his life, his body, up on the Cross, and in doing so confronted the worst possible evil and suffering on our behalf, with the full faith and confidence that God would raise up his broken body to new and elevated life.
Lose this wholeness, and you lose both the incarnational and eschatological dimensions of our faith. The doctrines of the bodily resurrection, the kingdom of God, the New Creation, and Jesus’ Second Coming—all part of orthodox teaching—have disappeared from much of our popular consciousness as Christians. Instead, we have a flattened-out religious perspective that amounts to a kind of moralism. All that matters is following the right rules so that you can “go to heaven when you die,” more often than not understood in disembodied Platonic terms (freedom from body, the senses, and concrete created reality). We conceive a “purely spiritual” heaven, and then try awkwardly to shoehorn the resurrection into that. But the whole point that the evangelists were getting across is that God’s kingdom, heralded by the Resurrection, is something that is coming to meet us in the present, reflected in Jesus’ saying that the kingdom “is in your midst.”
When we look at the ancient Jewish view of Heaven, we will discover not a Platonic never-neverland in a distant future after we die, but a dimension of reality parallel with our own, and which can intersect with our world in heightened circumstances. Most eminently, the Temple in Jerusalem was the place where heaven and earth were considered to meet—a place of prayer, praise and sacrifice, whose furnishings reflected the splendor of the cosmos and whose Holy of Holies (the building’s inner sanctum) represented the precise meeting place between God and mankind. The Sabbath, the day of rest, pointed toward the ultimate rest of eternity and, in doing so, anticipated a new creation in the midst of the old. Recall how Jesus identified his own body with the Temple, the structure that summed up all of Jewish beliefs and aspirations; just as the Temple was once destroyed and was built up again, so would God raise Jesus’ body (the ultimate symbol of Jewish beliefs and aspirations) to new life after its destruction.
From time immemorial skeptics have accused Christians of being devoted to a fantastical “future life” to the neglect of “life here and now.” And admittedly, our turn toward a Platonized, disembodied view of “life after death” might seem to lend credence to the charge. But there is an obvious and enlightened retort we can make, namely that the dichotomy is unnecessary because the “future life” is taking shape right here and now; the kingdom is in our midst. And this is because heaven and earth are not separated by a huge gulf, as Epicurus and Plato thought, but intimately intertwined. There will be both continuity and difference between the present life and the future life. The point is that God’s future takes root in the midst of the present, just as Christ’s resurrection erupted in the midst of everyday reality. Let us recall that Jesus is currently in heaven with his glorified body: a mystery to be sure, demanding that we stretch our minds to understand how a body can be in a place that is outside the space-time continuum.
Here is Pope Benedict on the transformative effect of the resurrection:
Jesus’ Resurrection was about breaking into an entirely new form of life, into a life that is no longer subject to the law of dying and becoming, but lies beyond it—a life that opens up a new dimension of human existence. […] In Jesus’ Resurrection a new possibility of human existence is attained that affects everyone and that opens up a future, a new kind of future, for mankind.
Christ’s resurrection was the Big Bang starting off a revolution that continues to our day, gathering steam and rolling on toward the final consummation that God has planned.
What the Resurrection Means
Think about it: we have been living in the End Times for the past nearly 2000 years, as the kingdom of God gradually grows under the operation of Christ’s church. This puts subsequent history and our lives in perspective. Christ’s resurrection appears as the true turning point of history, the new beginning that gives life to culture and civilization. Oscar Wilde made this point when he said that Christ’s was the true renaissance (renaissance, rebirth) with a power that has inspired the life and culture of Christendom. This view challenges any notion that the summit of history was reached in the Italian Renaissance or the 18th century Enlightenment. Once we keep the resurrection and Christ at the forefront, we will be in a position to appreciate and value other time periods in human history at their true worth. The resurrection does not destroy, but rather perfects, all other human realities.
I think what we have been getting at in all these reflections is that in all theology, the idea of creation is primary. And this would seem to vindicate a more Aristotelian view of reality, emphasizing the richness of the created world, which we find echoed and elaborated in the thought Thomas Aquinas. This is a view that leads to a full exploitation of humanism in its true Christian sense.
To understand the true, full meaning of the resurrection is to be alive to the full potential of art, culture, and science. Since material creation will survive in a new and heightened form, what we do in the body and in the world of matter is of immense significance. Such an attitude will lead, not to a world-denying puritanism, not to a platonic escapism, but to a world-embracing creativity. When St. Paul and St. John speak of new heavens and a new earth, or when St. John describes the kingdom of God as a city and a civilization, they are not using flowery metaphors for floating on a cloud and playing a harp. They are speaking in utterly literal terms. The kingdom of God will be a heaven–earth complex, or what Fr. Slattery calls a “heavenized earth.”
Our faith is not static but dynamic. It is not about trudging along in the same stale routines until we sink into the grave. It is about God working new things in the world. It is about new beginnings and new possibilities opening up before us. The keynote of Easter is joy and newness, the unexpected and the spectacular. God is slowly revealing new things to us, epiphanies of his truth, if we only listen and attend. The original Christians had this freshness and joy but it has become attenuated, for all too many of us, as time has worn on. It is time to bring it back.
When we tacitly buy in to modern compartmentalized thinking, we lose a sense of the resurrection as a source of hope in the present, as opposed to an isolated event in the past. When we put things back together again—the body and the spirit, time and eternity, the past and the present—we will have the sharpened vision to see around us signposts of God’s future.
We are in the habit of saying all too carelessly that the Church has been in existence “for 2000 years” or “for two millennia.” But we have been jumping the gun a bit. If we do our arithmetic, we will realize that we have not even reached the 2000-year mark yet. That will occur in the year 2033, when we will commemorate the Passion, death, and Resurrection of our Lord, and the Spirit-filled birth of the Church.
And after all this time, can we say that we have truly come to terms with, truly absorbed the message of Easter and the full reality of the resurrection? Have we allowed it to transform our outlook on life? Here is a telling symptom: N. T. Wright laments that many places allow for a lengthy, drawn-out observance of Lent, and a short perfunctory one of Easter—“the one-day happy ending tacked on to forty days of fasting and gloom.” He suggests that just as Lent is a time to give things up, Easter could be a time to take new things up, for the greater flourishing of the kingdom. There should be at least as much joy in Easter as there is sorrow and repentance in Lent. As Wright declares, “This is our greatest day. We should put the flags out.” Amen; let us go and do likewise.
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The featured image is “Resurrection of Christ” (between 1499 and 1502), by Raphael, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
