Readings Between the Lines

Reflections

‘Jesus was raised: Can you believe it?’

Readings Between the Lines

Father Glenn LeCompte

Although Easter Sunday occurred last month, we continue to celebrate Easter during May. With that in mind, I thought I would focus my article this month on the issue of the “reality” of Jesus’ resurrection. When people have questioned the reality of Jesus’ resurrection they are usually questioning whether or not it was a historical occurrence or even scientifically possible. As I will suggest below, however, while the resurrection is a phenomenon that transcends our usual idea of historicity, that fact does not make it unhistorical.

While challenges to the historicity of Jesus’ resurrection have flourished in the scientific age, such challenges were not unknown in the first century. In Matthew 28:11-15, the Jewish religious leaders concoct a false story to explain the emptiness of Jesus’ tomb on the Sunday morning after his crucifixion. They tell the guards at the tomb to report that Jesus’ disciples absconded with his body at night. Between the late 18th and the 20th century, many have offered “naturalistic” explanations of Jesus’ resurrection. The “stealing of the body” hypothesis itself was resurrected after many centuries! Some theorized that Jesus only appeared to be dead and somehow revived in the tomb and departed from it. Some proposed that the disciples’ experiences of the risen Lord alive after he died were hallucinations, even mass hallucinations. Still others maintain that, since the aim of the Gospels is to express belief in who Jesus Christ is, the meaning of his mission and its implications for people, and not to narrate history, the resurrection is a way of saying that through his death Jesus showed himself to be Lord and Messiah because God accepted his offering. This last group of thinkers would therefore conclude that the historicity of Jesus’ resurrection can be discounted.

Even from a historical, scientific, psychological and philosophical perspective each of these theories has weaknesses, and fails to offer a solid explanation of the phenomenon of Jesus’ resurrection. Part of the problem is that in most, if not all, cases, these “naturalistic” theories presuppose that since we do not have experiences of resurrection in our world today it cannot have happened to the human Jesus. That presupposition is not necessarily true. There was a time when the possibility of space travel or landing human beings on the moon was not seen as possible because at the time the technology was not available, but at a point in history it did become available and space travel occurred.

Before I explain why we can accept Jesus’ resurrection as “real,” there is something we must understand. It is true that when we speak of resurrection, we are speaking of something that is beyond our current experience. Jesus was not resuscitated as was Lazarus, who would die again. Jesus’ resurrection is a transformation of him into a form of existence like nothing we know in our world. Yet that new form of existence apparently retains properties of our existence in this world. For example, in several cases the fact that Jesus possesses a real body in his risen state is emphasized. Jesus appears and eats fish before his disciples huddled behind locked doors (Luke 24:36-43), and invites “doubting Thomas” to touch physically the wounds inflicted by his crucifixion and the spear thrust through his side (John 20:24-29).

The bodily aspect of Jesus’ resurrection is the first reason we can accept it as real. In his risen presence we are not speaking of Jesus as a formless, indiscernible spirit. He has a body, although it is somehow different from the bodies we have.

A second reason we can accept Jesus’ resurrection as real is that he was seen alive after he had died on the cross by various groups and individuals. The first aspect of the experience of these people is that he was “seen” (John 20:18, 25; 1 Corinthians 15:58). The second aspect is that these sightings were experienced by multiple people, sometimes as individuals and sometimes as groups, which varied in size from two to five hundred. These sightings were experienced on different occasions and in different circumstances. In Luke 24:33-35, the two disciples who encounter the risen Lord on their journey to Emmaus and as they sit down at table with him there run back to Jerusalem to tell the disciples gathered there of their experience. Before the two can a

Reflections

say anything they are greeted with “The Lord has truly been raised and has appeared to Simon!” The two disciples from Emmaus had no knowledge of Simon’s experience. Then the two proceed to tell the others of their own experience, about which the others did not know. In other words, neither group knew about the other’s experience so they could not have influenced one another. This fact lends credibility to the claims of both groups.

That the disciples stole and hid Jesus’ body then claimed he was raised is not likely because the Gospels indicate in several places that when Jesus predicts his passion, death and resurrection, the disciples do not understand what he means (e.g. Mark 8:31-32), and this lack of understanding persists when the disciples discover Jesus’ body missing from the tomb (e.g. John 20:2, 9, 13-15). The disciples were not expecting to encounter Jesus as risen from death.

Some have suggested that the disciples’ perceived visions of Jesus alive after death resulted from extreme grief. It is clear, however, that the disciples journeying to Emmaus are grieving yet do not even recognize the risen Jesus as he joins the two on their journey.

The fact that the Gospels’ aim is to inspire faith and not to recount history does not necessarily discount the reality of Jesus’ resurrection. As the Pontifical Biblical Commission explained in 1964, the Gospels as we have them contain multiple strata of tradition. Those who communicated the tradition about Jesus first orally and later in writing interpreted the meaning of Jesus’ actual words and deeds, which often lie hidden beneath the interpretations. Thus, even if the Gospels do not explain Jesus’ resurrection from either a scientific or historical viewpoint this does not discount its reality.

At the end of the day, even if Jesus’ resurrection is something that, at least for now, is beyond the realm of our experience, there is good reason to believe in the reality of it. BC

Reflection Questions

v What implications for your life does the following Scripture passage have? “If Christ has not been raised, then empty (too) is our preaching; empty, too, your faith” (1 Corinthians 15:14). v How do we proclaim Christ’s resurrection to a world which struggles to acknowledge anything that cannot be experienced by the senses or verified by science? v What is your favorite Gospel story or New Testament passage dealing with Jesus’ resurrection? Why?

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