The Question of Easter Morning: The Answer of Easter Day (Part 11)

Within a few weeks of the death of Jesus, the apostle Peter stood up and declared to the people of Jerusalem: “God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified” (Acts 2:36). What had happened? How had Peter found hope in the tragic mission of his Master? How had he become convinced that Jesus was in some way alive?

All four Gospels agree that on the Sunday morning after the Friday on which Jesus had died, his tomb was found to be vacant. The evangelists also knew that an empty tomb, all by itself, proves nothing. The grave could have been empty for any of a number of reasons. As a result, the Gospels embellish the story with angelic visitations (adornments that may or may not have a factual basis) — angels who explain the meaning of the perplexing discovery of the empty tomb to the women who first came to visit the grave. According to St. Mark, however, at first the women did not say anything to anyone — frightened, perhaps, that no one would believe them — and indeed, according to St. Luke, when they did speak up, the apostles did not at first believe their “idle tales.” Two of the disciples, Peter and John, ran to the tomb to check out their story (Lk 24:24; Jn 20:3-10). Stories and rumors must have spread fast: did the disciples themselves steal the body (Mt 28:13)? Did the gardener and keeper of the tombs take it away (Jn 20:15)?

The answer to the question mark of the empty tomb comes with the sudden, wonderful appearance of the risen Jesus in the midst of his followers. The evangelists write these as a series of detached incidents, as if they were not able to put them into a developing narrative. Clearly, they had an impossible task: trying to describe and make sense of a unique event in history, something beyond its normal course, something brand new in human experience. And yet, as New Testament scholar C.H. Dodd pointed out, the essential pattern of all the accounts is the same: “the disciples are orphaned of their master; suddenly he is there — it may be on the road, in the garden, on a hillside, beside the lake, wherever they happen to be. At first there is amazement, with some doubt or hesitation, and then they recognize him” (The Founder of Christianity, p. 169). From each encounter, the disciples came away with the unshakeable conviction of the direct presence of the risen Lord.

Jesus was alive again — yet in a new way, clothed with a new kind of life, which may be one reason why the accounts tell us that the disciples did not recognize him at first. They were stunned, amazed, “blown away” not only that he was alive again, recognizably himself and standing before them, but also that he was in some way transformed. He returned in the flesh, for he ate bread and fish with them, and showed them his wounded hands and side; yet he also suddenly appeared and disappeared, and as St. Paul wrote — stretching the boundaries of language to the limit — he seemed “glorified,” with a “spiritual body” (I Cor 15: 1-19, 42-58).

In an important digression in their book The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus (2004), Gary Habermas and Michael Licona persuasively argue that by a “spiritual body” St. Paul certainly did not mean an immaterial body. Jesus was not a ghost. They write:

Many critics appeal to I Corinthians 15: 44-50 in order to support their view that Paul, the earliest author we know to have written about Jesus’ resurrection, says that he was raised a spirit rather than with a physical body. To support this view, these scholars appeal to Paul’s contrast of a resurrection body with our current mortal one by using the terms spiritual and natural. Some translations, like the New Revised Standard Version, use spiritual and physical. If this is correct, Paul is saying that the earthly body is material while the resurrection body is spiritual or immaterial.

A more careful look at the two Greek words Paul uses reveals that this interpretation is incorrect. Outside of this passage in I Corinthians, Paul uses the word translated “spiritual” (pneumatikos) in the sense of the spiritually mature in this world (2:15; 3:1; 14:37; cf. Galatians 6:1), or of something that has to do with, or has as its origin, the Holy Spirit (2:13-14; 9:11; 10: 3-4; 12:1; 14:1). With the possible exception of Ephesians 6:12, the term is never used in the Pauline letters to refer to or describe a being as immaterial.

But what about the term translated “natural” and “material” (psychikos)? Paul uses the term a total of four times in his writings, all in I Corinthians (2:14; 15:44 [2x]; 15:46). Granted four times is not a large sampling. When we observe how the other New Testament writers as well as intertestamental writings employ the word, we observe that neither Paul nor any other New Testament author nor the writers of the intertestamental books ever use psychikos to refer to or describe something as being material.

Accordingly, any attempts to use this passage to support an immaterial resurrection body are mistaken. Paul is also clear in other texts that Jesus was raised bodily. (p. 164-165)

Indeed, in I Corinthians 15: 35-41, he speaks of a continuity between the earthly human body that is sown in the ground at death, and the heavenly body that springs from it at the resurrection.

(More about St. Paul and the resurrection in future articles in this series.)

As we proceed, let’s remember that Jesus appeared to broken-hearted followers who had seen all their hopes and dreams shattered on Calvary, who would soon be hunted down by the Jewish and Roman authorities (or so they feared), and whose conscience was wounded by the fact that in the hour of trial they had abandoned their Master and their friend. They were expecting nothing more from life. One of them lamented: “We thought he was the one to save Israel” (Lk 24:41).

As we consider the historical evidence for what happened on the first Easter, let’s also continually bear in mind that something must have changed the followers of Jesus from disheartened, and disillusioned disciples into confident leaders of a new movement for which, in the end, they gave their lives. The historian cannot explain away Easter without accounting for the sudden explosion of Easter faith among his disheartened disciples. They at least were sure that their treasured relationship with Jesus of Nazareth had been miraculously restored and transformed, and this formed the basis for all their preaching:

Men of Israel, hear these words: Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with mighty works and wonders and signs which God did through him in your midst, as you yourselves know — this Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men. … This Jesus God raised up, and of that we are all witnesses. Being therefore exalted at the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he has poured out this which you see and hear. … Let all the house of Israel therefore know assuredly that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified. (Acts 2:22-23, 32-33, 36)

Furthermore, it is not just their newfound faith in a risen Jesus, and their sudden burst of courage and missionary zeal that needs explaining. The historian also needs to explain what led the first Christians radically to redefine the idea of the Messiah, from the conqueror of the Romans that most of the Jews expected, to a suffering servant of the Lord vindicated by God through resurrection. Bishop Robert Barron lays out for us just how extraordinary this transformation of religious belief really was:

[I]t is practically impossible to explain the emergence of Christianity as a messianic movement apart from the resurrection. In the context of first- century Judaism, the clearest indication possible that someone was not the Messiah would be his death at the hands of Israel’s enemies, for as we have seen, one of the tasks of the Messiah was to battle those enemies successfully and unite the nation. … Yet the first Christians stubbornly and consistently proclaimed the crucified Jesus as Messiah. Paul refers time and again in his letters to Iesous Christos, which is his Greek rendition of Ieshoua Maschiach (Jesus the Messiah). The first disciples went to the ends of the world and to their deaths declaring the messiahship of Jesus. How can we realistically account for this apart from the actual resurrection of Jesus from the dead?

Far too many scholars attempt to explain away the resurrection, turning it into a myth, a legend, a symbol, a sign that the cause of Jesus goes on. But this kind of speculation is born in faculty lounges, for few in the first century would have found that kind of talk the least bit convincing. Can you imagine Paul tearing into Corinth or Athens or Philippi with the message that there was an inspiring dead man who symbolized the presence of God? No one would have taken him seriously. Instead, what Paul declared in all of those cities was anastasis (resurrection). What sent him and his colleagues all over the Mediterranean world (and their energy can be sensed on every page of the New Testament) was the shocking novelty of the resurrection of a dead man through the power of the Holy Spirit. (Catholicism. New York: Image Books, 2011, p. 31-32)

Next time: The Appearances of the Risen Christ

Robert Stackpole, STD
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