Did Jesus Really Rise From The Dead?

There is a moment in Martin Gardner’s novel The Flight of Peter Fromm that gets at a fundamental issue in biblical theology and in the life of faith for every believer: whether or not Jesus Christ really did rise from the dead.  

Peter is a pious young man (“Fromm” in German means “pious”) from Oklahoma who had been raised with certain preconceived notions about the gospel. Desiring to become an evangelist, he attends divinity school in Chicago. Once there, he encounters another set of notions, those of his professors. Caught between the certitudes of his childhood church and the heady ideas of academia, the walls of Peter’s faith begin to slowly break down.

But at one point along the way, Peter questions one of these theologians about the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. The professor responds with airy, insubstantial terminology that appears to reduce the resurrection to a mere symbol or metaphor, or to a pious wish. So Peter presses him (I am paraphrasing here), “But tell me, when Jesus rose, did he cast a shadow? Did his feet make crunching sounds in the gravel?” “Why, sure,” the professor replies, “in a spiritual sense.”

“If Christ has not been raised…”

But for those of us who wish to uphold a very orthodox theology and a deep respect for the authority of Scripture, we know that characterizing the resurrection as an entirely spiritual event will never do. When the apostle Paul heard that among the small myriad of controversies and squabbles in the church in Corinth, there was a denial of the actual raising of Jesus’s body, Paul swung quickly and decisively into action, insisting on the actual physicality of Christ’s resurrection. Paul minces no words:

But if it is preached that Christ has been raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the dead. But he did not raise him if in fact the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised either. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost. If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied (1 Corinthians 15:12-19).

Paul knew what we must know: take away the resurrection and our faith is gutted. Because then Jesus did nothing to defeat death, which just a few verses later, Paul calls the last enemy (1 Corinthians 15:26). The resurrection also had to involve Jesus’s actual body. From the beginning, the devil seems to have had one primary goal: the destruction of God’s good creation. Evil cannot actually build anything. It can only diminish and destroy what God built. Among the things evil wishes to sully and take away is human life, and our embodied human life at that. So Jesus had to come out of the tomb with a renewed body, with the body that still bore the scars of what happened to him on the cross. Because then God has vindicated the original goodness of the whole material creation and shows that the devil’s attempt to wipe out that physical cosmos will fail in the end.

Christ is risen

Many years ago, the novelist John Updike composed a poem he titled “Seven Stanzas at Easter.” I commend the whole poem to you. Particularly striking is the fourth stanza:

Let us not mock God with metaphor,

analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;

making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the

faded credulity of earlier ages:

let us walk through the door.

Updike’s reference to “the faded credulity of earlier ages” seems to be a knock on those theologians who claim that (and I again paraphrase), “Of course, the disciples and people in the Early Church believed someone could rise from the dead. They were such naïve and unsophisticated bumpkins after all. They did not have the scientific view of the universe that we enlightened modern people do.” But that is ridiculous, too. Not one of Jesus’s followers expected him to be raised, and when he was, their first reaction was fear. They knew full well that such a thing was not supposed to happen, even after he told them he would be raised (Matthew 16:21).

But it did happen, and once they were able to wrap their minds around that glorious fact, they realized this was now the genesis of all hope. Or as Paul puts it as he rounds out 1 Corinthians 15:

When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: “Death has been swallowed up in victory.” 

“Where, O death, is your victory?
    Where, O death, is your sting?” 

The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God! He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ (1 Corinthians 15:54-57).