Interpreting the Resurrection

The Church owes the world a consistent and reasonable account of the faith to which it bears witness. For example, it cannot make propositions that lead to unsolvable problems.

While it is often the case that the Gospel was and is countercultural and stood apart from the mores of society, it also, particularly in our own time, must take into consideration substantial descriptions of the world.

For us, those descriptions have removed any thought of the existence of a supernatural realm. We live, in what the sociologist Max Weber described, in a disenchanted universe.

While it would appear that this view leaves Christianity without a leg to stand on, a closer inspection demonstrates that rather than demolish it, it actually focuses it central aspects.

A case in point, highlighted by the closeness of Easter, is what the Church means when it talks about the resurrection of Jesus. It is imperative that the Church talks clearly about this because it is at the very centre of faith.

A useful place to begin is to compare the resurrection with the crucifixion. We understand the crucifixion. The man Jesus was crucified "under Pontius Pilate", as the creed states. It was an historical event open to observation by all people. Jesus was given a second name "Christ" that refers to him being crucified.

The passion narratives of all four gospels are dramatic constructions on an historical base loaded with irony, puzzlement, dread and exposure of the hidden thoughts of many. It may be argued that the passion narratives that tell of the arrest, trial, scourging and crucifixion of Jesus lie at the centre of the Faith

The resurrection is much harder to understand because it is not open to historical inspection as is the crucifixion. Witnesses to the resurrection became believers; to witness the resurrection was to believe.

Thus the resurrection is a phenomenon that is held to have occurred by the Church and not by anyone else. By contrast to the passion narratives the narratives of the resurrection appearances are contradictory across the gospels. Mark, the earliest gospel relates no resurrection appearances. There is much to puzzle over, Jesus appears and disappears and is not recognised by his disciples.

In other words, the resurrection appearances do not read like history but like legend.

The idea of resurrection came to Judaism late, during the Maccabean wars (beginning 166BCE) and took for granted that the only possibility of justice in the face of cruel persecution and in the absence of a conception of soul/body dualism would be the restoration of the body.

For Jews, there can be only the resurrection of the body. Since they had no idea that the soul could exist as a form of life apart from the body, any continuation after death had to be in the body. In other words, there is no life without the body.

This means that the resurrection cannot be primarily understood as the residual memory of Jesus or as the continuation of his ideas or ideals or morality although these things do, of course exist. But they do not represent the full meaning of His resurrection.

When we talk about the resurrection of Jesus we can only talk about a physical body being raised from the dead.

This presents us with some problems in our time of disenchantment. If the resurrection was really the resuscitation of a dead person so that he could walk and talk and eat like any living being, as witnessed to in the gospels, did he have to die again and if he did where is his grave?

Why did the disciples that met him on the road to Emmaus in the gospel of Luke (chapt. 24) not recognise him? And why did they only recognise him when he broke bread with them, a clear Eucharistic sign? And how did he disappear from them?

If it was the resuscitated Jesus how could he have appeared in the locked upper in John 20.. and then just as easily disappear? We also note that although he invited Thomas the doubter to place his finger in the wound in his side, that we are not told that he did so but came to belief anyway. Indeed, Jesus' response to Thomas' belief indicates that actual seeing is not such an imperative: "Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe"

The problem with resurrection as resuscitation is that we do not know what to do with the now living Jesus. We are not told that he was reunited with his mother who we are to understand now lives in the house of the beloved disciple (John 19:26).

Luke has his own solution that is not shared with the other gospel writers in that he has Jesus ascend into the heavens like Elijah. But this does not solve the problem: Jesus is transferred from the earth to heaven as a living body. A living body must exist in a place, but where?

These problems will not be solved simply by asserting that faith is belief in what is ordinarily impossible but for the action of God. This may paper over the difficulties but they remain and will be an obstacle blocking the way of those who seek to understand.

It seems that we have painted ourselves into a corner. The resurrection of Jesus can only be the resurrection of the body. However, simply understood, that opens into all kinds of unsolvable problems. How else can we understand it?

I think that the only way forward is to understand the resurrection stories metaphorically and not as a nature miracle. The metaphor that is used is a metaphor of the body and it points to the real presence of Jesus in the Church that becomes His body alive in the world.

The central sacrament of the Church, the Eucharist or Mass, celebrates this reality. The bread is the body and the wine is the blood of Christ. This would be impossible without the understanding that the risen Christ is present not as a spirit or an idea or a memory but in the body: "For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them."

Thus the resurrection is not a nature miracle and proof of the power of God over physical death. It is the mainstay of how we understand what the Church is. Evangelism that takes the resurrection as resuscitation will be still born because it ignores the biblical witness to the contrary and the perfectly rational objections to the problems that arise.

When resurrection is resuscitation we are tempted to ignore what it means for how we understand Church and use it as a short cut to triumphalist thinking. It has been said that the Church sits uneasily with tragedy, with some justification. When the resurrection is used to change our perception of tragedy in a positive manner then we distance ourselves from the reality and compassion in us is damaged.

The resurrection is a real source of hope because it speaks of the presence of Christ in the Church not because it guarantees the existence of a God who will make everything right if only we believe. Tragedy is real in our lives, it crushes us whether we believe or not. As I indicated in my last post about the cry from the cross, Jesus plumbs the depths of human tragedy in which everything is emptied.

The common liturgical greeting is "The Lord be with you". Thus our hope is grounded in the presence of God i.e. the presence of the crucified and risen one. This occurs within a body, the body of the Church, without which the resurrection is meaningless and is why worship is at the center of Christian life.