Happy Easter

The Resurrection as pictured by Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld

Jesus said to [Martha], "I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and whoever lives and believes in me shall never die." - John 11, 25-26 (RSV)

The Christian faith in the Resurrection does not deny death, though it can be used in that way at some level. Rather, it affirms that people can experience eternity in our earthly lives, through life and love themselves. And that this experience of our lives is not solely related to the material facts of our earthly lives.

Jesus appears to Mary of Magdala

Now when he rose early on the first day of the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene, from whom he had cast out seven demons. She went and told those who had been with him, as they mourned and wept. But when they heard that he was alive and had been seen by her, they would not believe it. - Mark 16: 9-11

"Gregory of Antioch (d. 593) portrays Jesus as appearing to Mary Magdalene and the other Mary at the tomb and saying to them: 'Be the first teachers to the teachers. So that Peter who denied me learns that I can also choose women as apostles'." - Ann Graham Brock, Mary Magdalene, The First Apostle: The Struggle for Authority (2003).

Image from St. Martinskirche, Messkirch

I say, to believe in the Resurrection is to trust in God that His love will survive death. But it's not done with such statements. The Bible lives by pictures, and only he who understands the language of these images can preserve the truth of the faith. Even the empty tomb is an image for a truth of faith. - Eugen Drewermann, interview with Der Spiegel 52/1991 (12/23/1991 issue)

A Reubens version of the Resurrection

Spiegel: Was Jesus' tomb empty? Did Jesus rise physically from the dead on the third day after his death? That is what is celebrated on Easter.

Drewermann: If I say the Easter stories are legends, some will say that, therefore, they didn't happen. But that is thinking too simplistically. Even legends have their own value. But one can't avoid the findings of exegesis - therefore of New Testament research: the Easter stories did not provide the basis of the belief in the Resurrection, rather they only want to explain it. They are meant to proclaim in images that the story of Jesus did not end with His death on the Cross.

Spiegel: Therefore pious literature instead of truth?

Drewermann: Literature instead of historical reports, not instead of truth.

Matthias Grünewald's cosmic vision of the Resurrection

Spiegel: Only an image, not a report. Therefore you agree with [Biblical scholar Rudof] Bultmann: "A corpse cannot come to life again and climb out of the grave."

Drewermann: So it is. That goes for the grave of Jesus, and it goes for all other graves: in Verdun and in Vietnam, in Paderborn [where Drewermann's parish was located] and in Hamburg [where Spiegel is published]. The Resurrection is just so little visible there as three days after Easter in Jerusalem.

This interview of Drewermann's with Der Spiegel didn't make the Vatican happy, to put it mildly. But although most Christians probably assume that the Resurrection involved the physical resuscitation of Jesus' body, Christian doctrine understands the Resurrection as a spiritual event.

Drewermann's formulation emphasizes a key element of the Christian understanding of the Resurrection and eternal life: the emphasis on the importance of life in this world. Whatever the fate of souls may be the other side of death, the Christian religion insists on recognizing that something important and vital and irreplaceable is lost when people's lives are terminated prematurely.

The 1994 version of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, prepared under the direction of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, insists on the certain physical aspects of the Resurrection experience. But even the Catechism hedges its language carefully. The Catechism notes that the empty tomb "is not a direct proof of Resurrection" because "the absence of Christ's body from the tomb could be explained otherwise." (Item 640) Even the disciples themselves are recorded in the Gospels as reacting to the news of the empty tomb by asking whether Jesus' body had been stolen.

Hans Küng observes in Credo (1992) that the earliest mention of the Resurrection in the Christian Bible comes in St. Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians 15:4 and does not mention the empty tomb in connection with the Resurrection at all:

For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas [Peter], then to the twelve. (1 Cor. 15:3-5)

Nor does Paul rely anywhere in his writings, Küng notes, rely on the "empty tomb" as part of the Resurrection doctrine. And St. Paul was, after all, the first Christian theologian.

But even in what seems to be a direct description of the Resurrection as a physical event, the Catechism's language, at least in the English translation, doesn't quite insist on the physical resuscitation of Jesus' body: "Given all these testimonies [in the Gospels], Christ's Resurrection cannot be interpreted as something outside the physical order, and it is impossible not to acknowledge it as an historical fact". (643)

I'm not focusing on this as some sort of argument against village atheists or hardline philosophical materialists. It's a question of the religious, theological meaning of the Resurrection, however closely one might wish to parse how "historical" the event was.


The language of the Catechism can be easily misread if one forgets that for Catholic Christianity, there is a distinction between spiritual and material, but not between spiritual and real. Thus, the Church recognizes an essential continuity between the physical body of Jesus and his post-Resurrection body, while nevertheless insisting on a fundamental difference between the Resurrection of the Lord and the physical resuscitation of others in the Scriptures (645-646):

By means of touch and the sharing of a meal, the risen Jesus establishes direct contact with his disciples. He invites them in this way to recognize that he is not a ghost and above all to verify that the risen body in which he appears to them is the same body that had been tortured and crucified, for it still bears the traces of his Passion. Yet at the same time this authentic, real body possesses the new properties of a glorious body: not limited by space and time but able to be present how and when he wills; for Christ's humanity can no longer be confined to earth, and belongs henceforth only to the Father's divine realm. For this reason too the risen Jesus enjoys the sovereign freedom of appearing as he wishes: in the guise of a gardener or in other forms familiar to his disciples, precisely to awaken their faith.

Christ's Resurrection was not a return to earthly life, as was the case with the raisings from the dead that he had performed before Easter: Jairus' daughter, the young man of Naim, Lazarus. These actions were miraculous events, but the persons miraculously raised returned by Jesus' power to ordinary earthly life. At some particular moment they would die again. Christ's Resurrection is essentially different. In his risen body he passes from the state of death to another life beyond time and space. At Jesus' Resurrection his body is filled with the power of the Holy Spirit: he shares the divine life in his glorious state, so that St. Paul can say that Christ is "the man of heaven". (my emphasis)

It is this aspect of the Resurrection Jesus as "the man of heaven" which Grünewald's depiction shown above emphasizes. The Catechism also recognizes a distinctive feature of the Resurrection as presented in the Gospels is that the post-Resurrection appearances of Jesus often found people who knew him extremely well not recognizing him at first:

[Mary Magdalene at the empty tomb] turned around and saw Jesus standing, but she did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to her, "Woman, why are you weeping? Whom do you seek?" Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, "Sir, if you hhave carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away." Jesus said to her, "Mary." She turned and said to him in Hebrew, "Ra-bo'ni!" (which means Teacher). - John 20: 13-16 (RSV)

The Catechism recognizes the essential mystery in the Resurrection:

Although the Resurrection was an historical event that could be verified by the sign of the empty tomb and by the reality of the apostles' encounters with the risen Christ, still it remains at the very heart of the mystery of faith as something that transcends and surpasses history. This is why the risen Christ does not reveal himself to the world, but to his disciples, "to those who came up with him from Galilee to Jerusalem, who are now his witnesses to the people." (647)

Hans Küng writes that although the term "mystery" is often misused by Christians, the Resurrection in a mystery in the truest Christian sense of the word, because it deals with "God's fundamental realm", that being "in the resurrection to new life". The Resurrection of Jesus is not theologically about a return to earthly life but "in the apocalyptic-Jewish horizon of expectations, has to do directly with the raising of this executed and buried Nazarene from God to God, to a God that [Jesus] himself called "Abba", "Father". (bolding in original)