If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain. We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified of God that he raised.
(I Cor 15:14-15)
Today in liturgies throughout the world the word often heard is “resurrection.” Today is the day the Christian world celebrates and rejoices: It is the Resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. The words of St. Paul could not be clearer. This is the message of faith for the Christian professing the faith. If ever anyone wished to do away with the Christian belief, it could only occur if it could be proved that Jesus did NOT rise from the dead.
If the Resurrection were removed from the Christian story, what would remain? What we would have would be a collection of stories and events about God and humankind. We would have another religious world view. The reality would be this: “The Christian faith would be dead” (Pope Benedict XVI). Furthermore, the primary character in the story would be “a failed religious leader.” The Jesus role would be a “purely human” event in world history. A failed leader would not serve as a standard for Christianity. Only then could we opt for certain aspects of his life, “his heritage,” as norms for our own lives. We would be without a model that has nothing like it, equal to it or even better than it.
Only the Resurrection, Jesus risen from the tomb, changes world history. Repetitious world religion history would not be changed if Jesus had not risen from his death.
It is the Resurrection that actually teaches us who this historic figure was and continues to be. To best understand this extraordinary moment that truly changed human history, we must “listen” to the words that come to us from the New Testament. So we have to ask ourselves what truly happened.
From all accounts that we possess in the Scriptures, Jesus did rise from the dead and appeared to some witnesses in a period of time after his rising from the grave. What they experienced in this visitations was far beyond anything they had ever experienced. Even though they were compelled to tell others who had joined them in their allegiance to Jesus, these appearances were far beyond anything the had ever experienced. It was only in these experiences that the disciples could begin to understand the uniqueness of this event.
We know from the New Testament gospel accounts that “the miracle of resuscitated corpse” was very different from the “equivalent” to several events similar to this: the raising of (1)the son of the Naim widow; (2) Jairus’ daughter; and, (3) Lazarus. What we know about this three people is that they did return to a regular life and at another point in time their lives ended in a natural death.
With the Resurrection of Jesus, we encounter something very different. Almost 2000 years later we know this: Jesus did rise from the dead like the examples of other those just mentioned but we have never had a record of his continuing his life as usual nor did he ever die again. What the Resurrection teaches us is that Jesus’s Resurrection was about his “breaking into an entirely new way of life.” His new life was no longer constricted by the natural laws of becoming and dying. His rising put before the world “a new dimension of of human existence.” His rising was what Pope Benedict XVI calls an “evolutional leap.” His Resurrection is not considered an isolated event, limited to the past. Rather, in Jesus’ Resurrection there is a new possibility for human experience. Furthermore, it impacts not only Jesus but every human being created by his Father. His Resurrection present each of us with a “new kind of future.”
St. Paul, again writing to the Corinthian community, makes clear that Christians now have an inseparable link with the Son of God in and through his Resurrection.
What we give witness to in our celebration of this unique moment is that Jesus’ Resurrection is a “universal event, or it is nothing.” Jesus has returned to be among us but not in the “normal human life in this world like Lazarus” and others he raised from the dead. With the Resurrection, Jesus has rejoined the life of God, the life of his Father. It is from this new life that he has come to meet his friends. Through this great event, his followers and all humanity has reason “to believe in Jesus as the Son of God.”
The quoted words and phrases are from Pope Benedict XVI’s Jesus of Nazareth, Part Two, published just several weeks ago.
