Why Did Jesus Rise from the Dead?

In my last post, I talked about seven ways to understand the meaning of Jesus’ death. In this post, I will attempt to describe seven ways to interpret his resurrection. Like the cross, Jesus’ resurrection is a huge deal. I suspect most people, even many Christians, have a narrow, if not misguided, understanding of Jesus’ resurrection. In my case, growing up I thought that Jesus’ resurrection proved Jesus' divinity and made it possible to go to heaven after we die. To be clear, I absolutely believe Jesus is divine and that when we die, we’re with the Lord. But I don’t think either of these is fundamentally what Jesus’ resurrection is about.

You see, Jesus didn’t have to physically rise from the dead. For example, he could have risen without his body, returning to heaven in his pre-incarnational state. His Father could have said, “Son, we’re done here. These people don’t want us. It’s time we torched the place.” Think about it: why should God keep trying to help people who don’t want to be helped? Why continue loving people who tortured and cruelly executed your son? Why wouldn’t God give them the middle finger and pull the plug?

So, no, Jesus’ resurrection didn’t need to happen. (As far as proving he was alive, he could have appeared to his followers in a non-physical form.)

Before I share how I understand Jesus’ resurrection, based on my reading of Scripture, let me clarify what a resurrection is. It not only refers to someone who has physically risen from the dead, but someone with a transformed body – the indestructible body of the coming age. Jesus raised several people from the dead during his healing and teaching ministry. None of these are referred to as resurrections. There are three accounts of people being raised from the dead in the Old Testament, specifically in connection with the ministries of the prophets Elijah and Elisha. After Jesus’ resurrection, both Peter and Paul raised people from the dead. But Jewish and Christian scholars don’t call any of these resurrections. Nor does the Bible. New Testament scholar N.T. Wright calls these “resuscitations.” Resuscitated bodies, unlike resurrected bodies, eventually die again.

Reports that Jesus was the only one resurrected didn’t make sense to Jewish people. They believed there would be a general resurrection on the last day when people’s eternal destiny would be determined. None of the prophets had talked about a single person – even a Messiah – being resurrected, so the words “Christ is risen!” would have seemed nonsensical.

Of course, all this assumes that Jesus did, in fact, rise from the dead, and that there was something different about his body – for example, his suddenly appearing to his disciples in a locked room out of nowhere, and then asking for something to eat. Personally, I find the evidence for Jesus’ resurrection persuasive. It’s beyond the scope of this post to say more about that, but many intelligent and compelling books have been written about it, including N.T. Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God.

So, assuming for the moment, that Jesus did physically rise from the dead with a resurrected, transformed body, what's the significance of it happening?

1. Christ won!

The resurrection of Christ is his victory lap. The dark forces of sin, death, and evil have done their worst and been defeated. It’s clear now that death doesn’t have the last word.

Remember when Jesus told the man being crucified next to him, “Today, you will be with me in Paradise”? The shroud of death that hangs over all people has been shredded and will one day be removed altogether. The prophet Isaiah poetically describes that day:

On this mountain the Lord Almighty will prepare

    a feast of rich food for all peoples,

a banquet of aged wine—

    the best of meats and the finest of wines.

On this mountain he will destroy

    the shroud that enfolds all peoples,

the sheet that covers all nations;

    he will swallow up death forever.

The Sovereign Lord will wipe away the tears

    from all faces;

he will remove his people’s disgrace

    from all the earth.

The Lord has spoken (Isaiah 25:6-8).

It’s impossible to gauge how much the awareness and fear of death consciously and unconsciously affect how we live our lives. People have all sorts of psychological, philosophical, and spiritual ways to work with and around this fear -- all of them theoretical and based on some form of wishful thinking. But Christ’s death and resurrection happened. A Christian theology of death and the afterlife is based upon the historical events of Christ’s remarkable ministry, death, and resurrection, and how these impacted his followers soon after Jesus rose from the dead. (Read the book of Acts, an account of the early church. It’s a page-turner.)

2. Love won!

Remember when Jesus prayed from the cross, “Father, forgive them; they don’t know what they are doing”? When Jesus appeared to his disciples on Easter evening, his first words were, “Peace be with you!” These were the same disciples who had abandoned Jesus at the end. Their leader, Peter, had denied three times that he even knew Jesus. Jesus’ gracious greeting must’ve been music to their ears and balm for their souls. He could have said, “What sort of friends are you?! How could you?” Jesus’ surprising words lifted the burden of their guilt and shame and enabled them to bask in the joy of seeing him alive.

As for the rest of us, the death that should have damned us is the death God used to save us. In his first New Testament letter, John makes clear that the benefits of Jesus’ death extend beyond the failures of his circle of disciples: “And he himself is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for our sins but also for the whole world” (1 John 2:2).

We know now that God truly is love! (1 John 4:16). Sometimes I hear people say, “God is love, but he’s also just.” That word “but” is one of the most damnable words ever inserted into Christian theology. God is just because he is love. Yes, he allows and sometimes administers consequences, but it’s never for punishment or retribution. His goals include coming to the aid of the victims of injustice and the eventual reconciliation and restoration of their enemies. God is our Father. A loving parent disciplines their children to correct, teach, and restore. Christ didn’t die on the cross in order to love us, but because we are loved.

3. There absolutely will be a coming age, and it’s already begun.

The good news of Jesus Christ isn’t only about personal salvation. John writes: “God so loved the world that he gave his Son.” Like I said earlier, a resurrected body is a technical term for the body of the coming age. The fact that the Son of God, the second person of the Trinity, still has a (transformed) human body tells us that God has bought into that future 100%. God is all in. He is fully invested. Andrew Torrence says, “The Father sends the Son to identify with creation so that, in and through him, creation can return to the Father.”

Jesus’ resurrected body is a prototype of what will eventually happen to all creation. But it’s also a sign that the future age has, in a limited way, already begun. The coming age has started to bleed into the present age. The apostle Paul calls these inklings a “foretaste” and a “down payment.” Some of the present benefits of that future age include a deep and readily available forgiveness, the guidance and grace of the Holy Spirit, glimmerings of a revolutionary kind of community life, discovering intimate fellowship with the triune God, an ongoing process of personal transformation and healing, and the confidence that God can and will use everything in our lives for some good. I’m not trying to oversell any of these. Life can still be difficult. My own spiritual life still feels patchy and paltry. But I’m encouraged because I know this is just the beginning. I can honestly say that I’ve experienced at least some measure of all the blessings I just listed, and my experience has grown over time.

But this isn’t just a spiritual kingdom we’re talking about. Christ and his Spirit are spearheading God’s master plan to heal and restore all things. We get to help with that, with the comfort of knowing we don’t have to complete it. That’s why we shouldn’t get discouraged when progress is slow and there are setbacks.

God’s justice has begun to infuse and influence human institutions and relationships. The fact that so many people today embrace a “love your neighbor” approach to life is a sign of the kingdom’s influence. The fact that Jesus appeared to his disciples after his death over 40 days (Acts 1:3) symbolizes this overlapping of ages.

Let me share with you my elevator speech version of the gospel:

God loves this world and wants to transform it. Jesus is the key to that vision and mission. His life, death, and resurrection have made something possible that wasn't possible before. Each person can be born again into a living hope and join what God is doing in the world. Jesus Christ, the ascended Lord, wants to live with us and in us, forming communities of compassion where God is worshiped, the way of Jesus is learned, radical hospitality is practiced, and Christ's friends are sent into the world.

4. Jesus is the risen Lord.

According to John’s Gospel, Mary Magdalene was the first to see Christ alive. After Jesus said Mary’s name, she cried out, “Rabboni!” (“My Teacher”). Jesus replied, “Do not hold onto me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father” (John 20:17). We don’t know if Mary had actually grabbed Jesus or if Jesus was speaking figuratively. The point Jesus seems to be making is that Mary and others will not only have to let go of Jesus physically, but his role will change. Instead of only being their personal teacher and lord, he is now the risen and soon-to-be ascended Lord of heaven and earth. At Matthew’s gospel’s end, Jesus says, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.”

I mentioned earlier that Jesus greeted his disciples with the words, “Peace be with you.” A little later, Jesus said those words again, followed by, “As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.” Jesus wants his message of peace to be communicated to the entire world. A signature accomplishment of the Roman Empire was the Pax Romana or Roman Peace, but there were still ongoing conflicts, and prosperity wasn’t equally distributed. As the risen Lord, Jesus intends to establish a deeper, more equitable, more lasting peace. He commissions his disciples to be his emissaries: “As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.” Instead of demanding allegiance or using military force, Jesus tells them to preach a message of forgiveness:

And with that he breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive anyone’s sins, their sins are forgiven; if you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven.”

Instead of conquering the nations, Jesus told his followers to make disciples of all nations (Matthew 28:18-20).

5. There is always hope.

Because Jesus is the risen Lord, anything is possible now. He is the X factor in any situation. He told his disciples, “Ask, and you will receive; seek, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened.” This isn’t a blank check. We never know whether or how God will intervene. Jesus’ second coming will be his ultimate intervention, when everything will be as N.T. Wright says, “put to rights.” But God isn’t an absentee landlord. He is very much involved in his world, even though his ways are usually hidden and contain multiple agendas.

Take our present political situation. On Wednesdays at noon, Sharon and I join other clergy and believers in front of City Hall to pray for government leaders and God’s intervention on behalf of the victims of their current policies. Why pray? We believe in a God who is sovereign, who acts, and who uses various means to accomplish his purposes.

Earlier, I mentioned the New Testament book of Acts. In this account of the early church, we read about dramatic healings, people being raised from the dead, even divine jailbreaks. And martyrs die without being rescued, and church leaders like Paul are repeatedly tortured and spend years in Roman prisons.

We hope, even as we realize things don’t always turn out as we hoped. This isn't heaven. Yet, God is somehow able to use it all.

6. God’s ways can be trusted, even when they are unintelligible to us.

As our pastor, Rebecca Bell, said this past Sunday, at first there was no way for the disciples to make sense of what they were witnessing. They weren’t aware of any biblical or theological framework explaining Jesus’ death and resurrection. With Jesus’ personal instruction over the next 40 days and the ongoing guidance of his Spirit, these early believers began to see how Jesus’ entire ministry, death, and resurrection fit within the grand narrative of the biblical story: creation, vocation, fall, judgment and exile, redemption, and New Creation – a story that had repeated throughout Israel’s history. Jesus’ death and resurrection not only fit that narrative but fulfilled it.

Given all that is happening in the world right now – e.g. Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, and the unprecedented events within our own country and government – it can be hard to imagine how it is that Jesus is Lord at all, much less Lord of all. But he is. In addition to his direct involvement in the world, Christ uses his frail, sin-infected, mistake-prone followers to communicate and embody his good news. The abolition of slavery, universal access to healthcare, education for all, civil rights, human equality, care for the poor, regulation of capitalism, and stemming the excesses of human greed are some ways in which Jesus and his followers have made a difference. Yes, these changes are partial and have come about very slowly – sometimes despite the attitudes and actions of some of Jesus’ followers.

In an essay entitled “Three Mile an Hour God,” published in 1979, Japanese theologian Kosuke Koyama wrote:

We live today in efficient and speedy life. We are surrounded by electric switches, some of which cost us $10 and others may even cost $2000. We want more switches. Who among us dislikes efficiency and smooth going comfortable life...?

But let me make one observation. I find that God goes ‘slowly’ in his educational process of man. ‘Forty years in the wilderness’ points to his basic educational philosophy. Forty years of national migration through the wilderness, three generations of united monarchy (Saul, David, Solomon), nineteen kings of Israel... and twenty kings of Judah..., the hosts of the prophets and priests, the experience of exile and restoration – isn’t this rather a slow and costly way for God to let his people know the covenant relationship between God and man?

And then these insightful two lines:

God walks ‘slowly’ because he is love. If he is not love he would’ve gone much faster.

7. The risen Christ encounters each of us where we are, as we are.

After Jesus’ death, the disciples “were together, with the doors locked for fear of the Jewish leaders.” With the doors locked, “Jesus came and stood among them.” For many, if not most of us, there are parts of our selves or our stories that we’ve locked away. We hide these parts from others and even ourselves. God may be the last person we want to see them. Jesus understands and says, “Peace be with you.”

Earlier, Jesus had appeared to Mary Magdalene. Later, he came alongside two non-apostle disciples as they were returning to their village. We’re told they were kept from recognizing Jesus at first, even while he explained how his death and resurrection fit into the biblical story. Later, their eyes were opened during the evening meal. Immediately after they recognized him, he disappeared.

Thomas wasn’t with the rest of the apostles when Jesus first showed up. He was so traumatized by Jesus’ death that he refused to believe his companions when they said Jesus was alive. He told them, “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.” That’s quite a checklist.

A week later, when all the disciples were gathered, Jesus suddenly appeared and again said “Peace be with you.” Then he turned to Thomas: “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe.” His doubts evaporating, Thomas exclaimed, “My Lord and my God!”

There are all sorts of reasons why people resist putting their faith in Jesus, even if he did somehow rise from the dead. “So what? What does that have to do with me?”

Usually, there is some fear or hurt causing us to keep God and Jesus at arm's length. Churches and church people can also leave a bad taste in our mouths. For all I know, I’ve offended you. (I wouldn’t be surprised.) I've learned that while it’s essential that we not separate Christ from his church, we should still distinguish Christ from his church. Some say the church is in store for a once-in-500-years reformation. I’m hoping and praying for that.

One of the most moving encounters the risen Christ had with one of his followers was when he took Peter aside and asked Peter if he loved him. When Peter said that he did, Jesus repeated the question, and after getting the same response, asked the question again. So he asked him three times – the same number of times Peter had denied Jesus. I see Jesus massaging that shame-filled wound, reminding Peter that it is his love for Jesus, not his personal failures, that ultimately matters. Instead of berating Peter, each time Peter professed his love, Jesus responded by saying, “Then feed my sheep.” This was exactly what Peter needed.

What about you? What do you need from Jesus? Some of us may be “deconstructing” our faith, trying to figure out what we still believe and what we need to discard or hold lightly. Others may be intrigued by Jesus himself, but the whole church thing is a turnoff. For others, it may be some past trauma that’s making us cautious. May I make a suggestion? I’m going out on a limb here, but could I suggest that you tell God what you need from him in order to believe, or return to faith, or invest more deeply in your relationship with Jesus? I’m not saying he will answer your request exactly as you envision (though that may happen!). But keep your eyes and ears open, and see what happens.

In a recent op-ed, David Brooks wrote that Donald Trump doesn’t seem to know the difference between a risk and a gamble. I’m not sure I know the difference. We all need to take risks, and every risk is at least something of a gamble. As Blaise Pascal said, "You have to wager. It is not up to you; you are already committed."

Here are Jesus’ final words to Thomas:

Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.

My friends, Christ is risen.

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