A Little Book About a Little Word That Contains the World

Only 25 years after the crucifixion of Jesus, Paul wrote to some new believers that “if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith” (1 Cor. 15:14). The Resurrection is not the conclusion of the gospel; it is its beginning and center. Had Jesus remained dead, had the tomb not been empty, there would be no Good News to proclaim. In fact, there would be no news at all—corpses stay dead every day. One more wouldn’t muster interest.

For the apostles, theologian Michael Ramsey once wrote, “the Gospel without the Resurrection was not merely a Gospel without its final chapter: It was not a Gospel at all.” Put simply, “Christian theism is Resurrection-theism.”

It is passing strange, then, that so many people have tried so diligently to wrench Jesus away from the Resurrection—without, that is, accepting the consequences. Philosophers tried their hand at it during the Enlightenment, then skeptical biblical scholars took the baton and have been running with it since. 

When Ramsey published his little book The Resurrection of Christ about 80 years ago, he was responding to Protestant liberals who wanted to retain Jesus’ life and teachings but not his living presence. “The modern mind cannot accept the idea of a bodily resurrection for humanity,” he quotes from H. K. Luce’s commentary on Luke. (Ah yes, we meet again: the modern mind, that infallible fortress of scholarly prejudice. When you see its towers looming on the horizon, turn and run as fast as you can in the other direction.)

Similar attempts continue to this day. In 2019, for example, The New York Times published an interview with Serene Jones, president of Union Theological Seminary, in which she argued that the “message of Easter” is merely “that love is stronger than life or death,” and that this is actually preferable to a religion that depends—as Paul insisted—on the Resurrection: 

That’s a much more awesome claim than that they put Jesus in the tomb and three days later he wasn’t there. For Christians for whom the physical resurrection becomes a sort of obsession, that seems to me to be a pretty wobbly faith. What if tomorrow someone found the body of Jesus still in the tomb? Would that then mean that Christianity was a lie? No, faith is stronger than that.

Jones tried to nuance her answer after the fact (and any of us, excerpted by a journalist, might find ourselves humbled and wishing for a mulligan), but we should be clear: Whatever this is, it’s not Christianity. The problem is not just that her remarks were false or superficial but that they were dull, banal, boringAs Wesley Hill observed in an essay about the interview, nothing screams “Boomer religion” more loudly than a generic affirmation of love and a quiet dismissal of Christians’ “obsession” with Jesus’ resurrection.

It’s true that Christians are obsessed with the Resurrection, martyrs especially. That’s because Christianity is defined by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from death. As the liturgy has it, “Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.” Christians are those who are baptized into Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection and who proclaim their trust in him alone, the Living One, who died on a cross but will never die again. Our hope is that, by the power of God, the fate of Jesus will be ours, too.

In a word, Jesus’ rising from the dead isn’t a hypothesis the gospel offers for our consideration. It is the ground of faith, a nonnegotiable premise, the one and only reason to follow Jesus.

The Good News of Easter

Speaking of Wesley Hill, just a few weeks before Ash Wednesday, he has given us a new book grounded in that truth. Easter: The Season of the Resurrection of Jesus is part of the Fullness of Time series edited by Esau McCaulley and published by InterVarsity Press. 

This collection of seven books tracks the major seasons and feast days of the liturgical calendar: Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, Pentecost, and Ordinary Time. Alongside Hill are authors like McCaulley, Fleming Rutledge, and Tish Harrison Warren. The books are small, colorful, handsomely produced, and intended to assist churches and pastors in their use of the calendar. They may be particularly useful to evangelical congregations with no organic connection to the calendar tradition but a growing interest in its capacity to orient our worship to Christ. 

CT readers will likely be familiar with Hill as a writer, and particularly his work on sexual ethics. But he is also a priest, theologian, and scholar trained in New Testament studies. He has written about the Trinity, Paul’s letters, and much more besides, and is well qualified to explore the topic of Easter.

Compared with the series’ other titles, Hill’s is the least “calendrical,” if I may put it that way. He duly quotes the Book of Common Prayer and ancient patristic sermons; he reports marvelous experiences attending the Anglican Easter Vigil.

But mostly he just talks about Jesus. Easter is the sum and substance of the gospel, so Hill has the altogether happy job of telling the reader what the Resurrection means—why it is not just good news or even great news but the best possible news you could ever hear in your entire life. 

This is what Hill does, from a number of angles, across the book’s brief chapters. Following an introduction about the Easter liturgy, chapter 1 retells the stories of Easter morning found in Paul’s letters and the four canonical Gospels. Chapter 2 details the connection between the resurrection of Jesus and the baptism of believers. Chapter 3 outlines why and how the season (not just the day) of Easter came to be celebrated in church tradition. Chapter 4 moves to Acts, following the Anglican lectionary, which binds the mission of the church to the Great Commission of the risen Christ. Chapter 5 turns to the Ascension, which is inseparable from the Resurrection, the church, and the outpouring of the Spirit. Fittingly, the conclusion ends with Pentecost, which is the feast day and season that succeeds Easter.

What the Resurrection means

The great pleasure of Hill’s book is its transparency to Scripture. More than once I was gripped anew by the confounding, unsettling, life-altering fact that the man condemned to death by Pontius Pilate, rejected by his people, and abandoned by his friends returned to life with mercy on his lips.

Hill helps readers familiar with these passages to see how shocking they are. Following Robert Jenson and Rowan Williams, he suggests that the reason the apostles were huddled in the upper room may have been fear of being found out, not by the authorities but by Jesus. How could any of them, Hill asks, “be confident that Jesus hadn’t returned to enact a bloody vengeance?”

This is what longtime believers need to see about the Resurrection: The man with death behind him is forgiveness incarnate. He had every reason, in perfect justice, to return in terrifying judgment. Yet the scars he bore are not omens of revenge—eye for eye, whip for whip, nail for nail. His scars are instead a testament to his faithful and unflinching love. 

The Resurrection is a vindication of Jesus and confirmation of his identity. He will not be, now or ever, other than he was in Galilee and Jerusalem. As Hill writes, “The Jesus we see in the Gospels, the friend of prostitutes and lepers, is now the ruler and judge of all things.” In short, the Jesus you meet in the Bible is the only Jesus there is. If you fall in love with the man on the page, you aren’t falling in love with a dead man, like Socrates or Shakespeare, or even a saint, like Monica or Mary Magdalene. Jesus is alive. The man on the page is in heaven above.

But, Hill notes, this continuity of character does not mean that the Resurrection is simply the continuation of Jesus’ prior life by other means. His aging did not pause on Holy Saturday and recommence on Easter Sunday. His life is not extended but transformed (1 Cor. 15:42–49). Though risen bodily, he is not locatable somewhere in the universe, if only we had the right coordinates. This doesn’t mean Jesus is distant; precisely because he is at God’s right hand, he can draw near to you and me, even now.

Easter faith today

Christian faith is Easter faith. The one encapsulates the other. In the original Greek, the news of Easter morning could be put in a single word: ēgerthē (ἠγέρθη)—“He has risen” (Matt. 28:6).

Yet this one word is a microcosm, or synecdoche, for all the wonderful works of God. It is, in the words of the late theologian John Webster, “the open manifestation of the secret of the Word made flesh.” It is the destiny of the human race. It is the confirmation of the original blessing of creation, of the goodness of our mortal, finite, material bodies. It is the final future of all that is—the whole expanding universe, from quasars to quetzals to quarks. Every jot and tittle of the book of nature is charged with the hope of the glory of God’s Son, our Lord, “the First and the Last” and “the Living One,” who “was dead, and now look, [is] alive for ever and ever,” who holds “the keys of death and Hades” (Rev. 1:17–18).

Hill has written a little book about a little word that contains the world. “We aren’t trapped,” he says, and we need not succumb to despair, because “Jesus is alive.” Such a tiny sentence changes everything.

Only one tomb in the graveyard the women visited was empty. Yet they understood its wider import. Their cry was that of the psalmist: “You have turned my wailing into dancing” (30:11). This psalm, like every psalm, gives voice to us and to Christ, to body and head alike. The Lord says to his Lord, “You, Lord, brought me up from the realm of the dead” (v. 3). He turns to us: “Sing the praises of the Lord, you his faithful people” (v. 4). To him and to his Father in the unity of their Spirit, we reply: “Lord my God, I will praise you forever” (v. 12).

Easter is an eternal thanksgiving, the feast to end all feasts, because it gathers up all God’s love and all our joy and marries them forever in the happiness of the Trinity. In the risen man Jesus, divine life is undyingly ours. We can never be told this enough.

Hill’s Easter is a welcome addition to the chorus of voices unceasingly proclaiming this truth. And the next time someone tries to separate the Good News from the Resurrection, stifle a yawn, hand them Hill, and maybe, just maybe, it’ll help them uncross their fingers in worship. As for the rest of us, we won’t skip a beat.

Brad East is an associate professor of theology at Abilene Christian University. He is the author of four books, including The Church: A Guide to the People of God and Letters to a Future Saint.

The post A Little Book About a Little Word That Contains the World appeared first on Christianity Today.

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