In 1 Corinthians 15:12-14 St. Paul writes “Now if Christ is preached as raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead?  But if there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised; if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain.”

There is no Christianity without the resurrection of Christ.  Over the centuries, the Church has held fast to this truth – Christ was raised from the dead.  Literally.

In class we cover five full paragraphs of the catechism related to the resurrection (642-646).  Every year, I look for a way to reduce, consolidate, summarize them.  Then I read them, and that never happens.  They’re all important, and they address some of the more popular “myths” about the resurrection.  Like the community was just seized by a “mystical exaltation” and imagined they saw the risen Lord.  Or that a vision was produced by the apostles’ faith.  That Christ was a “ghost” they saw.  Along with the myths, they note the reality that resurrection of Christ was something substantially different than the raising from the dead he had accomplished in his ministry.  So, bear with me, here they are:

CCC642 (apostles)…As witnesses of the Risen One, they remain the foundation stones of his Church.  The faith of the first community of believers is based on the witness of concrete men known to the Christians and for the most part still living among them.  Peter and the Twelve are the primary “witnesses to his Resurrection”, but they are not the only ones – Paul speaks clearly of more than five hundred persons to whom Jesus appeared on a single occasion and also of James and of all the apostles.

CCC643 Given all these testimonies, Christ’s Resurrection cannot be interpreted as something outside the physical order, and it is impossible not to acknowledge it as an historical fact.  It is clear from the facts that the disciples’ faith was drastically put to the test by their master’s Passion and death on the cross, which he had foretold.  The shock provoked by the Passion was so great that at least some of the disciples did not at once believe in the news of the Resurrection.  Far from showing us a community seized by a mystical exaltation, the Gospels present us with disciples demoralized (“looking sad”) and frightened.  For they had not believed the holy women returning from the tomb and had regarded their words as an “idle tale”.  When Jesus reveals himself to the Eleven on Easter evening, “he upbraided them for their unbelief and hardness of heart, because they had not believed those who saw him after he had risen.”

CCC644 Even when faced with the reality of the risen Jesus the disciples are still doubtful, so impossible did the thing seem: they thought they were seeing a ghost.  “In their joy they were still disbelieving and still wondering.”  Thomas will also experience the test of doubt and St. Matthew relates that during the risen Lord’s last appearance in Galilee “some doubted.”Therefore the hypothesis that the Resurrection was produced by the apostles’ faith (or credulity) will not hold up.  On the contrary their faith in the Resurrection was born, under the action of divine grace, from their direct experience of the reality of the risen Jesus.

CCC645 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.

CCC646 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”.

In her 2013 Easter message, Bishop Mariann Budde who is the Episcopal bishop of Washington D.C.  said that “To say that resurrection is essential doesn’t mean that if someone were to discover a tomb with Jesus’ remains in it that the entire enterprise would come crashing down.  The truth is that we don’t know what happened to Jesus after his death, anymore than we can know what will happen to us.  What we do know from the stories handed down is how Jesus’ followers experienced his resurrection.  What we know is how we experience resurrection ourselves.

That experience is the beginning of faith, not in the sense of intellectual acceptance of an outlandish proposition, but of being touched by something so powerful that it changes you, or so gentle that it gives you courage to persevere when life is crushingly hard.”

To be fair to the Episcopal Church, that view is not consistent with their official teaching.  From page 868 of their book of common prayer:

1. Of the Resurrection of Christ.

Christ did truly rise again from death, and took again his body, with flesh, bones, and all things appertaining to the perfection of Man’s nature; wherewith he ascended into Heaven, and there sitteth, until he return to judge all Men at the last day.

https://www.episcopalchurch.org/files/book_of_common_prayer.pdf

One of the things that is most puzzling about her statement is the view that “we don’t know what happened to Jesus after his death.”  In my next post we’ll look at the Scriptures that tell us exactly what happened.