The Resurrection of the Dead
As we approach Easter we are reminded about the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus from the dead. I have been thinking about life and death and life after death and the resurrection of the dead. Let me tell you an ancient story.
Two monks had lived for many years in an ancient monastery. Growing old together they became friends. They reached an agreement that whichever died first would come back and tell the other what it was like. The returning monk was to tap on the cell wall: once, if things were as they expected, twice if things were turning out different.
The day came and one of the monks passed away peacefully. The other monk was full of excitement and couldn’t sleep as he waited for his friend’s communication. Sure enough, in the middle of the night came a single knock on the cell wall. “Ah”, smiled the monk, pleased. But then his smile slipped as he heard a second knock. And then a third, and a fourth, and a fifth until he shouted out, “Stop, I have got the message”.
What do you about know about life after death?
On our day off last Wednesday, Alison and I treated ourselves to a takeaway curry and a video. We watched Grand Torino, the Clint Eastwood film. In it there is an awkward conversation between the Roman Catholic priest and Walt, Eastwood’s character, about who knows more about life and death. Walt claimed to know about death because he had killed people in battle, the priest claimed to know about death because he had studied theology. Neither knew much about life.
How much do you know about life and death…and life after death?
As I have been preparing for this talk I have been asking people what they think about the resurrection of the dead. I asked my dentist just as she was about to plunge something sharp and shiny into my mouth. I asked a coroner’s officer, someone who deals with the dead all the time, I even asked an accountant.
Everyone I asked immediately assumed I was talking about Jesus – even though they didn’t necessarily believe in him. In other words, the concept of the resurrection of the dead has settled deep into our consciousness as what happened to Jesus 2000 years ago.
The faith of those who do follow Jesus is based on a preposterous claim that Jesus died and then came back to life, a resurrection from the dead. We are so familiar with this idea that we sometimes forget what a strange thing it is that we are claiming. We forget about what an outrageous statement it is. Over familiarity has meant that we forget the reality.
Although most people connect the phrase “resurrection of the dead” with Jesus, few people can actually believe that Jesus did indeed rise from the dead. So I asked them, what do you think happens after you die?
The answers generally fall into four categories:
- At some point after we die there will be a general rising from death for everyone. There will be a judgement and as a result you either enter into the presence of God or you don’t.
Christians (mostly), Jews and Moslems believe some version of this and Jews and Moslems believe that that this life is inferior and provides an opportunity to sort things out to best advantage so that when we get to the point of judgement we have enough credit in the balance to get into heaven.
Christians believe that we can’t sort this out, we can only believe in Jesus and that he is the way to heaven.
- Or people talk about re-incarnation. Hindus and Buddhists believe in various versions of this and I find that many non-religious people have a sort of woolly expectation of “coming back” in some way. This way of thinking usually expects that incarnations are an opportunity to live better and better lives in order to eventually escape this body and merge with God in some form.
I find that most people assume they will come back as someone a bit like them but better off … if only they could be sure! That hope can become a curse.
- The ancient Greeks and similar cultures believed in an after-life in which the soul went on and on. For some human life was not a good thing, it was the soul being imprisoned in a physical body and being forced to feel pain and hardship. For others, the body provided an opportunity for the soul to experience pleasure.
- Many people just don’t know. The Coroner’s officer with whom I was talking was a Roman Catholic. “I go to Mass every Sunday” she said but confessed in a whisper that as a scientist and with her experience of dealing with dead bodies every day, she found it very difficult to believe in the resurrection from the dead.
The Christian understanding of the resurrection of the dead is thoroughly explored in the New Testament. I want to dwell on just one verse.
Because Jesus was raised from the dead, we’ve been given a brand-new life and have everything to live for, including a future in heaven – and the future starts now! God is keeping watch over us and the future. The Day is coming when you’ll have it all – life healed and whole.
1 Peter 1:3,4 The Message
For us, for followers of Jesus, for believers in the bible, we have a wonderful perspective on the resurrection of the dead. God created us and gave us life. Originally it was good – that’s how God described creation. “It’s good”. However Adam’s sin and ours has meant that although we experience something of the wonder of God’s creation, there is an awful gap between us and our creator and the experience of what he described as “good”.
And then, wonder of wonders, this creator God, instead of abandoning us to our fate, loves us so much that he gives his only son, Jesus, to suffer and die for us and pay the price for our sin. That story of grace differentiates Christianity from any other faith.
Nevertheless, although the price had been paid, the result was death, the same curse that has blighted humanity since Adam.
And then God raises Jesus from the dead, to conquer its power and release new life. And with that proven historical event in place we know that the forgiveness is effective and that a new life is received. And we have an insight into what life after death is like.
The resurrection of Jesus from the dead is both an absolutely crucial part of the good news and also an impossibility. It is such an extraordinary claim that many people simply can’t believe it. Or won’t believe it.
1. There is not enough evidence;
2. The story is fabricated - the disciples were lying;
3. Jesus didn’t really die in the first place;
4. It’s a myth that has grown up over time;
5. The disciples stole the body;
6. The Jews stole his body;
7. The Romans stole the body.
Few have the courage to follow the argument. If you won’t believe in the resurrection then you have to explain why the disciples claimed it. And no one has yet managed to provide an alternative to the truth of their claim.
Think about it; they had no expectation that Jesus would rise from the dead. Jesus did not speak of his own resurrection except in kingdom terms. Not only did the disciples not understand these allusions, no one in their world ever thought about the resurrection of the dead like that.
The predominate worldview at the time was of death being a one way street. When you died your body was left behind and your soul went on some sort of journey toward Hades. Some thought that was a good thing because the body was an encumbrance. Some thought it a bad thing, they liked this life.
An epithet frequently found on gravestones in the ancient world went:
Non fui, fui, non sum, non curo.
“I was not, I was, I am not, I don’t care.”
Thus the ancient secular world was divided into those who said that resurrection couldn’t happen, although they might have wanted it to, and those who said that they didn’t want it to happen knowing it couldn’t happen anyway. (NT Wright)
The Jews were divided between the Sadducees who didn’t think anything happened after death, that was it, and the Pharisees - who were the only people who believed in the resurrection of the dead. They believed that after death there was a waiting period before souls were re-embodied at a future resurrection.
There were a few stories from the Old Testament of people coming back down the one-way street and Jesus of course raised three people from the dead. But these are resuscitations not the new embodied souls expected at the final resurrection.
Try and imagine what it must have felt like at the turn of the C17th when the suggestion by some philosophers, most notably Galileo, that the sun was the centre of the universe was first made. No one thought that way and it was treated as a major threat to faith and order. Now we can’t imagine it otherwise.
Similarly it is hard to put ourselves back into the minds of the disciples but if Jesus had not physically risen from the dead, it is nigh on impossible to believe that the disciples would have alighted on that as an explanation for their faith.
The tone of the narratives about the death of Christ are sombre and more “goodbye” than “surprise”. To go from a place where you had no concept of the immediate resurrection of the dead and an atmosphere of grief and loss to making a claim that Jesus had risen from the dead is astonishing. It was a completely original thought, an audacious theological invention.
Something had happened.
Have you ever seen a dead body or have you ever watched someone die? Many of us have lost loved ones and have seen the last stages. When I saw my sister-in-law a few minutes after she had died it was very clear to me that she wasn’t there. People usually say something like, “He’s gone”, “She is not there any more”.
My good friend James Garvican is a Pathologist and does post-mortems. He said to me the other day that he has examined many dead bodies, hundreds, and although he finds many things, he has yet to find the soul.
Although we hear stories of people coming back from near death experiences, man has not yet worked out a way of stopping the process of death.
When someone dies the heart and/or lungs stop working and within a few minutes the brain cells die. Within several hours the muscle cells go and after a few days the skin & bone cells die too. There is no going back. It is irreversible.
Once Jesus’ heart had stopped (through asphyxiation if not shock), within minutes that irreversible process had begun. After 40 hours – approximately the time until the Sunday morning after the Friday crucifixion – his body would have started to decay.
If you have seen a dead body, especially one that has been dead for 40 hours, two things are abundantly clear:
1. That body is not a person;
2. For that body to regain life is a miracle of staggering proportions. It is a miracle!
When Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead it was a phenomenal event – a miraculous resuscitation. I am not sure Lazarus was so pleased – he was going to have to go through it all again one day.
But when Jesus was raised from the dead it was a miracle of a different order all together.
Jesus wasn’t just resuscitated – that would have been spectacular enough.
Jesus was given an extra-ordinary new, resurrected body.
Not only had his soul returned from hell, it was now embodied in flesh and bones.
But a new body, part of the promised new creation. The resurrection from the dead that the Jews expected in the future, in the life after the life after death, had happened now. Wow. It is bizarre, it is phenomenal, it is mind altering – which is what happened to the disciples. They changed their minds.
We know some interesting things about Jesus’ resurrected body:
1. He was recognisably Jesus;
2. It bore the scars from his wounds;
3. He ate and talked and walked;
4. He was not constrained physically as our bodies are;
5. Sometimes they could see him and sometimes they couldn’t;
6. Somehow he escaped from the grave – either because this body can move through solid substances or because he had superhuman strength to move the stone.
The risen Jesus gives us a glimpse into the future. Into what our bodies are like when the prophecy from Revelation comes to pass:
Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away … there will be no more death, or mourning, or crying or pain, for the old order of things had passed away.” Revelation 21: 1-4
When the disciples saw Jesus’ risen body they saw his eternal body! How amazing! They were given an astounding revelation of the future kingdom, of the one who is King of Kings and Lord of Lords and will sit on the throne to judge all creation, they had a revelation right then in their time, in dusty, hot, 1st century Palestine.
At some point in the future when God rolls up this creation and all our earthly bodies too, there will be a new heaven and a new earth. New bodies too.
Because Jesus was raised from the dead, we’ve been given a brand-new life and have everything to live for, including a future in heaven – and the future starts now! God is keeping watch over us and the future. The Day is coming when you’ll have it all – life healed and whole.
1 Peter 1:3,4 The Message
Today, when we see someone healed, or even raised from the dead; when we see the hungry satisfied and broken relationships restored; at those times we are witnessing a small glimpse of the future heaven, or kingdom, today.
When we pray “Holy Spirit come” we are asking for some of that “life, healed and whole”. to come to us today.
We can enjoy endless speculation on what Jesus’ body was like; What age was he? What condition was he in? Why did the scars show? Could he go through walls? Did he enjoy his fish & chips? What did he feel like? We simply don’t know – and we can’t fully know until we have those bodies too and live in the new creation.
CS Lewis is good at describing what that may be like. In The Great Divorce he describes the occupants of hell having a day trip to heaven. He talks about how the ghosts cut their feet walking on the grass because it is so much more solid than they are,
“The visitors from Hell are all unsubstantial ghosts, man-shaped stains on the bright air, whitish or grey, transparent and fragile. The inhabitants of heaven, in contrast, have become Solid People. They all shone with love and joy, but they are all very much themselves.”
Heaven lacks many things he says: no one is needed there, even by their closest relatives. No one can hurt another person or manipulate others there. There are no VIPs, everyone is famous and that is one’s only reputation. People have no religion there; they think only of Christ.
We think of this as solid – but it is as nothing to a resurrected body in a resurrected world.
And what that phenomenal event means, Jesus rising from the dead, is that yes our sins are forgiven, but death has been beaten too and we have not only been shown new life but we have been given new life too.
When we give our lives to Jesus, he forgives our sin and fills us with his Holy Spirit and we are given a new life. Although we currently live in our old body, its days are numbered and our new life has begun.
This has certain ethical implications, because of course it impacts the way we live our lives. I will explore that some more on Easter Sunday/next week.
Because Jesus was raised from the dead, we’ve been given a brand-new life and have everything to live for, including a future in heaven – and the future starts now! God is keeping watch over us and the future. The Day is coming when you’ll have it all – life healed and whole.
1 Peter 1:3,4 The Message
The resurrection of the dead is true:
• but it is not a sword of Damocles hanging over our necks for a future judgement day;
• it is not just a hoped-for but uncertain future sometime after we have entered the one way street of death;
• it is not resuscitation to our old bodies just for us to have to die again;
• it is not the curse of being reincarnated back into someone else’s flesh and bones.
Christianity, choosing to follow Jesus is not based on an emotional experience but on something that actually happened.
When you turn to Jesus, repent and give him your life, the resurrection of the dead is the gift of a brand-new life which starts today and which, once this world is over, is lived forever, is healed and whole and is good.
David Flowers, 05/04/2010