Spirituality: Resurrection: Beyond Ghosts and Ghouls

Communities of Resurrection

Theology uses confession, the testimony of a community’s stories and personal experience, as primary data. Evaluating the resurrection accounts alongside the founding language and overall traditions of the various believing communities allows us to give the event a meaningful interpretation.

The living presence of Christ in community is a primary experience whereas the resurrection is the theological concept used to describe an event that predated those encounters. A personally perceived encounter with the formerly crucified and dead Jesus demands an explanation. The primary toolkit available to the early interpreters of this living presence came from Jewish apocalyptic. Resurrection in Jewish apocalyptic represents a type of cosmic hope in a time of national and personal abandonment; it became a resource for national religious martyrs who faced death with assurance of a bodily return.

In Ezekiel the resurrection image was depicted as the revitalizing of the dry bones of a dead nation. National impotence was overcome by the inauguration of God’s new reign called The Day of the Lord. This Day buried the current political systems in an eternal realm of justice and compassion. The timetable for this was at the end of temporal time; those involved in this kingdom were known as the Children of Light. Depending on the school of apocalyptic there was a figure known as the Teacher of Righteousness, Son of Man, or Messiah who would initiate the new cosmic era.

The Jesus Community had hoped that their leader would be the apocalyptic messiah but with his crucifixion and death that hope was obliterated. For those on the way to Emmaus, hope died on Golgotha:

This man was a prophet and was considered by God and by all the people to be powerful in everything he said and did. Our chief priests and rulers handed him over to be sentenced to death, and he was crucified. And we had hoped that he would be the one who was going to set Israel free! Besides all that, this is now the third day since it happened (Luke 24:20-21).

They scattered and returned to their occupations disillusioned. The impetus to proclaim the risen Christ surfaced when some reported seeing Jesus returned from the dead. They continued using the idiom of the apocalyptic but in a way that revolutionized it, setting a path for a new universal interpretation of its language. Jesus said in his ministry that he fulfilled and exceeded the Law. Nowhere is this principle more apparent than in the understanding of the resurrection. Never was there an apocalyptic expectation that one individual would be resurrected and especially that this individual would be the coming messiah. The reconfigured message, while using the language of apocalyptic, completely reinterprets and demolishes it. Instead of national liberation and a liberating messiah the gospel proclaimed universal liberation and a messiah who conquered through suffering and forgiving even the oppressor. The best news yet was that through the Suffering Servant’s raising and vindication the exodus was offered to the entire world and not to only one nation.

popup text

These were the apocalyptic images and symbols used to understand what had happened to Jesus Christ. The appearances themselves are wrapped in this linguistic skein and used to tell about genuine encounters with the raised One. Some of the gospel writers used the idea of seeing Jesus alive as a form of inner revelation or an unveiling; Christ allowed himself to be seen and the witness was passively involved. In other stories, faith and interpretation seem to be vital ingredients. Some saw the Risen Christ and others doubted and couldn’t see him (Matthew 28:17). If the showing of Christ were an ordinary event that could be captured on film then how could they doubt? Like the resurrection, the early appearances seem to have been aspects of eschatological history or the in-breaking of God’s future kingdom manifest to those with faith on the borderline of history.

Where the modern emphasis is “What actually happened at the precise moment of resurrection?”, the New Testament is more interested in answering, “How did the various communities who had encountered the living Christ describe the resurrection, find meaning in it, and live it?” Distinguishing between these questions ought not to imply that the resurrection did not happen, it merely points out that the early church did not puzzle over the metaphysics of the resurrection or question its historical validation. They assumed the resurrection was an inexplicable, mysterious eschatological fact, the dynamics of which were not speculated upon. They alleged that resurrection gave rise to a faith community that was in harmony with and permeated by the life of Jesus of Nazareth. The New Testament never pitted the fact of the resurrection against its meaning or interpretation.

Previous 1 2 [3] 4 Next