Last week, residents of the Myrtle Beach area of South Carolina got a controversial message in their mailboxes: a postcard, with a picture of a dead white rabbit surrounded by a bunch of smashed colored eggs. The caption on the postcard read, “Bunnies stay dead. Jesus didn’t.”
A church in the area sent these postcards as an invitation to their Easter services (service times were listed on the back), but they may have turned off more people than they reached. The online comments on the news story run by the local television station admonished the church for the implicit violence in the ad and expressed concern over its potential effect on children.
But however disturbing the imagery and however crude the message, the church was right about one thing: Jesus didn’t stay dead. And that claim has been causing controversy since it was first made two thousand years ago.
The people of Jesus’s time knew just as well as we do that dead things usually stay dead. So when the women who had been to the tomb started telling the male disciples that Jesus’s body wasn’t there, and that then they saw Jesus – or, well, they didn’t really know it was Jesus at first because he was different – but they knew it was him, really! – no wonder the men thought it was an “idle tale,” as Luke puts it.
But then they started encountering Jesus as well. The same Jesus who had been killed just a few days before appeared to them in locked rooms, entering and exiting through walls, appearing and disappearing like a character in some kind of children’s folktale. The Gospel accounts repeatedly tell us that the disciples were terrified when they encountered Jesus and thought that they were seeing a ghost. But the stories of the resurrection appearances also are careful to document that Jesus was not in fact a ghost, nor were the disciples merely having a vision of their deceased teacher – those who saw him after his resurrection attested that Jesus had a real, physical body (that still bore the marks of his execution) and that he could eat food and be touched. It was like nothing they had ever experienced. He wasn’t a ghost, but he wasn’t a regular living human being either. He was a physical being, but not constrained by the limits of human physicality.
These stories were just as incredible in the first century as they are today, and despite the fact that Christianity has become the world’s largest religion, there are still plenty of people who do not believe that Jesus was actually, physically raised from the dead. One woman who commented on the news story about the dead bunny postcard wrote,
“Perhaps the most ignorant thing about the card is that Jesus IS dead. He lives on in our hearts, but as far as walking around goes, nope, not happening. So I guess he DOES have a lot in common with that dead bunny.”
But this is precisely what the followers of Jesus did NOT say about him after his death: that he “lived on in their hearts.” No, they claimed that he was actually, physically alive – albeit in a different kind of body than he had before his death. When we Christians say that Jesus lives, we do not mean that he lives in the metaphorical ways in which loved ones “live on” after their deaths in the memories of others. No, when we say Jesus lives, we mean that he actually LIVES, that he appeared to his disciples in an embodied, physical form after his death.
This claim is outrageous, and from the start it has provoked ridicule and disbelief. The skeptics of our day are not saying anything new when they point to the lack of hard and fast proof that the resurrection actually happened and thus discount the witness of the first Christians as fanciful and deluded. Even some within the church, unable to believe in the bodily resurrection themselves or perhaps embarrassed by the foolishness of it in the world’s eyes, concede to the skeptics that perhaps Jesus was not raised in the flesh. As Christians, they still want to hold on to a belief in the resurrection, so they do this by saying that Jesus was raised from the dead, but that his resurrection was a spiritual resurrection, not a physical one. It doesn’t matter whether or not Jesus was physically resurrected, they say, what matters is that his followers continued to have an experience of him in some way and that we continue to have faith in him today. Even if the body of Jesus was found tomorrow, I could still be a Christian, they would say.
But the bodily resurrection does matter to our faith as Christians. It may seem attractive to have a faith that is impervious to challenge from outside forces, and belief in a spiritual resurrection of Jesus certainly gives one that gift. But it contradicts the testimony of the first Christians – that Jesus appeared in bodily form after his death – a testimony that forms the heart of the faith that the church has handed down over centuries. And to me, it seems like an intellectually sophisticated version of “Jesus lives on in our hearts.”
It matters that Jesus’s resurrection was a physical reality, not a vision. If it was a vision, it is entirely subjective, something that is nice for us Christians to believe, but doesn’t make any kind of claim on anyone else. On the other hand, if it was an objective, physical reality, it changes the course of history for all people.
If the resurrection really happened, if God actually raised Jesus from the dead, then Jesus’s message has been affirmed and shown to be true. He was not a false prophet deserving death for blasphemy, but the actual Son of God. And if the resurrection really happened, then the powers of sin and death have been overcome by the powers of love and forgiveness.
At the heart of the good news that we proclaim to the world is that God is not a god of violence and revenge. Jesus does not come back to wreak vengeance on those who betrayed and killed him. He doesn’t destroy Pilate or the religious authorities who had him put to death. Instead, he returns speaking peace. “Peace be with you” are his first words to the disciples who had deserted and rejected him. And then he sends them out with a message of forgiveness and reconciliation for all people.
If Jesus lives, then the cycle of violence has been broken. And if we are in Christ through our baptism into his death and resurrection, then we too are given the power to resist the evils of this world without fear and without violence, because we know that we too will share in that resurrected life that transforms and embraces all.
Jesus didn’t stay dead. It is a controversial claim. Of course, we cannot objectively prove that Jesus was raised bodily from the dead, but one historical fact is undeniable, even by the most skeptical of scholars: Jesus’s followers believed he had been raised from the dead, in bodily form, and they risked their lives to bring that message to the world. The question for us is, will we believe them?
**I must acknowledge both Christopher Bryan's The Resurrection of the Messiah (Oxford University Press USA, 2011) and The Resurrection of Jesus: John Dominic Crossan and N.T. Wright in Dialogue (edited by Robert B. Stewart, published by Fortress Press, 2006), which both played a strong part in the development of the ideas in this sermon.
