Jesus fulfilled hundreds of Old Testament prophecies, but the most astonishing was His own: “On the third day, I shall rise again”
The words of the angels who greeted the holy women outside of Jesus’ tomb tell us all we need to know: not only has He risen from the dead, but He has fulfilled His own prophecy.
In fact, Jesus recapitulates all of salvation history in this way: He fulfills the prophecy that began in the Garden of Eden (“I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring”) and continued throughout the history of the Chosen People.
It is we — each one of us — who are the heirs and beneficiaries of this fulfillment. He has overcome death: not only His own, but ours as well. Let us rejoice: Alleluia!
A metaphorical resurrection it wasn’t — Jesus gave us… the real thing
By Anthony Esolen
The Three Marys at the Tomb by Italian artist Annibale Carracci (1560-1609), Hermitage, St. Petersburg, Russia. The three Marys find the tomb… empty
A long time ago, I was present at a heated discussion between one of my colleagues, a Catholic who taught English literature, and a liberal Dominican priest. The priest said he was not certain that Jesus rose from the dead. Since the resurrection is the center of our faith and the great promise it offers to man, my colleague was astonished. “What do you tell the people at Mass?” she asked.
“Oh, I keep this opinion to myself,” he replied, with an air of sadness and condescension.
“But if you believe it is true,” I joined in, “why do you hide it?”
He had no answer to that. There was, mingled with that sadness, also the whiff of death and corruption.
Let us be clear. The people in Jesus’ time knew that dead bodies remain dead. They were closer to death than we are. There were no funeral directors to keep the unpleasant details of bodily corruption away from the loved ones.
That is why the holy women went to the tomb on that Easter morning. But that tomb turned out to be empty.
Or rather it was not empty, because two young men appeared there at the entrance, dazzlingly bright. That filled the women with awe, and they fell to their faces before them (Lk. 24:5).
The words we translate as tomb, Greek mnema (Lk. 24:1) and mnemeion (Jn. 11:38), have a strong verbal force, one which I wish to bring out, to counter what that priest of tenuous faith had to say about it. We may think of it as a memorial, where people go to remember someone who is no longer with us. We understand that only the dead are remembered in this way, as no one erects a memorial to the living. Nor were the people in those times prone to gauzy reflections about how the dead are still with us “in the spirit,” whatever that is supposed to mean.
Dead was dead. “It’s been four days,” said Martha of her brother Lazarus in the mnemeion, “and he will be stinking” (Jn. 11:39). That too is why the holy women brought their spices, their aromata (Lk. 24:1).
But the ironic thing about the women’s situation, as also about the disciples on the road to Emmaus and the apostles in hiding, is precisely that they have forgotten what Jesus said, or not understood it. That is, they must have taken as a mere figure of speech what Jesus had said.
“Remember,” say the young men (Gk. mnesthete) that “the Son of Man had to be given over to the hands of sinful men and be crucified, and on the third day he would rise again” (Lk. 24:7). You do not have to be a modernist professor of theology to know what a figure of speech is. What but a figure of speech was it, so people thought, when the prophet said that the name of the Messiah would be ‘Immanuel, meaning “God among us”? (Is. 7:14).
They could not have conceived of the Incarnation. As Jesus was Immanuel quite literally, in the flesh, so He arose quite literally, in the flesh. If He did not arise, we may say that he was not Immanuel either, but only a prophet. Even the best of dead men is dead, and his words begin to fade. Yet “Heaven and earth shall pass away,” said Jesus, “but my words will never pass away” (Mt. 24:35).
If Jesus did not rise, his words there are mere madness; but since even to His doubters Jesus has appeared to be the sanest man who ever lived, and since the apostles had no way to conceive of what he meant other than that there was some mysterious figurative meaning he intended, they must have thought, “Perhaps He will explain this to us someday,” and left it at that.
He would explain it by His resurrection.
And what is that, the Resurrection?
Let us be as literal and as physical as possible. The women expected to find a corpse, lying where it had been laid, with the uneasy odor of decay already about it, since the Sabbath evening fell before they had time to anoint the body.
But they are, say the angels, seeking the living among the dead. “He is not here,” they say. “He is risen” (Lk. 24:6). The Greek verb egerein, means to rise up, as in arms; to cause or bring into being; to rouse or stir up; to awake. And what does a person do as soon as he wakes? He gets up: he stands. That is the meaning of Greek anastenai, to rise up, to stand: what the angels say Jesus has done (24:7). That is what the verbal noun anastasis denotes: resurrection, standing up.
Imagine entering the memorial, then, having forgotten what Jesus said, forgotten it by never having understood it to begin with, and seeing that the body you expected to find there has awaked and gotten up, standing on his two feet, going to meet them in Galilee.
Of course, that is not all that the Standing-Up of Jesus means, not by far. The seed gives rise to the green plant. What is sown in corruption, says Saint Paul, arises in incorruption (1 Cor. 15:42). The resurrection is not a resuscitation. Lazarus, we may say, was resuscitated, and although he woke up and stood again, he would again fall asleep and fall prey to death. This world of things we in our mortal bodies can see and touch is, shall we say, hypo-dimensional, a flatland embedded within a greater reality, so that what appears to us as inexplicable may, even apart from any special miraculous intervention by God, be but the result of the ordinary action of objects in that higher reality. In any case, one greater than Lazarus is here.
But whatever will be revealed to us about the glorified body in the resurrection of the dead, this much we must believe: it will be not less physical than what we know now, but more; not less alive, but quicker, livelier; not less sharply defined in the individual features of personhood, but more, so that even though the saints are all members of the same genus of mankind, in glory they will shine with the particularity which the angels preeminently and essentially enjoy.
Let the hazy metaphors go slumbering down their way to the fog and sludge of hell, where sinners resemble one another in dreary sameness, as one pile of bones looks much like another. Metaphorical resurrection be damned. Jesus gives us the real thing. Let us remember that and leave the memorials behind.
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