The
first witnesses maintain that the same Jesus who had been brutally and
unmistakably put to death and buried was, through the power of God, alive
again. This
is the essence of the historical claim of Christianity.
Jesus
was not vaguely “with God,” nor had his soul escaped from his body; nor had he
risen in a purely symbolic or metaphorical sense. He, Jeshoua from Nazareth,
the friend whom they knew, was alive again. What was expected for all the
righteous dead at the end of time had happened, in time, to this one particular
man, to this Jesus.
It
was the very novelty of the event that gave such energy and verve to the first
Christian proclamation. On practically every page of the New Testament, we find
a grab-you-by-the-lapels quality, for the early Christians were not trading in
bland spiritual abstractions or moral bromides. They were trying to tell the
whole world that something so new and astounding had happened that nothing
would ever again be the same.
Over
the past couple of centuries, many thinkers, both inside and outside of the
Christian churches, endeavored to reduce the resurrection message to the level
of myth or symbol. Easter, they argued, was one more iteration of the
“springtime saga” that can be found, in one form or another, in most cultures,
namely, that life triumphs over death in the “resurrection” of nature after the
bleak months of winter.
Or
it was a symbolic way of saying that the cause of Jesus lives on in his
followers. But as C.S. Lewis keenly observed, those who think the resurrection
story is a myth haven’t read many myths. Mythic literature deals in ahistorical
archetypes, and thus it tends to speak of things that happened “once upon a
time” or “in a galaxy far, far away.”
But
the Gospels don’t use that sort of language. In describing the resurrection,
they mention particular places like Judea and Jerusalem, and they specify that
the event took place when Pontius Pilate was the Roman governor of the region,
and they name distinct individuals—Peter, John, Thomas, etc.—who encountered
Jesus after he rose from the dead. Moreover, no one dies defending mythic
claims. The myths of Greece, Rome, and Egypt are powerful and illuminating
indeed, but there are no martyrs to Zeus or Dionysus or Osiris. But practically
all of the first heralds of the resurrection went to their deaths defending the
truth of their message.
What
does the resurrection of Christ mean? What does it mean to history and to humanity? It
means, first, that the customary manner in which we understand the relationship
between order and violence—from the Epic of Gilgamesh to “Game of Thrones”—has
to be rethought. On the standard Realpolitik reading of things, order
comes about through the violent imposition of strength. And if that order is
lost or compromised, it must be restored through answering violence.
In
Jesus’ time, the great principle of order was the Empire of Rome, which
maintained its hold through the exertions of its massive army and through the
imposition of harsh punishment on those who opposed its purposes. The most
terrible and fearsome of these punishments was, of course, the cross, a
particularly brutal mode of torture that was purposely carried out in public so
as to have greatest deterrent effect. It was precisely on one of these Roman
crosses that Jesus of Nazareth was put to death, having been betrayed and
abandoned by his friends and condemned by a corrupt tribunal of collaborators.
When
the risen Jesus presented himself alive to his disciples, they were, we are
told, afraid. Their fear might not have been simply a function of their seeing
something uncanny; it might have been grounded in the assumption that he was
back for vengeance. However, after showing his wounds, the risen Jesus said to
his friends, “Shalom,” Peace.
The
teacher who had urged his followers to turn the other cheek and to meet violence
with forgiveness exemplified his own teaching in the most vivid way possible.
And what he showed, thereby, was that that the divine manner of establishing
order has nothing to do with violence, retribution, or eye-for-an-eye
retaliation. Instead, it has to do with a love which swallows up hate, with a
forgiveness which triumphs over aggression. It is this great resurrection
principle which, explicitly or implicitly, undergirded the liberating work of
John Paul II in Poland. He was able to stand athwart the received wisdom only
because he had some sense that in opting for the way of love Jesus was going
with the deepest meaning, operating in concert with the purposes of God.
Secondly,
the resurrection means that God has not given up on creation. According to the
well-known account in the book of Genesis, God made the whole array of finite
things—sun, moon, planets, stars, animals, plants, things that creep and crawl
on the earth—and found it all good, even very good.
All
that God has made reflects some aspect of his goodness, and all created things
together constitute a beautiful and tightly-woven tapestry. As the Old
Testament lays out the story, human sin made a wreck of God’s creation, turning
the garden into a desert. But the faithful God kept sending rescue operation
after rescue operation: Noah’s Ark, the prophets, the Law and the Temple, the
people Israel itself.
Finally,
he sent his only Son, the perfect icon or incarnation of his love. In raising
that Son from the dead, God definitively saved and ratified his creation, very
much including the material dimension of it (which is why it matters that Jesus
was raised bodily from death). Over and again, we have said no to what God has
made, but God stubbornly says yes. Inspired by this divine yes, we always have
a reason to hope.
Those who can, will gather at St. Paul's Basilica, 83 Power Street, Toronto, at 2:00 p.m. This is a simple gathering of those who wish to pass through the Holy Door which is one of several in the archdiocese open for the Jubilee Year of Mercy.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church describes an indulgence as "a remission before God of the temporal punishment due to sins whose guilt has already been forgiven, which the faithful Christian who is duly disposed gains under certain prescribed conditions through the action of the Church . . . " 
