What Easter Really Means

[Valin]

Real Clear Religion:

Father Robert Barron

April 19, 2014

 

In first century Judaism, there were many views concerning what happened to people after they died. Following a very venerable tradition, some said that death was the end, that the dead simply returned to the dust of the earth from which they came. Others maintained that the righteous dead would rise at the close of the age. Still others thought that the souls of the just went to live with God after the demise of their bodies. There were even some who believed in a kind of reincarnation.

 

What is particularly fascinating about the accounts of Jesus's resurrection is that none of these familiar frameworks of understanding is invoked. 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. He 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......Snip)

[Valin]

[nickydog]

Thank you, @Valin. Two excellent posts.