The shock of Easter is its historicity but the point of Easter is much much more!
Easter Sunday is when we celebrate the momentous event of the Resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. It is not to be domesticated by being reduced to the Easter bunny – whatever that means! Rather, it is the event of history. It is an historical event and no myth for myths are abstractions with no rootedness in history. Whereas the resurrection of Jesus is rooted in a particular place, Jerusalem and in a particular time, the time of Pontius Pilate, which no myth is. It is testfied by witnesses who had denied him and ran away from him at his arrest but all suffered and indeeed 11 of the apostles died for the truth and reality of this event.
No other kind of ancient Greco-Roman historical account is as close in time, place and eye witnesses to events as do the Gospels. The vast majority of scholars in this field, therefore, say that at a minimum the historical evidence tells us that: Jesus existed, he died on the cross, the tomb was empty and that Jesus appeared to his disciples in an objective and physical body to eye witnesses who were known personally by a man who himself was a convert from being a persecutor of Christians, who was also a scholar and a historically reliable source; that man is St Paul. Finally Paul and the Twelve all suffered and indeed, except for St John, they all died for the truth: that Jesus having been crucified rose from the dead and appeared to them in a physical body. Eleven of the Twelve, who had been cowards at the arrest of Jesus in Gethsemane, died for it; and we know that cowards do not die for a lie! Indeed, in terms of historical evidence we have not just witnesses but also written testimony of these witnesses from the letters of St Paul onwards which begin twenty years after the event!
Nor is the resurrection impossible for God, either. The God who made all creation out of nothing and had become flesh as Our Lord Jesus Christ walked upon earth curing the sick, healing the blind, the deaf, the dumb and the crippled and brought back from the dead a little girl and Lazarus his friend. So he could and did himself rise from the dead. Through the Apostles and the Church he instituted he now brings life out of death and make sinners into saints for out of a corrupt human nature a glorified human nature has now arisen!
The world is full of modern myths that seek immortality or supernatural power be they the superheroes of Marvell and DC Comics or Hollywood films, but they all signify at best a worldly alternative to the resurrection of Jesus Christ or at worst they signify nothing but fantasy and escapism from the real world. Jesus goes to the heart of the real world of pain, suffering, betrayal, torture, murder and death that sin has worked in our fallen world. But by taking on the cross Jesus brings out from it all the life of the resurrection. Comics, films and Hollwood create nothing but the escapist world of the dreamer, the drifter and the waster who find life and living too much to bear. Christ creates realists who live that realism that does not fly living but enters into its heart as it has now the hope of Jesus who was crucified and is now risen.
It is this resurrection that Jesus promises to all who stay faithful to him and this is the life that he gives through the Truth of the Word and the Grace of the Sacraments. A gift that Christians celebrate every Sunday and not just this Easter Sunday. Indeed it is the mark of a Christian to celebrate the life, death and resurrection of Jesus on what the Jews called the First day of Creation, but the Gospel evangelists speak of it as the eigth day so that for we now call it the day of the New Creation. It is also why we call Sunday the Lord’s Day; as all Sundays are a public celebration, profession and witness of the Resurrection and a celebration of a new creation.
The mystery of the Resurrection reveals to us ‘what no eye has seen and no hear has heard’ (1 Cor. 2:9), namely, the fulfillment of God’s promises of a new form of life that is beyond our wildest dreams. The resurrection reveals to us that life on earth is the prelude of life in heaven, so that heaven reveals the true meaning of being on earth. In the words of Peter Kreeft:
‘the world beyond the world made all the difference in the world to this world. The Heaven beyond the sun made the earth “under the sun” something more than “vanity of vanities”. Earth was Heaven’s womb, Heaven’s nursery, Heaven’s dress rehearsal. Heaven was the meaning of the earth’ (Everything you ever wanted to know about heaven but never dreamt of asking, [‘Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Heaven: But Never Dreamed of Asking’ by Peter Kreeft (Ignatius Press, 1990), p. 17].
The resurrection also transforms not just our lives by showing us that what we do on earth echoes for all eternity, but it is also the power that transforms our space, our time and our stories in and through the Liturgy. The Liturgy is God’s technology by which space, time, matter, energy is transfigured. The Liturgy receives it power from the Holy Spirit but gets its form and matter from the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. The life giving Spirit unites our fallen humanity to the sinless humanity of Jesus and it is life giving because his human nature is united to his divine nature in and through him being only begotten Son of the Father. As Jesus is the Logos and as he is the source of the power and form of the Liturgy, so through the liturgy our human existence is logicized; that is made full of meaning as it reflects the wisdom and mind of God. Peter Kreeft explains this relationship of life to liturgy as one where, through the resurrection, life is liturgicized, when he writes:
‘When we do this, life on earth becomes a liturgy, a sacred time. Liturgies are not measured by secular time; they are not measured externally, by clocks, but internally, by their events, their actions, their meaning. Living liturgically means living life as “a dance, not a drill”; poetry, not prose; a song, not a speech’.
So a human being who does not have liturgy in their lives will be a human being who drifts in space, wastes the time he is given and moves without purpose. Indeed, a human being without a liturgical life is a being who has no point of reference for his or her existence, indeed no point to his or her existence at all; he or she is aimless and deeply unhappy and deprived of real lasting joy. So it is that so many today experience life as being without joy and without direction, without meaning and without lasting purpose. The life they lead is, simply put, lacking any real story! In its place they try to hang on to passing joys, passing infatuations, passing toys and gadgets and passing fashions. It is sentimental at best and joyless at worst. For their life is at best a constant struggle to find and hold on to passing meaning of sentimentality and at worst it signifies nothing but an empty gong booming. In the words of Macbeth, Modern life has only this to say:
Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then it hears no more; it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing [‘The Tragedy of Macbeth’, Act V, Scene V].
In contrast to this modern way of living, a living out of nothing, Our Lord Jesus Christ offers something out of this world that has, through him, broken into this modern world of nihilism:
“I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die” [John 11:25-26].
