God Doing God Things

A man rising from the dead—at first it sounds crazy, something you’d find in a tall tale of magic and mystery, but certainly not real life. And yet, having now grappled with the paradox of the incarnation and the incomprehensible nature of the crucifixion, the resurrection is almost a relief. Finally, God is doing God things, defeating death and popping out of the tomb, going through closed doors and making dramatic disappearances. Compared to the (oxymoronic) humiliated God who died on the cross, victorious God feels pretty intuitive. A man rose from the dead—but of course he did, because he’s God.

It now seems as if Jesus’s divinity figures more prominently than his humanity. In his meditation on the actual moment of the resurrection, John of Caulibus, who so thoroughly detailed the events of the passion, contents himself with two whole sentences: “At dawn on Sunday, the Lord appeared at the tomb with a majestic multitude of angels. He again took on his most sacred body, and came forth from that closed tomb by rising on his own power” (280). Perhaps it’s because nobody else was there to see it either, but John does not invite the meditator to imagine herself there in the moment as Jesus rose. There is no exhortation to compassion or empathy; and this makes sense—why would we need to feel any sort of emotional connection with Jesus as he comes back to life? How could we? Our focus has shifted, and we instead empathize with the Marys and the disciples as Jesus appears to them.

Likewise, there is no description of the actual moment of resurrection in the York Mystery plays; in fact, Jesus doesn’t even appear in “The Resurrection.” We instead hear of the resurrection from the high priests, who want to prevent the fulfillment of Jesus’s words, then from the angel, who brings the news to the Marys, then from the soldiers at the tomb, who discuss the resurrection among themselves and relay it to Pilate and the high priests. By removing the audience from the actual event, the resurrection remains a distant rumor, something that supposedly has happened, but we don’t really care how. And yet, even without detailed narrative, the resurrection itself isn’t much of a mystery (again, God doing God things), while the crucifixion, which can be described in great detail, is made even more mysterious as we have to reconcile the human and divine. So perhaps the news of the resurrection is relayed through the words of others because the reactions are what matter; the moment of the resurrection itself seems almost, well, unimportant.

In class, we didn’t really discuss the significance of the resurrection, only that it’s not a proof for the validity of Christ’s claim to be the Son of God, since the only way to believe in the resurrection is to believe in the incarnation in the first place. We briefly discussed how Jesus’s resurrection can be a proof for our hope in our future resurrection, but it still seems less exciting than the incarnation and crucifixion. When Jesus died, there was an earthquake and a mass reanimation of the dead (Douay-Rheims, Mt. 27.51-53); but the gospel accounts don’t even describe the moment of the resurrection at all. At most, a few soldiers got knocked over when the angel rolled back the stone from the tomb (Mt. 28.4).

How did we get to this place, where the thought of a man rising from the dead and heralding the eternal life we have ahead of us, is, frankly, rather uninteresting? I mean, how did I get to this place? Just a month ago, my teenage sister described a debate she had with her friends about whether Christmas or Easter was the most "important" holiday, and I, needing to get my older sibling two-cents in, firmly advocated for Easter. After all, what was the incarnation for, if not to lead to Christ’s death and resurrection?

But now I find myself in a strange place. Perhaps I’m the only one who feels this way, but having spent some time now being immersed in understanding and relating to Jesus’s humanity, I’m finding it difficult to engage with the more clearly divine. Jesus died—mind blown. Jesus rose again—cool, if a little anticlimactic.

Yet the resurrection is, in fact, closely related to the human. Jesus comes back to life as a human. He has a body, albeit one that can apparently apparate, and he can eat and drink just as we can. He is (and continues to be) just as fully human as he was when he was nailed to the cross. The resurrection heralds our future—we will be resurrected with a spiritual body incorrupted, heavenly and rising in glory and power (1 Cor. 15.42-47). And we look not only to a future eternal life but to this one in the here and now. Because we share in Christ’s death and resurrection (Rom. 6.3-4), we are now dead to sin and free to live in righteousness:

“For we know that our old self was crucified with [Jesus] so that the body ruled by sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin—because anyone who has died has been set free from sin...In the same way, count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus” (New International Version, Rom 6.6-7,11). 

Because we are dead to sin, we are now governed by the Spirit, and “whosoever are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God” (Douay-Rheims, Rom. 8.14). We are adopted and redeemed, and we become heirs with Christ (Rom. 8.17). We are transformed now, in the present, and this is only possible because we die with Christ and are raised with him into new life. Thus the crucifixion and the resurrection go hand-in-hand; the one must follow the other or else all is for naught. They are not two events, but one and the same action: the redemption of humanity.

Perhaps this is why “The Resurrection” focuses on the human reactions to the news of Christ’s resurrection. “Do that no man the wiser be / Ne frain before, / Ne of the sight that ye gan see,” says Pilate, warning the soldiers not to speak of what they have witnessed (266). In light of what we know, this is almost pitiful. They continue on without realizing what has happened—they do not understand that things are no longer the same. A man has risen from the dead, and with him has the rest of humanity.

KY

Works Cited:

Douay-Rheims The Holy Bible. Loreto Publications, 2007.
New International Version. Zondervan, 2011.

John of Caulibus. Meditations on the Life of Christ. Translated by Francis X. Taney et al., Pegasus Press, 1999.
York Mystery Plays: A Selection in Modern Spelling. Edited by Richard Beadle and Pamela M. King, Oxford University Press, 1995.