On that first Easter morning, something happened. A frightened group of followers was transformed by an empty tomb, and by meeting their Lord whom they had seen executed two days before. But what happened, and was it a vision or reality?
These questions receive different answers even among Christians, let alone from people outside the church. So much depends on presuppositions, on what is acceptable as evidence, on what language we use to describe what we experience as "reality".
For example, when we say the Creed, we talk of Jesus "sitting at the right hand of God", even though we are not thinking of a hand with thumbs and fingernails. When Jesus said "Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in you", he was not suggesting we had to be cannibals to live. When he spoke of coming in the clouds, we do not link this with our experiences of air travel. Is all this talk of resurrection just a figure of speech?
The Resurrection is central to our faith. "If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins," said Paul (1 Cor 15:17). The link between our faith and a historical event is a distinctive part of Christian belief - that God works in and through history, and not in some other-worldly and purely spiritual universe which has nothing to do with our everyday life. And the historical event was a bodily resurrection, not just a spiritual resurrection. From the earliest days Christians have continued to hold the belief (which had come to them from the Old Testament) that not only our souls but also our bodies are inherently "very good" and that they have been redeemed through Christ's death and resurrection.
Two events can be said to be literally true. The tomb was certainly empty. The early Christians were not stupid. They had thought of all the possible explanations that modern sceptics have suggested - that the women went to the wrong place, that members of the Roman guard removed the body, that Jesus had not really been dead, but in a coma. They knew that none of these was the case.
And certainly some of Jesus' followers met him. If they had not, they would not have gone out and told others about it. Reading the accounts of Matthew, Luke and John, and of Paul in 1 Corinthians 15, we can spot inconsistencies. But, unlike the account in the so-called Gospel of Peter, they do not seem to be the product of over-fertile imaginations. (In 1823, Joanna's great-great-great-grandfather fell off a high scaffolding in Canterbury Cathedral and died. The event was reported in both the local newspapers, but the reports differ factually in several respects. Yet it is common sense that the event occurred nevertheless - so too with the Resurrection.)
The meetings were real. But were they with a real person or with a vision? When Paul lists the Resurrection appearances, he ends the list: "Last of all he appeared also to me." Wasn't this a vision? We know, and the early Christians knew, that dead people decay - they do not walk about. They knew, too, that normal people could not pass through locked doors (Jn 20:19) or suddenly vanish (Lk 24:31). Yet they also knew that ghosts would have difficulty sitting down to a meal of fish. Set against Jesus' instruction to Mary Magdalene not to touch him (could it be not to cling on to him?), we have his instruction to doubting Thomas to feel the physical reality of his wounds - and from this physical contact came faith.
To make sense of this, we need to adopt Paul's view that Jesus' resurrected body was something new. Not something imaginary, but something changed. He had "put off the old and put on the new", not just in the sense of changing clothes, but in the sense of a real transformation.
Paul used the analogy of a seed and a plant. Clearly Jesus' resurrection was harder to understand than the simple metamorphosis between seed and flower, between caterpillar and butterfly - even some of the eleven remaining disciples failed to grasp it (Mt 28:17 - "some doubted"!). But the Jesus who walked with Cleopas and his friend along the road to Emmaus was the same Jesus who had taught and healed in Galilee, who had died on the cross, and was now alive. It is he whom we worship. The Lord is risen indeed - alleluia!
HD