Jesus Is Risen!

On Easter morning Mary Magdalene reports to the Apostles that Jesus’ body had been taken by someone. As a result Peter and John dash off to the tomb. They both peer into the tomb, and yes, His body is missing. We are told by John himself in his Gospel that they “saw and believed.” What did they see and what did they believe? They saw an empty tomb and they believed that Jesus’ body was somehow missing. It might be easy for us the jump to the conclusion that Peter and John saw evidence of the Resurrection and had come to believe that Jesus had risen from the dead. We would be mistaken, as mistaken as Mary Magdalene was about someone having taken His body. John himself testifies “they did not yet understand the Scripture that he had to rise from the dead” (Jn 20:8).

Why didn’t Peter and John understand the clear evidence that lay before them? Why didn’t they understand that the empty tomb clearly meant that Jesus had risen from the dead? Because the evidence itself was not so clear. It merely pointed to the fact that Jesus’ body was absent. The evidence did not point to how His body came to be missing. But didn’t Jesus tell the Apostles about His suffering, death and resurrection? Yes, Jesus told them at least three times that He would suffer, die, and rise again. Jesus told them but they simply did not understand. Right after Peter proclaims to Jesus that “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God,” Jesus provides the first prediction of His Passion. He says He must “suffer greatly from the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed and on the third day be raised” (Mt 16:21).

Jesus does not provide many details here and the same can be said for the second prediction of His Passion: He will be raised on the third day” (Mt 17:23). In the third prediction of the Passion, Jesus gets far more detailed and explicit about what was to happen to Him, yet provides no details on the Resurrection other than “on the third day he will rise’” (Lk 18:33). So Jesus adds more details about His suffering and death, but He never says much more than “on the third day he will rise” regarding His Resurrection.

So why didn’t Jesus sit them down and tell the Apostles more about the Resurrection than simply saying “on the third day he will rise”? Surely Jesus could have made it clear that death would not have the last word. Certainly Jesus could have told them that He would defeat death by His rising again from the dead. Jesus could have drilled the reality of the Resurrection into the minds of the disciples to the point where Mary Magdalene, Peter, and John would not have been wondering about the significance of the empty tomb. Jesus could have made it so plain to them that they would have expected to see that empty tomb. Had Jesus done this, it would have certainly spared the disciples a great deal of grief, tears, and lamentation.

And that is exactly why Jesus did not say much more about His Resurrection than “on the third day he will rise.” Had they understood the Resurrection before the Passion as they would come to understand it later, there would be a real risk of not taking the events leading to Jesus’ death seriously. Would Judas’ betrayal be so dastardly if he had known that Jesus would rise from the dead? Would the disciples truly have mourned the suffering and death of Jesus if they thought that His death was only temporary? Would Peter have wept bitterly when he denied Jesus three times?

Likewise, if we focus on the Resurrection at the expense of the Passion, we will lose sight of our personal responsibility for the events of Good Friday. It was our sins that brought Jesus to the cross, but it is for our justification that Jesus rose from the dead. It was by His cross that Jesus cleanses us from our sins and it was by His Resurrection that He gives us new life (Rom 4:20-25).

Unless we weep with the Apostles, weeping over our own sinfulness and our role in Jesus’ suffering and death, we will not fully experience the Apostles’ Easter joy. Unless we understand how and why Jesus ended up on the cross, we will be as mistaken about the significance of the empty tomb as Mary Magdalene was when she first saw that the stone had been rolled away. Indeed, we must never separate the horrific Passion of Jesus from His triumphant Resurrection.

—Fr Booth