It is important to note that the earliest references to the Resurrection place the initiative with God. “Christ has been raised,” says Paul (1 Cor. 15:20). “Whom God raised from the dead,” says Peter in one of the sermons of Acts (Acts 3:15). Even the Greek word used for the appearances (ophethe) is the word used in the Septuagint to refer to angels and theophanies where the revelatory initiative lies with the angel or with God who desires to make God manifest. The experience of the recipient is clearly not primary; the action of God is. How the recipient sees in all biblical theophanies is left unclear. A marvelous story is told in the Pentateuch about how Moses was allowed only to glimpse the hind parts of God after much pleading on his part (Ex. 33:17ff). Does the recipient of the theophany see with the physical eyes or with the eyes of the mind or with some other kind of transcendent vision?
In the Old Testament the same verb we meet in the resurrection narratives is used where the prophet says,"God appeared unto me and said….” No one would suggest that these Old Testament phrases mean that God was visible to the physical eye. Indeed, the Old Testament in its passion against idolatry suggests that no one can see God and live. Yet the prophetic recipient of these experiences with Yahweh did not doubt for a moment the reality of these revelatory encounters. They were revelations not from heaven above, as our limited vocabulary and time-space-shaped language seemed to imply, but revelations from the timeless sphere of eternity, from the eschatological realm into the present. This is clearly the sense of the verb translated “appeared” in 1 Corinthians 15:5–7, Luke 24:34, and throughout the book of Acts. If we would grasp the full significance of this insight, we must seek to understand and comprehend the way the Jewish mind of the first century thought about these subjects.
When a first-century Jew thought about life after death, he inevitably had both his understanding and his vocabulary shaped by that which we call Jewish apocalyptic literature. This is a term used to describe a style of thinking and writing popular at that time. We meet this style of writing overtly in parts of the book of Daniel, which is a second-century B.C. work. It is also used in the intertestamental book of Enoch and finds its most obvious expression in the New Testament in the book of Revelation and in Mark 13, Matthew 24, and Luke 17, yet it has shaped and influenced the entire New Testament perspective. Apocalyptic literature pictorially described the end of the world, that moment beyond history when all of life would be brought to its final conclusion which preceded the dawn of a new age beyond time. This general resurrection was seen as the presupposition for carrying out the last judgment. Theemphasis was not so much on the fate of the dead as on the justice of God. As the faithful Jew would pray, “Blessed art thou, Oh Lord, that quickenest the dead.” This apocalyptic writing style was full of symbols, dreams, cryptic words and phrases.
Yet in this literature there is a very specific concept of life after death. God is the creator, and he will keep faith with his creation. He does not withdraw his yes to life. At the decisive moment of death, he adds another yes to his first one. When the end of this world would come, which the apocalypticist expected imminently, a new age, which was beyond history, would be born. At that moment (to use a time-oriented word to describe that which is beyond time), the living and the dead would undergo a transformation. There would be a new birth through which the living and the dead would enter that new realm of reality that is beyond the limits of both time and space. The dead would not be restored to life or resurrected into life; they would rather be translated, and the living would be changed.
Paul was under the influence of this apocalyptic idea when he wrote, “We shall all be changed in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye.” The transformation into this new being was thought to be so total that Paul could draw a pointed contrast, “We are sown in dishonor but raised in glory; we are sown in weakness but raised in power; we are sown a physical body but raised a spiritual body.” The dead will be raised imperishable, of a new order, participating in a new creation, a new being. This apocalyptic hope was not attached to a moment of history nor to an event in time. It was specifically beyond history and at the end of time.
Almost certainly a first-century Jew, when he thought of resurrection, and most particularly of individual resurrection, would think in these terms. Martha in the Fourth Gospel’s story of Lazarus said to Jesus, “Lord, I know he (Lazarus) will live again at the general resurrection on the last day.” All of the disciples were Jewish men whose minds had been shaped by the apocalyptic hope; hence, whatever they experienced on Easter and whenever they dated the Easter Moment would inevitably be understood in these concepts. So Easter dawned, and they began to say that the moment that was supposed to take place at the end of history somehow in Jesus of Nazareth had been experienced in history. Or at the very least that the Easter Moment was a promise, a foretaste of that eschatological, posthistoric moment of transformation into a new creation for both the living and the dead. This is to suggest that the Easter Moment, which they called Resurrection, was, in fact, a revelatory encounter of the living God seen raising Jesus as a guarantee of the reality of the age to come when the dead shall be raised and the living shall be changed and the Kingdom of Heaven will dawn. If this context is the proper interpretive framework in which Easter is to be understood, then physical appearances inside history (please note the word physical) have to be a later exaggeration by and for landlocked minds and eyes that could not embrace the startling wonder of the Easter Moment.14
Hints of this apocalyptic, metahistorical understanding of the Easter Moment punctuate the New Testament. The angels who announced the Resurrection at the tomb would immediately be read by first-century Jewish people to be apocalyptic interpreting angels, for their appearance and activity are described in the exact terms of the contemporary apocalyptic literature. In the book of Revelation Jesus is called “thefirstborn of the dead,” a clear apocalyptic reference. Paul calls Jesus “the first fruits of them that slept.” His death was seen to be analogous to the end of the world. “There was darkness over the whole land,” and whatever took place on Easter came to be thought of as analogous to or the first instance of what the ultimate resurrection at the last day would be. The events of crucifixion and Easter were seen to be of cosmic and universal significance. “As in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive,” wrote Paul. When we add to this the suggestion made previously that the final resurrection would take place on the third day after the end of history, we find a chronological harmony with the resurrection narratives.
Let us be sure we understand what this does and does not point to. It certainly does not suggest that the Easter narratives were contrived and do not possess reality. Easter cannot be nothing, or fictitious, or imaginary. In the most profound sense it must be a real event. But what Easter is bursts through and goes beyond the bounds of history. It is a transcendental happening in which God raised Jesus out of death into his own all-embracing dimension. It does point inevitably to the overwhelming conclusion that the apocalyptic expectation so popular among Jewish thinkers in the first century has, in fact, shaped not the experience of Easter which no language can shape, but the rational understanding of the experience of Easter. That is a crucial distinction. It does suggest that these apocalyptic concepts organized the details of the Easter story.
Something happened at the Easter Moment. Whatever it was that happened had to be described in the limited words and language of those who shared thatexperience. Inevitably, the historic details and the historic words used to describe and explain this Moment can never capture this Moment. For this Moment is beyond history, beyond finitude, beyond time, but somehow in some way it was experienced in history by finite people who are captured by time and limited by finitude. We might measure the impact on the recipient, but we can never measure that which created the impact.
I am further encouraged in this conclusion by the fact that Paul never in all his writing narrates or shares with his readers the content of his own conversion, which he calls a resurrection experience. He assumes it. His life reflects it. His activities make no sense apart from it. But he never talks about it. It remained for Luke, writing in the book of Acts some twenty-five to thirty years after Paul’s death, to create a narration of the details we know as the Damascus Road story. Paul probably would not recognize it. It is quite interesting to note that Paul never mentions Ananias whom Luke suggests played so determinative a role in Paul’s conversion.
All of this suggests to me that the Easter Moment was neither an appearance nor a vision but a revelatory encounter. It was a moment when a truth beyond the truths of men and women was perceived. It was a mind-expanding, eye-opening experience which forced those who shared it to identify Jesus of Nazareth with that apocalyptic power called the Son of Man who was to herald the end of this age. The idea of the resurrection of the Messiah was a startlingly new idea even inside the apocalyptic tradition. The idea of the resurrection of a messiah who had failed, who was victim not victor, broke through all of the apocalyptic imagery,was an absolute novelty in the Jewish tradition, and remains unacceptable today for Judaism even among those Jews who believe in life after death.
Yet this was the only way the disciples could explain what they had experienced. The Moment of Easter began with the sudden realization that Jesus’ death had cosmic significance. Something happened in his death that convinced this group of witnesses that what they expected to come at the end of the world had, in fact, been perceived now in Jesus with minds that still were limited by time and space and history. In Jesus they suddenly saw a new order of creation, and no longer was this realm in doubt. No longer was it even an object of speculation. Something about Jesus had tested all of the barriers of human existence in his life. He was free to live, to love, and to be. He could give himself away recklessly, totally. He had no need to defend or enhance his being. He could meet life on levels far beneath the superficial. He could penetrate beyond those inevitable human defense barriers and explore life in its depths. He could reach the very DNA of life. Now in his death he had tested the ultimate barrier, the ultimate limit of human life. Those who knew him and those who shared the Easter Moment were convinced beyond any shadows of doubt that he had opened to them and to all who are or will be in Christ both a view and a means of passage into that realm forever.
When the Fourth Gospel has the Christ say, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the father but by me” (Jn. 14:6), he is not making an exclusive Jesus claim to bolster later ecclesiastical, imperialistic missionary tactics. He is referring to the cosmic significance for all life of the Christ figure who in the Easter Moment revealed the truth of the timeless eternity of God and our way of sharing in that timeless eternity. God had raised him, revealing him to be both Lord and Christ, for his was the divine life that had opened to all humanity the new world, the new vision, and the transformed realm of new being. Those who came to share in his power found that they could participate in that realm now before death, before the end of the world. The person who is in Christ could live, as the New Testament suggests, in this world but by the power of the world to come. Easter was a ringing confirmation that beyond the limit of our eyes or the touch of our hands there was an eternal, timeless reality. Jesus is the door (Jn. 10:9), says the Fourth Gospel. He is the Resurrection (Jn. 11:25), the life (Jn. 11:25), the living water (Jn. 4:7ff), the bread of life (Jn. 6:35). All of the I AM claims of the Fourth Gospel are meant primarily to illumine the one central Easter claim: he lives and because he lives, you and I can live in a new way, a way we never dreamed possible. All of this is involved in the Easter Moment.
We have opened the doors to a reality that is beyond objectivity and history but which nonetheless was known by first-century people who were both subjective and historic. It remains now to press one step closer to that Easter Moment. What caused them to see this? What startled them and opened their eyes to see what they had never seen before? What enabled them to view life and Jesus in a dramatic new way? What forced them to see Jesus as included in God and God as including Jesus? For that is what Easter did.