Being a resurrection people: an Easter Reflection

What is the point of the resurrection? This might sound like a bit of a silly question for a Christian to ask, but actually it is possibly the most important question we can ask.

For many in our society language around 'the resurrection' is not really to do with resurrection at all, but about the immortality of the soul: life is envisaged in essentially Platonic terms in which the body is a transitory container that will fade away, but the soul after death will float up towards the one. It is Plato rather than the ideas of Christianity that most inform popular ideas about life after death: 'Do not stand at my grave and weep.... I am not there, I did not die'; 'Death is nothing at all...'

This is not how Christians envisage life, death or eternity. Instead death is a radical discontinuity: when we die, we can expect to stop existing because we cease to have a physical life. We are buried in the earth: 'we are but dust, and to dust we return'. The body is not a container, but is part of who I am. It matters, and the death of my body means the death of me.

When Jesus died, he was dead. No one expected him to return. He was gone. When friends or relatives die, we know we will never see them again. This is why we feel grief and loss.

Easter is about joy because it is the assertion that Christ rose from the dead. This is not the assertion that he continued to be exist due to the immortality of his soul and he appeared as an apparition. No. It is the assertion that he was physically raised from the dead and had a transfigured corporeal existence: he had a body.

Christ's resurrection is the type of resurrection that Christians believe in when they talk about 'the resurrection of the body'. We believe in a miracle that overcomes our physical death and gives us a fully human existence with God in heaven. We are not less than ourselves after death, but a fully human and physical self is that which enjoys eternity.

For Christians this makes Easter very significant. Christ's resurrection from the tomb is not an example of how immortality works, but rather it is a miracle that is a victory over the grave. It changes the way in which we think about life and death, and gives us the opportunity to live as a different kind of people who have been freed from the fear of death (and the need to deny death).