The existence of the Church is predicated on the historical event of Jesus of Nazareth returning to life from being dead. The Anglican tradition puts it this way:
Christ did truly rise again from death, and took again his body, with flesh, bones, and all things appertaining to the perfection of Man’s nature; wherewith he ascended into Heaven, and there sitteth, until he return to judge all Men at the last day.
This is the teaching of the earliest witnesses as recorded in books in the first century. The Apostle Paul said, “Why is it thought incredible by any of you that God raises the dead?” Paul said that Jesus “by being the first to rise from the dead…would proclaim light both to our people and to the Gentiles.”
Tom Wright says:
The actual bodily resurrection of Jesus (not a mere resuscitation but a transforming revivification) clearly provides a sufficient condition of the tomb being empty and the ‘meetings’ taking place. Nobody is likely to doubt that. Once grant that Jesus really was raised, and all the pieces of the historical jigsaw puzzle of early Christianity fall into place. My claim is stronger: that the bodily resurrection of Jesus provides a necessary condition for these things; in other words, that no other explanation could or would do. All the efforts to find alternative explanations fail, and they were bound to do so.
As the Catholic Church teaches,
The faith of the first community of believers is based on the witness of concrete men known to the Christians and for the most part still living among them. Peter and the Twelve are the primary ‘witnesses to his Resurrection,’ but they are not the only ones – Paul speaks clearly of more than five hundred persons to whom Jesus appeared on a single occasion and also of James and of all the apostles.
The man Jesus rose from the dead – you will too. You may rise to wonder and awe, or to terror and pain, but you will rise. This is a bedrock truth in a world that denies truth. This is a key to all of life. Ponder your future and the resurrection of Jesus.
Leave a Reply