The Problem with Easter

Reflections on the Lectionary for Easter Sunday

A depiction of the empty tomb from a 1499 lectionary published in modern Mosul, Iraq, by Nestorian scribes and artists. Image in the public domain, taken from Wikipedia.

There’s a problem with Easter.

The problem with Easter is that it is perfectly designed to challenge everything our rationalist, scientific, suspicious minds think is true about the world. Miracle simply doesn’t work very well for Enlightenment people.

The Enlightenment was an intellectual movement in Europe in the 18^th and 19^th centuries that centered on the use of reason and gave rise to the scientific revolution. The Enlightenment has given us many gifts and a fair number of curses, but one of its most lasting legacies is that it has made us almost pathologically suspicious of miracle and wonder. The Enlightenment taught us that things are only true if we can prove them, that belief is only ever a matter of evidence, and that science is the final arbiter of reality. If a claim can’t be measured and tested and verified, then that claim meets our skepticism. If a miracle can’t be explained away as an extraordinary bit of physics—strange but still in-bounds of all the stuff dreamt up by Newton and Einstein—then we cannot trust that miracle.

If, for example, you were to claim that someone you knew had died and then come back to life three days later, then as an Enlightenment thinker I would smile politely and try to change the subject of the conversation. But if you were to claim that the world is being constantly remade by the movements of invisible subatomic particles, that most galaxies host a black hole at their centers, that carbon emissions cause the planet to heat up—I would readily agree with you. Why? In none of these cases does my own personal experience or observation or expertise matter very much; I am neither an expert in biology nor an atomic physicist nor an astronomer or a climate scientist. But as someone who swims in the waters of Enlightenment thought, I trust science, and I trust the claims of scientists. Even as an ordained minister and a religion professor—even as someone professionally exposed to claims of miraculous and extraordinary things—I would be skeptical of your claims about a resurrection.

So there’s a problem with Easter: the resurrection is simply unbelievable from the intellectual standpoint most of us occupy, and worse than that, there is no way that it could ever be tested or verified. The resurrection is one of those things that lies beyond the capacities of science to know, and therefore it is one of those things that many of us can never possibly understand as true. Even those of us who believe it to be true often don’t necessarily think that it happened. We claim that resurrection is a useful metaphor, or we look for scientific explanations, or we understand resurrection as a literary device, but many of us don’t even entertain the possibility that the story happened the way the Bible tells it.

I wrote a few weeks ago about Tradition Criticism, which is a tool that scholars use to analyze the ways traditions show up in biblical texts. Tradition criticism pays attention to the ways traditions develop within and alongside the Bible. Perhaps the best example is the Exodus from Egypt; the story of Moses’ resistance to Pharoah and the Israelites’ flight from Egypt is told again and again throughout the Bible, in many different forms. But in the New Testament, the best example of a biblical tradition is the resurrection. In many different places in the New Testament, across several different types of literature, we encounter the claim that Jesus died and then rose again to life. It’s a vein that runs through the whole corpus (pun slightly intended): the New Testament presumes the kind of untestable, unverifiable claim that our Enlightenment mindsets are predisposed to reject.

What can we make of this tradition of Jesus’ resurrection? The lectionary texts for Easter Sunday collect some of these stories into a set of readings that reflects the variety of forms the resurrection tradition could take. It’s striking that the three readings that reference the resurrection directly all come from different genres, and they all reflect different uses of the resurrection tradition to achieve different purposes. This tells us that the tradition about Jesus rising from the dead was stable and well-known enough among early followers of Jesus that it did not always need to be argued, but that it could be brought into arguments as evidence for other kinds of claims. In other words, the resurrection was a story that everyone seems to have known already.

In Acts 10 we find Peter preaching to a crowd in Caesarea, at the home of the centurion Cornelius. The text and subtext of this passage are really about gentile inclusion; this is a section of Acts that’s preoccupied with the question of whether a gentile like Cornelius could be welcomed among the still-predominantly-Jewish followers of Jesus. This much is clear from the opening thesis statement of Peter’s speech: “I truly understand that God shows no partiality.” From that point, though, Peter launches into what scholars call a bit of kerygma—a little nugget or kernel of core meaning. Peter recounts some major parts of Jesus’ life and ministry. He describes Jesus as a preacher, as the spreader of a message, and he notes that Jesus began his ministry in Galilee sometime after the work of John the Baptist had already begun. Peter claims that Jesus was anointed by God with the Holy Spirit (an early bit of trinitarian thinking, perhaps), and that Jesus’ public ministry had a lot to do with “doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil.” Peter places himself within a capacious “we” who “were all witnesses” to everything that Jesus said and did; this speech is framed as an eyewitness account. After all this, Peter gets to the tradition about Jesus’ death: he was hanged on a tree, Peter says, or crucified, by a fuzzy “they,” which is even fuzzier in the Greek. (This is probably a function of Luke-Acts’ caginess about Roman power, and maybe a function of Peter giving this speech in the presence of a powerful representative of Roman military strength). Finally, Peter claims that Jesus was raised by God on the third day (note that God does the raising; Jesus does not raise himself), and then he appeared alive again to the same “witnesses” chosen by God to begin and transmit the very tradition Peter is recounting.

There’s more in this speech—Peter tells about the resurrected Jesus’ command to preach and testify, and he claims that the prophets had foretold Jesus—but the key part for Easter is the bit about God raising Jesus on the third day after his death. It’s remarkable that Peter simply includes this as a clause in a longer sentence among many other sentences about Jesus; Peter does not single this claim out for special scrutiny and he does not feel the need to defend it in any special way. The rest of what Peter’s speech claims—the nature and timing of Jesus’ life and ministry, the circumstances of his death—are not especially controversial among scholars or among Christians. But as post-Enlightenment scientific thinkers and skeptics, we get hung up on the claim of rising from the dead, even though there’s nothing in the text to indicate that the claim of resurrection stood out from the rest to its author or its earliest audiences. This should alert us to a hermeneutical difference between us as modern thinkers and the first- or second-century audiences of Acts: we raise objections to this claim where ancient people did not seem to see much of a problem.

1 Corinthians 15 is a strange chapter. It’s a chapter that dwells at length on the formation and transmittal of tradition (see, for example, 15:3, “I handed on to you…what I in turn had received”), and it’s a chapter in which Paul is anxious to make sense of death. (You’ve probably heard selections from this chapter read at many funerals). As is true of many passages from Paul, here we have a view of Paul kind of working through difficult questions in real time. As a practical theologian and a pastoral theologian—someone who was engaged in ministry and whose writings were a byproduct of pastoral activities—Paul can often be found test-driving ideas and metaphors in his letters. That’s what’s happening here. Paul is aware of the tradition of Jesus rising from the dead (again, note that in 15:20 the action belongs to God and not Jesus; “Christ has been raised from the dead”), and he’s working to make practical sense of that tradition. He lands on a way of describing death and life: Jesus is the “first fruits of those who have died,” the first but not the last of a new kind of harvest. For Paul, Jesus’ resurrection is the harbinger of new and even grander things: the resurrection of “those who belong to Christ” at Jesus’ second coming, and finally, the destruction of death itself.

In this chapter, Paul is forthright about the fact that he’s transmitting a tradition about Jesus’ death that he himself has received, and he’s leveraging that tradition as a way of offering some explanation and comfort to people who have questions about their own lives, and about the greater meaning of Jesus’ life and death and resurrection. Paul is piecing together a makeshift kind of soteriology here—a pretty decent one really—and using the tradition of the resurrection to do his practical pastoral work.

Finally the lectionary offers two gospel accounts of Jesus’ resurrection—the ones from Luke and John. These two accounts differ from each other in substantial ways (and they both differ from the accounts in Mark and Matthew). But both Luke’s account and John’s account offer a version of the same story. On the first day of the week, one or more women went to Jesus’ tomb and found it empty. Confusion ensued, understandably. Heavenly figures appeared to explain; in Luke it’s “two men in dazzling clothes,” and in John “two angels in white” speak to Mary Magdalene. In both cases a woman or women are the ones to spread the news to the male disciples.

In contrast to the passages from Acts and 1 Corinthians, here the gospels do feel the need to acknowledge that the resurrection was an extraordinary event to digest. In Luke the women are “terrified,” and in John the shock of the empty tomb sends Mary Magdalene running to Peter and the disciple whom Jesus loved, and Mary was later (verse 11) to be found weeping at the empty tomb. But notice how both these gospel accounts use tradition to soften the news for the reader. In John, Mary has a conversation with Jesus in which Jesus gives a bit of instruction about what happens next: “I am ascending to the Father.” And Mary’s proclamation to the rest of the disciples in verse 18 lets the reader know where the tradition about Jesus’ resurrection came from in the first place; the resurrection story is an eyewitness testimony from Mary Magdalene.

Luke is even more obvious about using tradition. The “two men in dazzling clothes” who were standing at the tomb gave the women a refresher course in the history they had all been living. “Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be handed over to the hands of sinners and be crucified and on the third day rise again.” For Luke’s story, the tradition was ongoing before Jesus’ death even happened, and Jesus himself was the originator of it. And as one more indicator of how the claim of Jesus’ resurrection was treated as difficult to believe, the men—the disciples—thought that the women’s “words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them.” Disbelief, then, shows up in a story that’s ultimately about belief itself.

This is the problem with Easter: it’s a story about belief and disbelief, and both are foundational to the tradition. But the tradition, and the story, originated in a world that knew nothing about Enlightenment; the story and the tradition emerged into a world that had not yet seized on the scientific method as the final boss of all knowledge. So while biblical texts treat the story of Jesus’ resurrection credulously and unremarkably, or they treat it with equal measures of belief and disbelief, those of us who live on the far side of the Enlightenment treat the story with skepticism. We cannot abide a miracle; we cannot accept unexplainable wonder.

This perspective has served us pretty well. Enlightenment thinking has given us industrial agriculture and vaccines and clean water and deep-space probes and devices to write and read Substacks on. (Enlightenment thinking has also given us planetary destruction, industrial warfare, empty calories, and a profound addiction to screens). For better and for worse, we have bought in wholesale to the claims and the promises of Enlightenment rationalism. We have done well for ourselves, sifting the world through the sieve of scientific knowability.

But the problem with Easter is that it’s just not very scientifically knowable. Resurrection gets stuck in our sifting, filtered out as a throwaway remnant, not worth hanging on to. Easter gets flagged as superstition or a fairy tale. The resurrection a leftover from an earlier world, a living fossil, unsuited to life in the 21^st century.

Maybe that’s ok. Maybe Easter—maybe the resurrection—isn’t something that’s very worth believing in anymore. I know a lot of people feel that way. I feel that way, a little bit, if I’m being honest. The historical, knowable, testable truth of the resurrection doesn’t play much role in my own faith. But as Easter approaches, and I hear the tradition recited again and again, I find myself wondering what’s lost when we write off wonder as an idle tale and when we dismiss miracle as an impossibility. What do we throw away when we toss aside the unexplainable? What do we forfeit when we foreclose the impossible?

I’m reminded of something Mary Magdalene says, in John 20:2: “We do not know.” In the midst of all our certainty and all our sureness, maybe there’s value in Mary’s words and in her willingness to bracket off her disbelief. “We do not know” is different from “We know it’s not true,” and it’s different from “We know it’s true” too. It’s a way to be honest about ourselves and honest about the world, and it’s a way to keep ourselves balanced between certainty and miracle.

In a world built on evidence, science, and proof, “We do not know” might be the best—and most traditional—answer we have.