The Scriptures tell us that the Apostles saw the Risen Lord, that they broke bread with him. Mary of Magdala swears that she saw him too, perhaps before all others even. But when did they see him? When did he rise?
The conflicting accounts in the Gospels of Matthew, Luke and John do not allow for a neat chronology at all. So, while the agnostic conclusion —“Then, the Resurrection is just a concocted story”—is one alternative, the other alternative is to treat the question: “When did he rise?”and companion questions like: “Who saw him rise?”—as questions resting on wrong premises.
It goes something like this. When you say: “Mabuhay ka, Kuya Pete” and Kuya Pete asks you: “Kailan ako mabuhay?”—you would be right in being totally flabbergasted, because “Mabuhay” is not timed. It is not susceptible of chronology. It is an acclamation, not a chronology!
When the centurion saw how Jesus died, when witnesses saw the kingliness with which the condemned man died, they said: “Truly, this was the Son of God.” They were in fact saying: “They couldn’t defeat him.” And that is the first aspect of the Resurrection faith: The conviction that the Cross could not defeat Jesus and could not bring about his total undoing.
Even before his death, he had already insinuated, intimated if not declared very clearly that though he was indeed to die a very real death, he was sent by the Father to be more than just ending up a corpse, because the Father’s love could not be sealed in a tomb! And it rubbed on on his disciples—that intimacy with the Father that allowed Jesus to call on God as Äma”, trusting in an Äma” who would never let him down.
And then, of course, there were those phenomena, widely attested to, that sealed on Jesus’ closest followers and an ever-widening band of believers the indelible conviction that he was risen: appearances so real as to be unmistakable, the firmness of conviction and the enthusiasm to preach his name that could only be explained by an encounter with him, Saul’s extraordinary experience that made him Paul, and the zeal to proclaim his resurrection that they could only describe as tongues of fire descending on them.
No, it is not easy to talk about the Resurrection, because it has to do with the very foundation of what we are and what we are called to be. “Resurrexit sicut dixit”…this became the cry by which martyrs courageously went to their deaths, preachers sallied forth to every lonely corner of the world, and young men and women today still preach.
All that they had heard from Jesus before his death, the power that they saw in his works and his words, but most of all in his person, the intimacy with the Father that he assured them was the same love he had for all those who came to him, none of whom he would ever lose, his triumph in death, though bloodied and martyred but dying with an invincible faith more powerful than the anger of his enemies, the testimony of those who he appeared to, talked and ate with, the report of the empty tomb, and the courage that seized them all to proclaim without fear and hesitation that he was victorious—that is everything that is summed up on the greatest acclamation of humankind: HE IS RISEN!
