by Eric Metaxas
The story of Lazarus—because it is a picture of starkest contrasts—gives us a picture of what all true miracles really are: God acting alone, without our help. Lazarus did absolutely nothing to cooperate with Jesus. He was as inert and passive as a stone. As a corpse. As such, he was by definition incapable of helping. Lazarus did not have the ability to “exercise his faith” or “trust in Jesus” or “believe.” Because the text says he had been in the tomb for four days, we are not even given the luxury of supposing that his “spirit” was hovering nearby and only reentered his body as we might have supposed with the other two whom Jesus raises to life. Here in the final days of Jesus’s life and ministry he gives us an unadulterated picture of what a miracle is: God acting from beyond this world. We see clearly that it is all God and all God’s grace. This in turn gives us a clear picture of our spiritual condition: We are spiritually dead. Apart from God and the spiritual life that God imparts to us, we have no life. We are not merely spiritually sick and in need of God’s healing. We are spiritual corpses who need the resurrection life that only God can give us. We cannot give it to ourselves and we cannot even help God give it to us. It is a picture of our total and abject dependence on God.
This miracle shows us what we talked about in chapter 4: God is the reason for life. We see it in Jesus’s raising of Lazarus, but it is presaged in his superlatively powerful declaration, “I am the resurrection and the life,” which, in a way, is a chilling statement. Can we believe that this dear soul who loved his friends and who wept when they wept is the same one who created the moon and the sun and the stars? Jesus declares that he is “the resurrection and the life” and then he demonstrates it by raising a four-day-old corpse to breathing, walking, conscious life. In raising Lazarus from the dead, Jesus wanted all to see the thing that it seems no one had yet seen: that he was God, the very author of life. Once we can fathom this, we not only think of Jesus differently, we think of life differently as well. When we see trees bursting into leaf and when we see eggs hatching to produce birds that fly through the sky, we think of him, the man weeping by his friend’s tomb. The miracle of Lazarus is God’s way of forcing us to see that apart from this Jesus, there is no life. He—that humble man who would die a horrible death in a short time—is the one who spoke the world and life into being and who has sustained it ever since and sustains it now.
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THE RESURRECTION
Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul’s delivery.
Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well
And better than thy stroke; why swell’st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.
—JOHN DONNE
The great English poet John Donne, in his famous poem, declares what Christians have always believed: that Death was murdered in a tomb, and that Death and the tomb can hold us no more. Donne doesn’t refer specifically to that tomb because he doesn’t need to. As an English bishop, it is what he and what all Christians have believed, that the resurrection of Jesus opened the door, leading the way from that tomb and death to freedom and eternal life. Even though Death still lingered through the centuries, it ultimately died. Even though each of us will die, we may now all live again, forever. This belief has informed Western civilization for nearly twenty centuries, but it is a belief that is so radical it can easily be taken for granted, can be ignored as metaphorical, as something akin to saying that each spring brings new life, or that “life springs eternal.” But we mustn’t take it for granted. The death of Death is not about the recurring cycle of spring. On the contrary, if the resurrection happened, it is that event—simultaneously historical and mythical—of which the recurring cycle of spring itself is a mere shadow and type.
The real defeat of Death hangs on an event as implausible as anything imaginable: In a hewn rock tomb just outside Jerusalem, the cosmos itself—and not just the material cosmos, but the temporal universe too, which is to say space and time both—pivoted and reversed course, undoing the curse of Death that had been upon us since the Garden of Eden. Is this a beautiful myth, or did something miraculous literally happen?
How is it possible that a human being that has really and truly died—that has become an inert corpse, with all the attendant unpleasant attributes of congealed bodily fluids and rigor mortis—could reverse course and again become a living, breathing, walking, talking, and eating human being? There can be no question that it’s impossible, so for it to happen would require no small miracle.
THE CENTRALITY OF THE RESURRECTION
The claim that this happened is not merely important to the Christian faith, it is superlatively central and crucial. According to the apostle Paul, if it did not actually happen, there is nothing more to discuss of Christianity at all. What Paul said was that if Christ was not actually and literally raised from the dead, Christian faith is useless. If that did not happen, our sins cannot be forgiven and washed away, so the central idea of Christian faith, that Jesus’s death and resurrection fundamentally transforms and redeems each of us who put our faith in him, evaporates. If he did not rise from the dead, we do not rise from the dead—and Death wins. In fact, Paul pointedly says that if Jesus did not rise from the dead, “[W]e are of all people most to be pitied.”
Some scholars in the last century or so seem to have missed or discounted the passage where Paul makes this so explicitly clear. They seem to want to say, Er, um . . . let’s not be so hasty. We can work with this. If Jesus did not literally rise from the dead—because science is now advanced enough to tell us that none of these things could have happened—all is not lost! On the contrary, let’s see what we might salvage from this wreck. They would then talk movingly of how Jesus had not risen bodily but had risen spiritually, whatever that might mean. They would say he had risen “in the hearts of his disciples”! But this is nothing more than a rhetorical dodge and a linguistic fudge; it is, practically speaking, meaningless. It’s as though I would say to my wife, Let me help you with those heavy packages—metaphorically speaking. Or as though I would tell my landlord, The rent check is in the mail. Spiritually speaking. Or as though I would say to my daughter, I love you so much I would die for you. Figuratively speaking!
So how can scholars say such things? It is no great mystery. From where they are, they have no choice. They are materialists who have dismissed the very idea of a literal resurrection, and with it every other kind of bona fide miracle. But in overemphasizing the materialistic world and dismissing the idea of anything supernatural, they ironically inflate metaphor beyond the bursting point. They say that this cannot happen literally, because all there is is the natural, materialistic world. So to somehow get beyond the material world without literally getting beyond it, we will just put all of our supernatural eggs in a metaphorical basket. They will simply take all of that stuff that we think of as unreal—because we have arbitrarily limited reality to our physical and natural and sensory reality—and put it in a basket that exists only in our minds, which is actually not real, but which we will inflate to the point of a kind of reality. We will do an end run around our circumscribed definition of reality and voilà, we will square the circle. But this too they have only done in their minds. Their circle is still as circular as ever it was.
But it seems clear from what he writes that Paul has somehow heard this all b
efore, centuries ahead of his time. So he has definitively preempted this kind of thinking with that famous passage. And the Church Fathers and the Church itself in its councils has ratified his thinking as canonical. There is no escape. It’s all or nothing. Christians do not have the option of hedging their bets on this one. Our entire belief is predicated on this miracle. We can ignore what Paul wrote or try to marginalize it somehow, but if we do that, we marginalize ourselves from the great river of Christian thought over the last two millennia. We claim a tiny tributary as the “true river” and paddle alone into a swamp.
In looking at Paul’s famous passage, we see that Paul not only says what he says, but he then underscores it dramatically by teasing out the fatal implications of it. He seals the gate and then double and triple seals it. He says if Jesus did not rise from the dead we are left with precisely nothing, and less than nothing, because not only wouldn’t we have no forgiveness of sins or anything else, we would be the most pitied of all people in the world; we would be pathetic. He is saying that if Jesus did not rise bodily from the dead we are far worse off than pagans and nonbelievers.
What Paul does in that passage is like what Elijah does in the Second Book of Kings. Elijah has a kind of contest with the priests of Baal, in which they both build piles of wood and then ask their respective gods to light it on fire, except Elijah pours gallons and gallons of water on his pile, as if to say, If God is God, I think that not only can he light wood on fire, he can light it on fire if it’s soaking wet. Which of course God does. It’s an effort to underscore things, to raise the stakes dramatically, and that is precisely what Paul is doing in that passage. He’s saying we cannot have it both ways. Either Jesus rose bodily from the dead or he didn’t, and if he didn’t we lose everything—and then some. So let’s not kid ourselves.
If someone says that the miracle of the resurrection doesn’t matter, remember that Paul says that it matters more than anything; and two thousand years of the Church has said the same. If someone tells us that Jesus “rose in the hearts of the disciples,” we are obliged to smile and say, that’s a nice idea, but unfortunately it cannot work. It’s a fundamental contradiction of what Paul and all Christians have been saying since the first century.
So that’s the biggest question: Did this miracle really happen?
Before we answer that, here is John Updike’s wonderful poem “Seven Stanzas at Easter,” in which he makes the same point:
Make no mistake: if he rose at all
It was as His body;
If the cell’s dissolution did not reverse, the molecule reknit,
The amino acids rekindle,
The Church will fall.
It was not as the flowers,
Each soft spring recurrent;
It was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the
Eleven apostles;
It was as His flesh; ours.
The same hinged thumbs and toes
The same valved heart
That-pierced-died, withered, paused, and then regathered
Out of enduring Might
New strength to enclose.
Let us not mock God with metaphor,
Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence,
Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded
Credulity of earlier ages:
Let us walk through the door.
The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
Not a stone in a story,
But the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of
Time will eclipse for each of us
The wide light of day.
And if we have an angel at the tomb,
Make it a real angel,
Weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in
The dawn light, robed in real linen
Spun on a definite loom.
Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
For our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
Lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed
By the miracle,
And crushed by remonstrance.
DID THE RESURRECTION REALLY HAPPEN?
The idea that there is enough evidence to make an informed decision on something as outrageous and as long ago as the resurrection of Jesus from the grave is itself startling and hard to believe. Many persons (this author was one of them) believe that we can never know much more about it than about where Adam and Eve are buried or whether Cain and Abel had freckles, or what Noah’s voice sounded like. But the life and death of Jesus took place well within historical times, which these other things certainly did not. The Iliad and Odyssey were written seven centuries earlier. The complex and brilliant plays of Euripides, Sophocles, and Aeschylus were written more than four centuries earlier and all we know of Alexander the Great and Aristotle and Socrates happened centuries before Jesus’s birth.
We know so much about what happened in Jesus’s time—about the Roman Empire and about what took place in Palestine during the Roman occupation and about Jewish life and customs in that time and place—that while we may not have a surfeit of knowledge and evidence, we’ve at least got a hatful. So let’s see if we can determine whether this miracle of miracles probably happened or probably didn’t happen—or whether it’s truly impossible to say.
We should begin by simply citing the great controversies and arguments that swirled around this epic event in the reign of Pontius Pilate. From these alone it’s clear that Jesus really lived and was crucified and laid in a tomb and that on the third day, that tomb was found to be empty. On those points there is almost zero doubt. The doubt only comes in on how Jesus left the tomb. Our only two options in answering that are whether he left the tomb through resurrection or other, less dramatic means.
DID SOMEONE STEAL JESUS’S BODY?
At the time that these events happened, there was a fierce contingent who insisted that Jesus’s disciples had stolen his body. Others claimed that the Romans had stolen it. Still others said that the Jewish religious leaders who had opposed Jesus had stolen his body. It’s very easy to make these claims. It’s even easier to simply say that the body was stolen, because in using the passive voice, one’s attentions are focused on the verb of “stealing” and distracted from the subject of “who.” Because when we home in on that, the idea that his body was stolen becomes dramatically less plausible.
So let’s examine each of the proposed thieves in turn, beginning with the idea that it was the Romans who took the body from the tomb. They would have been the only ones able to actually do it. Who else would get past the armed guards stationed outside the tomb? To appreciate what was at stake here, we should understand something of what this tomb was like and who was guarding it. Here is the passage from the Gospel of Matthew:
On the next day, which followed the Day of Preparation, the chief priests and Pharisees gathered together to Pilate, saying, “Sir, we remember, while he was still alive, how that deceiver said, ‘After three days I will rise.’ Therefore command that the tomb be made secure until the third day, lest his disciples come by night and steal him away, and say to the people, ‘He has risen from the dead.’ So the last deception will be worse than the first.” Pilate said to them, “You have a guard; go your way, make it as secure as you know how.” So they went and made the tomb secure, sealing the stone and setting a guard.
In the Roman world, “sealing the stone” was something done officially, with the full force of Roman law. Once the giant wheel of stone had been put in place, covering the mouth of the tomb, the Roman soldiers put a cord across it with an official wax seal bearing the imperial Roman mark. There would have been official, legal witnesses to this. This seal was infinitely more forbidding than the plastic yellow tape that reads: POLICE LINE. DO NOT CROSS. It was also more forbidding than the vast stone w
heel sealing the tomb. This is because anyone daring to break a Roman seal would risk death. It would be like spitting at an image of Caesar. Besides this imperial seal, there was a Roman guard, which does not mean there was a single guard but rather an official number of sixteen, four of whom would stand for the duration of their shift, with the remaining twelve sitting in a semicircle around the four.
That anyone would be able to get past these sixteen armed soldiers to roll away the massy stone and steal the body is preposterous. Some have said that perhaps the guards were bribed, but can we imagine it never occurred to the Roman authorities that guards might be bribed? Human nature has not changed in two millennia. The Roman authorities well knew such temptations existed, so if a guard in such a position were discovered or even thought to have taken a bribe, he would have been put to death in a gruesome fashion: by being crucified upside down or by being set aflame in his own clothing. If a policeman in our world takes a bribe, there will be a trial and he might lose his job and perhaps go to prison for some time, but he will not be put to death. But Roman soldiers knew death was nearly certain if they failed in their duties, and were mightily disinclined to take a bribe. Even the most beef-witted of them understood that money could not be enjoyed by the dead.
But besides asking whether someone might steal the body, we have to ask why. What might be their various motives?
MOTIVES FOR STEALING THE BODY
Starting with the Romans, we know that their reason for consenting to have Jesus executed was to quell the unrest that was always threatening to explode among the Jews in Jerusalem. At Passover, this threat was dramatically increased, so if throwing a sop to the Jewish religious leaders by executing this popular upstart would give them a way to keep their people in check, why not do it? But they knew that if the body were to be stolen, it would be far worse than if Jesus had not been executed in the first place, so they took every precaution to prevent its being stolen. To understand the extent of these precautions is to know the idea of theft is too flimsy to take seriously.
