What is Said When Jesus is Said to be "Risen"

The Forever Friend of Sinners

Whatever else we may intend by the term, the gospel can only ultimately refer to the apostolic pronouncement, “Jesus is risen.”

The resurrection of Jesus the Israelite from the dead is the message that the apostles raced across the Mediterranean to proclaim. Contrary to the church’s subsequent emphasis on the cross, apostolic preaching presented the crucifixion of Jesus as salvific only to the extent that God overcame it, raising the crucified Jesus from the dead. Peter puts it just so in the first gospel sermon, “This Jesus, whom you crucified and killed by the hands of those outside the law. But God raised him up, having freed him from death, because it was impossible for him to be held in its power.” Meanwhile Paul, in his epistle to the church at Corinth, sets out the proclamation of resurrection as the claim without which the church is worse than a vain endeavor.

The church’s final, interpreting pronouncement is “Jesus, the Israelite, has risen from the dead.”

Gospeling occurs as this pronouncement interprets the hopes and fears not only of its hearers but of all created history.

If the church’s gospel has no other event to report but the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, it’s surely crucial for believers to inquire what is said when Jesus is said to be risen. At its most essential, what are the “gospel-minimum” components of the faith’s resurrection claim?

What must we be saying when we say that Jesus is risen?

1— That Jesus is risen means he must now be alive.

Though a great deal of what passes today for Christianity would suggest otherwise, the most minimal claim of Easter faith is that Jesus, who once was dead, now lives with death behind him. To put the gospel-minimum plain, if Jesus is risen, he must now be alive.

But this is not as self-evident as we might assume, for what is said when someone is said to be alive? Robert Jenson suggests that the minimum difference between a live person and a dead person is that “the live person can surprise us.” That Jesus is alive, therefore, means that he is known by us yet not contained or constrained by our knowledge of him. The Gospel narratives are testimonies to him; they are not exhaustive biographies of him. The liveliness of Jesus, his ability to surprise us still, is a matter of time. That Jesus is alive, in other words, means that he comes to us from the future. Jesus is thus the first moment of the End, having been raised by the Father and ascended in the Spirit into the future— this is of course what Paul means by calling the Risen Jesus the first fruit of the new creation.