What Happened at Jesus’s Resurrection?
What happened at the resurrection is that Jesus was fully revealed as the eternal
and deathless Christ in embodied form. Basically, one circumscribed body of
Jesus morphed into ubiquitous Light. Henceforth, light is probably the best
metaphor for Christ or God.
For most of the first six centuries, the moment of Jesus’s resurrection was
deemed unpaintable or uncarvable. The custom for a long time was just to
picture the shrine in Jerusalem where the resurrection was supposed to have
happened—but never the event itself.*5 Similarly, the event is not even
described as such in the New Testament. All we see are the aftermath stories—
stunned guards, seated angels, and visiting women. The closest thing we have to
an immediate description is indirectly given in Matthew 27:51–53, but this
describes a general resurrection of tombs opening and bodies rising, and not just
the raising up of Jesus. Read this verse now, and be shocked at the implications!
“The tombs also were opened. And many bodies of those who had fallen asleep
were raised up.”
After the resurrection stories, more followers dared to see Jesus as “the
Lord”—or at least as one with the Lord, which we often translated as “Son of
God.” This is a clear and dramatic leap forward, an understanding that is fully
perceived only after the resurrection, although hints had been dropped
throughout Jesus’s lifetime. One could say he is gradually being revealed as
“Light,” which we especially see in the three accounts of the “Transfiguration”
(Matthew 17:1–8, Mark 9:2–8, Luke 9:28–36). These are likely transplanted
resurrection accounts, as is the story of Jesus walking on the water. Most of us, if
we are listening and looking, also have such resurrection moments in the
middle of our lives, when “the veil parts” now and then. “Believe in the light so
that you also may become children of the light” Jesus says in John’s Gospel
(12:36), letting us know that we participate in the same mystery, and he is here
to aid the process.
My personal belief is that Jesus’s own human mind knew his full divine
identity only after his resurrection. He had to live his life with the same faith
that we must live, and also “grow in wisdom, age, and grace” (Luke 2:40), just as
we do. Jesus was “not incapable of feeling our weakness with us, but has been