This remarkable and deliberate recording of the first Christians\u2019 incomprehension of what they insisted was the irreducible bottom line of their faith teaches us two things. First, it tells us that the early Christians were confident enough about what they called the Resurrection that (to borrow from Prof. Wright) they were prepared to say something like, \u201cI know this sounds ridiculous, but it\u2019s what happened.\u201d And the second thing it tells us is that it took time for the first Christians to figure out what the events of Easter meant\u2014not only for Jesus but for themselves. As they worked that out, their thinking about a lot of things changed profoundly, as Prof. Wright and Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI help us to understand in their biblical commentaries.<\/p>\n
The way they thought about time and history changed.<\/em> During Jesus\u2019 public ministry, many of his followers shared in the Jewish messianic expectations of the time: God would soon work something grand for his people in Israel, liberating them from their oppressors and bringing about a new age in which (as Isaiah had prophesied) the nations would stream to the mountain of the Lord and history would end. The early Christians came to understand that the cataclysmic, world-redeeming act that God had promised had taken place at Easter. God\u2019s Kingdom had come not at the end of time but within time\u2014and that had changed the texture of both time and history. History continued, but those shaped by the Easter Effect became the people who knew how history was going to turn out. Because of that, they could live differently. The Easter Effect impelled them to bring a new standard of equality into the world and to embrace death as martyrs if necessary\u2014because they knew, now, that death did not have the final word in the human story.<\/p>\n The way they thought about \u201cresurrection\u201d changed.<\/em> Pious Jews taught by the reforming Pharisees of Jesus\u2019 time believed in the resurrection of the dead. Easter taught the first Christians, who were all pious Jews, that this resurrection was not the resuscitation of a corpse, nor did it involve the decomposition of a corpse. Jesus\u2019 tomb was empty, but the Risen Lord appeared to his disciples in a transformed body. Those who first experienced the Easter Effect would not have put it in these terms, but as their understanding of what had happened to Jesus and to themselves grew, they grasped that (as Benedict XVI put it in \u201cJesus of Nazareth\u2013Holy Week\u201d) there had been an \u201cevolutionary leap\u201d in the human condition. A new way of being had been encountered in the manifestly human but utterly different life of the one they met as the Risen Lord. That insight radically changed all those who embraced it.<\/p>\n Read it all<\/a>.<\/p>\n He is risen indeed. Alleluia! pic.twitter.com\/qrlCpvAuar<\/a><\/p>\n — St Paul's Cathedral (@StPaulsLondon) April 12, 2020<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n \n