Resurrection of the dead in the Old Testament:
Belief in the resurrection of the dead, called for by the Old Testament prophets to indicate that the living God who is able to give life is redeeming his people who hope for his salvation and conquering death for their sake (Isaiah 26:19; 51:6-9; Hosea 6:1-3; 13:14; Ezekiel 37:1-14), is an initial proclamation of the promise of resurrection that is not without ambiguity and symbolism. In the second century B.C., revelation advances significantly. When the Maccabees were martyred by Antiochus IV in 167 B.C., the Jews began to wonder about the fate of the righteous who died for the faith. The answer is given in the Book of Daniel (12:2), where its author strengthens the resolve of his people and depicts for them in pictures the hidden face of their martyrdom, that is, the glory that awaits them, so that the image of the resurrection that was given symbolically in the past is understood in a realistic way: God will raise the dead from hell and will share them in his kingdom.
The Greek (Platonic) view of resurrection is in no way similar to the Hebrew view. According to the Greek conception, the soul is similar to the world of ideas and imprisoned in the body, and therefore death releases it and frees it from the body; but the soul, by its nature incorruptible, enters into divine immortality from the first moment when death strips it of the bonds of the body. The Hebrews, on the other hand, believed that the person as a whole, according to his present state, is chained under the power of death. The soul, which is the principle of life, descends into hell, into the abode of the dead (an indefinable pit into which the dead are thrown under the power of death) (Psalm 94:17, 115:17) and is without personal existence, because God, who is in his essence light and life, does not visit it, and consequently it cannot praise him (Psalm 88:11; Isaiah 38:18) nor have any relationship with people (Job 14:21…). However, the Hebrews did not believe in the annihilation of man after death, but on the contrary, they said that he would continue in hell until the resurrection, where the general and comprehensive encounter would take place. The end of man’s life in death is only a passing state, after which man is resurrected alive by the grace of God, as from a sleep or a deep sleep.
In the time of the Lord, there were several religious parties with conflicting theories on the subject of resurrection. The Sadducees, who used only the five Mosaic books, which they believed did not mention the resurrection, considered the issue of resurrection a useless innovation and did not believe in it (Matthew 22:23; Acts 23:8). The Essenes rarely mentioned the resurrection and viewed it as a transformed world. As for the Pharisees, they were the ones who firmly believed in the resurrection. Some of them believed that it would happen before the coming of Christ, while the other group said that it would happen after his coming and expected a transformed life according to what was stated in the Book of Daniel or the Proverbs of Enoch.
Resurrection of the dead in the New Testament:
Jesus affirmed the resurrection of the dead and resisted its deniers (Matthew 22:23-33). He proved to the Sadducees, the enemies of the resurrection – in his time – by using the names of the first fathers on the basis that they were alive. The Torah also spoke of life’s victory over death, but the new thing that was revealed in Jesus, which changed everything, is that the event of his resurrection from the dead fulfilled the ancient hope of the righteous who trusted that God would rescue them from the grip of death (see: Acts 2:24, 13:34 which cites Psalm 16). This is what the New Testament reveals in the correspondence between the image of the “Son of Man” mentioned in the Book of Daniel – which is the clearest symbolic image that indicated in the Old Testament the victory of the righteous over death – and Jesus personally. In Jesus who rose from the grave, all the symbols of ancient victory were understood, their meanings were realized and completed. What is striking is that the repeated prophecies that came in the New Testament from Jesus and related to his suffering and death always included the prediction of his resurrection (Mark 8:31, 9:31 and 10:34 and their parallels in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke) and each time the talk was about his resurrection on “the third day” or “after three days.”
Moreover, the Lord Christ defines himself by saying: “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live; and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die” (John 11:25). This strengthens the faith of believers that they share in the mystery of eternal life from their present life. Eternal life can be lived by the believer from today, before his death, if he takes Christ as Lord of his life and seeks to apply his teachings in his daily life. Eternal life is not something future, absent today and to come later. Rather, it is a reality that the believer lives through his commitment to life in the Church and the practice of the sacraments, especially the sacrament of the Eucharist. This is based on the words of the Lord: “He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day” (John 6:55). Christ does not say, here and elsewhere in the Gospel of John, that the believer will one day have eternal life, but rather, in the present tense, he affirms, “He has eternal life.” This means that the believer in Jesus begins, in this earthly life, to taste eternal life from the moment he enters into fellowship with the Lord.
The Apostle Paul (1 Corinthians 15:12-14) places the resurrection of the dead at the heart of the Christian faith. The Christian faith is not complete without his belief in the resurrection of the dead and eternal life. This is why this matter is also mentioned in the Creed, which includes the most important Christian doctrines: “And in the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the age to come.” In this context, it is very clear that the Apostle Paul established a close relationship between the resurrection of Christ and our resurrection. There is no meaning to the resurrection of Christ if its direct and certain result is not the resurrection of man. The Lord Christ does not need to show us His power and authority over death, for He is the Almighty God, whom death cannot defeat. But He accepted death in order to save man.
The Apostle Paul never ceased to highlight the paschal character of Christian life, distinguished by a true participation in the life of Christ risen from the dead. Baptism is nothing but participation in the death and resurrection of Christ: “Buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through your faith in the working of God, who raised him from the dead” (Colossians 2:12). The Christian, therefore, does not await the hour of his death, but rather anticipates death by dying in the baptismal font in order to rise as a new man, risen with Christ from the dead (see the message that the Church recites in the service of the sacrament of baptism: Romans 6:1-11).
There is no doubt that the beloved Apostle John sees the final resurrection already accomplished in the present. Lazarus emerging from the tomb symbolizes the faithful who are rescued from the clutches of death by the voice of the Lord. Therefore, Christ’s teaching on the resurrection of the dead contains explicit affirmations: “Truly, truly, I say to you, an hour is coming, and now is, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live” (John 5:25). This clear statement coincides with the Christian experience of the power of Christ’s resurrection, expressed in the First Letter of John: “We know that we have passed from death to life” (3:14). Hence, whoever possesses this life will never fall under the power of death. However, such certainty does not invalidate the expectation of the final resurrection, but rather makes hope powerfully present alongside faith.
There are many signs on which the New Testament attributed the meanings of the Lord’s resurrection and interpreted them in light of the mystery revealed on the third day (see: “The Sign of Jonah”: “For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the whale, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth” (Matthew 12:40); and “The Sign of the Temple”: “Jesus answered and said to them, ‘Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.’ The Jews said, ‘It took forty-six years to build this temple, and will you raise it up in three days?’ But he was speaking of the temple of his body. When he had risen from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this…” (John 2:19-22). However, some specialists in biblical exegesis agree that the phrase “on the third day” was first inspired by the prophecy of Hosea: “After two days he will revive us, and on the third day he will raise us up, that we may live before him” (6:1-2), and that it was taken in the days of Christ, in a theological sense, signifies what we call the “day of general resurrection,” the event expected to occur at the end of time for the entire community. If the early Christians testified that Christ rose from the dead “on the third day” (Luke 24:46; 1 Corinthians 15:4), this testimony certainly does not intend to specify a specific date (the day after the second day, the day on which the women went to the tomb and found it empty), but it declares that Jesus’ resurrection anticipated the end of history and brought about the general resurrection. Christ who rose is “the firstborn from the dead” (Colossians 1:18) or “the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep” (1 Corinthians 15:20), and from his resurrection we can understand our own resurrection, because his resurrection is the secret of our personal passage, along with the whole universe, to life in God.
The resurrection of Christ from the dead is not an event separate from the issue of human salvation. The resurrection of Christ, the foundation of the Christian faith, is also the foundation of the hope of believers in their own resurrection. Christ rose as “the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep” (1 Corinthians 15:20), that is, the first of them, according to the expression of the Apostle Paul, who says in the same context, denouncing the thinking of those who doubt the resurrection of the dead: “If Christ is preached as having been raised from the dead, how do some among you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? For if there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain, and your faith is in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:12-14).
We will rise, then, because Jesus has risen, and there are many evidences of this in the New Testament, including what is stated in the Epistle to the Romans: “He who raised Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies because of his Spirit who dwells in you” (8:11). The same certainty is found in what the Apostle Paul wrote in his Second Epistle to the Corinthians: “Because we know that he who raised the Lord Jesus will also raise us up with Jesus and will place us with you” (4:14). The resurrection of Christ gave the Apostle Paul and his contemporaries among the believers, and us after them, the hope of resurrection in imitation of the resurrection of the Lord. We become children of God because Jesus is the Son, and we inherit the Kingdom because Christ is the Heir… And so, by analogy, we will rise because Christ has risen.
Finally, it must be emphasized that the body, in the biblical heritage, does not only mean the material element of the human being. What is meant by the resurrection of the body is the resurrection of the entire human being, not the resurrection of one part of it without the other. As for the body that we see as corrupt, it is transformed into a body that is not controlled by corruption and dissolution, according to the words of the Apostle Paul: “For flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor can corruption inherit immortality (…) This corruptible body must put on incorruption, and this mortal body must put on immortality” (1 Corinthians 5:35-51). This body will be stripped of corruption so that through the resurrection it will become in the image of the body of Christ, who rose from the dead, who sat at the right hand of the Father and brought humanity into the heart of God to live with Him forever.
From the Parish Bulletin 1996 + 2003, with some modifications.
