The Easter Effect
and How It Changed the World
The first
Christians were baffled by what they called ‘the Resurrection.’ Their struggle
to understand it brought about astonishing success for their faith
By George Weigel March 30, 2018
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
In the year 312,
just before his victory at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge won him the
undisputed leadership of the Roman Empire, Constantine the Great had a heavenly
vision of Christian symbols. That augury led him, a year later, to end all
legal sanctions on the public profession of Christianity.
Or so a pious
tradition has it.
But there’s a more
mundane explanation for Constantine’s decision: He was a politician who had shrewdly decided
to join the winning side. By the early 4th century, Christians likely counted
for between a quarter and a half of the population of the Roman Empire, and
their exponential growth seemed likely to continue.
How did this
happen? How did a ragtag band of nobodies from the far edges of the
Mediterranean world become such a dominant force in just two and a half
centuries? The historical sociology of this extraordinary phenomenon has been
explored by Rodney Stark of Baylor University, who argues that Christianity
modeled a nobler way of life than what was on offer elsewhere in the rather brutal society of
the day. In Christianity, women were respected as they weren’t in classical
culture and played a critical role in bringing men to the faith and attracting
converts. In an age of plagues, the readiness of Christians to care for all the
sick, not just their own, was a factor, as was the impressive witness to faith
of countless martyrs.
Christianity also
grew from within because Christians had larger families, a byproduct of their
faith’s prohibition of contraception, abortion and infanticide.
For theologians who
like to think that arguments won the day for the Christian faith, this sort of
historical reconstruction is not particularly gratifying, but it makes a lot of
human sense. Prof. Stark’s analysis still leaves us with a question, though:
How did all that modeling of a compelling, alternative way of life get started?
And that, in turn, brings us back to that gaggle of nobodies in the early first
century A.D. and what happened to them.
What happened to
them was the Easter Effect.
There is no
accounting for the rise of Christianity without weighing the revolutionary effect on those nobodies of what they called
“the Resurrection”: their encounter with the one whom they embraced as the
Risen Lord, whom they first knew as the itinerant Jewish rabbi, Jesus of
Nazareth, and who died an agonizing and shameful death on a Roman cross outside
Jerusalem. As N.T. Wright, one of the Anglosphere’s pre-eminent biblical
scholars, makes clear, that first generation answered the question of why they
were Christians with a straightforward answer: because Jesus was raised from
the dead.
Now that, as some
disgruntled listeners once complained about Jesus’ preaching, is “a hard
saying.” It was no less challenging two millennia ago than it is today. And one
of the most striking things about the New Testament accounts of Easter, and
what followed in the days immediately after Easter, is that the Gospel writers
and editors carefully preserved the memory of the first Christians’ bafflement, skepticism and even fright about what
had happened to their former teacher and what was happening to them.
In Mark’s gospel, Mary Magdalene and other
women in Jesus’ entourage find his tomb empty and a young man sitting nearby
telling them that “Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified… has risen; he is not
here.” But they had no idea what that was all about, “and went out and fled
from the tomb…[and] said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”
Two disciples
walking to Emmaus from Jerusalem on Easter afternoon haven’t a clue as to who’s
talking with them along their way, interpreting the scriptures and explaining
Jesus’ suffering
as part of his messianic mission. They don’t even recognize who it is that sits
down to supper with them until he breaks bread and asks a blessing: “…and their
eyes were opened and they recognized him.” They high- tail it back to Jerusalem
to tell the other friends of Jesus, who report that Peter has had a similarly
strange experience, but when “Jesus himself stood among them…they were startled
and frightened, and supposed that they saw a ghost.”
Some time later,
Peter, John and others in Jesus’ core group are fishing on the Sea of Tiberias.
“Jesus stood on the beach,” we are told, “yet the disciples did not know that
it was Jesus.” At the very end of these post-Easter accounts, those whom we
might expect to have been the first to grasp what was afoot are still
skeptical. When that core group of Jesus’ followers goes back to Galilee, they
see him, “but some doubted.”
This remarkable and
deliberate recording of the first Christians’ 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, “I know this sounds ridiculous, but it’s what
happened.” 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—not 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.
‘The Easter Effect impelled them to bring a new standard of
equality into the world. ’
The way they thought about time and history
changed. During Jesus’ 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’s Kingdom had come not at the end of time but within
time—and 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— because they knew, now, that death
did not have the final word in the human story.
The way they
thought about “resurrection” changed. Pious Jews taught by the reforming
Pharisees of Jesus’ 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’ 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 “Jesus of Nazareth– Holy Week”)
there had been an “evolutionary leap” 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.
Which brings us to
the next manifestation of the Easter Effect among the first Christians: The way they thought about their
responsibilities changed. What had happened to Jesus, they slowly began to
grasp, was not just about their former teacher and friend; it was about all of
them. His destiny was their destiny. So not only could they face opposition,
scorn and even death with confidence; they could offer to others the truth and the fellowship
they had been given. Indeed, they had to do so, to be faithful to what they had
experienced. Christian mission is inconceivable without Easter. And that
mission would eventually lead these sons and daughters of Abraham to the
conviction that the promise that God had made to the People of Israel had been
extended to those who were not sons and daughters of Abraham. Because of
Easter, the gentiles, too, could be embraced in a relationship—a covenant—with the
one God, which was embodied in righteous living.
The way they thought about worship and its
temporal rhythms changed. For the Jews who were the first members of the Jesus
movement, nothing was more sacrosanct than the Sabbath, the seventh day of rest
and worship. The Sabbath was enshrined in creation, for God himself had rested
on the seventh day. The Sabbath’s importance as a key behavioral marker of the
People of God had been reaffirmed in the Ten Commandments. Yet these first Christians, all Jews,
quickly fixed Sunday as the “Lord’s Day,” because Easter had been a Sunday.
Benedict XVI draws out the crucial point here:
“Only an event that
marked souls indelibly could bring about such a profound realignment of the
religious culture of the week. Mere theological speculations could not have
achieved this... [The] celebration of the Lord’s day, which was characteristic
of the Christian community from the outset, is one of the most convincing
proofs that something extraordinary happened [at Easter]—the discovery of the
empty tomb and the encounter with the Risen Lord.”
Without the Easter
Effect, there is really no explaining why there
was a winning side—the Christian side—for Constantine the Great to choose. That
effect, as Prof. Wright puts it, begins with,
and is incomprehensible without, the first Christians’ conviction that “Jesus
of Nazareth was raised bodily to a new sort of life, three days after his
execution.” Recognizing that does not, of course, convince everyone. Nor does
it end the mystery of Easter. The first Christians, like Christians today,
cannot fully comprehend resurrected life: the life depicted in the Gospels of a
transphysical body that can eat, drink and be touched but that also appears and
disappears, unbothered by obstacles like doors and distance.
Nor does Easter
mean that everything is always going to turn out just fine, for there is still
work to be done in history. As Benedict XVI put it in his 2010 Easter message:
“Easter does not work magic. Just as the Israelites found the desert awaiting
them on the far side of the Red Sea, so the Church, after the Resurrection,
always finds history filled with joy and hope, grief and anguish. And yet this
history is changed…it is truly open to the future.” Which
perhaps offers one
final insight into the question with which we began: How did the Jesus
movement, beginning on the margins of civilization and led by people of seeming
inconsequence, end up being what Constantine regarded as the winning side?
However important
the role of sociological factors in explaining why Christianity carried the
day, there also was that curious and inexplicable joy that marked the early
Christians, even as they were being marched off to execution. Was that joy simply delusion?
Denial?
Perhaps it was the
Easter Effect: the joy of people who had become
convinced that they were witnesses to something inexplicable but nonetheless
true. Something that gave a superabundance of meaning to life and that erased
the fear of death. Something that had to be shared. Something with which to
change the world.
Mr. Weigel is distinguished senior fellow at
the Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he holds the William E. Simon Chair
in Catholic Studies.
