Introduction
Dwight A. Moody
Over the weekend, the prestigious New York Times published three articles about Christianity. It was Easter; but it was also Ramadan and Passover, and I wonder if the paper published articles about those holidays. These three articles were written by a black evangelical theologian Esau McCaulley teaching at Wheaton College in Chicago, a white evangelical lawyer and author David French writing from his home in Tennessee, and an interview that NY Times columnist Tish Warren had with British Evangelical theologian N. T. Wright. Wright is a leading thinker and preacher in the Episcopal Church in England while Warren is a minister of the American conservative offshoot of the Episcopal Church known as the Anglican Church of North America. French grew up in Kentucky where his father Austin French was a colleague of mine on the faculty of Georgetown College; they were Church of Christ, and David may still be. McCaulley is active in a progressive black Baptist church in Chicago. These four Evangelical Christians represent one segment of the Christian community in the western world, but none can be said to speak for Pentecostals, mainline Protestants, Roman Catholics, or Orthodox. Which I found odd. I can only wonder if the selection of these writers was the work of Tish Warren. Regardless, these pieces grapple with history, race, and politics, always necessary components of framing the faith and practice of Christianity in modern America.
On Hope, Hate and the Most Radical Claim of the Easter Season
Esau McCaulley
Easter has never been my favorite church service. Shouting “Alleluia, Christ is risen!” requires an emotional crescendo my melancholy temperament can’t easily manage.
I’m much more comfortable on Maundy Thursday, the beginning of the Triduum, the holiest three days in the Christian calendar. Maundy Thursday remembers Jesus’ last meal with his disciples. That night ends with Judas’s betraying Jesus and the other disciples’ abandoning him, fleeing into the darkness. I have always felt closest to God on this night in the silence, surrounded by the story of failure.
I have never been a big fan of hope. It’s a demanding emotion that insists on changing you. Hope pulls you out of yourself and into the world, forcing you to believe more is possible. Hate is a much less insistent master; it asks you only to loathe. It is quite happy to have you to itself and doesn’t ask you to go anywhere.
Growing up poor provided me with plenty of opportunities to wallow in that much less complex feeling. I hated drug dealers because I had addicts in my family. I knew they could afford Air Jordans, and I could not because my father visited the dealers on payday before he came home to us. When we wound up on government assistance, I detested the people I heard on talk radio who spoke about families like mine as the epitome of what was wrong with America. I abhorred the pastors I saw on television telling broke Black folks like me that a blessing was on the way if we just sent in $99.95. They treated faith like a spiritual lottery, and the chances of winning were about as likely as hitting the million-dollar jackpot. I was a person of few years and many resentments.
But it wasn’t just the ugly things that I rejected; I despised beautiful ones as well. At school when teachers tried to help us with inspirational speeches about the power of our minds and our potential to be more than athletes or criminals, we often mocked them. How dare they interrupt our despair with hope?
This tendency to reject beautiful things might explain why I have always felt sympathy for Judas. As a teenager, during Bible study class when other people spoke glowingly about mighty David or Moses, I pondered the tragedy of Judas. Known to history as the paradigmatic betrayer, Judas was the disciple who, for 30 pieces of silver, sold out Jesus by leading soldiers to where he was the night before he was crucified.
But what if Judas grew up on the rough-and-tumble side of Judea, where boots of Roman soldiers marching through his neighborhood filled him with rage and fear? What if he experienced the violent anti-Judaism the occupying force consistently inflicted upon his people? As a child of the South, from Northwest Huntsville, Ala., I know ways in which constant oppression can make pragmatism and self-preservation seem like the only realistic options.
For someone like Judas, Jesus offered the dangerous kind of hope that might have challenged him to relinquish his hostilities and reawaken that thing he had long since given up, the belief in the possibility that things might be different. That could explain why he agreed to betray Jesus. Betrayal was his chance to return to the safety and dependability of hopelessness.
Among the many times I rejected beauty in my teenage years, one day sticks out. My friends and I were sitting in a class with one of the instructors who didn’t transfer out of our district when things got hard and violence surged. That day we were in rare form, cracking more than the usual amount of jokes about her, interrupting her lecture. We also began a particularly intense game of trash can basketball with paper balls flying from all over the classroom. The more she tried to ignore us and continue, the more we wanted to break her.
After class, I saw her out in the hall, visibly troubled, steadying herself for the next group of kids. I remember walking away with my classmates, pretending to celebrate our victory — but a part of me knew that we had lost much more than we had gained. We had risked driving away someone whose only flaw was to care.
Isn’t it easier to believe that everyone who loves us has some secret agenda? That racism will forever block the creation of what Martin Luther King Jr. called the beloved community? That the gun lobby will always overwhelm every attempt at reform? That poverty is a fact of human existence? Despair allows us to give up our resistance and rest awhile.
The tragedy of Judas’s story is that his despair never let him go. The Gospel accounts tell us that after betraying Jesus, he killed himself. I do not know many people who have committed suicide, but lots of people from my neighborhood quit on life. Convinced by our shared traumas that their story was over, they let drugs or the streets take them. I have never thought of myself as better than them. I simply was lucky that the vices I turned to in my wandering years did not ruin me.
In the Gospel stories, Jesus overflows with forgiveness. On the cross, one of the last things he said was a plea that God forgive those who crucified him. After the resurrection, he forgives Peter and the other disciples.
His generosity has been a great cheer to all of us misfits who have faltered in our time of testing. The only better story of redemption I can imagine would have been the reconciliation of Judas the Betrayer and Jesus. I am confident Jesus would have forgiven Judas. But in the narrative Judas dies before Jesus rises from the dead. If only Judas had lived a little longer to find that the beautiful thing he tried to destroy was not so easily vanquished.
That indestructibility of hope might be the central and most radical claim of Easter — that on the third day after Jesus was killed, he returned to his disciples physically and that made all the difference. Easter, then, is a not metaphor for new beginnings; it is about encountering the person who, despite every disappointment we experience with ourselves and with the world, gives us a reason to carry on.
So this Easter I will make my way with my family to the South Side of Chicago, to that congregation that serves as our church home. I will do my best to join in the songs of celebration, not because I no longer feel the darkness that has marked so much of my journey, but because sometimes I still do.
(Esau McCaulley is a contributing Opinion writer and an associate professor of New Testament at Wheaton College. He is theologian in residence at Progressive Baptist Church, a historically Black congregation in Chicago and author of the forthcoming memoir How Far to the Promised Land He lives in Wheaton, Ill., with his wife and four children.)
Easter Rebukes the Christian Will to Power
David French
On Easter Sunday, billions of Christians gather together to celebrate the event that’s indispensable to the Christian faith — the resurrection of Jesus Christ. As the Apostle Paul wrote to the church in Corinth, without the resurrection our faith is useless. The Easter focus on the resurrection is profoundly encouraging for people of Christian faith.
But the resurrection isn’t the only lesson of Easter weekend. The story of Christ’s arrest, trial and crucifixion contains its own lessons, and one of them is quite relevant to this age and to debates about Christian engagement in the public square. Quite simply, the story of Easter weekend rebukes the Christian will to power.
To understand why, let’s revisit one of the most famous moments in Scripture. After Jesus’ arrest and show trial, Pontius Pilate, the Roman ruler of Judea, gave the people a fateful choice. It was customary to release a prisoner during Passover, and Pilate offered up Jesus. The crowd wanted someone else. “Release Barabbas to us,” they cried.
When I was a kid in Sunday school, no one ever truly explained the significance of the crowd’s choice. It mystified me. Barabbas was always described as a heinous criminal, a murderer or a robber. Thus, the crowd seemed completely irrational, even deranged. Its choice of a common criminal over Christ was incomprehensible.
Indeed, the contrast with the public reaction to Jesus’ initial entry into Jerusalem was profound. Days earlier, on what we now call Palm Sunday, Jesus entered the city to accolades. As he rode on a colt, his crowd of disciples yelled these words: “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord.”
As I grew older, I learned more context. Jesus was not the king the throng expected. He made clear that he was more interested in saving souls than in assuming power. And Barabbas was more than a mere criminal. He was an insurrectionist. The Books of Luke and Mark very clearly state that he participated in a “rebellion.” Those who chose Barabbas didn’t choose a common criminal over Christ. Instead, they chose a man who defied Rome in the way they understood, a mission that Jesus rejected.
A bit of historical perspective is necessary. Jesus of Nazareth was born a Jew in the town of Bethlehem, in a land that groaned under the weight of Roman oppression. The people of Israel longed for liberation from Rome. Indeed, it was not long after Jesus’ death that they launched their first great revolt against Roman rule, a violent uprising that met a catastrophic end.
But Christ wasn’t a political leader, even though the people hoped for political liberation. As the Book of Matthew relates, Jesus had already rejected Satan’s effort to tempt him with “all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor” if only Christ would “fall down and worship” him. Yet while Jesus refused the will to power, many of his followers simply couldn’t comprehend his purpose. They persisted in the belief that the kingdom he promised would look very much like the kingdoms of this earth, including the Roman kingdom that dominated their lives.
The spirit of Barabbas — the desire to seize or retain power, through violence if necessary — has been at war with the spirit of Christ ever since. Two millenniums of church history demonstrate a terrible truth: There was nothing uniquely evil about that ancient crowd. Instead it held up a mirror to our own nature, one that is all too eager to wield the sword, to believe that our own power is a prerequisite to justice.
Easter weekend contains more than one example of the spirit of Barabbas. When Christ was arrested, the Apostle Peter — a man who had been by his side for much of his ministry — still could not see the truth. He drew his sword, struck the high priest’s servant, and cut off his ear.
Though he was in the midst of an unjust arrest that would prove prelude to an unjust execution, Christ rebuked Peter, saying, “Put your sword back in its place, because all who take up the sword will perish by the sword.” As he reminded Peter, Jesus had the power to call on “legions of angels” to stop the arrest, but he chose not to. His purpose was to go to the cross, and as Jesus told us, that’s our purpose as well.
There is a difference between the quest for power and the quest for justice. Believers are required to “act justly.” We should not stand idly by in the face of exploitation or oppression. We do not retreat from the public square. But Christian engagement must be distinctive. It cannot emulate the world’s methods or morality.
In fact, we have a modern model. The single most consequential movement for American justice in the last century was influenced and empowered by the Black churches in the South. The civil rights movement wasn’t exclusively Christian by any means — there are Jewish Americans who gave their lives in support of their Black brothers and sisters, for example — but it was animated by faith. As John Lewis said in 2004, “Without prayer, without faith in the Almighty, the civil rights movement would have been like a bird without wings.”
Specifically, the example of Jesus dominated the minds of civil rights leaders. “We discussed and debated the teachings of the great teacher, and we would ask questions about what would Jesus do,” said Lewis. “In preparing for the sit-ins, we felt that the message was one of love — the message of love in action: Don’t hate. If someone hits you, don’t strike back. Just turn the other side. Be prepared to forgive.”
Tragically, other Southern Christians had forgotten the example of Christ. The spirit of Barabbas was alive and well in the men who trained their fire hoses on peaceful protesters, who loosed dogs on the Black children of Birmingham. They weren’t trying to seize power, but they were trying to maintain it, through violent, lawless means. Their will to power collided with the quest for justice. It is only through God’s grace and the unimaginable courage and persistence of peaceful protesters that justice prevailed, and Jim Crow laws were overturned.
The spirit of Barabbas tempts Christians even today. You see it when armed Christians idolize their guns, when angry Christians threaten and attempt to intimidate their political opponents, when fearful Christians adopt the tactics and ethos of Trumpism to preserve their power. The spirit of Barabbas most clearly captured the mob on Jan. 6, when praying Americans participated in an insurrection based on a lie.
Christ did not reject earthly rule so that his flawed followers could seize the world’s thrones. His ethos was clear: “You know that the rulers of the gentiles lord it over them, and those in high positions act as tyrants over them. It must not be like that among you. On the contrary, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant.” This Easter it is as servants, not rulers, that Christians should resolve to love this land.
(David French is a New York Times Opinion columnist. He is a lawyer, writer and veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom. He is a former constitutional litigator. His most recent book is Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation.)
Did Jesus Really Rise From the Dead?
Tish Harrison Warren
Happy Easter! Easter marks the high point of the Christian liturgical calendar, when billions of Christians around the world celebrate the Resurrection of Jesus, the central hope of the Christian faith. Perhaps no one on earth has studied that event and the subsequent responses to it more than N.T. Wright. He serves as senior research fellow at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford, and is emeritus professor of New Testament at the University of St. Andrews. He has written over 80 books focused on Jesus and his first followers. He is also a Christian and a former bishop of Durham in the Church of England. One of his books, “The Resurrection of the Son of God,” is an exhaustive dive into the scholarship and debates around the Resurrection. I asked Wright to speak with me about his research and this baffling, world-altering claim of resurrection. This interview has been edited and condensed.
Tish Harrison Warren: Your book presents the Resurrection of Jesus as an actual, physical, historical event, not simply a metaphor or spiritual experience. Why does the idea that this was an actual event matter to you?
N.T. Wright: I’m well aware that many people — including some in churches — have treated the Resurrection and Easter as a general way of talking about the rebirth of hope or a spiritual metaphor. Indeed, in the New Testament, the idea of resurrection is sometimes used metaphorically to talk about a new moral life, a life where everything is going to be different. But in the New Testament, that’s always rooted in the claim that when they’re talking about resurrection, they’re talking about something that actually happened.
In the first century, the word for “resurrection,” the Greek word “anastasis,” was never about a vague sense of possibility or the rebirth of hope or anything like that. It was always about people who had been bodily dead now discovered to be bodily alive. I’ve shown in great detail in the book that all the early Christians for whom we have any evidence, right through until around 150 years after the time of Jesus, when they’re talking about resurrection, that’s what they’re talking about.
It’s beyond question that when the first followers of Jesus used that language about him, they intended to say something definite about his being bodily alive, albeit in a whole new way. He seemed to have gone through death and out the other side, but into a new world in which he was emphatically embodied. Unless we are prepared to acknowledge that, we’re simply not taking their words seriously.
Then, as now, claiming that somebody was alive again — particularly somebody who made the sort of claims that Jesus made or were made about him — was revolutionary. It was dangerous talk. So if people don’t like dangerous talk, then stay away from Easter is my advice.
There’s a funny line where you write, “The discovery that dead people stayed dead was not first made by the philosophers of the Enlightenment.” That’s obvious, of course, but we sometimes assume that skepticism is a recent phenomenon. How would ancient Jewish audiences and Gentile audiences think about the apostles talking about the Resurrection?
Early Christianity was born into a world where everybody knew that its central claim was ridiculous, and the early Christians knew it themselves. It’s not that they thought resurrection might just happen to a few people here and there. But they said it had happened in this case.
This claim seemed absolutely crazy. Ordinary, sober people knew perfectly well that dead people don’t get raised up again.
Many Jewish people for two centuries before Jesus and on for at least the next century believed that in the end, all God’s people would be raised because they believed that the God of Israel, the Creator God, would remake the whole world. But this is about one person being raised from the dead ahead of everybody else.
In the non-Jewish world, there is no evidence that anyone is expecting dead people to come back again. There’s lots of speculation about other places they might go. The Platonic speculation about going off to the Isles of the Blessed and having lovely conversations about philosophy all day. The Stoics believed that there would be a great phoenixlike conflagration and the whole world would then be reborn.
But most people knew that when you died, that was basically it. That’s why when Paul, in Athens, said this had happened, most of them laughed at him. It didn’t fit their worldview. That’s crucial because you can’t fit the Resurrection into the existing worldviews that we’ve got. The Resurrection brings its own worldview with it and says, if you’re going to understand the way things are, you start with this and work out. If Jesus really has been raised, then everything is different.
You spend time in the book looking at Jesus’ post-Resurrection appearances in the Gospels. It seems that the disciples’ testimony about seeing Jesus matters to you. Why do you trust their testimony?
If you understand how people thought about death and life after death in the ancient world, you will need two strands of converging evidence.
On the one hand, there are extraordinary reports about people going to the tomb of Jesus and finding that there was no body in it. In that world, grave robbery was a common occurrence, so an empty tomb by itself says, “This is odd,” but we can tell some stories about this that are much more credible than the idea that he’s alive again.
However, if at the same time this person turns up and is seen and felt to be bodily alive and speaks to people and cooks breakfast by the shore, then that is totally unexpected as well. Those two things kind of interpret one another. We know many experiences that people have — and I’ve known of experiences like this in our own family — that somebody who recently died will suddenly show up in a room or somewhere, for a moment or two, to people that they have known, then disappear again. They knew about that kind of thing in the first century as well. They had language for that. It was like an angel visiting. There’s a place in the New Testament where the disciples think that Peter has been killed in prison in Acts Chapter 12, and he’s knocking on the door and they say, “It can’t be Peter. It must be his angel.” They think this is a kind of angelic visitation before he goes off to wherever he will go.
You need those two bits of evidence put together and then the testimony makes sense. Otherwise, empty tomb? Somebody has taken the body. That’s what Mary Magdalene thought. Appearances? “Oh, yeah, we know about those. Just go and check in the tomb. You will find there’s still a body there.” But if there isn’t, then we are into something different. So that’s why that evidence is so important.
It seems like these appearances meant something to the apostles themselves. Paul reminded people in his letters that at the time of his writing there were people still living who had seen Jesus after his Resurrection.
Exactly. At the beginning of the 15th chapter of Paul’s First Letter to Corinth, he mentions the people to whom the risen Jesus appeared. To Peter and to the rest of the apostles, and various others. And then he says that Jesus appeared to 500 people all at once. And most of them are still alive. The implication strongly being: “You go and ask them. You find out what they saw.” In other words, they can’t all be just making it up or all be deluded.
We have evidence of other revolutionary or messianic movements whose founder or leader was killed by the authorities. In such cases, either the movement died out or they got another leader. The central and undisputed leader of the early Jerusalem Christians was James, known widely as the brother of Jesus. Josephus, a first-century Jewish historian who was in Jerusalem at the time when James was killed in the early 60s, refers to James as “the brother of the so-called Messiah,” i.e., Jesus. But nobody ever suggested that James was the Messiah. Had Jesus stayed dead, this makes no sense. An executed Messiah is a failed Messiah.
Was there a time that you didn’t believe the Resurrection occurred? Was there a moment for you or a series of moments over time that tethered you to belief?
I think until I was probably in my middle or late teens, I’d assumed that resurrection was more like a kind of Platonic “going to heaven” hope, souls going to heaven, and that Jesus had to be raised from the dead in order to lead the way to heaven or something like that.
When I was a student studying ancient history in Oxford, I read C.S. Lewis’s book “Miracles.” Lewis is very good on the appearances of the risen Jesus and how the people who first saw Jesus did not immediately recognize him. He was definitely embodied but his body seemed to be different. The way they cash that out is that he’s gone through death and out the other side, beyond the reach of pain, corruption, decay or death itself.
That did not comport with the sermons I was hearing in churches, which were more or less, like the hymn says, “You asked me how I know he lives. He lives within my heart.” I realized that actually, that’s not good enough. The gift of the Holy Spirit is the presence of Jesus within your heart. But the truth of the Resurrection is a truth about something that actually happened in history.
Let’s say that what the Gospels claim is true: Jesus is risen. It seems that the world keeps going and there’s still oppression, suffering and grief. There’s still death. So what difference does it make that Jesus is raised from the dead?
It’s exactly the same objection that people made right at the beginning, including during the public career of Jesus. He went about saying, “This is what it looks like when God becomes king.” And people would say, well, there’s still an awful lot of bad stuff going on. Caesar is still ruling the world. And Jesus constantly told stories to say, no, this is what God’s kingdom looks like: It’s like a seed that grows secretly. It’s like somebody planting lots of seed and some go bad. But look, there’s a huge harvest coming up over here.
People regularly say, if there really was a God, if he really wanted to sort the place out, then he would come and, bang, it would be done. He would send in the tanks — metaphorically speaking, or perhaps not — and sort out the evil and wickedness in the world. But the Sermon on the Mount says that when God comes to sort out the world the Jesus way, he doesn’t send in tanks. He sends in the poor and the brokenhearted and the hungry-for-justice people and the meek and the people who are ready to suffer for getting the world sorted out. The way the Sermon on the Mount works is exactly the same way that the gospel of the Resurrection works. Jesus, risen from the dead, is the planting of that great seed. And now the plant has spread in all directions.
Obviously bad things happen. Bad things happen in and through the church. We all know that. I know that as well as anyone. But all sorts of great and good things do happen. Healing happens, hope happens, and ultimately it all goes back to this single seed of the raising of Jesus from the dead.
How did the Resurrection change the disciples’ lives? And is that instructive for how it would change Christians’ lives today?
It’s hugely instructive because even Jesus’ most loyal disciples clearly had not expected him to be raised from the dead. They were flattened by his death. But then his Resurrection, plus what happened afterward, which was Jesus doing this very strange thing of somehow bequeathing them his own personal presence, which they came to call the Spirit, or the Holy Spirit. This absolutely revolutionized them. And it’s not just that they were fearful before and completely emboldened and ready to go to the ends of the earth afterward. It’s that the agenda changed.
When Jesus was arrested, one of his closest followers had a sword and was prepared to do battle. But as soon as the Resurrection happens, we find that everything has changed and they are embodying Jesus’ agenda, which is to love your enemies and pray for your persecutors. So that when the first Christian martyr is killed, Stephen, in Acts Chapter 7, as he’s dying, he says, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.”
The deep spirit of Jesus’ way of going about doing God’s kingdom has changed within them because the Resurrection has shown them that the way to victory is not by fighting, is not by force of arms, but is by the Way of the Cross and the Resurrection which follows. And that is as radical today as ever it was.
(Tish Harrison Warren is a priest in the Anglican Church in North America and the author of Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep.)
Introduction
Dwight A. Moody
Over the weekend, the prestigious New York Times published three articles about Christianity. It was Easter; but it was also Ramadan and Passover, and I wonder if the paper published articles about those holidays. These three articles were written by a black evangelical theologian Esau McCaulley teaching at Wheaton College in Chicago, a white evangelical lawyer and author David French writing from his home in Tennessee, and an interview that NY Times columnist Tish Warren had with British Evangelical theologian N. T. Wright. Wright is a leading thinker and preacher in the Episcopal Church in England while Warren is a minister of the American conservative offshoot of the Episcopal Church known as the Anglican Church of North America. French grew up in Kentucky where his father Austin French was a colleague of mine on the faculty of Georgetown College; they were Church of Christ, and David may still be. McCaulley is active in a progressive black Baptist church in Chicago. These four Evangelical Christians represent one segment of the Christian community in the western world, but none can be said to speak for Pentecostals, mainline Protestants, Roman Catholics, or Orthodox. Which I found odd. I can only wonder if the selection of these writers was the work of Tish Warren. Regardless, these pieces grapple with history, race, and politics, always necessary components of framing the faith and practice of Christianity in modern America.
On Hope, Hate and the Most Radical Claim of the Easter Season
Esau McCaulley
Easter has never been my favorite church service. Shouting “Alleluia, Christ is risen!” requires an emotional crescendo my melancholy temperament can’t easily manage.
I’m much more comfortable on Maundy Thursday, the beginning of the Triduum, the holiest three days in the Christian calendar. Maundy Thursday remembers Jesus’ last meal with his disciples. That night ends with Judas’s betraying Jesus and the other disciples’ abandoning him, fleeing into the darkness. I have always felt closest to God on this night in the silence, surrounded by the story of failure.
I have never been a big fan of hope. It’s a demanding emotion that insists on changing you. Hope pulls you out of yourself and into the world, forcing you to believe more is possible. Hate is a much less insistent master; it asks you only to loathe. It is quite happy to have you to itself and doesn’t ask you to go anywhere.
Growing up poor provided me with plenty of opportunities to wallow in that much less complex feeling. I hated drug dealers because I had addicts in my family. I knew they could afford Air Jordans, and I could not because my father visited the dealers on payday before he came home to us. When we wound up on government assistance, I detested the people I heard on talk radio who spoke about families like mine as the epitome of what was wrong with America. I abhorred the pastors I saw on television telling broke Black folks like me that a blessing was on the way if we just sent in $99.95. They treated faith like a spiritual lottery, and the chances of winning were about as likely as hitting the million-dollar jackpot. I was a person of few years and many resentments.
But it wasn’t just the ugly things that I rejected; I despised beautiful ones as well. At school when teachers tried to help us with inspirational speeches about the power of our minds and our potential to be more than athletes or criminals, we often mocked them. How dare they interrupt our despair with hope?
This tendency to reject beautiful things might explain why I have always felt sympathy for Judas. As a teenager, during Bible study class when other people spoke glowingly about mighty David or Moses, I pondered the tragedy of Judas. Known to history as the paradigmatic betrayer, Judas was the disciple who, for 30 pieces of silver, sold out Jesus by leading soldiers to where he was the night before he was crucified.
But what if Judas grew up on the rough-and-tumble side of Judea, where boots of Roman soldiers marching through his neighborhood filled him with rage and fear? What if he experienced the violent anti-Judaism the occupying force consistently inflicted upon his people? As a child of the South, from Northwest Huntsville, Ala., I know ways in which constant oppression can make pragmatism and self-preservation seem like the only realistic options.
For someone like Judas, Jesus offered the dangerous kind of hope that might have challenged him to relinquish his hostilities and reawaken that thing he had long since given up, the belief in the possibility that things might be different. That could explain why he agreed to betray Jesus. Betrayal was his chance to return to the safety and dependability of hopelessness.
Among the many times I rejected beauty in my teenage years, one day sticks out. My friends and I were sitting in a class with one of the instructors who didn’t transfer out of our district when things got hard and violence surged. That day we were in rare form, cracking more than the usual amount of jokes about her, interrupting her lecture. We also began a particularly intense game of trash can basketball with paper balls flying from all over the classroom. The more she tried to ignore us and continue, the more we wanted to break her.
After class, I saw her out in the hall, visibly troubled, steadying herself for the next group of kids. I remember walking away with my classmates, pretending to celebrate our victory — but a part of me knew that we had lost much more than we had gained. We had risked driving away someone whose only flaw was to care.
Isn’t it easier to believe that everyone who loves us has some secret agenda? That racism will forever block the creation of what Martin Luther King Jr. called the beloved community? That the gun lobby will always overwhelm every attempt at reform? That poverty is a fact of human existence? Despair allows us to give up our resistance and rest awhile.
The tragedy of Judas’s story is that his despair never let him go. The Gospel accounts tell us that after betraying Jesus, he killed himself. I do not know many people who have committed suicide, but lots of people from my neighborhood quit on life. Convinced by our shared traumas that their story was over, they let drugs or the streets take them. I have never thought of myself as better than them. I simply was lucky that the vices I turned to in my wandering years did not ruin me.
In the Gospel stories, Jesus overflows with forgiveness. On the cross, one of the last things he said was a plea that God forgive those who crucified him. After the resurrection, he forgives Peter and the other disciples.
His generosity has been a great cheer to all of us misfits who have faltered in our time of testing. The only better story of redemption I can imagine would have been the reconciliation of Judas the Betrayer and Jesus. I am confident Jesus would have forgiven Judas. But in the narrative Judas dies before Jesus rises from the dead. If only Judas had lived a little longer to find that the beautiful thing he tried to destroy was not so easily vanquished.
That indestructibility of hope might be the central and most radical claim of Easter — that on the third day after Jesus was killed, he returned to his disciples physically and that made all the difference. Easter, then, is a not metaphor for new beginnings; it is about encountering the person who, despite every disappointment we experience with ourselves and with the world, gives us a reason to carry on.
So this Easter I will make my way with my family to the South Side of Chicago, to that congregation that serves as our church home. I will do my best to join in the songs of celebration, not because I no longer feel the darkness that has marked so much of my journey, but because sometimes I still do.
(Esau McCaulley is a contributing Opinion writer and an associate professor of New Testament at Wheaton College. He is theologian in residence at Progressive Baptist Church, a historically Black congregation in Chicago and author of the forthcoming memoir How Far to the Promised Land He lives in Wheaton, Ill., with his wife and four children.)
Easter Rebukes the Christian Will to Power
David French
On Easter Sunday, billions of Christians gather together to celebrate the event that’s indispensable to the Christian faith — the resurrection of Jesus Christ. As the Apostle Paul wrote to the church in Corinth, without the resurrection our faith is useless. The Easter focus on the resurrection is profoundly encouraging for people of Christian faith.
But the resurrection isn’t the only lesson of Easter weekend. The story of Christ’s arrest, trial and crucifixion contains its own lessons, and one of them is quite relevant to this age and to debates about Christian engagement in the public square. Quite simply, the story of Easter weekend rebukes the Christian will to power.
To understand why, let’s revisit one of the most famous moments in Scripture. After Jesus’ arrest and show trial, Pontius Pilate, the Roman ruler of Judea, gave the people a fateful choice. It was customary to release a prisoner during Passover, and Pilate offered up Jesus. The crowd wanted someone else. “Release Barabbas to us,” they cried.
When I was a kid in Sunday school, no one ever truly explained the significance of the crowd’s choice. It mystified me. Barabbas was always described as a heinous criminal, a murderer or a robber. Thus, the crowd seemed completely irrational, even deranged. Its choice of a common criminal over Christ was incomprehensible.
Indeed, the contrast with the public reaction to Jesus’ initial entry into Jerusalem was profound. Days earlier, on what we now call Palm Sunday, Jesus entered the city to accolades. As he rode on a colt, his crowd of disciples yelled these words: “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord.”
As I grew older, I learned more context. Jesus was not the king the throng expected. He made clear that he was more interested in saving souls than in assuming power. And Barabbas was more than a mere criminal. He was an insurrectionist. The Books of Luke and Mark very clearly state that he participated in a “rebellion.” Those who chose Barabbas didn’t choose a common criminal over Christ. Instead, they chose a man who defied Rome in the way they understood, a mission that Jesus rejected.
A bit of historical perspective is necessary. Jesus of Nazareth was born a Jew in the town of Bethlehem, in a land that groaned under the weight of Roman oppression. The people of Israel longed for liberation from Rome. Indeed, it was not long after Jesus’ death that they launched their first great revolt against Roman rule, a violent uprising that met a catastrophic end.
But Christ wasn’t a political leader, even though the people hoped for political liberation. As the Book of Matthew relates, Jesus had already rejected Satan’s effort to tempt him with “all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor” if only Christ would “fall down and worship” him. Yet while Jesus refused the will to power, many of his followers simply couldn’t comprehend his purpose. They persisted in the belief that the kingdom he promised would look very much like the kingdoms of this earth, including the Roman kingdom that dominated their lives.
The spirit of Barabbas — the desire to seize or retain power, through violence if necessary — has been at war with the spirit of Christ ever since. Two millenniums of church history demonstrate a terrible truth: There was nothing uniquely evil about that ancient crowd. Instead it held up a mirror to our own nature, one that is all too eager to wield the sword, to believe that our own power is a prerequisite to justice.
Easter weekend contains more than one example of the spirit of Barabbas. When Christ was arrested, the Apostle Peter — a man who had been by his side for much of his ministry — still could not see the truth. He drew his sword, struck the high priest’s servant, and cut off his ear.
Though he was in the midst of an unjust arrest that would prove prelude to an unjust execution, Christ rebuked Peter, saying, “Put your sword back in its place, because all who take up the sword will perish by the sword.” As he reminded Peter, Jesus had the power to call on “legions of angels” to stop the arrest, but he chose not to. His purpose was to go to the cross, and as Jesus told us, that’s our purpose as well.
There is a difference between the quest for power and the quest for justice. Believers are required to “act justly.” We should not stand idly by in the face of exploitation or oppression. We do not retreat from the public square. But Christian engagement must be distinctive. It cannot emulate the world’s methods or morality.
In fact, we have a modern model. The single most consequential movement for American justice in the last century was influenced and empowered by the Black churches in the South. The civil rights movement wasn’t exclusively Christian by any means — there are Jewish Americans who gave their lives in support of their Black brothers and sisters, for example — but it was animated by faith. As John Lewis said in 2004, “Without prayer, without faith in the Almighty, the civil rights movement would have been like a bird without wings.”
Specifically, the example of Jesus dominated the minds of civil rights leaders. “We discussed and debated the teachings of the great teacher, and we would ask questions about what would Jesus do,” said Lewis. “In preparing for the sit-ins, we felt that the message was one of love — the message of love in action: Don’t hate. If someone hits you, don’t strike back. Just turn the other side. Be prepared to forgive.”
Tragically, other Southern Christians had forgotten the example of Christ. The spirit of Barabbas was alive and well in the men who trained their fire hoses on peaceful protesters, who loosed dogs on the Black children of Birmingham. They weren’t trying to seize power, but they were trying to maintain it, through violent, lawless means. Their will to power collided with the quest for justice. It is only through God’s grace and the unimaginable courage and persistence of peaceful protesters that justice prevailed, and Jim Crow laws were overturned.
The spirit of Barabbas tempts Christians even today. You see it when armed Christians idolize their guns, when angry Christians threaten and attempt to intimidate their political opponents, when fearful Christians adopt the tactics and ethos of Trumpism to preserve their power. The spirit of Barabbas most clearly captured the mob on Jan. 6, when praying Americans participated in an insurrection based on a lie.
Christ did not reject earthly rule so that his flawed followers could seize the world’s thrones. His ethos was clear: “You know that the rulers of the gentiles lord it over them, and those in high positions act as tyrants over them. It must not be like that among you. On the contrary, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant.” This Easter it is as servants, not rulers, that Christians should resolve to love this land.
(David French is a New York Times Opinion columnist. He is a lawyer, writer and veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom. He is a former constitutional litigator. His most recent book is Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation.)
Did Jesus Really Rise From the Dead?
Tish Harrison Warren
Happy Easter! Easter marks the high point of the Christian liturgical calendar, when billions of Christians around the world celebrate the Resurrection of Jesus, the central hope of the Christian faith. Perhaps no one on earth has studied that event and the subsequent responses to it more than N.T. Wright. He serves as senior research fellow at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford, and is emeritus professor of New Testament at the University of St. Andrews. He has written over 80 books focused on Jesus and his first followers. He is also a Christian and a former bishop of Durham in the Church of England. One of his books, “The Resurrection of the Son of God,” is an exhaustive dive into the scholarship and debates around the Resurrection. I asked Wright to speak with me about his research and this baffling, world-altering claim of resurrection. This interview has been edited and condensed.
Tish Harrison Warren: Your book presents the Resurrection of Jesus as an actual, physical, historical event, not simply a metaphor or spiritual experience. Why does the idea that this was an actual event matter to you?
N.T. Wright: I’m well aware that many people — including some in churches — have treated the Resurrection and Easter as a general way of talking about the rebirth of hope or a spiritual metaphor. Indeed, in the New Testament, the idea of resurrection is sometimes used metaphorically to talk about a new moral life, a life where everything is going to be different. But in the New Testament, that’s always rooted in the claim that when they’re talking about resurrection, they’re talking about something that actually happened.
In the first century, the word for “resurrection,” the Greek word “anastasis,” was never about a vague sense of possibility or the rebirth of hope or anything like that. It was always about people who had been bodily dead now discovered to be bodily alive. I’ve shown in great detail in the book that all the early Christians for whom we have any evidence, right through until around 150 years after the time of Jesus, when they’re talking about resurrection, that’s what they’re talking about.
It’s beyond question that when the first followers of Jesus used that language about him, they intended to say something definite about his being bodily alive, albeit in a whole new way. He seemed to have gone through death and out the other side, but into a new world in which he was emphatically embodied. Unless we are prepared to acknowledge that, we’re simply not taking their words seriously.
Then, as now, claiming that somebody was alive again — particularly somebody who made the sort of claims that Jesus made or were made about him — was revolutionary. It was dangerous talk. So if people don’t like dangerous talk, then stay away from Easter is my advice.
There’s a funny line where you write, “The discovery that dead people stayed dead was not first made by the philosophers of the Enlightenment.” That’s obvious, of course, but we sometimes assume that skepticism is a recent phenomenon. How would ancient Jewish audiences and Gentile audiences think about the apostles talking about the Resurrection?
Early Christianity was born into a world where everybody knew that its central claim was ridiculous, and the early Christians knew it themselves. It’s not that they thought resurrection might just happen to a few people here and there. But they said it had happened in this case.
This claim seemed absolutely crazy. Ordinary, sober people knew perfectly well that dead people don’t get raised up again.
Many Jewish people for two centuries before Jesus and on for at least the next century believed that in the end, all God’s people would be raised because they believed that the God of Israel, the Creator God, would remake the whole world. But this is about one person being raised from the dead ahead of everybody else.
In the non-Jewish world, there is no evidence that anyone is expecting dead people to come back again. There’s lots of speculation about other places they might go. The Platonic speculation about going off to the Isles of the Blessed and having lovely conversations about philosophy all day. The Stoics believed that there would be a great phoenixlike conflagration and the whole world would then be reborn.
But most people knew that when you died, that was basically it. That’s why when Paul, in Athens, said this had happened, most of them laughed at him. It didn’t fit their worldview. That’s crucial because you can’t fit the Resurrection into the existing worldviews that we’ve got. The Resurrection brings its own worldview with it and says, if you’re going to understand the way things are, you start with this and work out. If Jesus really has been raised, then everything is different.
You spend time in the book looking at Jesus’ post-Resurrection appearances in the Gospels. It seems that the disciples’ testimony about seeing Jesus matters to you. Why do you trust their testimony?
If you understand how people thought about death and life after death in the ancient world, you will need two strands of converging evidence.
On the one hand, there are extraordinary reports about people going to the tomb of Jesus and finding that there was no body in it. In that world, grave robbery was a common occurrence, so an empty tomb by itself says, “This is odd,” but we can tell some stories about this that are much more credible than the idea that he’s alive again.
However, if at the same time this person turns up and is seen and felt to be bodily alive and speaks to people and cooks breakfast by the shore, then that is totally unexpected as well. Those two things kind of interpret one another. We know many experiences that people have — and I’ve known of experiences like this in our own family — that somebody who recently died will suddenly show up in a room or somewhere, for a moment or two, to people that they have known, then disappear again. They knew about that kind of thing in the first century as well. They had language for that. It was like an angel visiting. There’s a place in the New Testament where the disciples think that Peter has been killed in prison in Acts Chapter 12, and he’s knocking on the door and they say, “It can’t be Peter. It must be his angel.” They think this is a kind of angelic visitation before he goes off to wherever he will go.
You need those two bits of evidence put together and then the testimony makes sense. Otherwise, empty tomb? Somebody has taken the body. That’s what Mary Magdalene thought. Appearances? “Oh, yeah, we know about those. Just go and check in the tomb. You will find there’s still a body there.” But if there isn’t, then we are into something different. So that’s why that evidence is so important.
It seems like these appearances meant something to the apostles themselves. Paul reminded people in his letters that at the time of his writing there were people still living who had seen Jesus after his Resurrection.
Exactly. At the beginning of the 15th chapter of Paul’s First Letter to Corinth, he mentions the people to whom the risen Jesus appeared. To Peter and to the rest of the apostles, and various others. And then he says that Jesus appeared to 500 people all at once. And most of them are still alive. The implication strongly being: “You go and ask them. You find out what they saw.” In other words, they can’t all be just making it up or all be deluded.
We have evidence of other revolutionary or messianic movements whose founder or leader was killed by the authorities. In such cases, either the movement died out or they got another leader. The central and undisputed leader of the early Jerusalem Christians was James, known widely as the brother of Jesus. Josephus, a first-century Jewish historian who was in Jerusalem at the time when James was killed in the early 60s, refers to James as “the brother of the so-called Messiah,” i.e., Jesus. But nobody ever suggested that James was the Messiah. Had Jesus stayed dead, this makes no sense. An executed Messiah is a failed Messiah.
Was there a time that you didn’t believe the Resurrection occurred? Was there a moment for you or a series of moments over time that tethered you to belief?
I think until I was probably in my middle or late teens, I’d assumed that resurrection was more like a kind of Platonic “going to heaven” hope, souls going to heaven, and that Jesus had to be raised from the dead in order to lead the way to heaven or something like that.
When I was a student studying ancient history in Oxford, I read C.S. Lewis’s book “Miracles.” Lewis is very good on the appearances of the risen Jesus and how the people who first saw Jesus did not immediately recognize him. He was definitely embodied but his body seemed to be different. The way they cash that out is that he’s gone through death and out the other side, beyond the reach of pain, corruption, decay or death itself.
That did not comport with the sermons I was hearing in churches, which were more or less, like the hymn says, “You asked me how I know he lives. He lives within my heart.” I realized that actually, that’s not good enough. The gift of the Holy Spirit is the presence of Jesus within your heart. But the truth of the Resurrection is a truth about something that actually happened in history.
Let’s say that what the Gospels claim is true: Jesus is risen. It seems that the world keeps going and there’s still oppression, suffering and grief. There’s still death. So what difference does it make that Jesus is raised from the dead?
It’s exactly the same objection that people made right at the beginning, including during the public career of Jesus. He went about saying, “This is what it looks like when God becomes king.” And people would say, well, there’s still an awful lot of bad stuff going on. Caesar is still ruling the world. And Jesus constantly told stories to say, no, this is what God’s kingdom looks like: It’s like a seed that grows secretly. It’s like somebody planting lots of seed and some go bad. But look, there’s a huge harvest coming up over here.
People regularly say, if there really was a God, if he really wanted to sort the place out, then he would come and, bang, it would be done. He would send in the tanks — metaphorically speaking, or perhaps not — and sort out the evil and wickedness in the world. But the Sermon on the Mount says that when God comes to sort out the world the Jesus way, he doesn’t send in tanks. He sends in the poor and the brokenhearted and the hungry-for-justice people and the meek and the people who are ready to suffer for getting the world sorted out. The way the Sermon on the Mount works is exactly the same way that the gospel of the Resurrection works. Jesus, risen from the dead, is the planting of that great seed. And now the plant has spread in all directions.
Obviously bad things happen. Bad things happen in and through the church. We all know that. I know that as well as anyone. But all sorts of great and good things do happen. Healing happens, hope happens, and ultimately it all goes back to this single seed of the raising of Jesus from the dead.
How did the Resurrection change the disciples’ lives? And is that instructive for how it would change Christians’ lives today?
It’s hugely instructive because even Jesus’ most loyal disciples clearly had not expected him to be raised from the dead. They were flattened by his death. But then his Resurrection, plus what happened afterward, which was Jesus doing this very strange thing of somehow bequeathing them his own personal presence, which they came to call the Spirit, or the Holy Spirit. This absolutely revolutionized them. And it’s not just that they were fearful before and completely emboldened and ready to go to the ends of the earth afterward. It’s that the agenda changed.
When Jesus was arrested, one of his closest followers had a sword and was prepared to do battle. But as soon as the Resurrection happens, we find that everything has changed and they are embodying Jesus’ agenda, which is to love your enemies and pray for your persecutors. So that when the first Christian martyr is killed, Stephen, in Acts Chapter 7, as he’s dying, he says, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.”
The deep spirit of Jesus’ way of going about doing God’s kingdom has changed within them because the Resurrection has shown them that the way to victory is not by fighting, is not by force of arms, but is by the Way of the Cross and the Resurrection which follows. And that is as radical today as ever it was.
(Tish Harrison Warren is a priest in the Anglican Church in North America and the author of Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep.)
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