We Believe: On the Third Day He Rose Again
As with much of the Nicene Creed, the words call our attention to more than an abstract philosophical proposition. In the Creed, we claim historical fact: the person of Jesus of Nazareth, who was truly killed, thoroughly dead, and really buried, rose again into newness of life at a specific time (on the third day after his last supper with his disciples) in a particular place (Jerusalem, the heart of the world [Matt. 12:40]).
The Faith “once and for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 1:3) is, therefore, unlike the mystery cults of the ancient world. In real space-time, the human body of a Jewish rabbi, which was mortified under Roman Imperium on a hill east of Zion’s summit, was resurrected by the Living God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
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The Uniqueness of Christ’s Resurrection
Not only is Christ’s resurrection different from the rituals of pagan mysteries it is also different from the various dead-raisings that God has accomplished throughout time. Jesus is more than a Joseph who was thought dead but in reality was only in exile (Genesis 45:26-28). He is also more than a widow’s son (1 Kings 17:17-24; 2 Kings 4:18-37), a Lazarus (John 11:1-44), a dead man making contact with a prophet’s bones (2 Kings 13:20-21), a Jarius’ daughter (Mark 5:35-43) or a corpse which rose when its grave was made to give-up its dead on Good Friday (Matthew 27:52-53). All of these, having died, resurrect to postlapsarian biological life.
A More Real Body
The Resurrection of Jesus from the dead is something distinct, similar to but not identical to these events, which are essentially resuscitations. After all, on a basic level, the only difference between Lazarus’s raising four days after death and the raising of a corpse on Good Friday, which may have died months or even years before its demise, is a quantity of time, not a kind of life. Jesus’ resurrection is not merely a quantitative extension of life but a qualitative glorification of it. Jesus rises with a “spiritual body” (1 Corinthians 15:44-45), which does not mean “a not real body” (as us poor, sad moderns are prone to believe) but “more real”—in some sense more physical, more alive, and more embodied. Jesus rose in an eschatological body. It was the kind of body humans were always designed to receive (Philippians 3:20-21; 1 John 3:2).
The Resurrection as Fulfillment
It is easy, also, to miss the Creed’s emphasis on “on the third day” (cf. 1 Corinthians 15:4) or at least to perceive it to be a unique tidbit, true but ultimately inconsequential to the substance of Christ’s Resurrection. It is easy to think that Jesus happened to rise on the third day, but to assume that the numerical ordering of these days is a matter of accident and not of fulfillment.
On the road to Emmaus, just hours after the Resurrection, Jesus walks with two disciples and unfolds the scriptures to them (Lk. 24-13-27). Specifically, he rebukes them for being “slow” (v.25) and not understanding “that the Messiah would have to suffer these things and then enter his glory?” (v.26). Why? His rising on the third day is chronologically essential not only because it marks time but also because it fulfills it.
A Day for New Life
It is “new” and “old” in the same way that an acorn, which finally moves beyond germination and becomes a sapling, is both a fulfillment of the old order of seedling and also a new transition in the life of the tree. This is apostolic language: The body of Jesus was “sown” in one manner and “raised” in another (1 Corinthians 15:44-45), and it draws on a deep Biblical tradition. The third day is a day for new life:
- Day three in the creation cycle sees the first animate life (Gen 1:11-13); the inanimate forces of light, dark, water, firmament, give way to new living biological things, plants, and growing trees.
- Day six in the creation cycle (the second “third day”) sees the beginning of other living, growing things, of new forms of life: animals and humanity (Gen 1:24-31).
- On the third day, Abraham sees the place where he will lay down his son as dead and receive him back as living (Genesis 22:4).
- On the third day, David hears of Saul’s defeat, and Israel receives a new king in a very real way (2 Samuel 1:2).
- Jonah spends three days in the depths of the sea (within the bowels of the fish) (Jonah 1:17). He then arises to new life to declare the Word of the Lord to Ninevah, a city that took three days to pass through (Jonah 3:3), and call them to repentance.
- On the third day of fasting, Esther approaches the king, her husband, to invite him to a series of banquets in which she will make her petition for the life of her people (Esther 5:1-2). She arises from the dearth, the symbolic death of fasting, to approach the throne boldly.
Shadows of Who Christ Is
Jesus’ resurrection “on the third day” adds the unique signature of God to the historical event of that first Easter. It is a sign that speaks not only to the “what” of what happened, but also names the “who” of who did that thing. Jesus fulfills all the biblical third-day types because they are all shadows of who he is (Colossians 2:17):
- Jesus is New Life (John 11:24, 14:6), the Lord of the Third Day as much as of the Sabbath (cf. Matthew 12:8).
- Jesus is the firstborn of a New Humanity (Psalm 89:27; Romans 8:29; Colossians 1:15; Revelation 1:5).
- Jesus is both the Greatest Son of Abraham and the sacrificial ram whose head was wrapped in thorns (Genesis 3:18, 22:12-13; Matthew 27:29; John 1:29; Galatians 3:16; Revelation 13:8).
- Jesus is the greater Son of David (2 Samuel 7:15-16; Psalm 132:11; Matthew 1:1; Romans 1:3; 2 Timothy 2:8) who gains the kingdoms Adam and Saul lost (Matthew 4:8-11, 28:18; Romans 5:17).
- Jesus is the festal King, the Ruler of the Empire that can never be overthrown, He is the Salvation Feast prepared by the Woman (Genesis 3:15; Isaiah 7:14; Esther 5:4; Luke 1:46-55; John 6:50-51; Galatians 4:4; Revelation 2:17, 12:1-17).
- Jesus is the One who gives the sign of Jonah (Matthew 12:38-48, cf. Matthew 16:21; 17:23, 20:19; Luke 24:7).
Vindication
Typology, however, if it is solid and if it is going to be anything other than sophistry, is built on a foundation of real things. The plenary sense always springs from the plain sense. Christians have affirmed that what took place in the Body of Jesus on the Third Day was more than the appearance of resurrection, more than something abstract or nebulously “spiritual” in the way that moderns use “spiritual” as a lame synonym for “not-real.” The dead cadaver of Jesus of Nazareth fulfilled all the types and shadows precisely because it happened as a real historical event.
It is not hard to find those quarters of culturally-safe heterodoxy in which one may hear a sermon about how the Resurrection of Jesus “is not about a literal resurrection but about the symbolic way in which love is stronger than death” or whatever. But this quite misses the entire point.
If There is No Resurrection
If the body of Jesus did not literally rise from the dead, or if the body of Jesus only appeared to be dead, then there is no symbolic meaning: love, in that case, is not stronger than death. The grave still swallows and keeps it down. Life is just inanimate matter awaiting higher orchestration unto more complex forms of nothingness, and we of all folk are most to be pitied (1 Corinthians 15:12-19).
The Resurrection as electrifying fact acts as a cosmic vindication: Jesus is the Son of God (Romans 1:4), Satan is a phony king (Colossians 2:15; 1 Corinthians 2:6-7; Hebrews 2:14-15), Hell has been de-fanged and Death has been trampled-down (Hosea 13:14; 1 Peter 3:19; Revelation 1:18), God is victorious (Psalm 47:5; Ephesians 4:8), the race of Adam has hope (1 Corinthians 15:22) as does the whole created order (Romans 8:18-25), and many waters cannot drown Love, for it is set aflame with the very fire of Yahweh (Songs 8:6). G.K. Chesterton summed it up nicely: the Resurrection of Jesus declares that “The Cross cannot be defeated […] for it is defeat” Itself.
That Mighty Power in Us
The Scriptures, however, do not leave us here, just with the risen body of Jesus, glorified and vindicated. The Resurrection of Jesus on the Third Day has salvific consequences and, what’s more, those consequences are social. The Resurrection of Jesus inaugurates not only a new human, but a new humanity: the Church.
For that social body of Jesus, the Resurrection People of God, we are told that the same Spirit of God who raised Jesus from the dead is at work (Romans 8:11).
When we confess the Creed, therefore, we do something more than confess ourselves to be those who ride in the wake of Jesus’ victory. We are confessing something communal and living: What happened to Jesus is happening in and among us right now. “Here, right now,” we are saying, “we are bearing witness to the fact of Christ’s Resurrection.”
Third-Day People
We are Third-Day folks, Jonahite people, Esthers and Isaacs, coheirs with Christ of the Davidic kingdom, the totus corpus of the Risen Jesus.
The mysterious life of the Church is the life of the Body of Jesus, which God raised from the dead. We have died with Christ, we have been raised with Christ, we are seated with Christ in heavenly places (Romans 6:8-11; Ephesians 2:6). Even as we await the fulfilment of all things, the being clothed-upon with spiritual bodies and the everlasting life of the world to come (Romans 8:23; 2 Corinthians 5:1-10; Revelation 21:1-4), we must be careful not to pretend that Christian life now is some delay in the waiting room of the Resurrection. No, brothers and sisters, for you have died and your life is now hidden with the Christ who rose again on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures (Colossians 3:3; Galatians 2:19-20).
Image: Christ Triumphant Over Sin and Death by Peter Paul Rubens (ca. 1622). Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Digitally edited by Jacob Davis.
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