After He died, Jesus Christ’s pure body was taken down from the Cross, wrapped in fine linen with spices, and placed in a new tomb that was sealed with a large stone. After three days, an angel removed the stone door and announced that Christ was risen from the dead. The women reported what they saw to the skeptical Disciples. Peter and John ran to the tomb, discovering that the body of Jesus had vanished, but the grave clothes that had been wrapped around His body remained.
Three days after Christ’s death and burial, when His Disciples had gathered together behind locked doors, their Master suddenly appeared in front of them. He showed them the scars of crucifixion in His hands and side. Christ ate some food in order to prove that He was not a spirit or ghost, but physically alive.
The Disciple Thomas had been absent the first time Christ showed Himself to the other Disciples. After hearing his brothers talk about what they had witnessed, Thomas declared that He would not believe Jesus was raised from the dead unless he could investigate Christ’s wounds himself. A week later, Christ appeared again to the Disciples, including Thomas. When he saw Jesus Christ alive, the once-skeptical Disciple proclaimed, “My Lord and my God!” Over the course of forty days, Christ appeared at various times, showing Himself convincingly to be alive, the first-born immortal from among the dead.
Through the Holy Resurrection of Jesus Christ, God raised up our human nature to immortality. Christ did not exist the gave as a mortal, but was raised to immortality in a newly spiritualized physical body incapable of being touched by death again. Because Christ has brought immortality to the human nature we all share, at the end of time the soul of each human being will be reunited with the body, a body raised to immortality that is both spiritual and physical. Those who put their trust in Jesus Christ, the Immortal One, and follow His Way will live with God eternally in the kingdom of heaven after the general resurrection of the dead at the end of the age.
Every year at Pascha (called Easter in the West), we celebrate the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. During the celebration, we sing, Christ is Risen from the dead, trampling down death by death and upon those in the tombs bestowing life! This hymn proclaims with joy the reason that we follow Christ. Why does the Way of Holy Orthodoxy matter? Simply put, because “Christ is Risen!” As our Physician, Jesus Christ has conquered death in the soul and body on behalf of us all so that we too can share in His accomplishment and be completely healed from the disease of death with all its destructive effects.
Read: John 5.25-29; 20.1-21.14; Luke 24.1-12; Matthew 28.9-15; Luke 13-49; 1 Corinthians 15.1-28, 35-58.
Text copyright © 2017 by Fr. Symeon D. S. Kees / Mosaic icon by Aidan Hart in St. George Orthodox Church, Houston, TX