I Am Risen! Hallelujah?

 

For Easter, friend Xerxes speculates on how it must have been for Jesus to wake up from his coma in that cave outside Jerusalem, and realize he was still alive.

He bases this speculation on the fact that the Gospels do not account for the time between Jesus being laid in the tomb, and rising again on the third day.

This is a strange argument, surely. If Jesus was lying dead in the tomb, what was he supposed to be doing in there? As to the apostles, the gospels point out that it was the Sabbath. What were they supposed to be doing on the Sabbath, when no action was permitted?

It is wrong to say there is no account in the Bible, if not in the Gospels, of the time between Jesus’s death and his resurrection. 

1 Peter 4:6

“For this is why the gospel was preached even to those who are dead, that though judged in the flesh the way people are, they might live in the spirit the way God does.”

Now where and when would Jesus have preached to the dead?

Ephesians 4: 8-10:

‘“When he ascended on high he led a host of captives,

    and he gave gifts to men.” 

(In saying, “He ascended,” what does it mean but that he had also descended into the lower regions, the earth? He who descended is the one who also ascended far above all the heavens, that he might fill all things.)’

While these references are slight, more detail is given in non-canonical sources: the Gospel of Nicodemus, and the Acts of Peter and Paul. It is also in the Apostles’ Creed: “descended into hell, rose again from the dead on the third day.”’

It is reasonable enough that this is not mentioned in the Gospels proper, because the value of the Gospels is as eyewitness accounts, and as guides to individual salvation. None of the apostles were present for Jesus’s sojourn in the underworld. The interest in what Jesus did for those three days is theological, not soteriological. 

All that aside, the hypothesis that Jesus was simply waking up from a coma on Easter morning is incompatible with the Gospel account. The Gospels repeat that the tomb was sealed with a huge stone, and was guarded. Matthew also says that an angel was seen to remove the stone. 

Moreover, in his resurrected body, Jesus is capable of moving through walls, disguising his appearance, and being in different places at almost the same time. 

To entertain Xerxes’s hypothesis, that the Resurrection can be medically explained, you would have to assume that the Gospels are wrong, that they or their sources are lying. If so, you are free to deny anything else in them—you are rejecting them as evidence. Do that, and you might as well imagine Jesus as a female Chinse silk merchant.

Moreover, people of that time would be perfectly familiar with the phenomenon of people waking from comas after being presumed dead. Had the apostles and disciples had reason to suspect that this could explain it all, it seems unlikely they would have spread out to the ends of the Roman Empire and beyond to preach the message of the Resurrection, and accept torture and death to do so.

I do think it would be interesting to speculate on what the apostles were thinking that Sabbath. For many years, I have had it in my mind to do this as a radio play, but I’ve never gotten around to it.

“Try to imagine Jesus’ own experience of resurrection,” Xerxes writes. “He was dead. And he was alive! Hallelujah!” 

Had this been a mere recovery from a coma, where’s the Hallelujah? He is still under sentence of death. Where does he go, to escape going through that torture and execution all over again, and even if he somehow evaded that, what joy would he face as a fugitive, his life mission abandoned?

But it is pointless to begin with to try to get inside Jesus’s head. That defeats the entire purpose of the Gospels, which is to see yourself as a disciple, not as God. Jesus is God. The mind of God is inaccessible to us, as God is omniscient and perfect, and our awareness is limited and imperfect. We know what he chooses to reveal to us.