After the Resurrection, Jesus appeared to his disciples with his wounds, not with his body miraculously restored, as if he had never been wounded (which of course is the way we would usually like our own wounds to be healed – in such a way that we have no bodily or spiritual scars).
I would like to share with you a few thoughts on the Resurrection from James Alison’s book Raising Abel: The Recovery of the Eschatological Imagination (28-31); for Alison finds it crucial that Jesus was “risen as crucified.” The risen Jesus, he says “didn’t appear to his disciples just as someone who had been dead, but was now better and risen….In contrast to this, the risen Jesus was dead.”
The risen Jesus was dead? Doesn’t this contradict everything we have been taught about the Resurrection? Then we remember that unlike Jesus, the raised Lazarus was not dead. He had been returned to life – and so would have to die again.
Alison continues,
But that death is nothing but a vacant form for God, something whose reality has been utterly emptied out, which can only be detected in the form of its traces in the human story of someone who has overcome death.
The marks, then, of Jesus’ death were something like trophies: it was his whole human life, including his death, which was made alive and presented before the disciples as a sign that he had in fact conquered death.
The risen Jesus was dead, but this death no longer had substance – it was “nothing but a vacant form for God.” It was empty of any death-reality and filled with God.
“Whatever death is,” says Alison,” it is not something which has to structure every human life from within (as in fact it does), but rather it is an empty shell, a bark without a bite. None of us has any reason to fear being dead, something which will unquestionably happen to all of us, since that state cannot separate us effectively from the real source of life.”
“Peace be with you,” says Jesus to the disciples hidden and trembling behind locked doors on the first day of the week. Then he shows them his wounds and says once again, “Peace be with you” (John 20:19-21).
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For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.
For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.
(1 Corinthians 1:18,25)