Ted Grimsrud—March 18, 2024
Christianity, it seems, owes its existence to on-going presence of Jesus among his followers after he was executed by the Romans. Against all expectations including their own, Jesus’s disciples within a few days of his death proclaimed that God had raised Jesus from the dead. Ever since, Jesus’s resurrection has been a rallying cry for Christian faith. It was quite a turnaround, because in the immediate aftermath of Jesus’s arrest and execution, it appeared that his movement had met its end.
The shock for Jesus’s followers
Jesus’s arrest and crucifixion were a devastating blow to his followers’ hopes. They “had hoped he was the one to redeem Israel” (Luke 24:21); in the days that followed the shattering of those hopes they scattered and wandered around Judea. Jesus’s most prominent disciple, Peter, led the desertion by Jesus’s followers. They concluded that God had abandoned their leader—in line with Deuteronomy 21:23: “For a hanged man is accursed by God.” Jesus’s mission seemed to have ended up for naught. His message about God’s mercy, it appeared, proved to be no match for the forces of powers-that-be in their society. Whatever the disciples may have thought about the possibility of resurrection from the dead at the end of time, they clearly seemed not to have imagined that it would apply to Jesus in the immediate aftermath of his death.
A few of Jesus’s followers did remain close to him—Mary Magdalene, Jesus’s mother, a couple of others. They seem to have remained simply out of love for him and as an expression of solidarity in their grief, not that they expected his resurrection. Though the story tells that Jesus alluded to resurrection as he spoke of his likely death, it seems that no one actually understood him to mean his personal resurrection prior to the general resurrection at the end of time. The events of Easter Sunday took everyone by surprise.
Thinking Pacifism 