The resurrection of Jesus is probably the most essential tenet of Christianity.

A person can be a Christian without believing everything in the Bible, or everything that a particular church tradition teaches. A person can have any number of understandings of Jesus’ atoning death and still be a Christian. A person can even question the virgin birth and still be a Christian in some sense. But take away the resurrection, and nothing definitively Christian is left.

Without the resurrection, Jesus’ life is simply the story of one more religious revolutionary who failed.

In the words of Saint Paul, “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins” (1 Cor 15:17).

In the last post I noted how Jesus’ death unmasks the evil of the ruling powers of this world, thus freeing us from their power. But sin (alienation from God and one another) isn’t just a corporate matter; there’s a personal element to it as well. And resurrection is needed to free us from this.

Even without the wickedness of the system, there’s still within each of us an instinctive drive for self-preservation; and when given full reign, this urge becomes the selfish, alienating force that the Bible calls “sin.”

The survival instinct is closely related to the fear of death. By rising from the dead, therefore, Jesus gives us power over this most primal fear (Heb 2:14-15), and all the selfish striving that goes along with it.

When we know that our lives are not limited to our mortal bodies, we no longer cling to them so tightly. Once this anxious striving is stopped, sin loses its power over us. We are now free to live for God and for others.

Without the resurrection, it’s very hard to have this kind of hope. For those who believe that this mortal life is all there is, life is all too often “nasty, brutish and short.” There may be moments of joy, but these are fleeting; and death has the final word.

This is why Paul says that “If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied” (1 Cor 15:19).

The truth is that for many people, life sucks; and if this earthly life is all there is, many people rightly feel they have gotten a raw deal.

Certainly the earliest Christians, suffering under brutal persecution, had every reason to feel this way.

When Jesus’ earliest followers saw him raised from the dead, however, it changed everything for them.

They could now endure almost anything, and not lose their joy – for they knew that the love they had known in Jesus could never be lost. This is what gave them the power to be such bold witnesses.

Just how Jesus’ resurrection took place, and what sort of body it involved, remains a mystery; but it’s clear that what the early disciples experienced was more than just a vivid memory, and it was more than just an encounter with His spirit.

In the gospel of Luke, the resurrected Christ makes it clear that He’s not a ghost, but has flesh and bones – and can even eat (Luke 24:36-43). In the gospel of John, He shows the apostle Thomas the scars in His hands and side (John 20:24-29).

If Jesus’ resurrection is merely spiritual (and not also material), these narratives are completely meaningless. Central to the Christian faith, therefore, is a belief in a physical resurrection – though what this means isn’t exactly clear.

The Apostles’ Creed tells us that after His resurrection, Jesus “ascended into heaven, and is seated at the right hand of the Father.”

For a long time, I wondered what it could possibly mean to say that Jesus “ascended into heaven.” It’s hard for me to believe that heaven is a physical “place” outside of this universe; but if heaven isn’t a physical place, how could an embodied Jesus “ascend” to it?

Just recently, a Facebook post from a friend of mine clarified this for me.

“When Christ ascended and sat down on the throne of heaven, he didn’t go into outer space,” my friend wrote. “His ascension communicated a cosmic filling and outpouring onto all flesh. He wasn’t enthroned up there in space, but within us and within all things” (Jacob M. Wright, emphasis mine).

As soon as I read these words, I knew he was speaking truth. Indeed, my experiences (and those of many other people) verify this. Jesus is indeed omnipresent, “within us and within all things.” No longer confined to a mortal body, His spirit is everywhere in time and space.

To say that Jesus is “seated at the right hand of the Father” means that He is exalted to the highest degree possible. It’s a symbolic way of saying that He has become one with God in every possible way – so much so that we may rightly speak of Jesus as God.

Most Christians believe that the Christ spirit has always been a part of God – and I include myself in this number. But in some strange way, the spirit that was incarnated in Jesus of Nazareth is even more exalted now, after His earthly life, death, and resurrection.

This, then, is what the Creed tells us happened after Jesus’ death: He was given a new body, free from the limitations of mortality; His spirit spread to every corner of the universe and is now available to everyone in every time and place; and He remains in perfect unity with God, even while retaining His humanity.

This is quite a claim, indeed, and it would be incredible enough if we stopped here. But the Creed, like the Christian faith itself, doesn’t end there.

As amazing as the story of Jesus is, it doesn’t stop with Him; for in the time following Jesus’ resurrection, His disciples discovered something even more amazing – it was starting to happen to them as well!

(Coming Next: The Apostles’ Creed, Part Six: “He Will Come Again”)