The messages of Good Friday and Easter are not the same, according to an opinion
The Resurrection of the Son of God: N.T. Wright’s story about the disciples of Jesus and the persecution of his father
Editor’s Note: Bart D. Ehrman is a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, focusing on the New Testament and the history of early Christianity. He wrote the books “Armageddon,” “Misquoting Jesus,” and “Heaven and Hell.” The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.
The disciples of Jesus never saw two important events on Easter Sunday and Good Friday. They didn’t accept that he had said that his goal in life was to die. They were to follow in his footsteps.
The disciples believed that Jesus was the Messiah who would destroy God’s enemies and establish his kingdom here on earth. They assumed he was going to Jerusalem the final week of his life to be coronated. When he entered the holy city, he would come in conquest. The crowds would hail him as the king to come, sent by God to deliver them in fulfillment of prophecy.
The crowd turned when he didn’t raise an army. Jesus was tried and tortured to death. The disciples’ hopes were brought to a brutal end. Jesus was not a hero, he was a criminal and the disciples were not sure about his fate. They fled the scene.
The reversal of their hopes was themselves reversed. On the third day they claimed that God raised Jesus from the dead. He was the Messiah. He was the one who saved us. He really was the king and Lord. And thus began the Christian movement.
Happy Easter! Easter marks the high point of the Christian liturgical calendar, when billions of Christians around the world celebrate the resurrection of Jesus, the central hope of the Christian faith. N.T. Wright has studied that event and the subsequent responses to it the most. He serves as senior research fellow at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford, and is emeritus professor of New Testament at the University of St. Andrews. He has written over 80 books focused on Jesus and his first followers. He is also a Christian and a former bishop of Durham in the Church of England. One of his books, “The Resurrection of the Son of God,” is an extensive look at the resurrection of Christ and the debate around it. I asked Wright to speak with me about his research and this baffling, world-altering claim of resurrection. An interview has been edited.
This tension is not new: It is embodied already within the narrative arc of the New Testament itself. The Gospels show Jesus giving his life to others in order to have a good life and an end in an apocalypse that describes his destruction.
Most Christians prefer to read the Gospels, but in the end, they adopt the view of the Apocalypse. Christian faith is about sovereignty. Jesus’ resurrection and return is what matters the most; not his life and death.
It is not that the Gospels themselves refuse to countenance the coming glory. Jesus does indeed predict that his death will lead to a resurrection. This will be a validation by God of what Jesus has taught and done. But what was that?
Did Jesus spend his ministry harassing sinners into submission for the sake of world domination, or did he destroy his enemies with supernatural power and accumulate massive wealth? That is certainly the Christ many of his followers embrace today.
The Christ of the apocalypse, who came back for blood after he had been slaughtered, is not the Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount; he was the Christ of vengeance, wreaking vengeance on the world that rejected him before he had time to do anything.
The Jesus of the Gospels is not the ideal. He abandoned everything to minister to others. He came “not to be served but to serve.” To show love and not to exercise power. Not to acquire wealth but to give it away for the sake of others. Not to cling to this world but “to give his life as a ransom for many.”
And he insists his followers do likewise. They aren’t saying that they have power over others. They are to be meek and humble. They are to feed the hungry, welcome strangers, tend to the sick, sell what they have and give to the poor — even those they don’t know, strangers, foreigners, followers of other religions. Most emphatically, Jesus insists his followers not be violent, not seek revenge, not return evil for evil. They are to turn the other cheek; they are to love their enemies.
It certainly can be. How often does it happen in our day? Jesus’ followers used his victory over death as leverage for their own ambitions, but John of Patmos was not one of them. Those who celebrate the resurrection but neglect the pain of Good Friday are at risk of going down that path.
It was not the path of Jesus according to the New Testament. On Good Friday, the sacrifice for others was nothing short of a glorious victory at Easter. And the ultimate victory at Easter was not a warrant to use power to harm and destroy others, to acquire masses of wealth in a city of gold and to achieve world domination. The resurrection was supposed to show God’s mark in a life of service. Easter is not the goal but the surprising outcome.
Good Friday doesn’t offer a recipe for personal success: no pain, no gain. It is a lesson in selflessness. Others matter. Helping those who need it is the focus of following Jesus.
The First Centennial Resurrection: An Introduction to the Christianity of the Early Church (Anasis in the Early Gospel)
Tish Harrison Warren: Your book presents the resurrection of Jesus as an actual, physical, historical event, not simply a metaphor or spiritual experience. Why does the idea that this was an actual event matter to you?
In the first century, the word for resurrection, the Greek word “anastasis,” was never about a vague sense of possibility or the rebirth of hope or anything like that. It was always about people who were dead and were found to be alive. I’ve shown in great detail in the book that all the early Christians for whom we have any evidence, right through until around 150 years after the time of Jesus, when they’re talking about resurrection, that’s what they’re talking about.
