Some years ago, in a television report from Jerusalem, a reporter said “I’m standing in front of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, one of the holiest places in all of Christianity, where Jesus is buried.” NO! That’s where Jesus WAS buried. On the Sunday after He was crucified the followers of Jesus went to the tomb where He had been laid and found it empty, with the burial cloths neatly laid on the stone where His body had been.

One theory for the empty tomb is that some of the Apostles snuck into it in the dead of night and removed the body of Jesus so that they could proclaim that He had risen as He had predicted He would. But why would they take a naked corpse and leave the burial cloths behind? It takes more faith to believe that the Apostles, who were so afraid that they were going to be crucified next and who hid behind locked doors, would suddenly get the idea to take Jesus’s body and then concoct a story that He really had risen from the dead. It takes more faith to believe that these weak and frightened men would risk being thrown out of the synagogues, persecuted, and even killed for a story that they knew was false. It takes more faith to believe that than to believe that Jesus really did rise from the dead.

But what do we mean by “rise from the dead”?

What happened was more than the soul of Jesus reuniting with His body. Something beyond our human experience happened. The risen body of Jesus was transformed and glorified. It was a truly human body but in a totally new state.

In a 2011 television interview on Good Friday, Pope Benedict was asked about the Resurrection and said the following:

He is beyond the laws of biology and physics…. Therefore there is a new condition, a different one, that we do not know but which is shown in the fact of Jesus and which is a great promise for all of us: that there is a new world, a new life, toward which we are on a journey. Being in this condition, Jesus had the possibility of letting himself be felt, of offering his hand to his followers, of eating with them, but still of being beyond the conditions of biological life as we live it. We know that, on the one hand, he is a real man, not a ghost, that he lives a real life, but a new life that is no longer submitted to death. That is our great promise.

While many today may wish you “Happy Easter!” Let’s not forget that this day is more than baskets with colored eggs, chocolate bunnies, jellybeans, and peeps. Perhaps the greeting of our Eastern Catholic and Orthodox brothers and sisters is better: “Christ is Risen!” To which one responds, “Indeed He is Risen!” And so will we!