The resurrection of Christ is the greatest miracle, the victory of reason and of goodness over evil.
If course, a stand taken for justice and love, sealed with death and crowned with the sacrifice of life was well known before the coming of Christ. In those events, man can reverently discern the inner triumph of truth. But in those events, truth triumphed only in spirit. The sanctity of life remained in desecration. When Christ rose from the dead, it was different. He revealed that truth and love are stronger than death, and that death suffered for the sake of truth and love is no more than a passage to eternal life.
The Resurrection of Christ transcended all other joys. It consummated what love has most yearns for. Christ the Beloved will be forever with us, our separation is annihilated forever, and nothing can again threaten Him. All one can do is fall before Him and say My Lord and my God (John 20, 28), because no one can doubt that He is God become man, who came into the world to save us. The Resurrection of Our Lord also contains the promise of our own resurrection and of the resurrection of all whom we love. We shall be inseparable from them and from the Lord if only we follow Him and believe in His Resurrection.
All attempts to doubt Christ's Resurrection vanish before the Gospel testimony. Is one to say, for instance, that the Disciples were hallucinating when the Gospel tells us of their despair after Our Savior's death, of their persistent unbelief with which they met the first news of Christ's Resurrection, and of their doubts when faced with the appearance of Our Lord Himself? Who can doubt the strength of their subsequent conviction of Christ's Resurrection. These convinced Christians went to their deaths willingly as conquered the ancient world? The basis of such unshakable conviction must be a factual event.
Quite baseless as well are those few attempts to explain the faith in Christ's Resurrection by the influence of ancient myths about gods who die and rise again. Comparative mythology is a totally different order of idea. Christ died and rose again not as God but as a man or a God-man. This duality concept is alien to ancient religion. Also absurd and fantastical are attempts to explain Christ's Resurrection by natural causes: Christ did not recover, having been taken from the Cross in the state of unconsciousness. This kind of slander, cited in the Gospel itself, about the theft of Christ's body by the Disciples was never tenable, never supported later by Jews or pagans. This slander is dissipated by the truth of the Gospel and by the subsequent history of Christianity. Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed (John 20, 29) says the Lord.
We believers who have not seen and yet have believed in Christ's Resurrection are the same as eyewitnesses, by force of our joyous experience of this great miracle. The Orthodox Church is so rich in this spiritual experience of the Resurrection.
According to Orthodox teaching, the Resurrection of Our Lord was preceded by His descent into hell, the spiritual abode of the souls of the dead. This humiliation of Christ was the beginning of our victory. Christ prefigured our victory when He freed the souls of those in hell who had awaited His coming with faith (I Peter 3, 18-22; 4,6; Col. 2, 15).
By the Resurrection, the body of Christ became transfigured, glorified, and spiritual, that is, became subordinate entirely to the Spirit. Neither time nor space limited the Resurrected Lord, Who appeared simultaneously in various places. He passed through locked doors. He no longer needed the food of this earth, but in order to convince the Disciples, he partook of food in front of them. The body of the Resurrected Lord also preserved the wounds He had suffered. The meaning here is that all suffering and every worthy achievement of the just will find its rightful recognition when the just are glorified forever.
Archpriest Victor Potapov
May 1986