Easter has come and gone (at least it has for Protestants and Roman Catholics; Easter is May 5 this year for the Orthodox church). But, before we move too far past the celebration, I’d like to circle back and dive into an aspect of the Easter story we often overlook: the burial. The early church proclaimed not only the death and resurrection of Jesus, but also his burial. In fact, the earliest confessions of Jesus contain explicit references to his burial. Even though the Gospels recount the life of Jesus, most scholars agree that the letters of Paul were written before the Gospels were recorded. Likely the earliest confession of Jesus is found in 1 Corinthians 15:3-7, where Paul “hands on” to the Corinthian believers what “he had received” (15:3a). The language of “handing on” and “receiving” are typical of passing on an oral tradition. In other words, Paul is telling us that what follows in 1 Cor 15:3b-7 is what believers prior to Paul were saying. These earliest Christians were confessing “that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures…” (15:3-4). Later Christians clearly saw the importance of his burial, as his burial shows up in both the Apostles’ and the Nicene creeds. Even the famous “Lord I Lift Your Name on High” popular praise song from the 1990s celebrates Jesus “from the cross to the grave, from the grave to the sky.”
Why did the earliest Christians mention Jesus’ burial, and later Christians add it to the ecumenical creeds? Why did “the grave” feature prominently in one of the most popular praise songs? Beyond the historical fact of Jesus’ actual death, burial, and resurrection, the recurrent emphasis on the grave speaks to Jesus’ sharing in our human condition. Jesus “had to become like his brothers and sisters in every respect” (Heb 2:17), which includes both his ontological humanity (“sharing in flesh and blood;” Heb 2:14) and his subjective experience of the human condition (“tested as we are, yet without sin”; Heb 4:15). As the fourth-century Cappadocian theologian Gregory of Nyssa notes, Jesus had to be united to every phase of the human story to redeem humanity. As Gregory explains, a person laundering a garment does not remove only a few stains but tries to clean the entire garment from top to bottom to achieve uniform brightness and cleanliness. In the same way, human life is stained with sin from beginning to end: from birth to death. It would be irrational to cleanse one end while ignoring the other. Therefore, Christ had to assume flesh through birth and be obedient to death in order to heal humanity. In the burial of our Messiah, we see God himself participate in the human condition. We can face the grave with confidence because the fully divine and fully human Christ died, was buried, and rose again.
Matt Easter, Interim Pastor
Fee Fee Baptist Church