Death and Resurrection

Jesus was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that.

I hope you will forgive me for appropriating the first two sentences of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol for my Easter post, but I think it makes a good point. Just as readers don’t understand why it’s so extraordinary that Jacob Marley would visit Scrooge unless they know that Marley is dead, we don’t understand how extraordinary the resurrection is unless we know that Jesus was dead, and what death has meant for humanity from the beginning.

Death has always been the great unknown for human kind. Life, it seems, is more than just chemical reactions in an organic frame. The people we love have personalities and creativity, they have passions and quirks. Is it possible that all of that uniqueness, all of that nuance that makes us who we are would be simply erased? As Job asks, “If a man die, shall he live again?” (Job 14:14)

To understand the answer, and to understand the Atonement’s importance, let’s do a thought experiment for a moment. Let’s imagine for a moment that Christ did not perform the Atonement. What would life be like? What would wait for us after we die?

Fortunately for our experiment, a prophet has addressed this very question. It is recorded in the Book of Mormon that Jacob taught what would have happened if Christ had not fulfilled his mission. “Our spirits must have become like unto [the devil],” he said, “and we become devils, angels to a devil, to be shut out from the presence of our God, and to remain with the father of lies, in misery, like unto himself” (2 Nephi 9:9). In short, there would have been no hope for us.

In order to live with God, we have to be like God. And since God has a perfected and glorified physical body, in order to live with him, we would need a similar body. The problem is that none of us has the power to give that body to ourselves. Once we died, and our spirits were forever severed from our bodies, we would have a existence that would be characterized by the absence of light. We would be forever cut off from God’s light. Such an existence, it could be argued, would be worse than an end of existence. No matter how miserable we were, however, our spirits are eternal, and would never be able to die.

This is the doom that Jesus Christ saved us from. It is the burden that he took upon himself. Though he was the Son of God, and had power over death, he allowed himself to die. His body lay in the sepulcher for three days while his spirit was elsewhere. To his apostles and disciples, who didn’t seem to understand when he foretold his resurrection, it must have appeared as if he too had succumbed to this doom.

Which is why his appearance to them that first Easter Sunday was so spectacularly meaningful. Now they understood that he came not to save them from some earthly enemy like the Romans, but the eternal enemies of death and hell. “I am he that liveth, and I was dead” Christ declares, “and, behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen; and have the keys of hell and of death” (Rev. 1:18). With those keys, Christ opens the gates of death for us. All will be resurrected. In answer to Job’s question, all will live again.

Some modern Christians, in an effort to explain away Christ’s divinity without explaining away those teachings of his that they agree with, try to claim that he didn’t die on the cross. That he was in some sort of coma and that he walked out of the sepulcher after awaking from it. This idea denies everything that Christ came to accomplish. He didn’t come just to be a great teacher or social reformer. He came to be the our Savior. And his suffering, death, and resurrection, which we celebrate on this Easter Sunday, is how he saved us.