by Terry Eagleton, UnHerd
Easter is a celebration of absence
At the centre of Christianity lies a great big hole, more commonly known as the empty tomb. It’s around the absence of God that the feast of Easter turns, not some glorious revelation of him. The tomb is empty because Jesus is supposed to have risen from the dead, but the New Testament doesn’t actually recount this event. It shows Jesus before his death, and then as moving among his disciples afterward, but there’s another big hole between the two episodes.
This is because the resurrection can’t be represented. Not because it’s too sacred, but because although Christians believe it actually happened, it isn’t an event in the sense that the Budget or the war against Iran is an event. You wouldn’t have been able to take a photo of it had you been lurking around Jesus’s tomb with your phone. It’s not as though he yawned, scrambled to his feet, shucked off his shroud and walked out blinking into the sunlight. The resurrection throws into question the whole idea of what counts as something happening. Is waiting, for example, an event — or is it the absence of one? Falling in love is an event of a kind, but not in the way that burning a piece of toast is. The resurrection is beyond representation not because it isn’t real, but because it’s too real to make an image of. If there is something one might call ultimate reality, we wouldn’t be able to capture it in language. It would lie on the far side of our speech, like the unconscious.
But Jesus’s rising from the dead isn’t just a “spiritual” or symbolic affair, because it involves an actual human body. The risen Jesus eats with his friends to show that he’s not a ghost, he has real wounds in his hands and so on. Yet this body is of a different order from the body of, say, Pete Hegseth — not because it’s less flesh-and-blood than he is, but because it’s more intensely so.