The central belief of the Christian faith is that, on the third day after he was crucified, God raised Jesus from the dead. By far the simplest hypothesis that explains the rise of the early church and its beliefs about Jesus is that, on the first Easter, Jesus’ disciples were fully convinced that they had encountered Jesus and that the encounter was physical.

However, though he was physical, his physicality was of a different sort than ours. He could eat and be touched. But walls posed no hindrance to him. While the physicality of the resurrected body was anticipated, the elements of continuity – eating and touching for example – and of discontinuity – spontaneous appearance for example – were not. The simplest explanation for these elements is that this was exactly how it was.

But what did the resurrection mean? Too often we Christians think of it simply as a new life, a life after death. And very often, being so heavily influenced by platonic dualism between matter and spirit, we cannot fully understand why God would bother with a resurrection. If it were only for giving us a life after death, then surely God could have conceived of some sort of disembodied existence like that proposed by Plato and believed by many Christians when we think sentimentally of the state of our loved ones who have departed.

But this is not what the resurrection means. The resurrection of Jesus, as the precursor to the general resurrection of all, is not even a religious experience. Rather, it is a highly political statement.

Jesus was crucified despite the fact that none of the charges leveled against him could hold. He had declared that he was Israel’s Messiah and was crucified for it. In a stroke of remarkable irony, Pilate had the words ‘Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews’ inscribed on his cross. He meant it for ridicule. But he unwittingly was declaring the truth.

Crucifixion was originally the punishment meted out to runaway slaves. The Romans adopted the practice but used it against revolutionaries. Those who challenged Roman authority and the rule of Rome’s Emperor were sentenced to crucifixion. They used crucifixion as a deterrent against future revolutionary activities. And much like the failure of capital punishment to curtail homicides, crucifixion failed to curtail the production of revolutionaries.

In other words, crucifixion was a political act through and through. Whatever spiritual meanings we may glean from it are secondary to the political meaning. We must not, as we all too often have, ignore the political meaning, drowning it in our pious shrieks of orthodoxy. But if crucifixion was political then God’s response to it – resurrection – must also have been political.

What was the political message of the resurrection? The Romans had used the ultimate power at their disposal – the power of death – against Jesus. They had flaunted their ability to kill by murdering Jesus even though Pilate repeatedly declared that Jesus was innocent.  And in the case of Jesus they even executed a miscarriage of justice by murdering an innocent person.

The resurrection is not just a reversal of death. Rather, it is the defeat of death. Through it God declared that the Roman power of dealing in death was relativized. And the same declaration is given to all subsequent – past, present and future – entities that arrogate to themselves the authority to deal in death.

The resurrection declares that Jesus is who he claimed to be – the king of the Jews, the Jewish Messiah – and that therefore all authority in heaven and on earth belong to him. The resurrection declares as subordinate all other claimants to power and authority.

This is the political message of the resurrection. It is explosive. It threatens every entity that presumes to wield ultimate authority. That is why the early Christians were persecuted and killed. And they went willingly to their deaths knowing that the one they served has the final say. Why then do we fear to proclaim the politics of the resurrection? Do we not believe that Jesus has the last say? Or are we just afraid?