The Resurrection: What Truth?

“Christ is risen!—He is truly risen!” This greeting and response are common in the Christian East during Easter. The emphasis falls on the adverb: “Truly!”, which also appears in the Latin liturgy, drawn from the Gospel of Luke (Lk 24:34). The insistence on the truth of the resurrection guards against readings that trivialize it. It is not, for example, a question of an ethereal immortality of the soul, already taught by Plato; nor does Christ live on merely because his project lives on, as liberal Protestantism would have it. So what truth is at stake? What does it mean that Christ has risen “truly”?

After a period of aversion to the truth—which was seen as the root cause of totalitarianism—our era is now grappling with the crisis of post-truth, which erodes mutual trust and obstructs common endeavors. At most, the truths of the natural sciences are accepted, while deeper questions are left to opinion, taste, or mystical intuition. Could the “truly” of Easter heal this fragmentation of truth, helping us recover shared visions that touch the very depths of what it means to be human?

This “truly” refers, in the first place, to the truth of an event that genuinely took place. Today this is one of the few uses still admitted for the word “truth.” At the same time, it is increasingly difficult to distinguish fabricated facts (“fake”), or to guard against those who distort them in support of self-serving narratives. This malleability of facts reveals that bare facts do not, in reality, exist. Facts, insofar as they touch on what is human, are always accompanied by an interpretation that gives them meaning within the unfolding of history. Now, the fact of the resurrection of Jesus is, par excellence, the event that overflows with meaning.

Indeed, if Jesus, the Son of God who entered into history, guides history—by rising from the dead and ascending to the right hand of the Father—then history has reached its fulfillment. Facts are no longer mere fragments open to endless reinterpretation. The fact of the resurrection illuminates them as milestones in a narrative in which God’s love, embracing human freedom, proves capable of both initiating the ages and bringing them to their fulfillment. No subsequent event carries sufficient weight to redefine this culminating event; rather, it is this event that sheds light on all others, past and future.

The “truly” of the resurrection refers, in the second place, to the fact that the resurrection occurs in the flesh, and not only in some private spiritual realm. The ancient formulas of faith pair “true” with “flesh” or “body”: The Lord has risen “in his true flesh.” Christ rose because he loved so completely with his body—with his desires and fears, his sorrows and joys—that he made this body fit to be filled with the love of God. The resurrection thus invites us to anchor truth not directly in the realm of the mind, but above all in the flesh. What is true is what awakens us from the slumber of isolation and launches us into the common bodily world. Truth belongs to the realm of working side by side and meeting face to face.

For without a truth of the body, without a common bodily language that allows us to recognize the other as a brother or sister, truth ends up as nothing more than a dreamed fantasy. But if there is a truth of the body, then truth can be, as the Polish philosopher Stanisław Grygiel defined it: “the adequation of the person to the person of the other.” The Book of Genesis situates the root of this bodily language in the language of the family, based on the man and the woman’s becoming “one flesh,” which extends their unity into the flesh of their child. The resurrection confirms that this language of the body, which unites all human beings, has been healed and empowered to mediate forgiveness and communion.

The “truly” of the resurrection implies, in the third place, that the resurrection does not merely affect our uncertain future, but bursts into our present to transform us. While the Jews awaited the general resurrection at the end of time, Jesus’ resurrection takes center stage in history, so that we may already live the resurrected life through him. The resurrection is an act of such energy that it overflows from Jesus to propel humanity toward its goal. Easter does not, therefore, justify passivity in the face of the world’s affairs, but rather confers urgency upon our action. For if human life tends toward the eternity of God, then every human choice in time takes on seriousness and weight. And if our bonds are destined to mature and be tied forever in God (if husband and wife are to be reunited after death), it is crucial to choose and nurture those bonds with dedication. The truth of the resurrection inspires and directs our works, so that what has happened in Christ may happen in every human being. It is a truth that is put to the test in the practice of Christian life: Will those who do not perceive Christ as living be able to perceive, in believers, the living love of Christ?

If the truth of the resurrection shows itself as a truth of facts, and as a bodily and practical truth, then Easter faith illuminates the crisis of truth precisely where our age has located it. The resurrection tells us: facts have meaning; the body has a language; our action has both an origin and a goal. And so the truth of the resurrection proves to be the root in which every other truth is grounded. Descartes sought to build his system on the foundational truth of the cogito ergo sum: “I think, therefore I am.” Christianity bases all truth on the shared experience of the encounter with the Risen One in his flesh: Resurrexit, ergo sumus. “He is risen, and therefore we are.”