Christ is risen! He is risen, indeed!

For centuries, Christians have used this so-called “Paschal Greeting” on Easter morning and throughout the fifty-day season of Easter. It originated in the Eastern Orthodox Church, but now Christians in many traditions have adopted the practice of greeting one another in this distinctive way, thus celebrating the resurrection of Jesus.

You may wonder where this tradition started. If we look into the gospel accounts of the resurrection, we find that the angel(s) at the tomb were the first to announce that Jesus “has risen” (Luke 24:5). The first humans to proclaim this good news were the women who had gone to the tomb in order to anoint the body of Jesus with spices (Luke 23:55-24:1). When they found the tomb empty and heard the angelic announcement, they immediately told the eleven remaining disciples of Jesus the good news that he had risen from the dead.

The disciples, however, did not respond with “He is risen, indeed!” On the contrary, Luke tells us that “these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them” (Luke 24:11). One of the reasons I find the reports of Jesus’s resurrection compelling is that they contain historical remembrances that would never have been concocted by the early church. For one thing, the testimony of women was not highly regarded in first-century Jewish culture, so the early Christians would never have made up a story about women as the first witnesses to Jesus (though Jesus himself, we should note, had no problem with drafting women as his first evangelists). Moreover, it’s striking that the male disciples are, once again in the gospel accounts, pictured as being completely confused. These future leaders of the church just didn’t get it . . . yet.

Peter, however, decided to check things out for himself. So he ran to the tomb and found it empty (Luke 24:12). What comes next in Luke is the story of Jesus appearing to two people on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24:13-32). We don’t get a description of what happened to Peter. But, in Luke 24:34, the eleven disciples report, “The Lord has risen indeed, and he has appeared to Simon!” (see 1 Corinthians 15:5). Apparently, this appearance to Simon Peter persuaded the other disciples that what the women had initially reported was in fact true.