The acclamation of those who initially proclaimed the resurrection of Jesus featured the third person and the past tense, not the first person and the future tense. Their touchstone wasn’t “God will raise me from the dead” or “God will raise us from the dead.” Rather, it was “God has raised him from the dead.” Later on, to be sure, as with Paul in 1 Corinthians 15, some did, naturally enough, move from Jesus’ resurrection to their own. But when Mary Magdalene and her friends returned from the tomb, their message wasn’t about themselves but another. In the words of the angel, “He has been raised.” Likewise, when Peter stood up at Pentecost, the topic was neither his own existential anxiety nor the persistence of his own ego in the face of death but instead what’d happened to someone else. So the initial point to contemplate is that the chief concern of Peter and Mary wasn’t their inevitable death but another’s triumphant life. They seemingly—in contrast to most of us most of the time—weren’t looking firstly at themselves.1
- Dale C. Allison Jr., Night Comes: Death, Imagination, and the Last Things (Grand Rapids, MI; Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2016), 15. ↩
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