One thing for sure: The Resurrection of Jesus is not about “resuscitation.” A corpse does not come to life here and wait again to die. A body does not rise to bleed again. After the crucifixion, Jesus “appeared” in places, the Scripture tells us. He did not walk through doorways. He did not travel to them as he did from Galilee to Jerusalem. He did not sail to them as he did to Capernaum. He did not ride there by borrowed colt as he did on the way to the Temple. He simply “appeared” in the midst of their lives, while they were doing mundane things, without warning but vividly, the same but different.

No, the Resurrection of Jesus is not about revivification of an old life, it is about experiencing a new kind of life entirely. And no one knows how it happened, we only know that it happened. They “saw” him and “heard” him and “walked” with him and “felt” his presence in their lives. What else is there to know in a world where the wondrous has become commonplace? We “see” people and “hear” people and “experience” people long gone or far away and do it routinely and take it all for granted. Here, too, an entire community began to experience Jesus differently.

Resurrection testifies to the metamorphosis of the Jesus of history to the Christ of faith. It is about the shift in people’s perception of the Jesus of first-century Nazareth to the Christ who galvanizes all time. It is about the Incarnation of the Jesus born in Bethlehem to the Jesus born in us. It designates the transformation of Jesus who rises from the dead in Jerusalem to the Jesus who rises, if we allow it, in us. The Resurrection of Jesus is about coming to grips with the transformed and transforming presence of Christ then, now, and always. Once that happens, life is never again the same. Life begins anew.

—from In Search of Belief by Joan Chittister (Liguori)