ἀνάστασις anastasis
What It Means
Anastasis is one of the plainest words in Greek—a standing-up, a getting to one’s feet. Paul carried it onto the Areopagus in Athens, and because he preached it alongside a name, some philosophers heard “Jesus and Anastasis” as two foreign divinities (Acts 17:18); John Chrysostom, the fourth-century preacher, says they took Anastasis for a goddess.1 The mistake was more than comic. A Greek could picture an immortal soul slipping free of the body; what he had no category for was a dead man on his feet, body and all. So when the meaning came clear, some laughed.
Luke’s phrase for what God did about the laughter is πίστιν παρασχών (*pistin paraschōn*), literally "having furnished proof". God does not take the floor and win the argument; he raises a man three days dead and lets the fact stand. It's a pattern we've seen in God's work before, if we're looking closely—Joseph out of the pit, Jonah from the whale, Israel through the sea; and most revealingly, Ezekiel’s dry bones. An argument can be answered with a better argument. A corpse that got up is something different: not a case argued but a pledge given — and a pledge reaches us as testimony, from men mocked, not rewarded, for telling it.
As it turns out, the man God raised is the man God appointed to judge—so the one fact says two things: the dead will get up, and they will get up to a verdict (John 5:29). But on the cross the Judge paid what that verdict would cost us, and rose because nothing was left owing. Paul's command then, is repent: not a fee charged for the mercy but the unclenching that receives it. A hand clutching its own immortality can’t take hold of the one on offer. The repentance commanded is the repentance given.
A Story
In a side chapel of the Chora church in Constantinople—today’s Istanbul—a fresco painted around 1316 shows the resurrection, and it shows it strangely. Christ, robed in white, stands astride the shattered gates of the underworld. One hand has closed around Adam’s wrist and the other around Eve’s, and he is hauling them bodily out of their graves, while the figure of Death lies bound below him. The Eastern church rarely painted Anastasis as one man’s private escape. It painted a rescue, with other people in the rescuer’s hands.
For Your Journey
We have gentler words for death now, and most of them leave the grave shut. We say a person lives on in memory, or in the good they did. Both are true, and we reach for them rather than a Redeemer because a legacy leaves us our own vindicator. The Athenian’s wish and ours are one wish in different clothes: he wanted the soul to slip the body; we want the body to go and some trace of us to stay. Neither asks for a rescuer. Only the honest materialist expects nothing at all, which is why the resurrection reaches him not as an argument but as news.
Anastasis offers something else: not death denied and not the body discarded, but death named an enemy and killed—which is why Paul can permit the tears and forbid the despair (1 Thessalonians 4:13). This is an embodied hope—the old Hebrew hope that learned to wait, now shown what it waited for.
And it answers hope with a pair of hands. Nobody in the fresco is climbing out. The hands doing the lifting are the ones that were nailed down, and they pry ours open to receive.
In Christ
Paul’s word for the risen Christ is firstfruits: “Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep” (1 Corinthians 15:20). The first sheaf is not the whole harvest but the same crop, brought in early.2 Job had reached for that in the dark: “I know that my Redeemer lives” (Job 19:25). Now the sheaf is in, and Christ’s rising is the front edge of ours—“as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive” (1 Corinthians 15:22)—though in order, “those who belong to Christ” at his coming (1 Corinthians 15:23).
That is what the Chora painter had in view. We need not follow him into the underworld to take what he got right—the hand closed on Adam’s wrist is the last Adam’s, gripping the first to undo what the first had done. And the grip does not loosen until our adoption is complete in “the redemption of our bodies” (Romans 8:23). Because the hands holding us are nailed hands and the harvest has started, nothing we do in the body—the caring, the unnoticed work, the tears Paul permits—is thrown away.
“And I look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen.”
“One short sleep past, we wake eternally, / And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.”
- John Chrysostom, *Homilies on the Acts of the Apostles* 38 (on Acts 17:18): the Athenians “supposed ‘Anastasis’ (the Resurrection) to be some deity, being accustomed to worship female divinities also.” ↩
- The firstfruits framing follows Timothy Keller, “The Hope of Glory” (Easter 2004 sermon, gospelinlife.com). ↩