Spirituality

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The intimacy of the Resurrection

Friday, April 10, 2026Spirituality

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God must be allowed scope to act in ways that are private and unseen, as much as in ways that are public and very visible . . .

Michael
Pakaluk

Here is a puzzle: The suffering and death of the Lord were public. He was sentenced by Roman authorities before a crowd and put to death on a public byway with the placard, "Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews." But his resurrection was private. He did appear to some unsought, we are told. But mainly, he appeared to his disciples, and he left it for them to tell others.
He did not return to Pilate to convict him of injustice. He did not appear to the Pharisees to convict them of their hypocrisy. He did not re-enter Jerusalem triumphantly a second time, with an impassable body. He could have traveled to Rome with Peter, spoken before a crowd in the Colosseum, and left evidence for Roman historians to pass on to us. But he chose to do none of these things. Why?
One reason is that these things would be "staged," but nothing he did was staged. He went up to Jerusalem knowing that he would be put to death, but not staging his death. He went there to teach, and to be with his disciples, and in the course of his doing these things, the world reached in and destroyed him. Likewise, after the Resurrection, he taught his disciples and was with them, but now the world had no interest in reaching in and confirming that he was alive. Pilate and the Jewish leaders could have investigated and confirmed the fact, but for obvious reasons, they chose not to do so. The world has only an interest in destroying the Messiah, not confirming him.

So, we have asked the wrong question. The question is not why he died in public but rose in private, but rather why the world was concerned to put him to death but not to vindicate his rising, and this question answers itself.
But yet it was not that anything was left incomplete or done imperfectly, because the manner in which he acted suited what had happened. A natural reality is fittingly documented to the world in an historian's report then, or in a scientific paper today, but a transcendent reality is fittingly kept intimate, as the Catechism says:
"'O truly blessed Night,' sings the Exsultet of the Easter Vigil, 'which alone deserved to know the time and the hour when Christ rose from the realm of the dead!' But no one was an eyewitness to Christ's Resurrection, and no evangelist describes it. No one can say how it came about physically. Still less was its innermost essence, his passing over to another life, perceptible to the senses. Although the Resurrection was an historical event that could be verified by the sign of the empty tomb and by the reality of the apostles' encounters with the risen Christ, still it remains at the very heart of the mystery of faith as something that transcends and surpasses history. This is why the risen Christ does not reveal himself to the world, but to his disciples." (n. 647).
This is the second reason. And indeed, we instinctively keep private the most precious realities, where God's power and authority reach directly into our lives. Despite an insane love of attention that people show on social media, they generally do not film and post the births of their children. They do not film and post their giving of themselves to each other in the marital embrace. They do not film and post the moment of death of a beloved.
But surely a third reason is that sin has lots of evidence already, and needs no additional cooperation, while redemption is a matter of anticipation, and requires our free cooperation. That a holy person would be put to death -- this is almost obvious. That the world wants to crush goodness -- we have seen it many times. That all of the failings and sins of the world might be concentrated in the crushing of one astonishing man in particular: to make this public is only to write in larger letters what we see in the headlines each day.
But God, who is spirit and unseen, wants to address and lure us in unseen ways, because, as St. Paul just about says, in that way we can join him in rejecting the sin and the "fleshly man" which is seen.
The images that Our Lord had used were of unseen action. The seed that grows in a manner that even the farmer does not discern. Salt, which dissolves and disappears once added to food. Light which is not seen so much as that by which everything else is seen. Leaven, which, again, is worked in and is not the stuff of the bread. The very laws of nature are not seen.
God must be allowed scope to act in ways that are private and unseen, as much as in ways that are public and very visible, and it should not be surprising that those things which are most precious he establishes and fosters in the second way.
And then there is the virtue of discretion shown by the Lord. He tells Thomas in Sunday's Gospel to take his hand and place it in his side, which is a tremendous act of condescension. Out of respect for the Lord's intimacy, it is enough for us to hear the Apostles tell of it.

- Michael Pakaluk, an Aristotle scholar and Ordinarius of the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas, is a professor in the Busch School of Business at the Catholic University of America. He lives in Hyattsville, MD, with his wife Catherine, also a professor at the Busch School, and their eight children. His latest book is "Be Good Bankers: The Economic Interpretation of Matthew's Gospel.'' You may follow him on Substack at MichaelJosephPakaluk.Substack.com.