Not my Jesus but the Jesus. . .

The witness of the New Testament and particularly of the apostles is not that Jesus is risen but that the Jesus who was crucified and buried is risen.  It might seem a nuance but the kerygma is clear in the proclamation.  Think of the first sermons recorded in Acts.  This Jesus whom you crucified, God raised...  The identity here is not incidental but essential.  The Jesus who is risen is the crucified Jesus who suffered upon the cross, died, and was buried.  Those who had followed Jesus from the beginning of his ministry to the eve of his Paschal death give specific and not a general public witness -- the Jesus whom you crucified is the same Jesus who is risen (Jn 15:27). 

This is profound because it connects the resurrection to the incarnation, to the obedient life, and the life-giving death of our Lord.  It is, after all, not different works but one saving work which our Lord accomplishes for us and our salvation by taking on our flesh in the womb of the Virgin, living in obedience to the Law, dying in our place upon the cross, paying for our sins with the agony of His suffering and death, and visiting hell to announce the triumph even before the world knows Christ is risen.  You cannot have one part of His work without the other.  It is, if you will, one package given to us by God.

The resurrection is not some release to a different plane but the resurrection of the body to the life that is without end.  Christ did not rise as spirit or ghost or in the imagination of the faithful but as a body -- the same body marked with the scars of His suffering and death.  The witness of the apostles was not to their Jesus but the crucified Lord who rose on the third day.  They were confessing a fact to which there were not only witnesses who saw the same thing but who saw and recognized Jesus as the same Jesus whom they watched suffer and die upon the cross.

Even though we are not witnesses in the same way as those who were with Jesus from the beginning and were witnesses with us, as the apostles put it when filling the place of Judas the betrayer, ours is not a witness to our Jesus but the one Jesus identified in Scripture as the incarnate Word, the righteous Lord, the suffering Savior, the dead Redeemer, and the risen Christ.  We do little good in telling people about our Jesus unless that Jesus is the Lord of Scripture, the crucified One, and the same One whom the Father raised on the third day.

Sadly, the resurrection has become a nebulous concept in our world of spiritual without being religious, in which the idea of the Savior is chosen over the fact of Him given shape in the Scriptures.  We dare not fall into the same trap.  The Christian kerygma cannot thus be separated or treated in abstraction apart from the incarnation, crucifixion, and death.  For the witness of the faith given by the Twelve and Paul is not a witness to their reception of Jesus but to His revelation, in fulfillment of the Law and the Prophets, as the incarnate, crucified, and risen Lord Jesus.  "Let all the house of Israel therefore know for certain that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified.”  Acts 2:36  In so confessing, the apostles unite the complete saving work of Jesus under the witness of His resurrection that attests that this Jesus is who He claims to be.