G.K. Chesterton on the Resurrection of Jesus
“In a semblance of the gardener God walked again in the garden”
While working on the final chapter of a book on the resurrection of Jesus, I was reminded of this quotation from the inimitable Gilbert Keith Chesterton, which will most certainly find a place in the book:
“They took the body down from the cross and one of the few rich men among the first Christians obtained permission to bury it in a rock tomb in his garden….
“In that … cavern the whole of that great and glorious humanity which we call antiquity was gathered up and covered over; and in that place it was buried. It was the end of… history that was merely human. The mythologies and the philosophies were buried there, the gods and the heroes and the sages. In the great Roman phrase, they had lived. But as they could only live, so they could only die; and they were dead.
“On the third day the friends of Christ coming at daybreak to the place found the grave empty and the stone rolled away. In varying ways they realized the new wonder; but even they hardly realized that the world had died in the night. What they were looking at was the first day of a new creation, with a new heaven and a new earth; and in a semblance of the gardener God walked again in the garden, in the cool not of the evening but the dawn.”
—G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man