Which is greater: Christ’s birth, resurrection?

Which is the greater: Christmas, the birth of Jesus Christ, or Easter, the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ?

For Christians in the United States, the likely answer in Man-on-the-Street interviews with the secular press would be Christmas.

Not because of Christ’s birth, mind you, but because of how we have morphed the gift-giving story of St. Nicholas in 280 A.D. into Santa Claus and ultimately into the biggest, commercial retail extravaganza of the year for the American economy. 

Like Christmas, American capitalism has made the most of Easter, though it is far less of the economic boom than in Christmas. 

Sadly, and more and more over time, lost in both remarkable “holy days,” now “holidays,” are the extraordinary, world changing events — the birth and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Which of the two is greater? A simple, logical answer is the second could not have occurred without the first. But taken separately, each is a profound, almost incomprehensible occurrence for us mere mortals.

The first is the incarnation. As is said in the Christian Nicene Creed: “For us men and for our salvation,” God sent his son “from heaven, and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary, and became man.”

Image via Adobe Stock

The atheist would scoff cynically at this human impossibility of divine incarnation. And yet for 2,000 years, this historically documented, extraordinary, miraculous life of Jesus remains and is accepted among the 2.2 billion Christians in the world. 

Then there is Christ’s resurrection — equally inconceivable from a human perspective. No man, no woman rises from the dead and appears among his friends in human form.

In his 1996 Easter message, Pope John Paul II explained:

“Whoever had condemned Jesus, deceived himself that he had buried His cause under an ice-cold tombstone. The disciples themselves gave in to the feeling of irreparable failure. We understand their surprise, then, and even their distrust in the news of the empty tomb. 

“But the Risen One did not delay in making himself seen and they yielded to reality. They saw and believed! Two thousand years later, we still sense the unspeakable emotion that overcame them when they heard the Master’s greeting: ‘Peace be with you.’”

Pope John XXIII, 35 years earlier,  summed up Christ’s resurrection this way:

“In reality, Easter … is all in this: the celebration, perennial and ever renewed, of the mystery of Christ; of Christ, the glorious and immortal King of the nations and of the ages; the comfort and encouragement of all humanity redeemed by him and preserved for the triumph of its eternal destiny, and also for the peaceful success of human living-together and of ordered prosperity on Earth.”

Which of the two is greater? 

The late Calvin Burrell, a teacher of theology and editor of the Bible Advocate, answered that question before he died in 2022:

“Rather than deciding which is more important, we recognize them as the first and second great scenes in the divine drama of redemption … God ordained both birth and resurrection … as equal halves of the complete divine-human experience … the twin miracles of Christ’s birth and resurrection are of equal importance in the divine drama of redemption.”