Back in my undergraduate theology days Fr. Robert Werenski, our Bible professor, regularly came back to what he called the “PDR” — the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. We Catholics call it the “Paschal Mystery,” which we just finished celebrating during the Paschal Triduum but still have seven days of Octave and the whole of Eastertide to go! Not only did Werenski regularly talk about the PDR but stressed its indivisibility: the elements are distinct in the sense they can be intellectually differentiated, but they are not separable. Indeed, to attempt to separate them is to destroy the Paschal Mystery.

Yet on Easter I ran into this argument on social media: The moment of Christ’s supreme glory was not His resurrection, but His final moments on the Cross: “It is finished.” For in that moment He accomplished what God had foreordained from all eternity: the salvation of the world, showcasing His infinite mercy to all of humankind.

Well, no. We cannot separate Jesus’ Passion and Death from His Resurrection. We cannot — at least in the ordinary, timebound way people speak — say that “in that moment He accomplished… the salvation of the world.”

You don’t have to believe me. Believe St. Paul, who made it clear: “ If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins” (1 Cor 15:17). If Christ has not been raised, there is no salvation, only a dead Jew in a Jerusalem grave. Jesus’ Resurrection is not some kind of afterthought, a personal reward, as if the Father says: “Jesus, you did good Friday! You saved humanity! You deserve resurrection!”

It is clear from the first pages of Genesis that death is the inseparable consequence of sin. Sin means turning from God, who not only created but sustains us contingent creatures. God didn’t just create us, wind us up, and we run according to some internal rule, like Energizer Bunnies. (That’s deism). If God withdrew Himself from sustaining us, we would cease to exist (Ps 104: 29). Death is not so much a “punishment” of sin as its ineluctable consequence. It’s not as if, prior to warning Adam and Eve, God debated what “punishment” should follow disobedience. Death? Time out? Growing two heads? “Okay, death” (cf. Wis. 1:13-14). No, one cannot turn from God without dying anymore than a lamp can disconnect itself from its power plant and keep shining.

So, Jesus’ Resurrection is an essential part of His conquest of death. Because if Jesus is not resurrected in his human body, we would be arguing that He defeated sin but not its effects. That would give a whole new meaning to “Where, O death, is your victory? Where is your sting?” (1 Cor 15:55).

I fear our social-media poster’s phraseology because it seems to suggest the divisibility of Jesus’ Passion and Death from His Resurrection, a false separation inventing “deed” and “reward” which also seems then to require some really problematic Christological and Trinitarian positions. It seems to draw sharp lines between the work of Jesus as man and Jesus as God, as well as between the work of God the Son and the satisfaction of God the Father. Don’t go there!

And while the particular blogger is a committed Catholic solidly seeking to combat modern errors, the language formulated also can abet a heresy espoused by some liberal Protestants raised on radical Biblical exegesis. They argue that Jesus “rose” in the “hearts of His disciples,” so that our faith would in no way be different if they found Jesus’ bones in Israel. Back to 1 Cor. 15:17: If Christ is not risen in the flesh, He’s a dead Jew, Christianity is a fraud, and nobody is saved. And I fear that loading all the weight of “salvation” onto Good Friday as if Easter and what happened on it is separable or an afterthought/reward can get you to that very same non-Resurrection cul-de-sac.

Of course, some liberals will say I am smuggling in the phrase “in the flesh.” For those who debate whether “resurrection” would have been intelligible to twelve Jews, all of whom (except maybe Matthew) were tradesmen (and thus very concrete in their contact with reality), I refer you to the arguments in this regard made in an “oldie but goodie,” Karl Adam’s The Son of God, published in 1934.

Speaking of other smuggled phrases, early on I wrote “in the ordinary, timebound way people speak” we cannot separate the elements of the PDR. “Timebound” is not a common word. What do I have in mind? Well, salvation is a matter of man (its beneficiary) and God (his benefactor). Man lives in time and space; God does not. What happened in the PDR occurred in a given place (Israel) over a given time (three days, from the “day of preparation” until the passing of the solemnity). That’s how man reckons it.

God, in His eternity, may reckon it differently. In Matthew, when Jesus dies “the tombs are opened and the veil is torn” (Mt 27:51-53). People coming out of graves are an eschatological sign of salvation. When John (19:34-35) speaks of the blood and water flowing from Jesus’ pierced side, he’s not just recording an event in history — a Roman soldier made a hole in Jesus’ chest — but one in eternity: salvation, blood (the Eucharist) and water (Baptism) flow out from the right side of the Temple that is His Body (see John 2:21).

We speak of the time between Easter and the Last Day as involving the “already” and the “not yet.” Salvation is “already” accomplished: sin and death are defeated, there is no reclama of the PDR. But the effects of salvation in individual persons are “not yet,” they still need to be worked out in conjunction with the free will of those persons.

As we will see in the Gospels of Eastertide, Jesus is Himself in the “already” yet “not yet,” the latter not because He is waiting for something but in order to interface with His disciples. He has to meet them, as human beings, on human, i.e., spatio-temporal terms. So, the Man who walks through locked doors has a fish dinner; He who suddenly appears on the shores of Galilee cooks breakfast. He comes and goes in ways hitherto unknown, ways that are not man’s but are the Man’s.

In that sense, salvation does not necessarily respect the human “three days,” e.g., by opening graves on Good Friday versus empty tombs on Easter Sunday. Arguably, in God’s eternity, that power was already in the world when Jesus raised his friend Lazarus or perhaps an “unknown” person in the son of the widow of Naim. Indeed, it was present some 50 years earlier, when its prevenient graces were found at the beginning of the life of she who is “the Immaculate Conception.”

But we human beings, strongly immersed in space and time, should beware of formulations that can confuse others (at least without a long explanation) about “when” salvation happened. It happened in the indivisible PDR; just as we say you can’t have Easter without Good Friday, so neither can you have Good Friday without Easter. Jesus’ “Glory” and the salvation He won for us can only be understood properly by us time-bound humans in the indivisible PDR.