All was dark. For those first disciples of Jesus, the story ended tragically and unjustly. Dreams of justice were crushed under the boot of oppression. Lies and manipulation triumphed where truth and love had been offered. The end had come with the clang of the hammer pounding nails into raw flesh. The end had come, and the rulers had won. There was no way out, and the timid band of followers huddled fearfully in a closed upper room, gathering their emotions, planning to return to their jobs and defeated living. The pressing question was how to get out of Dodge without getting killed.
Because the end had come, what happened early Sunday morning came as a complete and shocking surprise. The words at first were biting, as if someone had told you your mom’s corpse had been stolen from the funeral home. Just when you thought the ridicule was over, now they stole the body! Peter and John, the two crusty fishermen, ran to check it out. What they saw, or did not see, was only the beginning of the greatest paradigm shift in history. What they saw when they went to the tomb were the linens neatly folded and an eerie absence of the body. They had that feeling of numbness you get when you have no clue what is happening around you. So, they went back and waited. And then something happened. Make no mistake–something must have happened. The twelve had clearly received the message the Romans intended to convey: stop this nonsense about Jesus being the “King” of Israel. There is room for only one King, only one Son of God, and His name is Caesar.
SOMETHING HAPPENED THAT CHANGES EVERYTHING
But something happened. The story of Christianity was not formed by artful minds seeking to create a new religion. The story was formed within a few hours when the greatest paradigm shift in history took place. The story of Christianity began in an instant, when Jesus of Nazareth was raised from the dead. If Jesus had not come back to life with some form of “transformed” new body (not the beaten pulp that was laid in the tomb), we would have never heard of him. Without doubt, something happened.
But if Jesus did rise from the dead, everything changes! History now does have a purpose. If Jesus really did rise from the dead, God is really like all that Jesus said! And more than that, Jesus’ claims to be God “come down” to be with us are true! If Jesus did rise from the dead, that means we too can be assured that this life is not all there is and that death does not have the final say. That means “the game is won…. The Easter message tells us that our enemies, sin, the curse, and death, are beaten. Jesus is the Victor…and we are invited and summoned to take seriously the victory of God’s glory in this man Jesus and to be joyful in Him. Then we may live in thankfulness and not in fear.”[1]
DID JESUS REALLY RISE FROM THE DEAD?
But can we believe that Jesus really did rise from the dead? Richard Swinburne, Professor of Philosophy at Oxford University, puts the odds at 97%.[2] One of the world’s leading Jewish theologians, Pinchas Lapid, is convinced the God of Israel raised Jesus from the dead.[3] Numerous lawyers, journalists, academics, and even scientists have investigated the resurrection, concluding that the evidence in favor of the resurrection of Jesus is overwhelming.[4]
There are three main pieces of evidence that convince these people.
First, the risen Jesus appeared to a large number of people. The apostle Paul, who was no fool, says he appeared to over 500 people (1 Cor. 15:6). And these appearance stories have all the earmarks of authenticity. For example, the language used to describe these appearances always use the terms for “sight” or “seeing.”
Second, no one ever found Jesus’ dead body–the “tomb was empty.” If the Jewish leaders had wanted to disprove Jesus’ resurrection (and they had every reason to want to), they could have found the body and brought it out for all to see. Some have argued that the disciples stole the body and hid it so that it couldn’t be found, but that makes no sense. These same disciples suffered and were even killed for believing in the resurrection of Jesus. Why die for a hoax? In addition, the first persons who discovered the empty tomb were women. Women were not considered reliable witnesses in antiquity, so if the early Christians were to fabricate the resurrection, they would not have included women as eyewitnesses. The fact that the early sources say that women were the first eyewitnesses supports the authenticity of the story.
Third, the astonishing growth of the early church points to a spectacular, unexplainable event. We must remember what happened immediately before the disciples began claiming the resurrection: their leader had been publicly humiliated and crucified. Only an astonishing event could have convinced them to be so fearless. Even greater support is found in the conversion of Paul, who was trained under the best Greek and Jewish minds of the day. Paul was a rising star in the Jewish intelligentsia. How do we explain his conversion without the resurrection? How could Paul be convinced of a crucified Messiah unless he had seen the risen Jesus?
THE MAIN REASON TO BELIEVE IN THE RESURRECTION OF JESUS
But there is one final reason to believe in the resurrection of Jesus, and it is the most important one for me. I believe in the resurrection of Jesus because I have gotten to know God in this world. I have come to realize that God is indeed real, that he has been “with me,” and I know he won’t leave me for dead. I believe that, as Jesus himself said, “He is not the God of the dead, but of the living, for to him all are alive!” (Luke 20:38).
Jesus made this statement to a group of religious leaders who did not believe there was life after death, the Sadducees. They didn’t believe in the afterlife because they couldn’t understand it. How’s this going to work? Will dead bones and dust just fly up together and the dead will come back to life? Those Sadducees, like us, have a hard time believing what we can’t comprehend. But there are many things I believe which I don’t comprehend. I’ve come to believe in black holes and quarks based on the reasoning of smart scientists, even though no one has actually seen such things. Most of this universe is made up of things we can’t comprehend.
But what impresses me about Jesus’ answer is that he does not ask us to take a blind leap of faith here. Jesus doesn’t ask us to believe a set of facts; he tells us we can trust the faithful hesed of God. Jesus points to something tangible in this life to make us realize there really is life after death. Jesus pointed the Sadducees to the heart of the Jewish Old Testament, back to that burning bush where God revealed his name to Moses. God told Moses, “I AM the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob” (Ex. 3:6, 15). Jesus points to the importance of the tense when we talk about God; God spoke of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the present tense. God did not say he was the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; he said he is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Wait a minute—Abraham had been dead 500 years when God appeared to Moses, so how can God say, “I am the God of Abraham”? Because God had made a promise to Abraham, a covenant of love, that God would bless the whole world through him. If God loses Abraham at death, how could Abraham enjoy this promise? How would he see its fulfillment? If God loses Abraham at death, what does that say about God? But Abraham knew that God was trustworthy, and that even death could not come between God and his love for Abraham. The writer of the New Testament letter of Hebrews tells us that Abraham believed God had power over death: “Abraham reasoned that God could raise the dead” (Heb. 11:19). Why did Abraham think this? Because he knew God. Because he had come to trust in the faithful love of his God.
And that is finally the most important reason to believe in the resurrection of Jesus: because of the faithful love of God. I believe in the resurrection not because of wishful thinking, or even because of all the logical arguments, but because I have come to know God, and I know that he will not let death come between him and me. The physicist John Polkinghorne writes that in view of all the suffering and death in the world, what could be the ground of a true hope beyond history? His answer:
There is only one possible source: the eternal faithfulness of the God who is the Creator and Redeemer of history. Here Christianity relies heavily upon its Jewish roots. Hope lies in the divine chesed, God’s steadfast love, and not in some Hellenistic belief in an unchanging realm of ideas or an intrinsic immortality of the human soul. Christian trust in divine faithfulness is reinforced by the knowledge that God is the One who raised Jesus from the dead. Only such a God could be the ground for that hope against hope that transcends the limits of any natural expectation. To sustain hope it must be possible to speak of a God who is powerful and active, not simply holding creation in being but also interacting with its history, the one who ‘gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist’ (Rom. 4:17). This same God must be the one whose loving concern for individual creatures is such that the divine power will be brought into play to bring about those creatures’ everlasting good. The God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is just such a God…. The only ground for such a hope lies in the steadfast love and faithfulness of God that is testified to by the resurrection of Jesus Christ.[5]
[1] Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline (New York: Harper & Row, 1959), 123.
[2] Richard Swinburne, The Resurrection of God Incarnate (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 214.
[3] Pinchas Lapide, The Resurrection of Jesus: A Jewish Perspective (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1983); see also N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003); Michael R. Licona, The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach (Downers Grove, Il: IVP Academic, 2010).
[4] For just a few, see Gary Habermas and J.P. Moreland, The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2004); Ted Peters, Science and Theology: The New Consonance (Boulder, Co.: Westview Press, 1998); John Polkinghorne, The God of Hope and the End of the World; John Polkinghorne, Science and Religion in Quest for Truth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011).
[5] Polkinghorne, The God of Hope, 94-95, 149.