Resurrection is such an important word for Christians. It is the central belief that gives life and vitality to our faith. We Christians maintain that a Christianity without the Resurrection is a hopeless endeavor (1 Corinthians 15:19).
Sometimes there is a fair amount of misunderstanding about what is meant by the Resurrection. Some people think it only affirms that Jesus’ “spirit” lived on in the hearts of his disciples. Others think it only affirms that Jesus’ spirit went to heaven after He died. I want to be abundantly clear that both of these stances are not in the least what is being affirmed by the Resurrection.
The Bible affirms that Jesus’ literal body came walking out of His tomb on the 3rd day. He was seen by hundreds of people. He was able to share meals with His disciples. He offered for His wounds to be touched and examined so as to verify that it truly was the same body that went into the tomb which came walking out of it. All of this was evidence that something more than His spirit surviving death had taken place. The Christian belief is that Jesus conquered death by walking out of His tomb that day almost 2000 years ago.
Is there any evidence for such a belief? Actually, there is an abundance of evidence. All scholars agree that Jesus’ tomb was empty. Why? For the simple reason that a religion arose claiming that Jesus had come back to life in the same city where He was killed and where His tomb was. If His body was still in that tomb, then the religious leaders, who had a vested interest in destroying this new religion that threatened their place in society, would have simply shown the populous His tomb with his body in it. The fact that this religion flourished in the very city where His tomb existed is abundant evidence that there was no body in the tomb for the religious leaders to produce. This fact is widely accepted among believers and skeptics alike. The question comes down to how His tomb ended up empty. There are 4 basic possibilities.
- His enemies stole the body – while a possibility, this makes no sense at all. When the “rumors” began to stir that Jesus had risen from the dead, would they not simply have produced His body or at least told everyone that they were the ones who stole it? The fact is that they never did produce a body nor claim to have stolen it.
- He disciples stole the body – the assertion here is that a group of uneducated peasants either overpowered a cohort of Roman soldiers that were guarding the tomb, or they stealthily snuck past the soldiers as they slept (even though such dereliction of duty was punishable by death for Roman soldiers). While both of those scenarios are hard to accept as plausible , the fact that all of these disciples went on to experience extreme persecution and even death for a belief that they would have known to be false goes against everything we know about human nature. Had they got rich off the deception, one could imagine such an endeavor. But the fact that not one of those disciples broke ranks even in the face of horrific deaths bears testimony that they truly believed they saw Him alive after He had died.
- He didn’t really die – some people claim that Jesus didn’t die when He was crucified, so when He walked out of the tomb on the 3rd day, there was no miracle involved. This claim downplays the fact that Romans were quite accustomed to killing people and they knew how to do it well. It ignores the fact that Jesus was stabbed in the side in addition to the whipping and crucifixion that He received. Then it asks us to believe that a man who was beaten and bloodied and placed in a cold tomb for 3 days somehow found the strength to roll a huge stone from the entrance to the tomb, and then stagger out and somehow convince His disciples that He was “the Lord of Life”. In such a scenario, it’s much more likely that He would have been seen as an improbable survivor of crucifixion who was on death’s doorstep rather than the conqueror of death.
- God raised Him from the dead – when all other possibilities are examined, there is no good reason to accept any of them as answers for how the tomb was empty. The most likely and the most rationale answer is that, just as He had predicted before He died, God raised Jesus of Nazareth from the dead.
So what difference does it make? It makes all the difference in the world. If a man claimed to be the Son of God, and He proved it by coming back from the dead; then we must take seriously His claims of lordship over our lives. We also can joyously accept the peace and the hope that He provides us as our Risen Lord. It is to that hope that we turn our attention in our worship service today.