Michael Bauman | Politics | The Chronicle of an Undeception

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"Only he who apprehends with the first Christians the horror of death, who takes death seriously as death, can comprehend the Easter exultation of the primitive Christian community and understand that the whole thinking of the New Testament is governed by belief in the resurrection." Oscar Cullmann, Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead?	Chapter Six: “The third day He rose again from the dead.” “Tertia die resurrexit a mortuis” "In the death of Jesus we have a test-case of supreme decisive importance for the world: a showdown between the power of death to destroy life and the power of God to reverse the work of death . . . Death was allowed to strike its blow, to do its worst, to do all that it could. It was not enough to annihilate the Lord of life. He came back from the grave the conquering Hero." Carroll Simcox, Living the Creed "When we come to die, I think, no moving power in our own hearts or wills is going to raise us from our dust. We shall be dead; and the difference between a real God and an edifying fiction will then be plain, for no edifying fiction raises the dead." Austin Farrer, Words for Life "I was dead, and behold, I am alive for evermore, and I have the keys of death and of Hell." Jesus, Revelation 1: 18 By affirming that Christ rose "on the third day," the creed returns, as it always does, to a clear and undecorated statement of historical fact. As did its previous assertion that Jesus "suffered under Pontius Pilate," the creed's affirmation here that Christ rose "on the third day" helps pinpoint the resurrection for us in space and time. The resurrection of Jesus, in other words, was no ephemeral, shadowy, nondescript pseudo-event; it was solid and substantial, and it happened "on the third day." In its historicity the resurrection is like all other events; in its importance it most definitely is not. This historical event is the most significant historical event in the world. Along with what precedes it in the creed, it is the other half of the central assertion of the Christian faith: Christ has died; Christ has risen. Here the creed (indeed the world) reaches a pivot. Until now, the creed's statements regarding Christ were primarily statements of descent, a descent that began in Heaven and went down to a stable in Bethlehem; down further not only to death, but to the death of a common criminal; down still further to the grave; finally descending even into the depths of Hell itself. But Hell is not the end. With the words of resurrection now before us, the creed starts to chronicle Christ's long re-ascent; here it begins. Christ comes back to life, back to earth, back to the family, friends, race, and world He came to save. By his resurrection Christ vindicated his own righteousness (John 16: 10), demonstrated his mastery over death (Acts 2: 24), proved Himself the Son of God (Rom. 1: 4), and secured the forgiveness, justification and resurrection of all those who believe in Him (Rom. 4: 25; 1 Cor. 15: 17, 18). Clearly this is not merely the pivotal fact of the creed, but the pivotal fact of history, the event on which all other events, regardless of scale, turn. Sin and death have been beaten, and by faith in the One who beat them, we ourselves can share the victory. That is the gospel; that is the good news. From the very beginning, the content of this portion of the creed formed the heart of the Christian message: Christ has died for the sins of the world and He has risen again from the dead. If He had not risen, virtually everything the creed affirms after his descent into Hell would have to be stricken. Indeed, the Christian faith itself would be no more, for that is what the Christian religion proclaims, and that is what helps set it apart from all other religions -- a living Savior, one who is able to cancel both the sin and death of all those who come to Him. Because Christ is alive and active in the world, you can come face to face with Him. You can come to know Him as a living Savior, friend, and Lord. But Mohammed is dead; Buddha is dead; Moses is dead; Confucius is dead. They are subject to, and trapped within, the same destiny as all other fallen mortals. Being dead, they cannot help us. They cannot deliver us, regardless of their renown: "The paths of glory lead but to the grave," wrote Thomas Gray. But with Jesus this is not the whole story. In one case the path that led to the grave led back to life again, and that path is Christ's. He alone lives. Attached by faith to Him, so shall we. Put differently, Archimedes, the ancient mathematician, realized that by means of the principles of leverage he could move even the world itself. All he needed was a fulcrum outside the world and a lever long enough for the job. Christ's resurrection, so to speak, is that lever and fulcrum. By it God lifts the burden of sin and death from creation. That Christ was raised "on the third day" is a fact in accordance with the ancient Scriptures, as both Jesus and Paul affirmed. Jesus made it a subject for his own prophetic announcement (Mark 8: 31; John 2: 19-21, 10: 18) and said that in accordance with what befell the prophet Jonah, whose story was a prefiguring of Christ's, He Himself would rise from the dead after three days. He did. The ancient Jewish method of counting days, because it differs from ours, has led to confusion on this point. The Jews counted any part of a day as that day. In the case of Jesus, He was crucified on Friday, the day before the Sabbath. He was buried that same day and remained in his tomb the rest of that first day and all the second. Then, on Sunday morning, the third day, He rose from the dead, which is why the apostles began to keep Sunday, the first day of the week (Acts 20: 7; 1 Cor. 16: 1, 2; Rev. 1: 10), as their holy day, rather than remaining in concert with the Jews, who continued to worship on Saturday, the seventh day. On that first Easter Sunday, three of the women followers of Jesus went to his tomb with the intention of anointing the body, a common ancient practice. But to their amazement and alarm, when they arrived at the tomb they found the gravestone rolled back and the body gone. A young man standing at the grave, in order to comfort the understandably distressed women, told them not to be afraid; Jesus was alive. They must go, the young man said, and tell the apostles what they have seen and instruct them to go to Galilee, where Jesus Himself would meet them (Mark 16: 1-7). The apostles, as I imagine you and I would have been, were more than a little skeptical of the women's report, which they considered idle talk (Luke 24: 11). But their skepticism was short-lived because even before they left for Galilee Jesus appeared to them, in the flesh. That remarkable sight notwithstanding, the apostles were initially incredulous. Luke tells us that they were afraid and believed that they had seen a ghost (Luke 24: 37). But this was no ghost, they soon learned, no phantom, no wraith, no vision, no wish. Under the weight of overwhelming evidence of every sort, the apostles were soon compelled to change their minds. Jesus was indeed risen. They saw Him repeatedly with their own eyes numerous times in the next several weeks, as the gospels report (Matt. 28: 16ff; John 20: 24-29, 21: 1-14). The apostles saw Christ in virtually every imaginable fashion and circumstance. They saw Him separately and they saw Him while together; they saw Him at night and they saw Him in the day; they saw Him while eating, while fishing and while walking. They saw Him in Jerusalem and they saw Him in the Galilean countryside. He was seen by men and by women, by very large groups and by very small. People spoke with Him, touched Him, ate with Him, drank with Him, listened to Him, and kept appointments with Him. He was alive, and by virtue of that tremendous fact their belief in Him as Savior and Messiah was rekindled, and on behalf of that fact they sealed their testimony with their own blood. On behalf of that fact most of them were eventually martyred. Peter, we are told, was crucified upside down because he thought himself unworthy to die in the same manner as He who conquered both sin and death. All of them but John went on to die a brutal and premature death for the faith they now practised and preached, the same faith on which every one of them had turned his back just days before. John, the only one of them to survive to old age, survived beating, torture, imprisonment and exile for this new faith. The men we meet at the beginning of the book of Acts are a very different lot from what they were on Good Friday and the two days that followed. Ardent belief replaced sorrowful dejection, and death-defying courage replaced shameful cowardice. This new-found holy boldness grew out of their own personal experience of the power of God, which they saw irrefutably demonstrated before their very eyes in the resurrection of Jesus. If God can do that, they realized, He can do anything; and if He has done that for Christ, He can do it for all those who give themselves to Christ in faith, just as He promised. They soon recognized that for all those who are in Christ sin no longer reigns and death is not the final word, because the tomb was empty and the Lord was risen (Luke 24: 6). Peter, who shamefully denied Jesus three times in one night, and the motley band of disciples, who fled from Him in humiliation and fear, and whose abject resignation to failure sent them back to their former way of life, these unlikely people changed the world, but only after the resurrected Christ had first changed them. Nothing else accounts for the massive transformation of the disciples. They went from being broken, distressed and discouraged men at the end of the gospels to being the conquering heros and martyrs whose message eventually turned the Roman Empire on its ear, and which presided over its demise. The power that transformed them has not diminished. It can do for us what it did for them -- it can make us people of courage, of conviction, of piety, of power, and of victory. It can, and does, verify itself to us as the same genuine and decisive reality it was in the earliest days of the faith. The apostles made certain that this indeed was Jesus Himself, a man like them, a man of flesh and bone (Luke 24: 38-43). They were convinced of the reality of Christ's resurrected body because they touched it, saw it, and heard it (1 John 1: 1-3), especially Thomas, perhaps the apostle whose thought is most like our own. As would most of us, Thomas said he would not believe in the resurrection until he put his hand in Jesus's side, where the spear had pierced Him, and put his finger in the holes in Jesus's hands, where the nails had punctured them. What Thomas did and saw convinced even him that indeed Jesus was alive, as it would have convinced us, had we been there. As I see it, the case of a man like Thomas is great comfort and great confirmation. When a man like Thomas -- who shares our suspicions and our misgivings, and who wants as firm a basis for believing as possible -- when a man like that finds the evidence so solid and compelling that he devotes his entire life to it and eventually dies for it, we have reason to believe. Those who share our doubts saw Jesus with their own eyes, touched Him with their own hands, and heard Him with their own ears. Then they died for what they saw, heard, and touched. They themselves tell you it is true -- Jesus is alive (1 John 1: 1-3). It is a simple, yet colossal, historical fact, certified by credible testimony, an event more well-attested than any other in the ancient world. Let me make the point even more clearly. The gospels record at least nine appearances of the resurrected Christ to his disciples, and in his letter to the Corinthians Paul himself mentions six (1 Cor. 15: 5-9), one of which was to more than 500 people at once. Yet even these multiple and amazing appearances are not all, for Christ was seen also by those who were not his disciples, such as the Roman soldiers (Matt. 28: 4ff) stationed at his grave, soldiers by no means predisposed either to believe the resurrection or to invent it. Those who say that the resurrection never occurred have it wrong on at least five counts. That is, they appear never to have come to grips with five arguments that seem to prove just the opposite. First, they forget the pagan Roman soldiers who saw the resurrected Jesus, and who had nothing to gain and much to lose by admitting they had failed to perform what seemed like an easy task, that of keeping a dead man inside his sealed tomb. To give them their due, the Roman soldiers tried their best to make the tomb secure by sealing it and then placing armed guards around it. But not even the military power of the Roman Empire was going to keep Jesus in his grave. Normally, we have no difficulty keeping dead men dead. But not in this case, because the One who was dead and (apparently) discredited was now back. If the devil of Hell was no match for the Son of God, neither were a few Roman guards. How this dead man managed to elude the grasp and watch of trained soldiers and yet stay dead the skeptics have never shown. Second, those who doubt the resurrection confuse cause and effect. The witnesses to the resurrection did not see Jesus because they were Christians, they were Christians because they saw Jesus. Had they not seen Him alive, they would have remained what they were before the resurrection -- disappointed, disillusioned people, afraid of the crowds, terrified by public opinion, deniers of Christ intent upon going back to their old jobs and leaving this unfortunate episode in their lives behind them forever. But something changed all that; something renewed their faith, changed their minds, and inspired them to courage where once there had been only cowardice. That powerful and life-transforming something was exactly what the apostles said it was -- the resurrection of Jesus. As Peter says at the beginning of Acts, in order to be an apostle one must be first a witness of the resurrection; he does not say that in order to be a witness of the resurrection one had first to be an apostle (Acts 1: 22). Paul, of course, agrees. He was an apostle because he saw the risen Christ (1 Cor. 9: 1; Gal. 1: 12-16), not the other way round. Third, the skeptics forget the empty tomb. All the Jews or the Romans needed to do (indeed all anyone needs to do today) to squash this rumor of resurrection was to produce the body. In this regard, the corpse of Jesus is an irrefutable argument. But the Jews and Romans did not produce the body and could not produce it. Neither have any of those who followed in their train. Far from producing the body, the ancient Jews resorted to bribing the guards on duty to say that the body was stolen by the apostles while the guards were asleep (Matt. 28: 11-15). The obvious fact that sleeping men are not convincing witnesses to events that allegedly transpired while they are sleeping and their eyes were shut seems not to have occurred to them. The simple fact is this: The tomb is empty; Jesus is risen. Fourth, those who try to gainsay the resurrection forget not only the apostles, the Roman soldiers, and the empty tomb, they forget the Church. Without the resurrection Christianity is nothing, as Paul taught centuries ago. That Christianity survives is testimony to the fact that the One in whom it believes could not be held by death. The empty tomb and the multiple appearances of the risen Christ created the disciples' faith; the evidence produced the conviction, not vice versa. If the apostles had merely succeeded in deceiving themselves, their delusion would not have outlived them, assuming it had lasted even their lifetime. But not only did the apostles' conviction and commitment last a lifetime, they succeeded in imparting it to others, thousands and thousands of others whose previous beliefs and experiences did nothing to predispose them to accept it. The case remains the same today, two millennia later. Some of the finest and most brilliant minds in this and in every preceding century have listened to the apostles' testimony, weighed the evidence fairly and objectively, and committed themselves to the resurrection as the most important fact in history. Many millions of people of all sorts -- young and old, men and women, learned and simple, modern and ancient, urban and rural, technological and primitive, and all those in between -- have discovered that Jesus Christ is alive, and they have come to know Him personally. They are not all fools, I can assure you. If only one of those millions is correct in their assertion that they have come to know Jesus personally and to have a one-to-one relationship with Him, Jesus lives. Because He does, the Christian Church not only continues to exist, it is older than any institution or empire in the Western world. Fifth, the doubters have yet another hard fact to explain, namely the rejection by the earliest Christians of their accustomed Sabbath (Saturday) in favor of Sunday, the day they came quickly to call "the Lord's day." No doubter has yet been able to demonstrate that something other than the resurrection of Christ persuaded the first Christians to reject the ancient holy day of their fathers and of their nation. Before conversion, the earliest Christians were Jewish by birth, by training and by conviction. As Jews, they considered keeping the Sabbath holy to be one of the most significant and enduring of their sacred obligations. God Himself had commanded it on Sinai (Exod. 20: 8-11). Being conscientious Jews, the first disciples were hardly disposed to discard the ancient Sabbath solely on their own prerogative, or at their own convenience. Only something truly remarkable, only something coming indisputably from God Himself, could persuade them to disregard the traditions of their forefathers and to consider some other day as the only day suitable for the worship of God and for special recognition of Him and his glory. That something was precisely what the apostles said it was, the resurrection of Jesus. In short, I am saying that the resurrection of Jesus is too extravagant a thing to invent and too well attested to deny. It is not fantasy; it is history -- sober, factual, shocking history -- history charged through with theological significance. To that significance we now turn. Just as Christ's body was raised and that body was altered, even so do we realize that this perishable and dying body of ours shall one day be transformed, that our mortality shall put on immortality. In the briefest of moments, in the twinkling of an eye, we shall all be changed (1 Cor. 15: 52). And in that light, in light of the historical manifestation of God's power and love, we realize that the life we now live is by no means all there is; it is but a fragment, the foreword to our unending existence and our eternal life with God. We shall not be absorbed by the sands of time like water in the desert. We shall endure. This life is but a part of the whole, and the whole is by far greater and grander than this one part. The resurrection undeceives us. It makes us realize that all along we have misunderstood the true nature of the world in which we live. Until the empty tomb, we never saw life as it truly is. Earthly life is not, and cannot be, complete in itself. And only in light of the resurrection do we understand what death is, because life after death gives our death its full and proper context, a context without which we could never comprehend the true meaning of anything, death included. In Christ, we understand that our departed loved ones have not passed away; they have passed on. In light of the resurrection we now know that under the transforming power of God, death and burial can be a means of grace, which is partly why Jesus said that those who mourn are truly blessed, for they shall be comforted (Matt. 5: 4). Ultimately, Christ's resurrection means that in our association with Him the tyranny of sin, death and Hell over us has been broken. Christ's resurrection concerns us all because He is the firstfruits, so to speak, of those who are dead (1 Cor. 15: 20), as each of us one day shall be. The resurrection touches each of us personally, even now, because it is the pledge, the promise, the prefiguring of our own resurrection. It is the historical basis upon which we come to expect the final transformation of all things, including ourselves. Christ's resurrection is the powerful proof in space and time that God can do what He says: renew the universe and grant us eternal life. For as in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive, wrote Paul (1 Cor. 15: 22). Christ is, as He said He was, the resurrection and the life (John 11: 25). When we stand at the mouth of the empty tomb, not only do Christ's suffering and death look different to us, but so do ours. As Paul explained, "If we have become one with Him by sharing in his death, we shall become one with Him by sharing in his resurrection" (Rom. 6: 5). In other words, just as Christ died for us, He also was raised for us: "He was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification" (Rom 4: 25). To be justified in the sight of God means that our sins are forgiven and that we are made righteous and pleasing to God. It means that we have become the adopted children of our Heavenly Father and have been made partakers of the divine nature; we have become the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit. Because of the resurrection, we know that our sins are cancelled, the debt is paid, and death has died. If, for believers, the crucifixion of Christ was the death of sin, and if the descent of Christ into Hell was the death of judgement, the resurrection of Christ is the death of death. In the resurrection of Christ, death itself finally dies. Mortality is mortal. Just as sin and death are indissolubly linked as cause and effect, even so the death and resurrection of Christ must be seen together as the two sides of one coin. By the one He redeemed us from sin, and by the other He rescued us from death. Furthermore, the resurrection shows that we human beings are not the targets of some cruel cosmic joke, one that placed a desire for eternity deep into our hearts and then doomed us to die tomorrow, perhaps even today. Quite the contrary, we were made for eternity, and eternity is ours in Christ. Easter was the day death died. Easter is not merely Jesus's survival of death; it is death's reversal. The life of Christ, from conception to resurrection, is God's own answer to the agonies and ailments that rack the world, and is the irreversible exorcism of the haunting specter of death that looms above it. The resurrection of Jesus also teaches us that the God and Father of us all, the God of Israel, is neither myth, nor philosophical concept, nor carved image, for such things do not, and cannot, raise the dead. In the Apostles' Creed, therefore, we deal not with the god of the pagans, nor with the god of the philosophers, nor with the gods of our own making; we deal instead with the God who acts powerfully in space and time, who discloses Himself to us by his mighty words and deeds, and who desires that we draw near to Him even as He draws near to us. The God and Father our Lord Jesus Christ, the God of the creed, is the divine dynamo behind and within history. And if it be true, as Jesus affirmed, that we can know others by their deeds, then by means of the resurrection of Christ -- God's greatest historical deed -- we discover that God is the One who forgives sin and destroys death. In the resurrection of Christ, eternal life and eternal death were locked in mortal combat; life won. In the wake of Easter, we discover that death is not the end; it is the prelude. In the resurrection of Jesus we find unveiled before us the love and power of the heart that stands at the heart of the whole world. In the resurrection of Jesus the grand and graphic lesson is this: Neither pain, nor sin, nor death, nor even Hell itself is the ultimate fact for those beloved by God. Such things are real and terrible, to be sure, but the love and power of "God the Father almighty, maker of Heaven and earth," has tamed them. We face those things now with faith, with courage and with confidence in God, knowing full well that we can confront this life and whatever follows it without despair. Christianity does not flee from the harsh reality of pain, of sin, and of death; it confronts them in all their wildness and terror and it defeats them. Here in the resurrection of Jesus the final victory of God over sin and death at the end of history has broken into history's middle. In Christ we see the presence of the future. If you want to know how the story turns out; if you want to know what happens to sin, to death, and to you; if you want to know what comes of suffering for the sake of Christ and his kingdom; the plain answer is put forward with simplicity and clarity in the words of the creed: "On the third day He rose again from the dead." As Luther explained, it is not that in the midst of life Christ dies, but that in the midst of death He lives, and so do we if we attach ourselves to Him in faith. Here is the fundamental fact: The Victim is the Victor. Finally, as regards our spirituality, we must remember that resurrection always presupposes death. Paul tells us that we were raised in Christ; but that can be so only if we have been crucified with Christ previously and put our old sinful selves to death as a result. Nothing that we can do is more important or more basic to our well-being. Do it. Do it now.	"Without the resurrection the New Testament would never have been written, for there would have been nothing to write about and no one to write it. The Church would never have existed, and the life of Jesus would never have been remembered." Lumsden Barkway, The Creed and its Credentials
	Copyright © 2006. Michael Bauman. All rights reserved.	date modified: 5 July 2006 Website Hit Counters

"Only he who apprehends with the first Christians the horror of death, who takes death seriously as death, can comprehend the Easter exultation of the primitive Christian community and understand that the whole thinking of the New Testament is governed by belief in the resurrection."
Oscar Cullmann, Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead?

Chapter Six:

“The third day He rose again from the dead.”

“Tertia die resurrexit a mortuis”

"In the death of Jesus we have a test-case of supreme decisive importance for the world: a showdown between the power of death to destroy life and the power of God to reverse the work of death . . . Death was allowed to strike its blow, to do its worst, to do all that it could. It was not enough to annihilate the Lord of life. He came back from the grave the conquering Hero."
Carroll Simcox, Living the Creed

"When we come to die, I think, no moving power in our own hearts or wills is going to raise us from our dust. We shall be dead; and the difference between a real God and an edifying fiction will then be plain, for no edifying fiction raises the dead."
Austin Farrer, Words for Life

"I was dead, and behold, I am alive for evermore, and I have the keys of death and of Hell."
Jesus, Revelation 1: 18

         By affirming that Christ rose "on the third day," the creed returns, as it always does, to a clear and undecorated statement of historical fact.   As did its previous assertion that Jesus "suffered under Pontius Pilate," the creed's affirmation here that Christ rose "on the third day" helps pinpoint the resurrection for us in space and time. The resurrection of Jesus, in other words, was no ephemeral, shadowy, nondescript pseudo-event; it was solid and substantial, and it happened "on the third day." In its historicity the resurrection is like all other events; in its importance it most definitely is not. This historical event is the most significant historical event in the world. Along with what precedes it in the creed, it is the other half of the central assertion of the Christian faith: Christ has died; Christ has risen.
         Here the creed (indeed the world) reaches a pivot. Until now, the creed's statements regarding Christ were primarily statements of descent, a descent that began in Heaven and went down to a stable in Bethlehem; down further not only to death, but to the death of a common criminal; down still further to the grave; finally descending even into the depths of Hell itself. But Hell is not the end. With the words of resurrection now before us, the creed starts to chronicle Christ's long re-ascent; here it begins. Christ comes back to life, back to earth, back to the family, friends, race, and world He came to save. By his resurrection Christ vindicated his own righteousness (John 16: 10), demonstrated his mastery over death (Acts 2: 24), proved Himself the Son of God (Rom. 1: 4), and secured the forgiveness, justification and resurrection of all those who believe in Him (Rom. 4: 25; 1 Cor. 15: 17, 18). Clearly this is not merely the pivotal fact of the creed, but the pivotal fact of history, the event on which all other events, regardless of scale, turn. Sin and death have been beaten, and by faith in the One who beat them, we ourselves can share the victory. That is the gospel; that is the good news.
         From the very beginning, the content of this portion of the creed formed the heart of the Christian message: Christ has died for the sins of the world and He has risen again from the dead. If He had not risen, virtually everything the creed affirms after his descent into Hell would have to be stricken. Indeed, the Christian faith itself would be no more, for that is what the Christian religion proclaims, and that is what helps set it apart from all other religions -- a living Savior, one who is able to cancel both the sin and death of all those who come to Him. Because Christ is alive and active in the world, you can come face to face with Him. You can come to know Him as a living Savior, friend, and Lord. But Mohammed is dead; Buddha is dead; Moses is dead; Confucius is dead. They are subject to, and trapped within, the same destiny as all other fallen mortals. Being dead, they cannot help us. They cannot deliver us, regardless of their renown: "The paths of glory lead but to the grave," wrote Thomas Gray. But with Jesus this is not the whole story. In one case the path that led to the grave led back to life again, and that path is Christ's. He alone lives. Attached by faith to Him, so shall we.
         Put differently, Archimedes, the ancient mathematician, realized that by means of the principles of leverage he could move even the world itself. All he needed was a fulcrum outside the world and a lever long enough for the job. Christ's resurrection, so to speak, is that lever and fulcrum. By it God lifts the burden of sin and death from creation.
         That Christ was raised "on the third day" is a fact in accordance with the ancient Scriptures, as both Jesus and Paul affirmed. Jesus made it a subject for his own prophetic announcement (Mark 8: 31; John 2: 19-21, 10: 18) and said that in accordance with what befell the prophet Jonah, whose story was a prefiguring of Christ's, He Himself would rise from the dead after three days. He did.
         The ancient Jewish method of counting days, because it differs from ours, has led to confusion on this point. The Jews counted any part of a day as that day. In the case of Jesus, He was crucified on Friday, the day before the Sabbath. He was buried that same day and remained in his tomb the rest of that first day and all the second. Then, on Sunday morning, the third day, He rose from the dead, which is why the apostles began to keep Sunday, the first day of the week (Acts 20: 7; 1 Cor. 16: 1, 2; Rev. 1: 10), as their holy day, rather than remaining in concert with the Jews, who continued to worship on Saturday, the seventh day.
         On that first Easter Sunday, three of the women followers of Jesus went to his tomb with the intention of anointing the body, a common ancient practice. But to their amazement and alarm, when they arrived at the tomb they found the gravestone rolled back and the body gone. A young man standing at the grave, in order to comfort the understandably distressed women, told them not to be afraid; Jesus was alive. They must go, the young man said, and tell the apostles what they have seen and instruct them to go to Galilee, where Jesus Himself would meet them (Mark 16: 1-7). The apostles, as I imagine you and I would have been, were more than a little skeptical of the women's report, which they considered idle talk (Luke 24: 11). But their skepticism was short-lived because even before they left for Galilee Jesus appeared to them, in the flesh. That remarkable sight notwithstanding, the apostles were initially incredulous. Luke tells us that they were afraid and believed that they had seen a ghost (Luke 24: 37). But this was no ghost, they soon learned, no phantom, no wraith, no vision, no wish. Under the weight of overwhelming evidence of every sort, the apostles were soon compelled to change their minds. Jesus was indeed risen. They saw Him repeatedly with their own eyes numerous times in the next several weeks, as the gospels report (Matt. 28: 16ff; John 20: 24-29, 21: 1-14).
         The apostles saw Christ in virtually every imaginable fashion and circumstance. They saw Him separately and they saw Him while together; they saw Him at night and they saw Him in the day; they saw Him while eating, while fishing and while walking. They saw Him in Jerusalem and they saw Him in the Galilean countryside. He was seen by men and by women, by very large groups and by very small. People spoke with Him, touched Him, ate with Him, drank with Him, listened to Him, and kept appointments with Him. He was alive, and by virtue of that tremendous fact their belief in Him as Savior and Messiah was rekindled, and on behalf of that fact they sealed their testimony with their own blood. On behalf of that fact most of them were eventually martyred. Peter, we are told, was crucified upside down because he thought himself unworthy to die in the same manner as He who conquered both sin and death. All of them but John went on to die a brutal and premature death for the faith they now practised and preached, the same faith on which every one of them had turned his back just days before. John, the only one of them to survive to old age, survived beating, torture, imprisonment and exile for this new faith. The men we meet at the beginning of the book of Acts are a very different lot from what they were on Good Friday and the two days that followed. Ardent belief replaced sorrowful dejection, and death-defying courage replaced shameful cowardice. This new-found holy boldness grew out of their own personal experience of the power of God, which they saw irrefutably demonstrated before their very eyes in the resurrection of Jesus. If God can do that, they realized, He can do anything; and if He has done that for Christ, He can do it for all those who give themselves to Christ in faith, just as He promised. They soon recognized that for all those who are in Christ sin no longer reigns and death is not the final word, because the tomb was empty and the Lord was risen (Luke 24: 6). Peter, who shamefully denied Jesus three times in one night, and the motley band of disciples, who fled from Him in humiliation and fear, and whose abject resignation to failure sent them back to their former way of life, these unlikely people changed the world, but only after the resurrected Christ had first changed them. Nothing else accounts for the massive transformation of the disciples. They went from being broken, distressed and discouraged men at the end of the gospels to being the conquering heros and martyrs whose message eventually turned the Roman Empire on its ear, and which presided over its demise. The power that transformed them has not diminished. It can do for us what it did for them -- it can make us people of courage, of conviction, of piety, of power, and of victory. It can, and does, verify itself to us as the same genuine and decisive reality it was in the earliest days of the faith.
         The apostles made certain that this indeed was Jesus Himself, a man like them, a man of flesh and bone (Luke 24: 38-43). They were convinced of the reality of Christ's resurrected body because they touched it, saw it, and heard it (1 John 1: 1-3), especially Thomas, perhaps the apostle whose thought is most like our own. As would most of us, Thomas said he would not believe in the resurrection until he put his hand in Jesus's side, where the spear had pierced Him, and put his finger in the holes in Jesus's hands, where the nails had punctured them. What Thomas did and saw convinced even him that indeed Jesus was alive, as it would have convinced us, had we been there. As I see it, the case of a man like Thomas is great comfort and great confirmation. When a man like Thomas -- who shares our suspicions and our misgivings, and who wants as firm a basis for believing as possible -- when a man like that finds the evidence so solid and compelling that he devotes his entire life to it and eventually dies for it, we have reason to believe. Those who share our doubts saw Jesus with their own eyes, touched Him with their own hands, and heard Him with their own ears. Then they died for what they saw, heard, and touched. They themselves tell you it is true -- Jesus is alive (1 John 1: 1-3). It is a simple, yet colossal, historical fact, certified by credible testimony, an event more well-attested than any other in the ancient world.
         Let me make the point even more clearly. The gospels record at least nine appearances of the resurrected Christ to his disciples, and in his letter to the Corinthians Paul himself mentions six (1 Cor. 15: 5-9), one of which was to more than 500 people at once. Yet even these multiple and amazing appearances are not all, for Christ was seen also by those who were not his disciples, such as the Roman soldiers (Matt. 28: 4ff) stationed at his grave, soldiers by no means predisposed either to believe the resurrection or to invent it.
         Those who say that the resurrection never occurred have it wrong on at least five counts. That is, they appear never to have come to grips with five arguments that seem to prove just the opposite. First, they forget the pagan Roman soldiers who saw the resurrected Jesus, and who had nothing to gain and much to lose by admitting they had failed to perform what seemed like an easy task, that of keeping a dead man inside his sealed tomb. To give them their due, the Roman soldiers tried their best to make the tomb secure by sealing it and then placing armed guards around it. But not even the military power of the Roman Empire was going to keep Jesus in his grave. Normally, we have no difficulty keeping dead men dead. But not in this case, because the One who was dead and (apparently) discredited was now back. If the devil of Hell was no match for the Son of God, neither were a few Roman guards. How this dead man managed to elude the grasp and watch of trained soldiers and yet stay dead the skeptics have never shown.
         Second, those who doubt the resurrection confuse cause and effect. The witnesses to the resurrection did not see Jesus because they were Christians, they were Christians because they saw Jesus. Had they not seen Him alive, they would have remained what they were before the resurrection -- disappointed, disillusioned people, afraid of the crowds, terrified by public opinion, deniers of Christ intent upon going back to their old jobs and leaving this unfortunate episode in their lives behind them forever. But something changed all that; something renewed their faith, changed their minds, and inspired them to courage where once there had been only cowardice. That powerful and life-transforming something was exactly what the apostles said it was -- the resurrection of Jesus. As Peter says at the beginning of Acts, in order to be an apostle one must be first a witness of the resurrection; he does not say that in order to be a witness of the resurrection one had first to be an apostle (Acts 1: 22). Paul, of course, agrees. He was an apostle because he saw the risen Christ (1 Cor. 9: 1; Gal. 1: 12-16), not the other way round.
         Third, the skeptics forget the empty tomb. All the Jews or the Romans needed to do (indeed all anyone needs to do today) to squash this rumor of resurrection was to produce the body. In this regard, the corpse of Jesus is an irrefutable argument. But the Jews and Romans did not produce the body and could not produce it. Neither have any of those who followed in their train. Far from producing the body, the ancient Jews resorted to bribing the guards on duty to say that the body was stolen by the apostles while the guards were asleep (Matt. 28: 11-15). The obvious fact that sleeping men are not convincing witnesses to events that allegedly transpired while they are sleeping and their eyes were shut seems not to have occurred to them. The simple fact is this: The tomb is empty; Jesus is risen.
         Fourth, those who try to gainsay the resurrection forget not only the apostles, the Roman soldiers, and the empty tomb, they forget the Church. Without the resurrection Christianity is nothing, as Paul taught centuries ago. That Christianity survives is testimony to the fact that the One in whom it believes could not be held by death. The empty tomb and the multiple appearances of the risen Christ created the disciples' faith; the evidence produced the conviction, not vice versa. If the apostles had merely succeeded in deceiving themselves, their delusion would not have outlived them, assuming it had lasted even their lifetime. But not only did the apostles' conviction and commitment last a lifetime, they succeeded in imparting it to others, thousands and thousands of others whose previous beliefs and experiences did nothing to predispose them to accept it. The case remains the same today, two millennia later. Some of the finest and most brilliant minds in this and in every preceding century have listened to the apostles' testimony, weighed the evidence fairly and objectively, and committed themselves to the resurrection as the most important fact in history. Many millions of people of all sorts -- young and old, men and women, learned and simple, modern and ancient, urban and rural, technological and primitive, and all those in between -- have discovered that Jesus Christ is alive, and they have come to know Him personally. They are not all fools, I can assure you. If only one of those millions is correct in their assertion that they have come to know Jesus personally and to have a one-to-one relationship with Him, Jesus lives. Because He does, the Christian Church not only continues to exist, it is older than any institution or empire in the Western world.
         Fifth, the doubters have yet another hard fact to explain, namely the rejection by the earliest Christians of their accustomed Sabbath (Saturday) in favor of Sunday, the day they came quickly to call "the Lord's day." No doubter has yet been able to demonstrate that something other than the resurrection of Christ persuaded the first Christians to reject the ancient holy day of their fathers and of their nation. Before conversion, the earliest Christians were Jewish by birth, by training and by conviction. As Jews, they considered keeping the Sabbath holy to be one of the most significant and enduring of their sacred obligations. God Himself had commanded it on Sinai (Exod. 20: 8-11). Being conscientious Jews, the first disciples were hardly disposed to discard the ancient Sabbath solely on their own prerogative, or at their own convenience. Only something truly remarkable, only something coming indisputably from God Himself, could persuade them to disregard the traditions of their forefathers and to consider some other day as the only day suitable for the worship of God and for special recognition of Him and his glory. That something was precisely what the apostles said it was, the resurrection of Jesus.
         In short, I am saying that the resurrection of Jesus is too extravagant a thing to invent and too well attested to deny. It is not fantasy; it is history -- sober, factual, shocking history -- history charged through with theological significance. To that significance we now turn.
         Just as Christ's body was raised and that body was altered, even so do we realize that this perishable and dying body of ours shall one day be transformed, that our mortality shall put on immortality.   In the briefest of moments, in the twinkling of an eye, we shall all be changed (1 Cor. 15: 52). And in that light, in light of the historical manifestation of God's power and love, we realize that the life we now live is by no means all there is; it is but a fragment, the foreword to our unending existence and our eternal life with God. We shall not be absorbed by the sands of time like water in the desert. We shall endure. This life is but a part of the whole, and the whole is by far greater and grander than this one part. The resurrection undeceives us.   It makes us realize that all along we have misunderstood the true nature of the world in which we live. Until the empty tomb, we never saw life as it truly is. Earthly life is not, and cannot be, complete in itself. And only in light of the resurrection do we understand what death is, because life after death gives our death its full and proper context, a context without which we could never comprehend the true meaning of anything, death included. In Christ, we understand that our departed loved ones have not passed away; they have passed on. In light of the resurrection we now know that under the transforming power of God, death and burial can be a means of grace, which is partly why Jesus said that those who mourn are truly blessed, for they shall be comforted (Matt. 5: 4). Ultimately, Christ's resurrection means that in our association with Him the tyranny of sin, death and Hell over us has been broken.
         Christ's resurrection concerns us all because He is the firstfruits, so to speak, of those who are dead (1 Cor. 15: 20), as each of us one day shall be. The resurrection touches each of us personally, even now, because it is the pledge, the promise, the prefiguring of our own resurrection. It is the historical basis upon which we come to expect the final transformation of all things, including ourselves. Christ's resurrection is the powerful proof in space and time that God can do what He says: renew the universe and grant us eternal life. For as in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive, wrote Paul (1 Cor. 15: 22). Christ is, as He said He was, the resurrection and the life (John 11: 25).
         When we stand at the mouth of the empty tomb, not only do Christ's suffering and death look different to us, but so do ours. As Paul explained, "If we have become one with Him by sharing in his death, we shall become one with Him by sharing in his resurrection" (Rom. 6: 5). In other words, just as Christ died for us, He also was raised for us: "He was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification" (Rom 4: 25). To be justified in the sight of God means that our sins are forgiven and that we are made righteous and pleasing to God. It means that we have become the adopted children of our Heavenly Father and have been made partakers of the divine nature; we have become the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit. Because of the resurrection, we know that our sins are cancelled, the debt is paid, and death has died. If, for believers, the crucifixion of Christ was the death of sin, and if the descent of Christ into Hell was the death of judgement, the resurrection of Christ is the death of death. In the resurrection of Christ, death itself finally dies. Mortality is mortal. Just as sin and death are indissolubly linked as cause and effect, even so the death and resurrection of Christ must be seen together as the two sides of one coin. By the one He redeemed us from sin, and by the other He rescued us from death.
         Furthermore, the resurrection shows that we human beings are not the targets of some cruel cosmic joke, one that placed a desire for eternity deep into our hearts and then doomed us to die tomorrow, perhaps even today. Quite the contrary, we were made for eternity, and eternity is ours in Christ. Easter was the day death died. Easter is not merely Jesus's survival of death; it is death's reversal. The life of Christ, from conception to resurrection, is God's own answer to the agonies and ailments that rack the world, and is the irreversible exorcism of the haunting specter of death that looms above it.
         The resurrection of Jesus also teaches us that the God and Father of us all, the God of Israel, is neither myth, nor philosophical concept, nor carved image, for such things do not, and cannot, raise the dead. In the Apostles' Creed, therefore, we deal not with the god of the pagans, nor with the god of the philosophers, nor with the gods of our own making; we deal instead with the God who acts powerfully in space and time, who discloses Himself to us by his mighty words and deeds, and who desires that we draw near to Him even as He draws near to us. The God and Father our Lord Jesus Christ, the God of the creed, is the divine dynamo behind and within history. And if it be true, as Jesus affirmed, that we can know others by their deeds, then by means of the resurrection of Christ -- God's greatest historical deed -- we discover that God is the One who forgives sin and destroys death.
         In the resurrection of Christ, eternal life and eternal death were locked in mortal combat; life won. In the wake of Easter, we discover that death is not the end; it is the prelude. In the resurrection of Jesus we find unveiled before us the love and power of the heart that stands at the heart of the whole world. In the resurrection of Jesus the grand and graphic lesson is this: Neither pain, nor sin, nor death, nor even Hell itself is the ultimate fact for those beloved by God. Such things are real and terrible, to be sure, but the love and power of "God the Father almighty, maker of Heaven and earth," has tamed them. We face those things now with faith, with courage and with confidence in God, knowing full well that we can confront this life and whatever follows it without despair. Christianity does not flee from the harsh reality of pain, of sin, and of death; it confronts them in all their wildness and terror and it defeats them. Here in the resurrection of Jesus the final victory of God over sin and death at the end of history has broken into history's middle. In Christ we see the presence of the future. If you want to know how the story turns out; if you want to know what happens to sin, to death, and to you; if you want to know what comes of suffering for the sake of Christ and his kingdom; the plain answer is put forward with simplicity and clarity in the words of the creed: "On the third day He rose again from the dead." As Luther explained, it is not that in the midst of life Christ dies, but that in the midst of death He lives, and so do we if we attach ourselves to Him in faith.
         Here is the fundamental fact: The Victim is the Victor.
         Finally, as regards our spirituality, we must remember that resurrection always presupposes death. Paul tells us that we were raised in Christ; but that can be so only if we have been crucified with Christ previously and put our old sinful selves to death as a result. Nothing that we can do is more important or more basic to our well-being.
         Do it.
         Do it now.

"Without the resurrection the New Testament would never have been written, for there would have been nothing to write about and no one to write it. The Church would never have existed, and the life of Jesus would never have been remembered."
Lumsden Barkway, The Creed and its Credentials

date modified:
5 July 2006

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