How do we know Jesus' resurrection was real?

In tomorrow's Gospel reading, we will read of the disciple Thomas doubting Jesus' resurrection after Jesus appears to the others while Thomas was away. I preached on this passage making a case for what we know about the resurrection and why I believe:

Last Sunday was Easter and we joyously celebrated the miracle of Jesus’ resurrection. A week has passed. The joy has subsided enough to look at things in the light of day. I want to dare to ask the question, “How do we know they didn’t just make it up?”

After all, we were all born centuries after that first Easter. On a morning when we have just read how Jesus’ own friend Thomas doubted whether the resurrection was true, we should feel emboldened to ask a couple of questions of our own. How do we know that the disciples did not just wish Jesus had been resurrected? How do we know they didn’t have something at stake in fooling everyone else into thinking that Jesus came back from the dead?

First, I want to give the standard answer and show the problems some folks have in accepting it. Then we will look a little harder to see if we might have something more to say on the matter to see if it holds up.

Here is the way the standard answer goes. The best proof of the resurrection is the change in Jesus’ own disciples. Before the resurrection, those same apostles were scared, hiding from persecution. After an encounter with their risen Lord, they were brave enough to take to the streets as Peter does in this morning’s reading from the Acts of the Apostles.

Yes, the disciples might have told a lie to keep the Jesus’ myth going, but not once it came at the price of their very lives. The disciples were in a position to know whether the resurrection stories were the truth or a lie. They were the very witnesses to Jesus’ resurrection. They might lie to keep the story going if it meant filling their purses with money, but when persecution came, they would back away from their claims of Jesus’ resurrection. When push came to shove they would not die for a lie?

That’s the standard answer and it works pretty well. The Bible does describe to us the beginnings of persecution against the early Christians. We hear of the first Deacon, Stephen, being stoned to death. But, we have no reason to believe he was a witness to the resurrection. We also read of the death Jesus’ brother James, who was himself converted by an encounter with the resurrected Christ. James was pushed off the top of the Temple for refusing to renounce his faith in Jesus. James would have been in a position to know the truth. Would he have died for a lie?

As for the other disciples, their fates are not described in the Bible. In fact, there is no good solid historical evidence for what happened to them, just traditions, that sometimes contradict one another. Yet, the traditions all have the apostles dying for their faith with the sole exception of John, who is said to have died of old age in Ephesus. Even if a skeptic were to grant that the traditions about these men having been put to death for their belief in Christ were true, would this prove that Jesus was really and truly raised from the dead? Not exactly.

Let’s be honest. It could have been a delusion—mass hysteria fed by a desire for the resurrection to be real. Maybe they felt that Jesus was somehow still present to them and they wished it into a historic fact. Or maybe they talked of Jesus’ teaching still being with them and later believers worked with the story until they told it that Jesus’ was resurrected. A symbolic event could have been confused as being an historic event by people living a few generations later.

The full sermon is online here: The Resurrection: An Apology and it continues by taking an honest look at the evidence for the resurrection.

peace,
Frank+
The Rev. Frank Logue, Pastor

Really, Truly Resurrected

Over at On Faith, the panelists are weighing in on the question,

Do you have to believe the resurrection is literally true—that Jesus came back to life in his body—to be a Christian?

I have answered this before saying that I do believe in a literal resurection and that I think that this belief is at the core of the Christian faith as it fits not only with scripture and my own experience of God in prayer in worship, but this belief is also affirmed by being the only thing to explain Christian history. What else could turn a rag tag group of followers into fired up disciples?

N.T. Wright says in part,

The New Testament presents the resurrection of Jesus not as a bizarre event within the old creation, the present world of decay, corruption and death, but as the foundational, prototypical and generative event within the new creation, the renewal of heaven and earth which Israel's God had long promised and which was decisively launched when Jesus came out of the tomb (not, we note, as a mere 'resuscitated corpse', as some have accused me and others of suggesting, but in a transformed physicality that decay and death could no longer touch).

His full response is here: Resurrection Revolution.

Chuck Colson writes,

People will give their lives for something they believe to be true. They will never give their lives for something they know to be false. Had they not seen the resurrected Christ with their own eyes, the Apostle Peter would have been the likeliest candidate to become the John Dean of the first century church.

All of the panelist responses are online here: Resurrection.

A startling new beginning

Today is the third Sunday of Easter and as our celebration of Jesus' resurrection continues here are some thoughts of N.T. Wright, Bishop of Durham, England, written for The Guardian on the resurrection:

If you frame Easter in the terms of the perceived problem, you belittle it. Whether you think in terms of pie in the sky (at best a thoroughly subChristian concept) or a better society, all you get is a happy ending after a sad or sinful story.

And whatever Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were doing in writing the final sections of their books, they were not telling the story of Jesus's resurrection as a happy ending. They were telling it as a startling new beginning. Easter morning isn't a slow, gentle waking up after the difficult operation. It's the electric shock that brings someone back to life in a whole new way.

That's why the Easter stories tumble out in bits and pieces, with breathless chasings to and fro and garbled reports - and then, stories like nothing else before or since. As the great New Testament scholar EP Sanders put it, the writers were trying to describe an experience that does not fit a known category. They knew all about ghosts and visions, and they knew it wasn't anything like that.

Equally, they knew the risen Jesus wasn't just a resuscitated corpse, still less someone who had almost died but managed to stagger on after all. They had the puzzled air of people saying, "I know this sounds wacky, but this is truly how it was." They were stumblingly describing the birth of new creation, starting with Jesus but intended for the whole world.

The full text of his commentary is online here: Face to Faith.

New Creation

At On Faith, the folks at Newsweek and The Washington Post have asked their panelists,

If the remains of Jesus had been definitively found, how would that change your view of Christianity?

The replies are online here: Remains of Jesus.

New Testament scholar and Anglican Bishop N.T. Wright says,

Christianity is about this creator God launching his project of new creation—transformed, now, so that death itself and all that contributes to it can no longer touch it—in and through the resurrection of Jesus, and continuing until the earth (not just heaven! THE EARTH) is filled with the knowledge of the glory of God as the waters cover the sea.

That began at Easter, continues in the life of faith, prayer and sacrament and the mission, in the widest and narrowest senses of the word, of the church, and will be complete when justice and mercy flood the whole creation.

Easter is the hinge on which all this turns, consequent upon the victory accomplished on the cross. Take Easter away, and we are at best like the first-century Jews, still hoping for redemption to happen but with no sign that it has just yet. And at worst we are back with some kind of paganism -- which is where, ultimately, the denial of resurrection will leave you.

Bodily resurrection is what you get at the intersection point between the lines of God as the good and wise creator and God as the judge who will set everything right at last.

Give up either, or both, and what you're left with isn't Christianity.

While scholar and noted author Marcus Borg writes,

Were the skeletal remains of Jesus to be indisputably identified, it would not matter to me. To think that the central meaning of Easter depends upon something spectacular happening to Jesus’ corpse misses the point of the Easter message and risks trivializing the story. To link Easter primarily to our hope for an afterlife, as if our post-death existence depends upon God having transformed the corpse of Jesus, is to reduce the story to a politically-domesticated yearning for our survival beyond death.

Rather, what mattered for his early followers was that they continued to know him as a living figure of the present after his death – not just during the forty days of appearances that the author of Acts mentions (Acts 1.3), but in the years and decades (and centuries) ever since. And to affirm, as Christians do, that the living presence of Jesus is Lord is to commit oneself to the story of Jesus as the central revelation of God’s dream for the world. It means to stand against the powers that killed him and to stand for the vision of God’s kingdom that he proclaimed.

Easter is both personal and political. The lordship of Jesus is the path of personal liberation from the lords of culture, and the affirmation of a very different kind of world. To lose this emphasis in a debate about what happened to the corpse of Jesus is to be distracted by the lords who killed him.

As for me, I will gather with others tonight at 7 p.m. to celebrate our first service of the resurrection this year with The Great Vigil of Easter. And tomorrow I will lead our worship at 8 and 10 a.m. knowing that the Lord is risen indeed!

peace,
Frank+
The Rev. Frank Logue, Pastor


The start of an Easter Vigil service at King of Peace
as we use new fire to light the Pachal (Easter) candle