Easter time is for pastors and churches the most wonderful and exhausting time of the year (along with Christmas). But I love it. I love the Tenebrae “Service of Shadows” on Good Friday, the Sunrise Service early on Easter Sunday Morning. But most of all I love the astonishing Truth that Easter celebrates, with is the keystone of our faith.
I don’t love the idea that Easter is all about springtime, the yearly cycle of birth-death- and reborn. And some vague sentiment of “what Easter means to us all”. And I especially don’t love the claim that Jesus’ resurrection was a myth.
I agree with the Apostle Paul: if Jesus didn’t rise for the dead, “we are of all people most to be pitied.” (1 Cor. 15:19) If I didn’t really believe that Jesus rose from the dead, I’d quit the ministry and go het an honest job.
Here are what are called the “minimal facts” about the death of Jesus and what happened next. Even unbelieving, skeptical scholars admit the following things:
1. Jesus really was crucified by being nailed to a Roman cross in the 1st century. Romans also tied victims to the cross, but sometimes they nailed them in place. We have corroboration of this from even secular sources and from archeology (bones of crucified victims with nail-holes in their hands and feet… in one case, the spike was still in the foot bones.)
2. The disciples of Jesus began claiming that they’d seen Jesus resurrected from the dead almost immediately after the crucifixion. And they actually believed it, because they died martyrs’ death for preaching it. Others may believe something so fervently that they are willing to die for it, but they believe what they believe based on what someone else told them. The disciples of Jesus believed He had risen from the dead based on what they had seen themselves. And they went to horrible deaths without a single one of them recanting their own accounts.
3. An enemy of the Christian faith was converted: Saul of Tarsus, the persecutor of the 1st century Christians suddenly began “preaching the faith he’d once tried to destroy” (Gal. 1:23). What happened to him? He said he’d seen the resurrected Jesus. You have to account for what happened to transform Saul into Paul.
4. James, the skeptical half-brother of Jesus was converted. James, along with the rest of Jesus’ family, didn’t believe Him at first (John 7:5). They were embarrassed by what Jesus was doing, thought He’d lost His mind, and tried to get Him to stop (Mark 3:21,31). But later James became the leader of the Jerusalem church, after Peter (Acts 15). And he wrote a letter to encourage believers, in which he never once referred to himself as “the Lord’s brother”. He only called Jesus by the title “the Lord Jesus Christ” (James 1:1, 2:1). James was martyred by being hurled from the top of the Temple. What changed James? An early creed dating to within 2-3 years of Jesus’ death (some scholars say 6 months!) said that the resurrected Jesus appeared To James (1 Cor. 15:3-7). I ask myself, “What would it take to convince my brothers that I was God in human form?” I really can’t think of anything. You have to account for what changed James said it was because he’d seen the resurrected Jesus.
5. The tomb of Jesus was empty. Even alternative explanations put forth by Christianity’s enemies acknowledge this fact (Matt. 28:11-15). The enemies of Jesus were strangely silent when it came to the burial place of Jesus. Why not simply point people to the right tomb, or even display Jesus’ mutilated body? Because it wasn’t there.
There’s more evidence, but there are the “minimal facts” about Jesus’ death and resurrection. Easter Sunday comes and goes but once a year. But in a sense, for Christians, every Sunday is Resurrection Sunday.
Years ago, Craig and Tricia Herdon taught me the Orthodox Greek Easter Greeting: “Hristos Anesti! Alitos Anesti!” “Christ is risen! He is risen, indeed!”
Amen!
And Soli Deo Gloria!
Pastor David