EASTER FAITH
Dear Friends
Every year Christmas packs them in, but Easter, which falls this month, is undeniably the defining Christian festival. It was St Paul, no less, who set out the stark truth: ‘If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile’.
Without the resurrection of Jesus which Easter celebrates, the whole Christian story collapses. He would simply take his place with all the other great religious teachers of history who died and are buried somewhere. But the Christian creeds are adamant: ‘on the third day, he rose from the dead’. The resurrection is not, for Christians, an optional extra.
In the current western atmosphere of scepticism, that claim is regarded as self-evidently ridiculous. We all know what ‘dead’ means, whether it’s a dead bird or flower or person. Death is the termination of life – as people say now, ‘end of’. Many people are attracted to the teaching of Jesus, but they simply can’t accept as credible the claim that he rose from the dead. They assume that the whole idea is the product of gullible minds. His followers wanted to believe that he was alive again, and simply talked themselves into believing that he was.
However, this scepticism about the resurrection of Jesus is itself the product of preconceived assumptions. The sceptics don’t believe that Jesus rose from the dead and assume that it is self-evident that he didn’t. In fact, their position is not based on evidence, but on an assumption that it simply couldn’t have happened. Yet strangely enough, what evidence we have suggests very strongly that it did.
We can, for instance, be pretty clear about a number of facts – well established, incontrovertible facts. One is that Jesus of Nazareth was a real person who lived in the early decades of the first century (as we call it). Another is that he was put to death by crucifixion during the period 26-37AD, when Pontius Pilate was the prefect of the Roman province of Judaea. Another is that by 70AD – within a life-time – Christianity was flourishing (though in places heavily persecuted) all over the Roman empire, and that its core belief was that Jesus had been raised from the dead after his execution, and had appeared alive to anything up to 500 different people, in various places and on various occasions over a period of about forty days. Many of these witnesses (listed by the apostle Paul in his letter to Corinth written in about 55AD, just twenty years or so after the event)) were still alive as he wrote – they could speak for themselves!
It shouldn’t, surely, be hard for a regime as efficient and ruthless as the Roman Empire to prove that a wandering Jewish preacher they had executed had remained dead. Yet it did prove impossible, to the point that Christianity eventually became the official religion of the empire.
Were those more gullible times? No, they weren’t. One of the two leading Jewish schools of thought, the Sadducees, didn’t believe in the resurrection of the dead, and neither did one of the leading schools of thought in the Greco-Roman empire of the time, the Stoics. The characters in the Gospels, friends of Jesus or his enemies, reacted exactly as you or I would – it can’t happen. The story of ‘doubting’ Thomas, one of the disciples of Jesus, is evidence that even among his closest followers there was a reluctance to believe the evidence of their own eyes.
No, they weren’t gullible, but they became completely convinced. Ten of the twelve apostles probably died for that conviction. You’ve got to be pretty sure of something to do that. When we sing ‘Jesus Christ is risen today’ on Easter morning, it’s a lot more than a pious wish!
Alleluia He is Risen! He is Risen indeed, Alleluia!
A Happy Easter to you all.
The Rector