COLUMN: Think Again – He is risen indeed

This upcoming weekend Christians around the world will celebrate Easter, the most important day on the Christian calendar.

It was on Easter Sunday nearly 2,000 years ago that Jesus Christ rose from the grave. To be clear, this was a literal bodily resurrection, not merely a symbolic or spiritual event. If Jesus did not rise in a physical body, then the Christian faith amounts to nothing.

I realize the last sentence might sound dramatic. However, there’s no need to take my word for it. In 1 Corinthians 15:17 the Apostle Paul clearly states, “And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins.”

There’s no wiggle room here. Paul staked the entire veracity of the Christian faith on the literal resurrection of Jesus. This is not a minor theological point. Rather, it’s the entire foundation of truth upon which the Christian faith rests. No resurrection—no Christianity.

Imagine for a moment that the resurrection of Jesus never took place. Is there any reasonable likelihood that the disciples of Jesus, men who were so cowardly that they abandoned Jesus the moment he was arrested, would have turned into bold preachers of the Gospel had the resurrection not occurred?

Jesus had been condemned to death by Pontius Pilate. He was killed by crucifixion, which was the most humiliating and torturous method of execution in the Roman Empire. Instead of liberating the Jewish people from oppression as the disciples had expected him to do, Jesus’ ministry came to a sudden end when he was put to death.

Peter, the disciple who had promised to remain faithful to Jesus no matter what, denied Jesus three times in one evening the moment he came under pressure from the people around him. The notion that Peter, or any other disciple, would willingly die for something that they knew was false is patently absurd.

And yet, something transformed Peter and the other disciples from men who fled at the first sign of trouble to men who fearlessly proclaimed that Jesus was the only way to be saved. What changed them was the fact that Jesus appeared to them alive on the third day after he had been crucified. It was the resurrection that proved to the disciples that Jesus had power over death and that they had nothing to fear so long as they put their faith in Jesus.

This is why Peter could stand in front of a huge crowd on the Day of Pentecost and boldly proclaim that, “God raised him [Jesus] up, loosing the pangs of death, because it was not possible for him to be held by it” (Acts 2:24). Obviously, this was a dramatic claim, and one that would have been easy to disprove had Jesus’ body remained in the tomb.

Instead, we read in Acts 2:37-41 that the people who heard Peter’s message were “cut to the heart” and asked what they needed to do. Peter instructed them to repent and be baptized. Later that same day, 3,000 souls were added to the church.

Keep in mind that Peter made a claim that was easily falsifiable. He was not merely proclaiming a spiritual principle or expounding on a theological point; he was making an objective truth claim about an event that occurred in real history. Truth is about correspondence with reality, and Peter’s statement about Jesus was only true if Jesus had literally risen from the dead.

On Easter Sunday, Christian pastors around the world will state, “He is risen,” while their congregations will respond, “He is risen indeed.”

Indeed, he did.

Michael Zwaagstra is a teacher and deputy mayor of Steinbach. He can be reached at mzwaagstra@shaw.ca.