By all the precedents of history, by all the known laws of nature, the story of Jesus should have ended with his burial. Not only was Jesus dead, but he had been brutally and publicly killed in such a humiliating manner that it seemed clear to all that he was not God’s Messiah. His followers had been humiliated and scattered. It was very definitely the end of the story.
But it wasn’t. Something happened, something that transformed Jesus’ followers and ultimately transformed the world, something that made the events of that Passover not the end of a story but the beginning of one. That this something was the resurrection of Jesus from the dead is the foundation of Christian belief, past and present. Christianity would not exist without the resurrection. Around AD 53, Paul wrote to Christians in Corinth: ‘If Christ was not raised, then all our preaching is useless, and your trust in God is useless.’ Paul was making the bold statement that the Christian faith stands or falls on the resurrection of Jesus.
The importance of the resurrection is still overwhelming. If the resurrection of Jesus did happen, then the implications are breathtaking. Everything the Bible says about Jesus is true: God can be known as Father, forgiveness is possible, heaven is attainable and death is just a short sleep before eternal joy. And if the resurrection of Jesus didn’t happen, then the implications are equally breathtaking, but in the worst and most devastating way. Whether or not the resurrection happened isn’t just a fact of history; it is a fact that changes our future. The resurrection of Jesus is not just an odd and awesome fact; it is something that overflows with consequences.
The resurrection is a vindication. Imagine a man being punished for what he didn’t do. If justice is to be done then he must be vindicated: the verdict must be reversed and he must be declared free of guilt. This picture applies to Jesus. The cross saw an innocent Jesus treated as a guilty man, and in the resurrection God is reversing that decision and vindicating him to his followers. By raising Jesus from the dead, God was declaring Jesus innocent and saying in an action what he had said before in words: ‘This is my beloved Son, and I am fully pleased with him.’
The resurrection is an authentication. Jesus made extraordinary claims. Those claims require our trust and demand our action. Inevitably, we ask whether he can be trusted. In raising Jesus from the dead, God is authenticating who Jesus is and what he said. The resurrection is God’s signature on Jesus’ claims. The resurrection says that Jesus can be trusted with our lives.
The resurrection has implications. The implications of Jesus’ resurrection are extraordinarily profound and farreaching: not only are Jesus’ claims and teachings authenticated as true and trustworthy but our great enemies of sin, evil and death are defeated. The resurrection shows that God has accepted Jesus’ payment for our sin on the cross, that the power of evil has been decisively broken, that our own personal resurrection from the dead is assured. If we believe in the resurrection of Jesus, our attitudes to life, death, the future, everything, become altered.
If you believe that dead people can never rise from the dead then, of course, nothing will convince you that Jesus did rise from the dead. But to take such a view is to be very confident that you know everything about how this still largely unknown universe works. And if you are at all open-minded to the possibility that Jesus might have risen from the dead, then the evidence for the resurrection is very strong.
Yet there is one area of evidence which we have not yet mentioned, an area of evidence for the resurrection of Jesus that can be personally tested. At the heart of the idea of the resurrection is the astounding belief that Jesus himself is alive, that he is not just an historical figure but a present reality: a living person we can communicate with and relate to. The testimony of Christians over the centuries is that this continues to be true: Jesus is alive and can be experienced as someone who transforms lives.