Someone said to me the other day, ‘Well, you have to believe in the resurrection because you’re a Christian.’

What he meant, essentially, was that because of the tribe I belong to, there are certain things that I just take blindly on faith.

In fact, he got it the wrong way round. I don’t believe in the resurrection because it’s been indoctrinated into me as fact. I believe in the resurrection because I think it happened. My inauguration into the Christian ‘tribe’ came after that belief – not before it.

The Christian faith stands or falls on the resurrection. People who say that Jesus was a wise man and nothing else seem to neglect that fact that he knew he was going to be killed and did nothing to prevent it. There’s nothing wise about that – it’s stupid. If Christ is not risen, then Christians are the worst fools out there. And, let’s be honest, nobody else who has ever lived has come back from the dead. So, the question this Easter is: what good reasons do we have for thinking that Jesus did what nobody else has ever done. What can give us belief that suspends disbelief? What do we know about the resurrection?

The Evidence

1 – We know that Jesus was buried in the tomb of a Jewish councilman, Joseph of Arimathea. If you were going to fabricate an account, you wouldn’t include the name of such a prominent person who could easily be cross-examined.

2 – We know that Jesus’ tomb was found empty. The location of the tomb was well-known, so this was easily checkable. Furthermore, the tomb was protected by armed Roman guards, whose lives could have been at stake protecting it.

3 – We know that the empty tomb was discovered by women. If you were going to try and create a convincing resurrection testimony, you would steer clear of this. The testimony of women was worthless at that time, and would have been instantly dismissed by everyone.

4 – We know that Jesus appeared to numerous groups of people (believers and non-believers) over the course of the few weeks following his crucifixion. 1 Corinthians 15 was written by Paul about 15 to 20 years after Jesus’ death. In it, he lists several hundred people who witnessed Jesus appearing to them as the risen Christ. Most of these would still have been alive, and would have collectively stomped out any untruth. Paul’s point was basically ‘if you don’t believe me, the evidence is still around.’

5 – The conversion of Paul himself is incredible unless he actually met the risen Christ on the road to Damascus. Paul was a terrorist, set on wiping out Christianity. He then became the greatest theologian in the kingdom. It’s been claimed that he might have had an epileptic fit, but you don’t have a fit and then spend your life prepared to die for the people you’ve been trying to kill. You just don’t.

6 – No historian disputes that the Christian church exploded in Jerusalem just a few weeks after Jesus’ death. The message was not of a good bloke who said ‘be nice’, but of God incarnate risen and alive. Beyond that, there is no other rational explanation for the transformation of the disciples. They went from denying their master, and cowering in an upstairs room, to boldly proclaiming the Lord’s resurrection to a hostile crowd. They had nothing to gain and everything to lose – and indeed, most of them were brutally killed for doing it. Maybe they were just embarrassed by the fact they got it wrong, and so concoted something? Sorry, but you don’t try and save face but not your own life.

Your instinct might be to say things like: ‘Someone stole the body’, or ‘The disciples just hallucinated’, or ‘The Gospels were doctored and written centuries after.’

Check – please, check – and you’ll find that those historical hypotheses don’t stand up to scrutiny. The above hypotheses do. This is not just an article of faith: the only explanation to satisfactorily explain all the historical evidence is that God raised Jesus from the dead.

You can still dismiss Jesus, but it will be emotional reasons, and nothing to do with evidence and truth. So let’s just call a spade a spade.

But maybe this Easter you could think about what Jesus said in John 10:10: ‘I have come so that they might have life, and have it in all its fullness.’ You might scoff at Jesus, but nobody else in history has offered you that. It’s a promise, to boot, that has been fulfilled in millions of lives. So for once, maybe, stop scoffing and taste and see. He’s waiting. He’s risen.

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This weekend is massive. It represents the crux of the Christian faith. It is a request to us to hit pause on our lives. Where we spend most of our time gazing forwards, Easter turns our vision back to the single focal point of history.

A couple of millenia ago, on a hill outside of Jerusalem, three men were nailed to rough, wooden crosses. Those three men died horrendously agonising – excruciating – deaths. But the man in the middle didn’t stay dead for long.

Now you can have Buddhism without Buddha, you could have Islam without Mohammed. But you can’t have Christianity without Christ.

And you can’t have Christ without the crucifixion and the resurrection.

Laws and rules and paths and journeys – they don’t hang on one person. Anyone could come up with them. But Christianity is different. It is a faith in a living person who died and rose again.

Quite simply, it all hangs on Jesus.

The Apostle Paul says, “if Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless.” There it is. The heart of the matter. No resurrection; no faith.

If we could show from the historical record that Jesus didn’t exist, or that he didn’t die, or that he didn’t rise again, we have no faith.

If we can prove that dead people always stay dead and resurrection is totally impossible, we have no faith.

Tim Keller sums things up this way:

“If Jesus rose from the dead, then you have to accept all that he said; if he didn’t rise from the dead, then why worry about any of what he said? The issue on which everything hangs is not whether or not you like his teaching but whether or not he rose from the dead.”

Defeat into Victory

There’s a great line from Chuck Palahniuk in his popular book (turned-into-movie) Fight Club: ”Only after disaster can we be resurrected.”

Oh how true this is. We’ve had the disaster; Christ has the resurrection.

The Bible describes this world perfectly. Created for life, with promise and hope, we now struggle in a broken system.

We fell out of relationship with God when we proudly thought we could go it alone, do it our way. Our rebellion came at a cost though and the price was more than we could pay. So God himself came to earth as one of us, as Jesus, to not only show us the way but be the very way back into relationship with our creator.

By dying a death he did not deserve he paid the price we could not pay. The cross – that awful Roman torture device – has become a symbol of cosmic love offered to this world.

And then he came back to life.

Death touches everything and steals from whatever it can. We had no answer to it, only remedies to distract us from it. But like administering Calpol for a broken leg, our efforts made no headway against our greatest adversary.

Christ’s resurrection from the grave shattered death’s hold on us and this world.

This Easter, pause a little. Linger over this event in history which changed the course of this world. Be resurrected out of disaster into new life. The victory belongs to Jesus and he offers it to all of us today.

photo from FreeFoto

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It was on Easter Sunday that Jesus rose from death. Jesus had told his disciples before he was arrested that he would be crucified and on the third day he would rise from the dead.

Sunday was the third day from Good Friday (Good Friday, Holy Saturday, Easter Day).

The second day after Good Friday.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Walter Raleigh

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I really love film. I enjoy trips to the cinema, if I want to watch something on TV it is generally a film; I am a fan of Mark Kermode’s podcast and I was even in the film society at University!  My friend Russell is also a film fan and I have recently borrowed a pile of various DVDs off him which included the film “The Gospel According to St Matthew”, directed by Pasolini in 1964.

Pier Paolo Pasolini was an Italian poet, intellectual, writer, filmmaker and political figure. He was something of a renaissance man in his breadth of activity and gifting, but he was also a controversial figure, his communist views being just one source of scandal.

The fact that Pasolini was a Marxist and an atheist makes the reverential approach of the film particularly surprising. The dialogue is taken straight from Matthew’s Gospel and he vowed to make it from the perspective of a believer; though when the work was finished he realised he had made it in a way that reflected his own Marxist worldview.  Still, it has been critically acclaimed as one of the best adaptations of the life of Jesus, and despite being quite dated in feel (and subtitled due to it being in Italian), it is very powerful.

I recommend it because it presents a different perspective on a well known story.  I am always trying to find new ways of looking at things.  The Easter story is so important, so fundamental, but when you are dealing with a story that is so familiar how do you ensure that it stays alive, how do you see new paradigms, keep the material fresh and maintain the impact?

So leading up to Easter this year I had been looking at the story from new perspectives, Pasolini’s being one of them.  I have also been reading “The Cross of Christ” by John Stott (a book I cannot recommend highly enough) and I have been meditating on the story of the Centurion who stood at the foot of the cross while Jesus died – especially the passage of Matthew 27:27-54.

We all tell the gospel from a different point of view, our own perspective.  Even the four Gospels are highly reflective of the characters that wrote them: the Jewish perspective of Matthew, the punchy account of Mark, the precise account of the doctor Luke, the mystical perspective of John.

The way we tell of our encounter’s with Jesus also reflect our own history and character.  The blind man hardly knew anything about Jesus and when questioned he just said what he knew:

John 9:11  He replied “The man they called Jesus made some mud and put it on my eyes.  He told me to go to Siloam and wash.  So I went and washed and then I could see…whether he is a sinner or not I do not know.  One thing I know.  I was blind but now I see!”

It is not the whole gospel but it was the good news as he knew it, how it applied to him. There is nothing wrong with us because it is by telling our own story that it remains authentic, and when people see the change in our character they can see something of the power of the gospel.

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After hanging out with victims of an armed robbery I got into the car and headed back to the newsroom. The car was freezing, like a penguin’s pocket, so as soon as the engine kicked in I whacked the heating on. Taking a deep breath and glancing over the Pennines, I carried out a task I had done a thousand times before. I turned the radio on.

Why is this in the opening chapter of my blog for this Easter weekend? Get this gentlemen.
The BBC Radio 1 presenter introduced a song as if he was waiting for me to get into the car.
As soon as I had pressed the on button he said this: “And number six in the updated chart show is Delirious with History Maker.”

There was so much wrong about this sentence that it forced me to put the car back into neutral and delay my journey back to the office.

This song was released in 1996, and is one of the many worship songs written by the most well-known Christian band to come out of the Twentieth Century. As I checked my pulse and wondered why on Earth a 14-year-old worship song, which had been sung in churches up and down the country, was being blasted out at number six in the UK chart, I cast my eyes back over the Pennines.

It was one of those moments which reinforced the idea that every passing moment in your life is a chance to feel alive again. I opened the windows and allowed the cold Lancashire air to fill the car and take the smell of rotten milkshake away temporarily.

I said a quiet prayer for the families in the terraced street I had just spoken to who had been left distraught after hearing one of their neighbours had been robbed at knife point in his own living room. I took stock of my life in the duration of the song which featured as a key anthem in the soundtrack of my Christian journey.

I stopped caring about why it was on BBC Radio 1 and just fixed my eyes on the snow-sprinkled mountains in the distance.

This week we remember the death and resurrection of Jesus; the hundreds of prophecies he fulfilled in the events we now call Easter. And though no one of can fully understand the secrets of the Cross and the mystery of the resurrection, I can testify with all my heart that Jesus is the hope of this generation.

Please, take a minute to glance at the lyrics of what may even be the number one on Sunday’s chart show, its a song called History Maker, by a band once called Delirious. Be encouraged.

Is it true today that when people pray, cloudless skies will break, kings and queens will shake?
Yes it’s true and I believe it, I’m living for you.
Is it true today that when people pray, we’ll see dead men rise and the blind set free?
Yes it’s true and I believe it, I’m living for you.
I’m gonna be a history maker in this land, I’m gonna be a speaker of truth to all mankind
I’m gonna stand, I’m gonna run, into your arms, into your arms again.
Well it’s true today that when people stand, with the fire of God, and the truth in hand
We’ll see miracles, we’ll see angels sing, we’ll see broken hearts making history.
Yes it’s true and I believe it, we’re living for you.

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Luke 24:5 says it all.

This weekend is what its all about for us at CVM.  Following a captain, brother, rescuer and friend who gave up everything for us on Friday and on Sunday served death and hell its final notice.  We follow a risen Jesus.

We are men with resurrection DNA.  We can be knocked down but are never “out”.

Have an awe inspiring weekend brothers and a great time of rest and reflection.

Your brother and fellow contender for the gospel.

Carl (on behalf of the CVM team).

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