Reflections: The resurrection matters
By Dave Tiessen
Two weekends ago the Christian world celebrated Good Friday and Easter Sunday, remembering the death/execution and resurrection of Jesus.
We don’t know the exact dates for these events although the first Easter happened at the same time as the Jewish Feast of Passover. In 325 the first Christian Council of Nicaea decided that Easter would be celebrated on the first Sunday after the first full moon following the spring (vernal) equinox.
So Jesus was resurrected from the dead? What does that mean? Isn’t that a preposterous, irrational claim? Don’t we now know that such a thing doesn’t/can’t happen?
In the weeks prior to His execution Jesus had told His followers that He would be killed but then be raised to life. None of them “got it” because the idea was unheard of in both Jewish and Gentile circles. When it happened everyone was surprised!
Jesus appeared to various of His followers for 40 days before ascending into heaven. Even so it took some time before those followers believed that it was true, and even more time before they understood the significance of it.
Belief in an afterlife, where the dead continue on in some kind of existence, was not always understood in the Old Testament. When Jewish theology began to perceive the truth of this claim they did so with a uniquely Judaeo-Christian spin.
Greek thought had affected much of the known world at the time with the idea of the immortality of the soul, i.e. upon death the body decays and only the soul goes on into eternity.
This was based on their assumption that the physical world including the body was only a necessary evil to make possible the far more important spiritual and intellectual identity of a person.
Jewish theology always believed that the world, including our bodies, was purposefully created by God and was very good. Body and soul were inseparable. So in conceptualizing the afterlife they declared that at the end of time there would be a resurrection of the dead when all the bodies that had once lived would be reunited with their spirits unto a renewed eternal existence on a recreated earth.
The New Testament teaches not that the souls of Christians who have died go to heaven to be there with God forever, rather that we go to a place of waiting with Jesus until the great resurrection day when we will be raised to life in new bodies and join God to live in the new Jerusalem upon a recreated Earth where there is no longer any evil, or suffering, or mourning, or crying, or pain, or death.
The resurrection of Jesus is the “first fruit”, i.e. the sign, that the resurrection of all people will happen. Is it plausible? Possible? For us not. But we are talking here about the God who created the whole incredibly amazing universe with power and knowledge far beyond human understanding. Can you truly say that the God who created DNA and gravity and light and the laws of physics is unable to raise His Son Jesus from the dead?
Many people say the resurrection did not happen because it breaks the laws of nature and such resurrections don’t ever happen. The resurrection did not break or negate the laws of nature, rather it was a singular exception to the laws of nature. Christians believe Jesus was raised from the dead to live forever, but don’t claim that this happens to anyone else until the end of time in the new creation.
The resurrection was necessary because the crucifixion of Jesus was a cosmic battle between God the Son, hanging on the cross, and Satan and his evil cohorts. Had Satan and evil triumphed the world would have been doomed by the reality that evil/Satan is more powerful than God/good. Evil played its trump card – death – murdering, with eager human cooperation, the very Son of God. On Friday Satan won and humans were doomed forever to live under the fear and power of death.
Except God wasn’t done just yet! As songwriter Phil Wickham writes:
Then came the morning that sealed the promise,
Your buried body began to breathe!
Out of the silence, the Roaring Lion,
Declared the grave has no claim on me.
On Easter Sunday morning God’s hand reached down and restored the tortured, battered body of Jesus – the Roaring Lion – to life! Thus God’s voice thundered through the universe:
‘Death has been swallowed up in victory.’
‘Where, O death, is your victory?
Where, O death, is your sting?’ (I Cor. 15:54-55)
The resurrection of Jesus ensures that life and all the best aspects of life – God, faith, love, joy, relationships, beauty, honesty, sacrifice, service, etc. – are eternal verities.
What we sow now – how we live now – matters, for after death we will reap an eternal bountiful harvest of blessings for choosing to be on God’s side as believers and followers of Jesus.
“Thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.” (I Cor.15:57)