4/3/24

The Lord is risen! He is risen indeed!

Last week’s newsletter and Easter Sunday’s sermon were on the evidence for the resurrection. As I said Sunday, there’s no DNA evidence to examine because the tomb is EMPTY! 

So, if there’s no physical evidence, where do we turn? The eyewitnesses. 

The fact that the eyewitnesses to the resurrection were women points to the trustworthiness of the narrative. If the Jewish males of the first century had made the story up, they would have been the heroes and the women would have been cowering behind locked doors. 

But that’s not the way it happened. The story they told, and this was in a time when a woman’s testimony wasn’t considered trustworthy, was that women were the first witnesses. Indeed, Mary is often called the “apostle to the Apostles,” because Jesus told her  to “go to my brothers and say to them, “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.”  And John tells us that “Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, ‘I have seen the Lord’” 

A woman first announced the resurrection to the men? Frankly, that’s pretty amazing  proof of the resurrection right there! The world was absolutely turning upside down!

But then Jesus appeared to the men as we’ll see this Sunday. And they believed and they told the story. The message spread and within 300 years, Christianity grew from 1 believer (Mary Magdalene) to over 6 million. 

But how do we know the testimony of the men was true? 

Several years ago, I read a book by an author who didn’t believe the biblical record — in fact, he was a member of the Jesus Seminar, a group of “scholars” who gather periodically to vote on whether or not Jesus actually said what is recorded in the New Testament (I know, it sounds ridiculous, but there’s a lot of ridiculous out there . . .). While he didn’t believe Jesus was physically resurrected, he begrudgingly admitted that it was pretty obvious that something happened. 

And why did he have to admit it? Because of the impact that the message of the resurrection had on the disciples. And for evidence, he pointed to the testimony of another very unlikely witness: Charles Colson. 

Chuck Colson was one of the “Watergate Seven” who were indicted in the infamous Watergate scandal that brought down President Richard Nixon. 

What could an indicted former White House aide have to say about the resurrection, you might ask? Well, read it in Colson’s own words:

“ . . . as Paul writes in 1 Corinthians, the historical fact of Christ’s resurrection is the only basis of our hope. Without the resurrection, our faith is futile. This is why critics of Christianity often try to explain away the empty tomb. They claim that the disciples lied – that they stole Jesus’s body themselves and conspired together to pretend He had risen. The apostles then managed somehow to recruit more than 500 other people to lie for them as well, to say they saw Jesus after He rose from the dead.

But just how plausible is this theory?

To answer that question, fast forward nearly 2,000 years, to an event I happen to know a lot about: Watergate. You see, before all the facts about Watergate were known to the public – in March 1973 – it was becoming clear to Nixon’s closest aides that someone had tried to cover up the Watergate break-in. 

There were no more than a dozen of us. Could we maintain a cover-up —to save the president? Consider that we were political zealots. We enjoyed enormous political power and prestige. With all that at stake, you’d expect us to be capable of maintaining a lie to protect the president. 

But we couldn’t do it. The first to crack was John Dean. First, he told the president everything, and then just two weeks later he went to the prosecutors and offered to testify against the President. His reason, as he candidly admits in his memoirs, was to “save his own skin.” After that, everyone started scrambling to protect himself. What we know today as the great Watergate cover-up lasted only three weeks. Some of the most powerful politicians in the world – and we couldn’t keep a lie for more than three weeks.

So back to the question of historicity of Christ’s resurrection. Can anyone believe that for fifty years that Jesus’ disciples were willing to be ostracized, beaten, persecuted, and all but one of them suffer a martyr’s death – without ever renouncing their conviction that they had seen Jesus bodily resurrected? Does anyone really think the disciples could have maintained a lie all that time under that kind of pressure? 

No, someone would have cracked, just as we did so easily in Watergate. Someone would have acted as John Dean did and turned state’s evidence. There would have been some kind of smoking gun, or a deathbed confession.

So why didn’t they crack? Because they had come face to face with the living God. They could not deny what they had seen. The fact is that people will give their lives for what they believe is true, but they will never give their lives for what they know is a lie. The Watergate cover-up proves that 12 powerful men in modern America couldn’t keep a lie – and that 12 powerless men 2,000 years ago couldn’t have been telling anything but the truth.”

The resurrection of Jesus transformed cowards into heroes. Boldly proclaiming what they witnessed and fearlessly facing the enemies before whom they previously cowered, the disciples of Jesus – men and women – would “turn the world upside down” with the message of the resurrection. 

The Lord is risen! He is risen indeed!