The Inescapable Truth of the
Resurrection
By Regis
Nicoll
By all
immediate measures, Jesus' ministry was a total failure. But it wasn't for lack
of effort or commitment.
At the prime of
life, Jesus left his carpentry bench in Nazareth
for the dusty roads of Palestine
Worse, at the
end of his ministry, one of his trainees betrayed him, another vigorously denied
him, and the rest abandoned him, leaving a handful of women to stand by and
mourn as life oozed out of his scourged and nail-pierced body.
When the stone
was rolled over the mouth of the tomb, Jesus was just one more in the parade of
misguided leaders whose visionary movements failed to outlive them. Or so it
seemed. Within two months after his death, something extraordinary happened: the
Jesus Movement didn't wither and collapse, it flourished.
Numbers and
impact
Within the span
of a few weeks, the small band of deserters regrouped and their ranks began to
swell -- first to 3000, then to 5000 (including women, their number was probably
close to 10,000) -- despite sustained opposition from detractors. And for two
thousand years their ranks have continued to increase, making Christianity the
world's largest religion with over 2 billion adherents and counting.
But it is more
than numbers that make Christianity a singular phenomenon: Against every other
movement, ideology, and belief system, the culture-shaping impact of
Christianity is unequaled. In fact, Christianity is the seed from which Western
civilization sprang up and blossomed.
It was the belief in an
intelligible universe populated with intelligent beings whom the Creator
entrusted to care for, manage, and enrich His handiwork, that enabled the shift
from astrology and alchemy to modern science. Christian notions about equality,
freedom, and man as divinely endowed being led to the Western rule of law.
Sacrificial love, as taught
and modeled by Jesus, inspired the establishment of the first hospitals,
orphanages, and charities. And believers who
took their faith into the public square, rather than leave it at the doorstep of
the church, became the vanguard of the great social movements of abolition,
suffrage, and civil rights.
If that doesn't strike you as strange, it should.
Screaming for
explanation
The Macedonian
Empire of Alexander the Great began splintering soon after his death. Within
five centuries of the assassination of Julius Caesar (the "dictator in
perpetuity"), his "Eternal
City" was sacked, leading to the
collapse of the Roman Empire . Scarcely one
century after the death of Karl Marx, the Berlin Wall fell, the rest of the Iron
Curtain came down, and the Eastern Bloc was dismantled.
Yet the kingdom
inaugurated by a Galilean carpenter has not only endured for two millennia, it
has grown numerically and influentially, despite being driven underground for
the first 300 years of its existence, and a target of persecution from its
beginning to the present day.
How did Jesus
accomplish what no other person in history ever accomplished? The phenomenon of
the Church is a fact screaming for explanation.
It stems from
the fact that the early Christians believed, really believed, that Jesus was more
than a great moral teacher or charismatic leader; they believed that he was Lord
and God. Their belief was based on the testimony of eleven men who claimed to
have seen something that defied scientific explanation, reason, and common sense: the risen Lord.
Singular and
unprecedented
When Jesus,
three days dead, passed through the locked door of the upper room, the disciples
became witnesses to a thing unprecedented in history.
Sure, there were cases of
resuscitations by physicians and stories of "raisings" by metaphysicians. There
were the biblical accounts of the
Sidonian widow's son raised by Elijah and the Shunammite's son who was raised by Elisha, as well as
Jesus' raisings of Jairus' daughter and Lazarus that the disciples were privileged to witness
first hand. But never before had the disciples (or anyone else) known of a dead
person rising on their own power,
and
in a reconstituted body. Only Jesus had done that.
Initially dazed and confused by what they had seen, the disciples soon
realized that Jesus' mastery over death only made sense if he was the God he had
claimed to be. The disciples became so convinced about the Resurrection (and
what it meant), that barely one month after they bailed on their crushed leader,
they boldly entered Jerusalem
The turnabout
The shift from jellyfish to ironman was exemplified in Peter.
Shortly following his second imprisonment for preaching the resurrection,
Peter was brought before the Sanhedrin for repeatedly defying their gag order.
After the robed masters rail against his intransigence, Peter responds bluntly:
"We must obey God rather than men!"
Then, continuing in his obduracy, Peter reprises his unwelcome testimony:
The God of
our fathers raised Jesus from the dead--whom you had killed by hanging him on a
tree. God exalted him to his own right hand as Prince and Savior that he might
give repentance and forgiveness of sins to Israel
Talk about chutzpah! Especially recalling that just a few weeks prior,
Peter cursed at the suggestion that he even knew Jesus. The only rational
explanation for Peter's turnaround is that he really believed in the Resurrection; and
the only rational explanation for his belief is that the Resurrection really occurred.
A mistake or ruse?
Could Peter and the other eyewitnesses have been mistaken about what they
had seen? Hardly, considering that all of them remained steadfast in their
belief, despite every motivation and opportunity to reconsider what had happened
that Sunday morning and in the weeks that followed. Even to the point of
martyrdom, an end to which all but one endured, none of the disciples ever
retracted or revised their testimony.
Could the disciples have hatched the whole resurrection story for some
personal gain? That was the explanation the robed masters
leaked shortly after the receiving the shocking news of the empty tomb, and it
is what is commonly held today among critics who spin various Passover plot
scenarios. But, as has been competently argued by others, while people may die
for what they believe to be true, they won't die for what they know to be
false.
The test
It is not a little ironic that after Peter's saucy response to the
Sanhedrin, one of their number, Gamaliel, proposed a litmus to his
colleagues:
Men of Israel
Gamaliel was
right. If Jesus was just another dead messianic leader, his following would come
to nothing. But it didn't; despite the suppressive forces of the cross, the
stake, the coliseum, the gulag, and anti-religious legislation, law suits,
speech codes, and political correctness, the kingdom has steadily advanced in
hearts of men and in man's institutions.
Outside of the
truth of the Resurrection, the phenomenon of the Church is inexplicable -- a
fact, which itself, is sufficient to establish that the "faith once given," was
given by none other than God. By his own criterion Gamaliel would be compelled
to agree, as would persons of any era who honesty consider the facts.
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Regis Nicoll is a Centurion of Prison Fellowship Ministries Wilberforce Forum. In addition to writing Thinking Christianly, Regis is a columnist for BreakPoint, Salvo, and Crosswalk, and a contributor to Prison Fellowship's worldview blog, The Point.
Regis Nicoll is a Centurion of Prison Fellowship Ministries Wilberforce Forum. In addition to writing Thinking Christianly, Regis is a columnist for BreakPoint, Salvo, and Crosswalk, and a contributor to Prison Fellowship's worldview blog, The Point.
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