What is the Easter Bunnies favorite sport? Basketball. What do you call the Easter Bunny after a hard days work? Tired. Okay I know those jokes were bad, I mean I had to look them up, but I used them to illustrate a simple point when it comes to Easter the world tends to focus on the Easter Bunny because what we really want is a resurrection we are afraid that it isn’t true. They are afraid to find that since Christianity sounds to good to be true that it is too good to be true. The fact that 86 percent of Americans claim to be Christians tells us two things, one that people instinctively know who God is and second that they want there to be something more. We want there to be a meaning and a purpose to our lives beyond ourselves and beyond what we can. The good news is that it’s all true; sadly too many people are afraid to examine the evidence and find the truth for themselves. They settle for paying lip service to God and hoping that when they die they will find that it is all true and that they will be in heaven.
It is a hope that we all have and something we should desire for everyone. God Himself is not willing that anyone should perish and yet most people never get around to finding the truth, sadly enough they even live under the assumption that if they were to dig to closely they would find a truth that they are unwilling to face. They remind me of a story told by Lee Strobel. When he was still a writer for the Chicago Tribune he received a phone call from a father desperate to find his missing 19 year old daughter. She was a good girl, never in any trouble, not much more than an innocent child-and now she was gone. The police weren’t helping, would he alert the city to her disappearance?
Moved by his anguish, Strobel began to pursue the story. But when he interviewed his daughter’s friends and the police, a much different story emerged. Tragically, it turned out she had been a drug addict, a petty criminal, the girlfriend of a gang member, and a part-time prostitute. When the police found her body a few days later, they determined she had been the victim of a heroin overdoes.
He didn’t have the heart to tell her father all the details I had learned about her lifestyle. He sincerely believed she was an innocent child, but he had been wrong. His love for his daughter had blinded him. He had seen what he wanted to see, overlooking obvious clues that pointed in another direction. Too many who reject Christ this is a close parallel to those of us who believe in Christ. They let us continue to believe what we want allowing us our illusion even though it seems so foolish. They write us off as people who are unwilling to question, unwilling to stare into the abyss because of the answer that we might receive back. All the while for the last 2000 years, Christian scholars have looked into that very abyss.
Look at what the apostle Paul wrote to the church in Corinth “If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is vain, your faith also is vain.” 1 Corinthians 15:14. What Paul literally wrote 2,000 years ago is that if there is no resurrection, if Christ does not literally come back from the dead then there is no reason for him to preach, there’s not reason for me to preach or anyone throughout the years. Literally Paul this man who lived at the time of Christ who gave his life to the cause of preaching the gospel said not only that he believed in the resurrection but that he believed it was so important that if it didn’t happen he had wasted his time.
Why? What is it about this one event that makes it so important? I mean Jesus was a good teacher, he taught a lot of good and worth while things. What would be wrong with that if he wasn’t God? Well let me give you another quote this one from a theologian, “In a profound sense, Christianity without the resurrection is not simply Christianity without its final chapter. It is not Christianity at all.” This is the power of the resurrection; the resurrection is what changes our understanding of Jesus from simply a good teacher, to the belief that He is God. The fact is that Jesus didn’t merely teach a bunch of ethical ideas. He didn’t merely teach us or model for us the act of loving our neighbor, He taught that He was God and that He had come to give us eternal life. That is the message of our key passage today.
John 11:25-26, “Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in Me will live even if he dies, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?
He not only taught it but He wanted us to believe it. Notice the last sentence, “Do you believe this?” Jesus was looking for faith in Him. But there is more, what is one of the leading requirements to be a good teacher? You must teach things that are true. You can teach with passion and energy, you can actually tell funny jokes, but if you teach that 2+2 is 7 you’re just not a good teacher.
Jesus taught that He was God; He taught that He would come back from the dead, and He taught that He had the power to grant us eternal life to live with Him someday. It sounds fantastic, it is a day that all of us should look forward to. It is all true if Jesus rose from the dead. That’s the catch isn’t it? So much depends on one little word, if.” Because of this people have challenged the resurrection. The problem really isn’t unbelief it is rebellion. They want to live there lives the way that they want to live without consequences. Consequences can be so messy. Of course so can Christianity, the founder got himself, beaten, striped and killed. But if He is right and He offers eternal life if you will just believe and follow Him then turning away costs something doesn’t it? And so they question the resurrection. No resurrection, no eternal life, no eternal life to gain then nothing is lost there are not consequences for rebelling.
So the questions are raise, the challenges are issued and yet, there are still pastors, still people willing to stare into the abyss and yet sacrifice to teach about this sad preacher who died years ago. Why? what evidence is there that Christ rose from the dead? Actually there is more that we could possibly cover today but I just want to look at three facts about Jesus and his resurrection.
All of them I think are very obvious but I don’t think we realize that each of them has been confirmed and what they mean. First, Jesus was seen alive. The next line I just gave you His life is recorded in the gospels. If you’ve ever read the New Testament this isn’t anything that I need to show you, I don’t need to reference this, He is the subject of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Do we also realize this fact; His life is recorded by non-Christian historians.
Josephus was a Jewish historian, he was a Pharisee and he became a Roman sympathizer. This is not the description of a religious fanatic who would bend history to favor Christianity since he rejected it. Yet look at what he wrote in his book Antiquities, “About this time there lived Jesus, a wise man. For he was one who wrought surprising feats and was a teacher of such people as accept the truth gladly. He won over many Jews and many of the Greeks.” Jesus was alive, He worked miracles and people followed Him, this is not just my belief or the belief of the church this is a historic fact.
Second thing, Jesus was seen dead. Jesus died, and people saw it. John records it this way, “Coming to Jesus, when they saw that He was already dead, they did not break His legs; but one of the soldiers pierced His side with a spear, and immediately there came out blood and water.” The scriptures say that Jesus died. John writes that not only did he see Him dead but then he watched as just to be sure they stabbed Him in the side with a spear so far that blood and water flowed, that means that the spear at the very least pierced the chamber that His heart rested in. John saw him dead.
But not only that, we have writings of historians like Tacitus who is perhaps the most credible of the first century Roman historians. Writing in 115 A.D. about Nero and his persecution of Christians Tacitus wrote the following, “Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus.” He didn’t see it personally but this noted historian states that Jesus died, that the Romans killed Him. By the way the person responsible matches the gospel accounts. If this were a court of law you would call this corroborating evidence.
People saw Jesus alive, people saw Jesus dead, and then Jesus was seen alive again. This is the real question isn’t it? Did Jesus really rise from the dead? What does Tacitus say? Well read a little more from our previous passage, “A most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment again broke out not only in Judea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome…Accordingly, an arrest was first made of all who pleaded guilty: then upon their information, an immense multitude was convicted.” By the way did you catch that? Tacitus considered the belief in Christ to be evil. But notice this when people were asked if they were followers of Christ, by the way that means did they believe in the resurrection, that Jesus was raised from the dead.
How do we know that is what the Christians in Rome believed, because that is what Paul preached when he was there, not that long before the persecution that Tacitus was writing about, in his letter to the church in Corinth Paul wrote not only that without the resurrection Christianity was a lost cause, but he also wrote a creed that he wanted them to learn. This is what it was to be a Christian, “For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He was raised on the third day according to the scriptures.” He wanted them to learn it and memorize it. That is what they were to believe. It was that belief that enabled them to stand in the face of the guards of the emperor and even though it could cost them their lives say that yes they believed in Jesus, that He lived, He died, and He was alive again.
Understand they were not just testifying to an empty tomb. In 1963 the body of 14 year old Addie Mae Collins, one of four African-American girls tragically murdered in an infamous church bombing by white racists, was buried in Birmingham, Alabama. For years family members kept returning to the grave to pray and leave flowers. In 1998 they made the decision to disinter the deceased for reburial at another cemetery.
When workers were sent to dig up the body, however, they returned with a shocking discovery: The grave was empty. Understandably, family members were terribly distraught. Hampered by poorly kept records, cemetery officials scrambled to figure out what had happened. Several possibilities were raised, the primary one being that her tombstone had been erected in the wrong place.
Yet in the midst of determining what happened, one explanation was never proposed: Nobody suggested that young Addie Mae had been resurrected to walk the earth again. Why? Because by itself an empty grave does not a resurrection make. If you read more of the letter to Corinth Paul continues, “That He appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve, After that He appeared to more than 500 brethren at one time, most of whom remain until now, but some have fallen asleep; then He appeared to James, then to all the apostles; and last of all, as it were to one untimely born, He appeared to me also. Jesus was alive again. We do not celebrate and empty tomb today we celebrate a risen savior.
But what about those other doubts. Why is there so much evil in the world? Can I ask you a question, how do we know what evil is? Without God who determined it? Furthermore even with all of the evil in the world. With all of the suffering that has come before us why do we still believe that there is a God? As C.S. Lewis wrote, “if the universe is so bad…how on earth did human beings ever come to attribute it to the activity of a wise and good Creator?
You know why? It is because there is also good. The joy of seeing a babies smile. That feeling when the first chill of winter comes, and the joy of the first really warm day of summer. It is the joy of the things that are good that makes evil so difficult to bear. But you know what? It is the sorrow of those times of struggle that make the good times so sweet. If there was never a struggle, if everything was easy, we would take the view from the mountaintop for granted.
God is not the absence of evil He is the presence of love. He is the father that stands just out of His child’s sight when they ride their bike without training wheels for the first time, when His daughter threads her first needle after poking herself in the finger several times before. Even non-Christian philosophers understand this must be the nature of God anything else does not allow us to grow. Day by day, hour by hour, Pain drips upon the heart. As, against our will, and even in our own despite, comes wisdom from the awful grace of God. It is difficult to endure and yet if God were to remove suffering He would also have to remove our free will, our ability to choose good over evil. Our ability to decide what to do with the reality of the resurrection.
This is what it means, Jesus understands our suffering. The prophet Isaiah writes that not only was Christ a man of sorrow but that He carried our sorrows. When we hurt Christ is there with us. When we fail when we realize our guilt we need to understand that Christ carried your guilt and our shame to the cross with Him. But when He came out of that tomb, He left it there. That is why we are promised that one day He will literally wipe the tears from our eyes. Notice God doesn’t promise the absence of sorrow but to comfort us in our grief.
The beautiful thing is that Jesus doesn’t offer us temporary relief and then leave it there. He doesn’t say that He will come make us feel better and then leave us to an uncertain future, one where we don’t know what the future will be. One where we hope that there is something more. Where we hope that when we die we go to a better place. No Jesus came and died on that cross so that He could come out of that tomb and tell us that we no longer need to fear death. He overcame death itself. Peter stated that “God raised Him up again, putting an end to the agony of death, since it was impossible for Him to be held in its power.” Acts 2:24.
What is impossible for God, it is impossible for Him to die, it was impossible for Him to have and end and that is what He promises to us, if we will just believe. The same thing that he asked for in John 11. Notice what the equation is Believe + Receive = Become. When we believe in Jesus, that He lived, He died and rose again. Then we must receive the gift that if we pray and ask Him, He will give us eternal life, life with Him forever. That is the promise of John 1:12, “But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, even to those who believe in His name.”
