The Tomb Is Empty

There’s an old joke that people tell about cemeteries when they drive by: ‘How many people are dead in that one?’ the answer, of course, is “All of them.” It’s true, isn’t it? Tombs are for people who have died. The really important ones may be called sepulchres or mausoleums. Some of them are major tourist sites - maybe because of the im-portance of the person buried there, or perhaps for their artistic, historic or archeological significance. They are places as different as Egypt’s pyramids, India’s Taj Mahal, Westminster Abbey, Lenin’s Tomb or the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. My own favorite is the 5th c. mausoleum of Galla Placidia in Ravenna, Italy. The themes portrayed on its gloriously decorated mosaic walls represent Christ’s victory over death.

But that doesn’t change the one, unmistakable fact: these tombs exist for people who are dead. Their inhabitants are no longer alive.

On the other hand, the most important tomb, the one with by far the greatest historical impact on the world is a simple unmarked cave somewhere near Jerusalem.

It has no architectural significance. Nobody important lies there. This tomb is important for one reason, and for one reason alone. It is empty. And that simple fact is the foundation upon which our faith is built. It provides unshakable testimony that Jesus of Nazareth is exactly who he said he was – the Son of God and the Savior of all who believe.

In 1994 Moody Memorial Church in Chicago hosted a debate between William Lane Craig and John Dominic Crossan over the historicity of Jesus Christ. Crossan is one of the members of the Jesus Seminar, a group of left-wing scholars who believe that the New Testament stories have little or nothing to do with objective historical fact, that Jesus’ followers simply made up stories to validate their religious fervor. He doesn’t believe in the resurrection at all. He thinks it’s a metaphor for the healing power of love. One of his colleagues, a man named Borg, said “Whether Easter involved something remarkable happening to the physical body of Jesus is irrelevant... it simply doesn’t matter.”

I beg to differ. You may believe, or you may disbelieve, but you cannot say it does not matter. Because it does. Easter claims that divine events happen to real people in real history. Easter claims that these events are a reliable basis for belief. Because our God acts in history, his acts can be seen and recorded and remembered and acted upon in turn. Every single one of the gospels emphasizes the reliability of the eyewitness accounts. Every single one of the gospel accounts emphasize the change that took place in the disciples after they understood that Jesus was still alive.

People have been trying to find an excuse to disbelieve for 2000 years. Some people claim that he wasn’t really dead, that he took some sort of drug before the crucifixion that put him in a coma, and that he was revived later on. The story circulated by the Jewish authorities was that his disciples stole the body. The modern scholars I quoted earlier think that the miracles recorded in the NT were for a simple, primitive people, people who didn’t understand the laws of cause and effect, people who didn’t understand that miracles just don’t happen. There’s something faintly embarrassing for this group of people about claiming to believe in something so inherently irrational as an actual bodily resurrection; sort of like believing in the Easter bunny but not as cute.

I believe people reject the resurrection not because Jesus is unbelievable, though, but because he is threatening. If it happened, then we must respond by changing as the disciples did. And that is hard. But if it didn’t happen, we can interpret the call of love on our lives in any way we want. It’s safer. It leaves us in control.

But, says Paul, “If Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith.” [1 Cor 15:14] Without the resurrection, the whole infrastructure of faith falls apart, and Jesus becomes just another Jewish teacher with good ideas from which we can pick and choose to build a philosophy that suits us. Without the resurrection, we know nothing more about God, about truth, about life and death and our place in the universe than we did before that long-ago Sunday morning. We Christians lose any claim we have to a truth which transcends the powerful pressure of this world. We lose our hope. And we lose our excuse for being. As John Updike put it in his wonderful poem Seven Stanzas at Easter:

Make no mistake:

if he rose at all it was as his body;

If the cells dissolution did not reverse,

the molecules reknit,

the amino acids rekindle,