It is said that there are two certainties in life – death and taxes. Ironically both subjects tend to be off limits at dinner parties. Our death is something we don’t want to talk about, let alone think about. Woody Allen once quipped: “It’s not that we’re afraid to die. We just don’t want to be there when it happens.”Yet Malcolm Muggeridge, a former British journalist and author, observed: In earthly terms death is the only certainty.
I don’t want to be morbid today, but it is a subject we need to consider. And what better time than during this season of Easter!
Our creed states: ‘I believe in… the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting’. What does this really mean? What happens if we’re burnt, or buried, or our body is destroyed? And, if one day we are to be raised, what kind of body will we have? The subject is complex and our answers can easily become no more than confused ramblings.
Consider what Paul writes in the clearest biblical statement on the resurrection. In 1 Corinthians 15:21 we read: For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man. For as in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive.
GOODNIGHT
When we attach ourselves, by faith, to Jesus, we can be assured that even though our bodies may rot and decay in a grave, the day will come when we too will be raised from the dead. On that awesome day when Christ will be seen in all his majestic power, he will give us a new body. For God’s people, death is not ‘Goodbye’, but ‘Goodnight’.
Jesus’ resurrection foreshadows the resurrection from the dead of all his people. This is the theme that Paul addresses in 1 Corinthians 15:35ff. He writes: Someone may ask, “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body will they come?” How foolish,what you sow does not come to life unless it dies. When you sow you do not plant the body that will be, but just a seed, perhaps of wheat or of something else.
When I was in Kindergarten class, my family was living in the country. I remember carrying out my first formal scientific experiment. We were given a saucer, cotton wool and some wheat. We put the wheat on the cotton wool, wet it and took it home. Over the next few days I was amazed at what I observed. Out of the rotting, smelly grain grew new life.
CHRISTIAN DEATH
In the present order of things death needs to take place before new life occurs. The death of the first is the means of effecting change. When you sow, you do not plant the body that will be, but just a seed… There’s a process of death before life, even in nature.
And Paul continues: God gives it a body as he has determined, and to each kind of seed he gives its own body. All flesh is not the same: men have one kind of flesh, animals have another, birds another and fish another (vv.38, 39). It is God’s prerogative to bring about change and give the sown seed its appropriate plant body as he wills.
Indeed, he is used to creating bodies appropriate for different kinds of environments – for men and women and for animals who live on the land, for birds that fly, and for fish that live in water. Each is perfectly fitted for its environment.
THE AGE TO COME
In the same way, our earthly bodies are suited for our earthly existence, but they will be useless in the perfection of the age to come. Our present bodies need to be buried when their work is done here, so that out of their raw material God can produce a new, spiritual body perfectly suited for the new age.
‘Have no doubt,’ says Paul, ‘the resurrection of our bodies will be a reality. It makes sense. It’s consistent with what we can observe of the various elements of the present natural order. It means there is continuity between our present and future existence.’
This is important for us to know. It means for one thing that God treats every aspect of his creating work seriously – nothing is lost, for everything has a meaning. There’s not some massive disjunction between the material and the spiritual world. This suggests that keeping as fit as we can now is an important part of worship of God. I’m not suggesting that we all go out and join ‘Fit for Him’ exercise classes, but certainly the continuity between the present and the future order should encourage us not to abuse our bodies.
What we do in every aspect of our life now matters to God.
Addressing the question, ‘How can we make politics better?’ in an opinion article in The New York Times yesterday (April 12), David Brooks observed: ‘…It’s increasingly clear that the roots of political dysfunction lie deep in society. If there’s truly going to be improvement, there has to be improvement in the social context politics is embedded in.
‘In healthy societies, people live their lives within a galaxy of warm places. They are members of a family, neighborhood, school, civic organization, hobby group, company, faith, regional culture, nation, continent and world. Each layer of life is nestled in the others to form a varied but coherent whole.’
Citing social commentators and pollsters, Brooks goes on to note: ‘…Americans have become worse at public deliberation. People find it easier to ignore inconvenient viewpoints and facts. Partisanship becomes a preconscious lens through which people see the world… They report being optimistic or pessimistic depending on whether their team is in power. They become unrealistic…’
PERSUASION
I draw attention to David Brooks’ comments, not because I want to discuss politics and how to make politics better, but because we need to understand our culture so that we can find better ways to communicate what it needs most – serious conversations about the larger realities of life. One way we can do this is by being prepared to work out ways we can persuade others to explore for themselves the primary documents of the Christian faith.
Some years ago I met one of Australia’s television screen-writers. He told the story of how on a wet afternoon during a television production he was forced to return to his hotel room. Having nothing else to do, he picked up a Gideon Bible and started to read Mark’s Gospel. He had never read the Bible before – in fact he rejected it as a myth.
However as he read, two things caught his attention. First, he observed that the writer (Mark) wrote in the style of a good journalist. Second, the main character had no character flaws. This astounded him, for as he said later, every good dramatist knows the fallibility of human nature and has to write in some flaw to each of their characters. These two elements persuaded him that he needed to explore the Bible for himself.
THE PROMISE OF THE RESURRECTION
Which brings us again to the subject of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead.
In 1 Corinthians 15, which is undoubtedly one of the earliest writings in the New Testament, Paul the Apostle not only draws our attention to the significant eyewitness evidence to Jesus’ physical resurrection, but he also pursues the logic of what he is saying.
In verses 17-19 we read: If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins.Then those also who have died in Christ have perished.If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.
As the television screen-writer observed, Jesus was a man without a character flaw – he was truly a good man. But the extraordinary thing is this: Jesus, in his goodness, was willing to sacrifice his own life for the sake of men and women who are anything but good. For humanity, of its own choosing, is caught in the web of self.
The English philosopher, Edmund Burke once wrote: All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing. Jesus is the ultimate ‘good man’ who did, not just ‘something’ but ‘everything’ to deal once and for all with the outcomes of our self-centeredness. His resurrection from the dead assures us of his success.
Sometimes people criticize Christianity because it offers heavenly rewards, as though there’s something suspicious about living Christianly with such ulterior motives in mind. But to make sacrifices because of religious principle without some hope that there is an ultimate purpose to it all, isn’t laudable or noble. It’s just stupid.
LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR
David Brooks concluded his article yesterday with: People experience their highest joy in helping their neighbors make it through the day.
Perhaps more than ever, all of us who profess to know that Jesus was truly raised from the dead, need to pray for the wisdom to know how to help our neighbors make it through the day, and for the words and the boldness to persuade them of Jesus’ transforming grace and goodness. Who knows what good things the Lord will then do?
Our culture resists the idea of Jesus’ physical resurrection. Most of the recent Easter cards reflect this. While there are motifs of new life, new birth, and even renewal, rarely is the word ‘resurrection’ mentioned. Theologians don’t always help, for some will tell us at Christmas that Jesus was not born of a virgin, and at Easter that he was not physically raised from the dead.
Hugh McKay, a Sydney commentator, once put it this way: ‘The historical, literal truth about the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, has little connection with the Easter celebration of Christian believers. Faith thrives on doubt and therefore, even if Jesus didn’t live, die and come back to life again, Easter would still have meaning.’ It’s a very attractive view: Jesus’ resurrection is no more than a mystical experience, without any necessary foundation in fact.
FICTION?
But that is one thing the New Testament refuses to accept. For, contrary to what society thinks, what some theologians think and what some ministers preach, the writers of the New Testament are insistent: Jesus’ tomb was empty. Witnesses saw him alive.
One of the remarkable features of the account of Jesus’ resurrection is the witness of women. Under Jewish law at the time, the testimony of a woman was inadmissible and even in Roman society a women’s witness was not treated with equal weight as a man’s. If Jesus’ resurrection was a fiction women would not be the first witnesses: yet all four Gospels record that they were.
Another amazing feature about Jesus’ resurrection is the reference to angels. If I was inventing a story that I wanted others to accept, I would not introduce angelic figures. Having said that, if I thought that introducing angels might make my story about supernatural events more acceptable, I would let the angels speak for themselves, and give their version of what had happened and why. An angelic press conference could be quite remarkable. But all the angel said to the women was: ‘If you want to find Jesus there’s no point in you being here; he is risen.’
G.K. Chesterton once applied some words of Lord Byron to Christianity: Truth is stranger than fiction, he said, for fiction is the creation of the human mind and therefore congenial to it.
THE UNTHINKABLE
On Monday, September 10, 2001, Judy and I were living just three short blocks from the World Trade Centre. That evening we dined just down from the Trade Centre. If anyone had said to us that on the following morning terrorists would hi-jack two commercial aircraft and crash them into the Trade Centre with innocent passengers on board, we would have said, ‘It wouldn’t happen. It couldn’t happen. It won’t happen’.
We may at first have difficulty understanding the notion of Jesus’ resurrection, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen and didn’t happen. The New Testament witness is consistent: Jesus did physically rise from the dead. In the earliest written account we read: Christ (he) was buried,… he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and… he appeared to Peter, and then to the Twelve. After that he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers at the same time, most of whom are still living… (1 Corinthians 15:4-6).
JESUS’ PHYSICAL RESURRECTION
Peter preached his first sermon about Jesus being raised from the dead less than three miles from the tomb. People could have easily checked for themselves whether the tomb was empty.
Dr John Lennox, Professor of Mathematics at Oxford University, in Gunning for God (Lion: 2011, p.212) writes, The empty tomb is important: if it were not empty, you could not speak of resurrection. But we need to be clear that the early Christians did not simply assert that the tomb was empty. Far more important for them was the fact that subsequently they had met the risen Christ… It was nothing less than this that galvanized them into action, and gave them the courage to confront the world with the message of the Christian gospel… The fact that they had personally witnessed these appearances of the risen Christ formed an integral part of that gospel.
God’s good news is good because it is true. It is grounded in fact. Jesus’ resurrection is not fiction. It is the reality that authenticates God’s willingness to forgive us; that gives us hope and joy. It is the reality that surely stirs us to speak with others about God’s gospel.
The resurrection of Jesus Christ is often lightly dismissed these days because most people have not taken the time to investigate it. For example, writing about the silence of the New Atheists on the subject of Jesus’ resurrection, Dr. John Lennox, professor of mathematics at the University of Oxford, writes in his Gunning for God (Lion: 2011, p.225): ‘There is a simple reason for that. For all their interest in evidence, there is nothing in their writings to show they have seriously interacted with the arguments (for the resurrection), many of them well known,… The silence of the New Atheism on this matter tells its own story.’
For his part, a former highly respected professor of theology at Cambridge University, CFD Moule, said of the resurrection: ‘If the coming into existence of the Nazarenes, a phenomenon undeniably attested in the New Testament, rips a great hole in history, a hole the size and shape of the Resurrection, what does the secular historian propose to stop it up with?… The birth and the rapid rise of the Christian Church… remain an unsolved enigma for any historian who refuses to take seriously the only explanation offered by the Church itself.
Mr Justice Ken Handley, a former Justice of the Court of Appeal, New South Wales, Australia wrote: ‘Most people who reject the resurrection do so with a closed mind without looking at the evidence. This is irrational and foolish. Jesus, the Son of God, who died to make us right with God, is calling each of us into a relationship with him which will involve faith, repentance, forgiveness and obedience. The Christian’s answers to those nagging personal questions make sense of the Cosmos and our place and purpose in it…’
CONFIDENCE AND VOICE
Too often today the Christian voice has been silenced. Too often we have lost our confidence in what we believe to be true or because we have failed to work at responses to those who would ridicule us. For my part, I am glad that, under God in my undergraduate years at Sydney University, I put in some hard work researching the question of the physical resurrection of Jesus. Without that foundation, humanly speaking, my faith and my witness may not have stood the test of time.
Over this Easter season, I plan to use the Wednesday ‘Word’ to touch on some of the salient elements of Jesus’ resurrection. Indeed, let me encourage you to use this time to refresh your own understanding of the reality and the significance of his resurrection. It is not without significance that every ‘outreach’ sermon in the New Testament affirms that Jesus was raised from the dead.
A good place to start is with 1 Corinthians 15 – possibly the earliest document we have on the subject. Consider: 3 For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, 4 and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, 5 and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. 6 Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died. 7 Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles…
ASSURANCE
Notice what Paul says: he tells us that God’s Messiah, the Christ,died for our sins… He then assures us that Christ was raised from the dead. Knowing that physical resurrection conflicts with our human observation of life, he goes on to present a case, as in a court of law – to argue for the truth and significance of this amazing event. He references eye-witnesses and goes on to present a cogent argument for the reality of the resurrection.
It is noteworthy that the Christian gospel did not come about because a group of fanatics had invented a story about their hero. It didn’t start because a group of philosophers had come to the same conclusions about life. And it didn’t start because a group of mystics shared the same vision about God. It began with a group of eye-witnesses – very ordinary men and women who saw something very extraordinary happen. In a word, God’s good news begins with history.
4 But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us 5even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— 6 and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, 7 so that in the ages to come he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. 8For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God— 9not the result of works, so that no one may boast. 10For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.
REASON FOR HOPE
But God who is rich in mercy… These words are profound and pregnant with meaning. Despite our desperate, flawed condition God took the initiative and stepped in. We were the objects of his wrath, but God, out of the great love with which he loved us, had mercy on us.
Consider how Paul describes that love of God. He doesn’t say simply that God loved us; rather he says, out of the great love with which he loved us. We were dead and the dead don’t rise. But God made us alive with Christ. We were slaves and powerless, but God has set us with Christ in a position of honor and power.
It’s essential that we hold both parts of this contrast together: What we are by nature and what we are by grace; the human condition and the divine compassion; God’s wrath and God’s love.
So what has God done? And why did he do it? Verses 5 and 8 tell us God has saved us – by grace you have been saved. Most of us are so familiar with this traditional language of salvation that its meaning is lost. Paul uses three verbs: in verse 5 we read, God made us alive together with Christ; in verse 6, he raised us up with Him; and in verse 6b He made us sit with Him in the heavenly places with Christ Jesus. The verbs refer to three key events in Jesus’ life: his resurrection, his ascension and his enthronement.
But notice what Paul is saying here: he is speaking about us. He is not writing about Christ, but about you and me. His emphasis is not on God raising Jesus and giving him a position of power and authority, but rather that he’s given us new life, he’s raised us, and he’s seated us with Christ. God has not just given us a new citizenship. He now treats us as royalty.
Why has God done this? Clearly it is not because there was something within us that was intrinsically worthy of merit or God’s special attention. Rather, it was something within God himself that prompted the action. Mercy, love for the outcast is what God has shown us.
So Paul writes: For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God— 9not the result of works, so that no one may boast.
There are three foundation words of the gospel here – salvation, grace and faith. Salvation is more than forgiveness – it is deliverance from the death, the slavery, and the wrath, that we’ve already considered (Day 37). Grace is God’s free and undeserved mercy towards us. Faith is the trust with which we receive the gift for ourselves.
THE RESURRECTION
How do we know these statements are true? The resurrection of Jesus Christ bears witness to it.
And there is more: 10For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.
Paul wants us to understand that we are God’s work of art – that our salvation is in fact a masterpiece of creation. In the Sistine Chapel in Rome Michelangelo’s masterpiece, ‘The creation of Adam’, portrays God reaching out to man. Paul wants us to know that God’s masterpiece is of a totally different order. Salvation is not just creation or re-creation: it is a new creation.
Furthermore, we are created in Christ Jesus for good works – good works which God prepared beforehand. Verse 10 ends with a word that we find back in verse 1 – the word walk. Walk is a Hebrew idiom for our manner of life. We are called to be pedestrians, putting one foot in front of the other, moving forward, going somewhere. Formerly we walked in trespasses and sins in which the devil had trapped us. Now we walk in good works that God has eternally planned for us to do.
Through God’s astonishing grace we can be new people. We can go to bed every night with a sense of peace because we know that we have been forgiven. We can wake up in the morning with a sense of purpose and joy. We now have every reason to ask each day, ‘Lord, what good works have you prepared for me to do today?’
You might like to consider:
what the words, but God who is rich in mercy, tell us about God;
what Paul is telling us about salvation – that it is a gift – and the way God now sees us;
how God now expects us to live.
For Further Thought. Ask:
Has this series of Bible readings and Reflections helped you understand more clearly the great themes of the biblical narrative?
Do you have a better idea of your part in God’s story?
What does the Lord want you to do with your life that will make a difference in the city or community where you live?
You might like to pray:
Almighty God, you have conquered death through your dearly beloved Son Jesus Christ and have opened to us the gate of everlasting life: grant us by your grace to set our mind on things above, so that by your continual help our whole life may be transformed; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who is alive and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit in everlasting glory. Amen. (BCP, Easter Day)
Teach us, gracious Lord, to begin our works with reverence, to go on in obedience, and finish them with love; and then to wait patiently in hope, and with cheerful countenance to look up to you, whose promises are faithful and rewards infinite; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. (An Australian Prayer Book, 1978, A prayer of dedication)
And there is more: 10For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.