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In The Return of the King, the 3rd volume in The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkein portrays the struggles Frodo and Samwise Gamgee faced on the final stretch of their perilous journey to Mt Doom. Utterly exhausted, Frodo is barely able to press on. Sam, despairing of achieving their goal, looked up: ‘There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty forever beyond its reach’.
Anyone who is alert to the strange mixture of good and evil in the world around us, can well be tempted to despair. Is there any hope for the future?
This was a very real question for the first followers of Jesus of Nazareth. Consider what they experienced. They had seen the man they thought was God’s Messiah die a brutal death on a Roman cross outside Jerusalem. They were numb with grief. ‘How could he allow this to happen? He was always in control,’ they must have said.
They had given up three years of their lives to follow this man and now he was dead. Was Jesus all a lie? Was he another failed leader? Like us today, they had watched leaders come and go. Many had shown promise as they flared into prominence but then they had sputtered out as their failures or the failures of those around them subsumed them. With Jesus’ death their hopes and dreams for the future were dashed to pieces.
Yet an extraordinary thing had happened on the Sunday following that fateful Friday: their lives were dramatically changed. Their tears of grief turned to tears of unbounded joy. Why? What had brought about that dramatic change?
Come with me to First Corinthians chapter 15, the single most important chapter in the New Testament on the subject of Jesus’s resurrection. In verses 3 following, Paul the Apostle writes: For I passed on to you as of first importance that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that 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…
Christianity didn’t start because a group of fanatics had invented a story about their hero, nor had it started because a group of philosophers had come to the same conclusions about life. And it hadn’t started because a group of mystics shared the same vision about Jesus.
The Christian story began with a group of eye-witnesses – a company of very ordinary men and women who saw something very extraordinary happen.
When Jesus was put to death John the Gospel-writer tells us that Jesus’s disciples thought for a while that they had been deluded. Thomas had said, ‘I’m not going to believe in him any more’. But a week after ten of the disciples had seen the risen Jesus, Thomas also saw him. “Put your finger here Thomas,” Jesus had said. “Don’t be faithless but believing” (20:22).
Was this a fantasy? Were these people deluding themselves, trying to make the best of the worst moment of their lives?
Do you know the first Christian sermon was preached around three miles from Jesus’s tomb? Nobody could have been in a better position to test the trustworthiness of the story of the resurrection than those who were there in Jerusalem that day. Yet when Peter insisted that Jesus was risen from the dead, we don’t find 3,000 skeptics, but 3,000 converts.
The first preachers are insistent. The tomb of Jesus of Nazareth was empty on the third day, not because the body had been stolen, nor because the disciples had removed it, nor because Jesus had come out of a coma in the cool of the tomb, but because of a divine intervention.
No historical event can be certain in the same way that 2+2 = 4. Ken Handley, a former Justice of the Court of Appeal in the Supreme Court of New South Wales, Australia, points out that all history is a matter of weighing up evidence and probability.
The New Testament faith cannot survive without evidence. It needs history, for without history faith is indistinguishable from fantasy. If someone turned up with conclusive evidence that Jesus had not risen from the dead, would you still be a Christian? I wouldn’t. Nor would the apostle Paul.
Jesus’s resurrection was not a myth. It was the creator God, breaking into history at a particular place and at a particular time. We know this because of the eye-witness evidence.
If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins, Paul continues.
Humanity has a problem: all of us are flawed one way or another. Malcolm Muggeridge, a former editor of the English Punch magazine once commented, The depravity of man is at once the most unpopular of all dogmas, but the most empirically verifiable.
Throughout his public life Jesus Christ spoke of our flaws in terms of our relationship with God and with one another. When asked what is the greatest commandment, he responded: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart mind, soul and strength, and love your neighbour as yourself.”
Jesus taught that the primary purpose of his life was to rescue the lost. He had also taught that his death would be for the ransom, the rescue, of many (Mark 10:45). And this is what Paul says in verse 3 of this resurrection chapter: Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures. Now in verses 17 – 19 he writes, 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.
The English philosopher Edmund Burke wrote: ‘All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing’. Jesus is the ultimate good man who through his death has overcome once and for all the powers of sin, evil and death. He didn’t achieve this by a call to arms, nor by calling down the powers of heaven. He achieved it by laying down his life in our place – the just for the unjust, the godly for the ungodly.
In our world of toil and trouble, how much we need to let the bright star of Jesus’s death and resurrection smite our hearts… and so find hope. For, to draw from the words of Samwise Gamgee, ‘there is light and high beauty beyond the reach of the darkness of this world’.
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So let me ask, are you praying for three people to whom you would like to share the good news of Jesus’s resurrection? Consider purchasing copies of The Jesus Story: Seven Signs using the link on the banner below. Simply pass on a copy at an appropriate moment.
Prayer. Almighty God, you alone can order the unruly wills and passions of sinful men and women. Help us so to love what you command and desire what you promise, that among the many and varied changes of this world, our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys may be found; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
© John G. Mason
