Easter Sunday, 2011
Topical
The Rev. Jerry Kistler
St. Stephen’s Reformed
Episcopal Church
The Resurrection: The Greatest Hoax or the Supreme Fact of History”
Okay, so here’s what really happened. Jesus was convinced He was the Messiah, and so He deliberately plotted to have himself arrested, drugged, crucified, and revived in order to “fulfill” the Old Testament Scriptures as He understood them. It was a plot He’d hatched with some of His secret Jerusalem disciples, including a young Joseph of Arimathea, but one that He’d kept hidden from His Galilean disciples—Peter and James and John, and the rest. And the plan was this: in order to insure that He’d make it safely through the crucifixion, He’d be given, not the regular vinegar-wine while He hung on the cross, but a potent drug that would render Him unconscious and make Him appear to be dead. Then He would be taken down from the cross in deathlike trance, removed by His accomplices to Joseph’s tomb, nursed back to health, and then be miraculously “resurrected.” Unfortunately for the comatose Jesus, what He and His fellow conspirators hadn’t counted on was a Roman soldier jabbing a spear into His side before He could be safely removed from the cross. And so later, when all attempts to revive Him failed, His secret Jerusalem followers quietly buried Him in a spot unknown to His Galilean disciples, who soon for some unknown reason and over a forty-day period, repeatedly mistook “the beloved disciple”—a young priest from Jerusalem—for the resurrected Jesus. And that’s how the whole thing really got started.
That’s the explanation of the resurrection of Christ put forward by a little book called The Passover Plot. And back in 1965 when the book first came out, it really caused a stir. It was sort of the DaVinci Code of its day. And just like Dan Brown’s book, The Passover Plot became an instant best seller, because everybody loves a good conspiracy theory. But in reality this was sociologist Hugh Schonfield’s serious attempt to give a “believable” explanation of the so-called resurrection of Jesus for modern-day people who can no longer accept things like miracles. But I don’t know about you, but I find this explanation more miraculous than the Resurrection itself. And when push comes to shove, always go with the “lesser” miracle.
It’s sort of like another explanation of the Resurrection called “the Swoon Theory.” Have you heard bout this one? It’s the idea that Jesus didn’t actually die on the cross, He merely swooned or fainted. And then in the coolness of the tomb He revived. But this again is more miraculous than the miracle of the Resurrection. Because it requires us to believe that after Jesus had lost all that blood, had even been pierced in the side with a Roman spear, He was somehow still able to have enough strength to roll away the stone from tomb, then sneak past all the guards, and then, even more miraculous considering what He must have looked like, to convince His disciples that He risen from the dead. You see, I just don’t have that much faith. I’m just too much of a skeptic to believe such an explanation.
So what can we believe about the so-called resurrection of Jesus? How do we know that the Resurrection is not a just myth the disciples conspired together to create perhaps with the aim of starting a new religion with themselves at the top? How do we know that the Resurrection is not the greatest hoax ever pulled off in the history of man, but is rather the supreme fact of all time—a fact that if it really is true must change everything we believe about life and death and beyond? One that if it’s true answers all the age-old questions: Is there a God? Is there life after death? How can I get there? What kind of response is required of me in light of Jesus’ death and resurrection?
These are life and death questions, and if the resurrection
of Jesus didn’t happen, then we need to look elsewhere for the answers. For
So how do we know that the Resurrection of Christ is not a myth? Well, let’s just talk about the empty tomb this morning. We could also talk about the credibility of the over-five-hundred witnesses who said they saw Jesus alive again after He was dead, and of the revolutionary transformation of the lives of the disciples from being fearful cowards they were before the Crucifixion, to the bold proclaimers of the gospel they became just a few days later, as further evidence of the truth of the Resurrection. But in the time we have this morning, let’s just consider the question of the empty tomb. How did the tomb come to be empty? It’s a question that every honest person must deal with, and should deal with, because the destiny of his or her eternal soul hangs in the balance.
So you have an empty tomb. What other explanations are there for how the tomb became empty? Well, first, there’s the claim that the tomb they buried Jesus in wasn’t really empty at all, but that what happened was that Mary and the other women, and then later the disciples, simply went to the wrong tomb. It was dark, and they got lost, and when they came to a tomb that had its stone rolled away, they mistook it for the one Jesus had been buried in but was now empty. And then later Mary mistook the gardener for the resurrected Jesus. And so that’s how the whole thing got started. It was all just one big, complex mistake.
But just a few weeks later, when the disciples began to preach that Jesus had risen from the dead, and began to be a real pain in the side of Jewish leadership (because they were converting so many people to Christ) why didn’t the Jews just say, “Hey, you guys have the wrong tomb. Here it is over here, and here’s the body to prove it.” They knew which tomb it was. They were the ones who had Pilate place a guard in front of it. And, furthermore, it was the tomb of one of their own members—Joseph of Arimathea. They knew exactly where it was. So all they had to do was open it up and show to the world that Jesus was still dead and buried.
But in fact, the Jewish leadership never disputed the fact that the tomb was empty. Nor did the Romans, for that matter. The fact that the Jews had to convince the Romans to say that the disciples had stolen the body, shows that they acknowledged that the tomb was empty. Why give an alternative explanation for what happened to Jesus’ body if you know it’s still in the tomb? But they knew it wasn’t! So the claim that the disciples just went to the wrong tomb isn’t credible.
So maybe the enemies of Christ—the Jews or the Romans—stole the body. The question is, Why? After doing away with the threat, after seemingly quelling this little rebellion, why on earth would they want to put doubt in anyone’s mind whether Jesus was still dead? And even if they had stolen the body and buried it in some secret place, when the disciples started preaching the resurrection of Christ all they’d have to do to totally discredit their message was again simply produce the body. But they didn’t, because they didn’t have it.
Again, they never claimed to have it, but they said the disciples stole the body. So what of that claim—that the disciples snuck in and carried away Jesus’ body, and then hatched the greatest and most successful deception of all time? Well, so the questions are, How and why? How could they have done it? Remember the Jews got permission from Pilate to place a guard in front of the tomb, because in their own words, “We remember, while he was alive, how that deceiver said, ‘After three days I will rise.’” Therefore,” they said to Pilate, “command that the tomb be made secure until the third day, lest His disciples come by night and steal Him away, and say to the people, ‘He has risen from the dead.’ So the last deception will be worse than the first.” And so Pilate gave them permission to place a detachment of their own temple guard to secure the tomb with specific orders to watch out for the disciples. These were highly disciplined soldiers, and the punishment for any kind of dereliction of duty was incredibly severe. If a man was caught asleep he was beaten and burned on the spot in his own clothes.
So I guess what happened that night was that the disciples
were some how able to sneak in and, with miraculous good luck, find every one
of the guards asleep, slip quietly between them, then somehow manage to break
the seal and roll away the two-ton stone without waking any of them up, and
then steal away into the darkness with the body of Christ without leaving any
evidence behind. It’s just not believable. Again this requires a greater
miracle than the Resurrection itself.
But even if they were somehow able to do it, the real question is why would they do it? The claim has been: so they could start their own religion. But these were conservative, orthodox Jews, and the whole time they were with Jesus they showed repeatedly that they had no concept of becoming anything other than conservative, orthodox Jews. They believed that Jesus was the Messiah. But even after Jesus told them point blank that He would be crucified and would rise again the third day, they never conceived of a resurrected Messiah. Why now, just a few days later, would they suddenly come up with the concept?
Again as good Jews, they believed that committing false witness against God would mean risking the damnation of their own souls to hell. This is what Paul is getting at when he says, “If we’re lying about the resurrection of Christ, then we’re found false witnesses of God, because we have testified that He has raised Him up.” The implication is, “If we’re lying, we’re damned. So why on earth would we lie?”
“Why on earth?” is a good question. What did the disciples have to gain by starting a new religion? They faced hardship, ridicule, hostility, and martyrs deaths for their claim that Christ had risen from the dead and is therefore the only one in whom is life and salvation. In light of what they had to go through, they could have never sustained such unwavering testimony to the resurrection of Christ if they knew what they were preaching was a lie. Think about it. If what they knew what they were preaching was false, why did not at least one of them – being faced with torture and death – not confess the lie to save his own skin? Bartholomew could literally have saved his skin; the tradition is that he was flayed alive for his witness to the resurrected Christ. How many of you would be flayed alive for something you knew was a lie?
No. Again, it is not credible that the disciples stole the body of Jesus. And that leaves us with just one explanation for how the tomb became empty. And that is, as we confess in our creed, that Jesus Christ was “crucified, dead, and buried. And the third day he rose again from the dead.”
There was no Passover Plot. There was no grand conspiracy that first Easter morning to pull off the greatest hoax of all time. It could have easily been debunked by those who had the motive and the means to do so. But they didn’t because they couldn’t.
Jesus Christ really did rise from the dead. And that makes it the supreme fact of history. It means there really is a God. In the whole history of the world no one has ever risen from the dead, except the Man who claimed to be God in the flesh. The Resurrection validates that claim. It means there is life after death. There is a heaven and a hell. And the Person who has descended into the one and ascended into the other is the only One who can give any reliable information about either place. It means that Jesus really is the resurrection and the life, and that it is as He said: “No one comes to the Father except through Me.” It means every one of us must now make a decision as to what we’re going to do with this supreme fact of history: whether we’re going to put our trust in the One who died and rose again and proved that He could bring us to God and make us right with Him, or whether we’re going to reject Him and continue to live as we can do it all on our own, as if the resurrection really didn’t happen. It did happen, and every one of us has to grapple with that fact.
You know, the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus is the crucial dividing point of all history. Everything before Jesus we call B.C., and everything after we call A.D. But the Resurrection is still the crucial dividing point of all of our lives. Some of you here today are still B.C.—before Christ in your lives. You may still not have come to accept the truth of the Resurrection and the implications it has for your lives. Don’t believe the Resurrection just because of all the nice stories you’ve heard about it all your lives, but because it’s the only credible explanation of the facts. Others of you are here this morning having come to accept the truth of the Resurrection, and it’s time for you to be renewed in your faith, and live and act and be who you truly are: new creatures in Christ.
One way or the other, the Resurrection is not just the supreme fact of history, but the supreme fact of each of our lives. For Christ is risen! He is risen indeed. Alleluia! +