He Is Not Here (2 of 2)

The resurrection is not a symbol. It is an event. A body went into the tomb on Friday and came out on Sunday, and was seen, touched, and heard by hundreds of people over forty days. That is what the faith rests on.

Second: The Resurrection Validates the Death

The cross, without the resurrection, is simply a man dying. A good man, a teacher, a reformer — dying, as good men have died at the hands of unjust powers throughout history. The resurrection is the Father’s verdict on the cross: not a tragedy that was subsequently redeemed, but a victory that was completed in the dying and announced by the rising.

Romans 4:25 captures it precisely: Jesus “was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification.” The raising is the proof that the delivering worked. The empty tomb is the Father’s receipt for the payment of sin. The resurrection does not cancel the cross. It ratifies it.

This is why the appearances of the risen Jesus always include the wounds. He does not appear in a body that has been restored to pre-crucifixion condition, the wounds erased as if the cross had been merely a temporary setback. He appears in a body that carries the marks of the cross into the resurrection — hands, feet, side — because the cross is not behind Him. It is part of who He is. And those wounds, offered to Thomas, are the same wounds that Revelation 5:6 sees in the heavenly throne room: “a Lamb, looking as if it had been slain, standing at the center of the throne.” The risen King is the crucified King. The wounds do not disappear in glory.

Third: The Resurrection Produces a New Creation

The resurrection body of Jesus is not the resuscitation of a corpse to the same biological life it had before. Lazarus was raised to the same life — and died again. The resurrection of Jesus is of a categorically different kind: a body that has passed through death and come out the other side in a mode of existence that is simultaneously continuous with what it was before and transformed into something it was not before. The same wounds. The ability to cook breakfast. The ability to pass through locked doors. The ability to appear and vanish. A body that is recognizably continuous with the earthly Jesus and that no longer operates under the constraints that bound Him before the cross.

Paul describes this in 1 Corinthians 15:42–44 in the language of agricultural transformation: “The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable; it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body.” Not a ghost in place of a body. A spiritual body — a body that is fully physical and fully transformed, no longer subject to decay, death, or the limitations of the fallen creation.

And Jesus’ resurrection is not a solitary event. Romans 8:11: “And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies because of his Spirit who lives in you.” The resurrection of Jesus is the first in a series. 1 Corinthians 15:20: “But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.” Firstfruits. Not the only fruit. The first of the harvest that the disciple will follow.

The Historical Case

The resurrection is the most examined event in ancient history. The objections are well-known: the disciples stole the body, the disciples hallucinated, Jesus did not actually die on the cross, the tomb was simply the wrong tomb. Each of these requires accepting a set of facts that is more implausible than the resurrection itself.

The disciples-stole-the-body theory requires that a demoralized group who had scattered at the arrest and hidden behind locked doors after the crucifixion somehow overpowered a Roman guard, removed the body, invented a detailed series of post-resurrection appearances, and then proceeded to preach the resurrection publicly in Jerusalem — the city where the crucifixion had just occurred, where the body was allegedly still available to be produced — and died for that lie under torture. People die for things they believe are true. People do not die for things they know are fabricated.

The mass hallucination theory requires that five hundred people had the same specific hallucination at the same time — a phenomenon with no precedent in the psychology of grief or religious experience — and that the individual appearances to Mary Magdalene, Peter, James, and two disciples on a seven-mile walk were all produced by the same mechanism.

The wrong-tomb theory requires that the disciples, who could have asked Joseph of Arimathea where he had buried Jesus, and the authorities, who had every motivation to produce the body and end the movement, never consulted the one man who knew exactly where the tomb was.

The historical case for the resurrection is not a matter of blind faith against evidence. It is a matter of evaluating the evidence and concluding that the resurrection is the explanation that requires the fewest implausibilities. N.T. Wright’s extensive historical analysis concludes that no first-century Jew invented the concept of an individual resurrection before the end of the age, that the disciples’ proclamation of exactly this unprecedented claim within weeks of the crucifixion in the city where it occurred requires a cause proportionate to the effect, and that the empty tomb plus the appearances together constitute the most economical historical explanation available.

Receive it as history. It is.