Everyone Believes in Resurrection 1 Corinthians 15:1-58 Introduction You’ve been hearing a lot of talk and singing a lot of lyrics about Jesus’ resurrection from the dead – and that’s because it’s Easter Sunday. I know it might seem obvious to some of you that Easter Sunday is about Jesus’ resurrection from the dead, but I’m not prepared to say it’s all that obvious to everyone. I say this because of a recent study by the Barna Group, which explored Americans’ definition of the Easter holiday. One of the things that the research showed was that only a minority of adults directly linked Easter to the Christian faith’s belief in the resurrection of Christ. “In all, 42% of Americans said that the meaning of Easter was the resurrection of Jesus or that it signifies [Christ’s] death and return to life.” So I don’t think it would be fair to assume that even everyone of you here knew before you came this morning that Easter is about Jesus’ resurrection from the dead. And I want to tell you that you shouldn’t feel stupid if you are among those people who didn’t know that Easter celebrated Christ’s resurrection. A large part of the reason why you don’t know is because the Christian church has been remiss in being clear about the nature of Easter. I love how the comedian Jim Gaffigan points this out: Easter: that’s a weird tradition. Easter: the day Jesus rose from the dead! What should we do? How ‘bout eggs?! Well, what does that have to do with Jesus? Alright, we’ll hide ‘em. I don’t follow your logic. Don’t worry. There’s a bunny. My point here is just to say that maybe – just maybe – the reason why not even half of American adults know that Easter is about Jesus’ resurrection from the dead has to do with the church’s failure to be clear about it. And we ought to be clear about it. For Jesus’ resurrection from the dead is the central truth of the Christian faith. Without it, there is no Christianity. As the great church historian of a previous century, Philip Schaff, has said, “The resurrection of Christ is...emphatically a test question upon which depends the truth or falsehood of the Christian religion.” But I can do no better than the Apostle Paul to make this point. Turn with me in your Bibles to 1 Corinthians 15. From your bulletin you can see that we’re going to spend the majority of our time working through more or less the entire chapter. But to the point that Christianity rises or falls on the truthfulness of the resurrection, read vv 12-19 with me. Without the resurrection, we’ve got nothing. There is no Christian faith without it. It is the issue in Christianity. You can like the teaching of the Christian faith, or dislike it. You can find some things distasteful, and others compelling. You can abhor Christians, or love them. But the bottom line in Christianity is what we’re celebrating this morning – Jesus’ resurrection from the dead. If this event really happened, then nothing’s the same. Nothing can ever be the same. So the question seems first and foremost to be whether or not it actually happened? Did Jesus rise from the dead on the third day, or didn’t he? If he didn’t then, you should throw out Christianity entirely. It is utterly meaningless without it. Whatever Jesus said or did up to the point of his resurrection is an utter travesty if he did not rise from the dead on the third day. Skeptical of Resurrection Now maybe you are skeptical of the whole idea of resurrections in general because you exclude the whole idea of the miraculous and supernatural as nothing more than superstition. Therefore the idea of there being in any meaningful sense something like an afterlife, let alone a physical resurrection from the dead, is preposterous to you. Well, if you are a skeptic of that ilk, I want to say something pretty bold to you today. And I’ll say it to you in the form of the title of this sermon: everyone (including you) believes in resurrection. Everyone has a sense, deep down, that this life can’t possibly be all there is. Everyone knows that there’s got to be more to this life than this life. It’s why in your heart-of-hearts you hold out hope for an afterlife. Built into the fabric of our being is not simply an impulse to survive, but to thrive; and that forever and ever. It’s why comedians like Groucho Marx and Woody Allen have said things like, “I intend to live forever, or die trying”; and “I do not want to achieve immortality through my work, I want to achieve immortality through not dying” – and why we find them clever. It’s why we’re obsessed with heath, fitness, nutrition, and everything wellness. We are reaching out after immortality. It’s why we’re obsessed with being young, and doing whatever it takes to stay that way, even if it means going under the knife. It’s why we love novels and films about rebirth and renewal and resurrection – life from death. It’s why nothing in this life satisfies the deepest longings of your soul; why, even when you get the very thing you’ve worked so hard for you feel a sense of emptiness, meaninglessness, and disillusionment. You know that there has to be more to this life than this life. And let me say that that hope for an afterlife is a clue to their being an afterlife. In fact, it’s a gift from God that he engineered in the human heart to point us to something beyond us… The book of Ecclesiastes describes it like this: “God has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.” In other words, God has placed this longing for eternity in our hearts, but has done so in such a way that you cannot find what you’re looking for in this world, or the stuff of this world. More than that, nature itself tells you over and over and over and over again that life comes after death. Look at how Paul puts it here in 1 Corinthians 15. Read vv 35-44. Check it out. <Read the text> One of the main things that Paul is saying here is that built into the very fabric of nature is the idea of resurrection. We see it with seeds. You bury a seed into the ground. It dies. And then it comes up on the other side not as another seed, but as something marvelously new. All the information for that renewal was built into the seed, but in order for that newness to be released it had to die. So it’s as if Paul is saying to the skeptical Corinthians (and they had become skeptical), “Listen: look around you! Clearly, there is such a thing as resurrection. Don’t you see what happens in seedtime and harvest? Death, then life!” Another place in the natural order that we see this one of the places in nature don’t we, especially in the change of seasons. In the fall, everything slowly dies. Then the winter comes. It looks like all hope is lost. It looks like the death is permanent. But then, the snow melts, the weather warms, and the buds start to come out.  Life from death! From sticks to blossoms. Out of death – resurrection. That hosta dies, but then it is reborn. Those leaves fall of your favorite tree, but then it comes to life again. And don’t you see? Again and again and again, year after year after year, God has made nature to tell us – there is such a thing as resurrection. As the psalmist says, “The heavens declare the glory of God.” And one aspect of the glory of God the heavens declare is that there is such a thing as resurrection. You know it: it’s why you long for it, why deep down you know that there has to be more to this life than this life. And you know it because you see it: you see it every year, without fail. The death which is winter, becomes new life, which is spring. Everyone knows that there is such a thing as resurrection. Deep down, you know. Challenging Your Skepticism Now then, let’s say that you are persuaded that this life isn’t all that there is. You’ll give me that there must be something like an after life, but you’re still not persuaded that Jesus Christ really rose from the dead. Well, if that’s where you’re at this morning, I’d like to challenge you on that belief. I’d like to challenge you in the same way that the early Christians were challenged. I’d like to challenge you on the basis of the evidence. You see, the early Christians (before they became Christians) were initially as skeptical as we are about the whole idea of the resurrection of the dead, only for different reasons. Our skepticism is most often the product of an incipient anti-supernaturalism, a prejudice against the miraculous, an assumption that the resurrection of Jesus Christ couldn’t have happened because miracles don’t happen. But you should know that before they became Christians, ancient people were just as skeptical. For Greeks and Romans, the whole idea of a bodily resurrection would have been seen as ridiculous. For them, spirit or soul is good, and physical life is bad. Therefore salvation meant deliverance from the body. Therefore, “[o]nce your soul is free of its body, a return to re-embodied life [would have been] outlandish, unthinkable, and impossible.”  Jews would have had the same skepticism, again, for different reasons. You see, the Jews of the first century would have believed in the possibility of what you might call resuscitation or revivification – a person dying and then being brought back to life only to die again. But what they wouldn’t have believed is what the Christian church had the audacity to proclaim: that Jesus rose again never to die again cf. vv 42-44, 49, 53-54. <Read the texts> As the Jews read their Bibles, they believed that this resurrection would only take place at the end of history, when all the rest of the evils in the world would also be overturned: poverty, disease, oppression. Tell a first-century Jew that the final resurrection has already taken place in the middle of history, and he’d say something like, “Then why are there still poor people? Why are we still oppressed? Why is my child still desperately sick? Nonsense.” Now I know that it is fashionable to say that people who lived “back then” were more likely to believe in something like a resurrection because people were gullible “back then.” We have science and technology and we know better. We don’t believe in fairy tales. We call them myths. People “back then” just didn’t know any better. Now let me ask you? Where does this bias against the past come from? C S Lewis called it “chronological snobbery” – the belief that an idea simply because it is old must be inferior to one that’s new. This is utter rubbish. Don’t we all know better than this? The present is full of blind spots that will only be revealed with the passage of time. We’ve got some things right, and we’ve got some things wrong just like every era of history has! C S Lewis reminded us that “[t]ruth and beauty and goodness are not determined by when they exist. Nothing is inferior for being old, and nothing is valuable for being modern.” And in point of fact, when it comes to skepticism over the plausibility of the resurrection, people “back then” were just as predisposed to disbelieve it as we are! And I would say that our anti-supernatural, anti-miraculous bias is one of our blind spots. We’ve inherited it from the philosophy of the Enlightenment, which made man the measure of all things true, beautiful, and good. If you can’t reason your way to it, it can’t be true. What a blind spot! Can you really reason to beauty? Can you really reason your way to love and mercy and self-sacrifice? Of course, not. But this mindset is precisely the mindset that has given birth to our anti-supernaturalism. One modern biblical scholar calls anti-supernaturalism a “scarecrow” that Enlightenment thought has put up in its fields to frighten away anyone following the historical argument for Jesus resurrection where it really leads. And, he says, “It is high time the birds learned to take no notice.”  Historical Evidence for the Resurrection So then, let me invite you this morning to ignore the scarecrow – it’s not a real man – and consider afresh the evidence for the resurrection that turned many people from a just-as-skeptical ancient audience from their skepticism to profound faith in Jesus Christ. There are two facts, that is to say, two bona fide historical realities that function as our chief evidence for the resurrection of Jesus from the dead: (1) the empty tomb; and (2) the post-crucifixion appearances of Jesus to the disciples. Taken together, the best way of explaining these facts is that Jesus did indeed rise from the dead. Both of these facts are found in this morning’s text. Check out vv 3-6. <Read the text> The Empty Tomb The first fact – the empty tomb – presupposes a related and necessary fact: Jesus was buried in a tomb. Makes sense, right? In order for us to talk about an empty tomb in any meaningful way, we have to talk about an occupied tomb first, both of which are addressed in v 4: and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day. First, tomb: occupied (he was buried); then, tomb: empty (he was raised). Now you should know that the majority of historians both of the believing and non-believing stripe are persuaded both that Jesus was buried and that the tomb came up empty three days after being buried in it. And they are persuaded for four reasons: Jesus’ burial is multiply attested in early, independent sources. Of course, we have Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, the four gospels. All of which independently attest that Jesus was buried in a tomb by a wealthy member of the Jewish ruling counsel called Joseph of Arimathea. The closer you are to an event, and the less connected the witnesses are to one another, the more believable their testimony. Now sometimes people pooh-pooh the idea that the sources for the burial of Jesus were all that early. The former believer and historian, Bart Ehrman, is a good example. Listen: “These are not historically reliable accounts. The authors were not eye witnesses; they’re Greek speaking Christians living 35 to 65 years after the events they narrate. The accounts that they narrate are based on oral traditions that have been in circulation for decades.” There are two big problems with his point. First of all, the passage we’re looking at this morning was written around 55 ad, which puts his description of Jesus’ burial within fifteen years of Jesus’ death (and resurrection). That’s pretty early. And when you add to that what Paul says in v 3, you come up with an even earlier source. Look again at v 3. <Read the text> Now the reason I say that this verse demonstrates that Paul’s source for what he wrote in 55 was even earlier than within 15 years of Jesus’ burial is that this language of receiving and delivering – “I delivered to you…what I also received” – this language is the language of receiving the information from another source, which necessarily would have been earlier than the writing of 1 Corinthians. And while it is true that the four gospels’ dates are later than 1 Corinthians, they not only are based on earlier testimony than when they likely put pen to paper, but they also (and this is the most important thing) do not deviate for a second from the claim that Jesus was buried in a tomb! So when you combine the testimony of 1 Corinthians, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John both in terms of how early and independent they are, you have good reason to believe that Jesus was buried. It is unlikely that the early followers of Jesus would have fabricated the character who buried Jesus, Joseph of Arimathea, a member of the Jewish high council, unless he really buried Jesus. Due to the hostility that many early Christians had toward the ruling council that condemned Jesus to death, it would be strange for them to make up a story of a Jewish leader who does right by Jesus. Instead, you’d want to make them only look bad. It is unlikely that the early followers of Jesus would have used women as the first eyewitnesses of the empty tomb, unless it is what actually happened. This would have been a colossal blunder. Though it is sad to say, women in the first century were not at all respected (except, interestingly enough, by Jesus). Because of this misogynistic tendency, women’s testimony was inadmissible in court. I mean, if you wanted to make people believe your story, you’d have picked more reliable people to be your star witnesses. The rough equivalent would be like a prosecutor using as his or her star witness to a murder in the street a person who saw the crime three-hundred yards away, at night, under a burned-out streetlight, without their glasses, which they needed to correct their 20/200 vision. That’s what I call grounds for reasonable doubt! This is what a woman star witness would have been like in ancient Palestine. The Christians were shrewd enough to know that this would have made them a laughingstock. N T Wright puts it like this: If [the early Christians] could have written stories of fine, upstanding, reliable male witnesses being first at the tomb, they would have done it. That they did not tells us either that everyone in the early church knew that the women…were in fact the first on the scene, or that the early church was not so inventive as critics have routinely imagined, or both. Would the…evangelists have been so…foolish as to [include] the story unless they were convinced that, despite being an apologetic liability, it was historically trustworthy? So, three reasons why scholars of every ilk are persuaded that there was an empty tomb: (1) early, independent sources; (2) Joseph of Arimathea; and (3) women eyewitnesses. So much for the first fact: the empty tomb. Post-Crucifixion Appearances The second fact is Jesus’ post-crucifixion appearances. Paul puts this very straightforwardly in vv 5-7. Read them again with me. <Read the text> This list of eyewitnesses is powerful if only because by mentioning them less than 15 years after the events of Holy Week, they could easily be falsified by anyone hearing the letter when it was read publicly in church! It’s as if Paul said, “If you question the resurrection, which some of the Corinthians undoubtedly were, then go talk to the eyewitnesses yourself. Although according to v 6 some have fallen asleep (i.e. died), most of whom remain until now (i.e. are still alive). If you don’t believe me, go talk to the people who saw Jesus after he was raised from the dead!” And because what Paul says here could so easily be falsified, you have good reason to take what he says seriously. And like the early, and independent testimony to the empty tomb, there is also early and independent testimony to Jesus’ being alive after his crucifixion. For example, Jesus’ appearance to Peter is attested by Luke and Paul; his appearance to the Twelve is attested by Luke, John, and Paul; and his appearance to the women is attested by Matthew and John.  It is virtually undeniable from a historical perspective that the early Christians had experiences after Jesus’ death in which Jesus appeared to them alive. Or, as Luke puts it in Acts 1:3, “To [the disciples Jesus] presented himself alive after his suffering by many proofs, appearing to them during forty days and speaking about the kingdom of God.” So there you have it: two facts. Cold, hard, intellectually credible facts surrounding the resurrection of Jesus from the dead: (1) the empty tomb; and (2) the post-crucifixion appearances. Why the Resurrection of Jesus Is the Best Interpretation of the Facts Now I know that this doesn’t prove that Jesus rose from the dead. It only proves that the early church believed that Jesus rose from the dead and that they were confident of it as fact of history – not a feeling, but something that happened in time, not in their hearts or minds. No facts are brute facts – not to us human beings anyway. There are no brute facts, only our interpretation of the facts. So the claim that Jesus rose from the dead is an interpretation of the facts of the empty tomb and the post-crucifixion appearances of Jesus. So the argument I’m making this morning is that Jesus’ resurrection is the best interpretation of the facts. It is the theory that accounts for the facts in the most intellectually honest way. Provided you don’t throw out the whole idea of the miraculous as fairy-tale nonsense, which I hope you haven’t done. Remember the scarecrow! Follow the evidence where it leads. So then, let me give you three reasons why the resurrection of Jesus is the best interpretation of the facts of the empty tomb and the post-crucifixion appearances of Jesus to his disciples. The original disciples came to believe that Jesus rose from the dead despite having every predisposition to the contrary. I mean, just think of the situation that Jesus’ disciples faced after his crucifixion: First, their leader was dead. Jesus was dead, and they had no category for the messiah dying and being raised again from the dead. They were not expecting it at all. Even though Jesus told them three times that he would rise again the third day, they had no idea what he was talking about. Only in retrospect did Jesus’ predictions make sense. Second, I mentioned already that first-century Jews did not believe that a person could be resurrected before the end of the world. They believed someone could be resuscitated, but not resurrected. “Nevertheless, the original disciples suddenly came to believe so strongly that God had raised Jesus from the dead that they were willing to die for the truth of that belief.” And most of them did! Neither the empty tomb by itself nor the post-crucifixion appearances by themselves could have generated the early Christian belief in Jesus’ resurrection. As N T Wright puts it: The empty tomb alone would be a puzzle and a tragedy. Sightings of an apparently alive Jesus, by themselves, would have been classified as visions or hallucinations, which were well enough known in the ancient world….However, an empty tomb and appearances of a living Jesus, taken together, would have presented a powerful reason for the emergence of the belief [in the resurrection]. And the reason why the empty tomb + the appearances = a real resurrection is that it’s the only thing that can explain the early church’s belief in it. The Jews’ of Jesus’ day defined resurrection in one way only: a new bodily life. Period. This is how the pagans understood it too, though they didn’t believe in it. Resurrection was one thing only: new bodily life. So there is no way on earth that the disciples would have believed in the new bodily life of Jesus unless there was an empty tomb and that empty tomb gave birth to Jesus alive again. If Jesus’ body had remained in that tomb, there would have been no belief in his resurrection. And the same is true for Jesus’ post-crucifixion appearances to his disciples. If he had not appeared to them, though the tomb would have been empty, they might have explained it just about any other way except to say that Jesus had risen again. This is why in the gospels the disciples did not believe simply at the sight of the empty tomb. They believed after they saw the empty tomb and also saw Jesus. When the women said that the tomb was empty and that the angel said that Jesus had risen from the dead, Luke makes this wry comment: “But these words appeared to them as nonsense, and they would not believe them.” Therefore the meaning of resurrection for the Jewish people of Jesus’ day would have made it impossible that any Jew could have believed in the resurrection of Jesus for a second unless it was known that Jesus’ body wasn’t in the tomb, and that Jesus had been discovered to be alive again. The only thing that can reasonably explain this belief is that Jesus had, in fact, risen from the dead. Finally, alternative explanations come up short. Hallucinations, or the idea that the disciples imagined it is a problem because the idea of an hallucination presupposes something about the early disciples that is simply untrue. It presupposes that Jesus’ resurrection was imaginable to the disciples in the first place, which as I have mentioned, simply wasn’t on their radar. Fabrication, or the idea that the disciples just made up the story to exonerate Jesus or themselves for believing in Jesus suffers from the same problem that the imagination view does: the resurrection of Jesus would not have been on their radar. But more than that, it doesn’t explain how hundreds, even thousands of other Jews came to believe in the resurrection, too. Tim Keller makes the argument this way: “Even if you propose the highly unlikely idea that one or two of Jesus’s disciples did get the idea that he was raised from the dead on their own, they would never have gotten a movement of other Jews to believe it unless there were multiple, inexplicable, plausible, repeated encounters with Jesus.” Tons of other theories abound: The disciples stole the body and lied about it to save face. Of course, they ended up losing face, big time, as most of them were tortured to death for their belief in Jesus. Jesus didn’t really die, he swooned but revived following the most atrocious beating and crucifixion (at least for three hours). The disciples suffered from “‘cognitive dissonance’: the hypothetical state, studied within social psychology, in which individuals or groups fail to come to terms with reality, but live instead in a fantasy [that] corresponds to their own deep longings.” In other words, the disciples wanted to believe so badly in the resurrection that instead of facing Jesus’ death, they claimed he was alive. The disciples’ experience of grace and forgiveness slowly morphed into metaphors for their experience which slowly morphed into claims of Jesus’ actual resurrection. And on and on we can go. I can’t say it better than N T Wright. He nails it: [D]espite the somewhat desperate attempts of many scholars over the last two hundred years (not to mention critics since at least [the second century]), no such explanation ahs been found. The early Christians did not invent the empty tomb…or ‘sightings’ of the risen Jesus in order to explain a faith they already had. They developed that faith because of the occurrence….Nobody was expecting this kind of thing; no kind of conversion-experiences would have generated such ideas; nobody would have invented it, no mater how guilty (or how forgiven) they felt, no matter how many hours pored over the scriptures. To suggest otherwise is to stop doing history and to entire into a fantasy world of our own. All this is to say that the best interpretation of the evidence of the empty tomb and the post-crucifixion appearances is that those appearances were post-resurrection appearances! The most plausible interpretation is that Jesus in fact rose from the dead! Jesus rose again! Conclusion Now I know that I haven’t proven the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. You can’t prove an historical event. You can’t put some chemicals in a test tube and prove the Civil War. But what you can do, and what I hope I’ve done is to demonstrate for you that the resurrection of Jesus Christ is at least intellectually credible. It is a reasonable approach to the evidence. And therefore you need to take it seriously. So I ask you, will you take Easter seriously? But more than that, and here I’m going to join with a pastor I deeply respect, Dr Tim Keller from Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City and say that even if you still don’t believe in Jesus’ resurrection, you should want to! You see, Jesus resurrection isn’t simply intellectually credible, but it’s also deeply, personally satisfying. It makes sense of life and death. It gives us real hope for our future. I’ll use his words: “The Biblical view of things is resurrection – not a future that is just a consolation for the life we never had but a restoration of the life you always wanted.”  All the reaching out for immortality that you do every day is meant to be satisfied in a relationship with the risen Christ. In 1 Cor 15:20 says that Jesus is the first fruits of those who are asleep, which means that Jesus is the prototype of our resurrected life. The future resurrection life has already begun in Jesus. And because of Jesus’ resurrection our future resurrection is guaranteed. If you believe in Jesus, the life you deeply long for but that you’re looking to everything and anything else to satisfy (resurrection life) is yours. No more death. No more sin. No more hell. No more weeping or crying or pain or oppression or poverty. It’s all yours in Jesus. More than that, because Jesus was raised from the dead, life matters! Life in this world has meaning – we are not simply the product of the collision of random molecules or the sum total of chemical reactions in our brains. Everything in this world will not simply be destroyed at some unforeseen time in the future when our sun explodes. Instead, because of Jesus’ resurrection we can know that life in the here and now, what we do on earth has meaning – deep meaning and purpose. That’s why Paul can say what he does in 1 Cor 15:58: “Therefore (on the basis of Jesus’ resurrection and yours) be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that your labor is not in vain in the Lord.” It’s not in vain! The good you do for others is not in vain! It’s not in vain because your life is more than this life. Easter proves it. So this Easter, realize that the resurrection isn’t just intellectually credible; it’s also deeply, profoundly satisfying! Turn away from your sin and whatever else your trusting in to give you meaning and purpose in your life and put all your hope in Jesus. He’s alive. And he’s calling you into resurrection life. So come, come to Jesus this Easter and watch in awe as your life turns from winter to spring, now and forever. Amen.