I do not know if you ever noticed this, but when Hollywood makes movies that have to do with the life of Christ, they are often very good up to the point of the resurrection. When they show the mob crying out before Pilate’s judgment hall, “Crucify Him! Crucify Him!” that always carries conviction. And when the time for the execution itself comes and they begin to drive the nails through the hands of Christ, that is also very real and convincing. Up to that point, everything is alright, if the movie is attempting to be faithful to the biblical account.
Then comes the burial, followed by the resurrection. It is often the case in these films that when the resurrection comes, you can barely discover Jesus Christ at all. I saw one of these films when the resurrection came and the disciples were there. They began to rush around in the early morning of what we call Easter Sunday morning in the joy of the resurrection. But where was Jesus? Finally, there was a sort of mystical, cloudy head up there in the sky, kind of floating away somewhere. It was not a very convincing depiction of the resurrection. And I do not think it would have convinced Thomas, or Peter, or John, or any of the others either.
When you read the Bible, Jesus’ crucifixion was a real death. But it was followed by a real resurrection. When Jesus stood before them and said to touch Him and know that it really was Jesus, they did not have any questions whatsoever. The one who stood before them was the same one who had died. I find it interesting that sometimes even secular writers or those who at least have a secular reputation can say this well. One of them is John Updike, who has described the resurrection in memorable and detailed language in a poem called, “Seven Stanzas at Easter.” Updike wrote:
Make no mistake: if He rose at all it was as His body; if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules reknit, the amino acids rekindle, the Church will fall.
It was not as the flowers, each soft Spring recurrent; it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the eleven apostles; it was as His flesh: ours.
The same hinged thumbs and toes, the same valved heart that–pierced–died, withered, paused, and then regathered out of enduring Might new strength to enclose.
Let us not mock God with metaphor, analogy, sidestepping, transcendence; making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded credulity of earlier ages: let us walk through the door.
The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché, not a stone in a story, but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of time will eclipse for each of us the wide light of day.
And if we will have an angel at the tomb, make it a real angel, weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen spun on a definite loom.
Let us not seek to make it less monstrous, for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty, lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed by the miracle, and crushed by remonstrance.
That is what Paul is talking about in 1 Corinthians 15. This doctrine of the resurrection which he preaches is not mythology. It is not a story that somebody made up to illustrate some profound spiritual truth that is hard to grasp. No, he says this is something that happened, and the fact that it happened makes all the difference in the world. People who are confronted with Christ are therefore confronted not simply with the idea of Christ but with the living Lord of history. This is the one who came to this earth to die for our salvation, and who then rose bodily from the dead, and appeared to His disciples, and ascended to heaven, and in His glorified body will one day in His own time come again to judge the quick and the dead.
When Paul gets to the end of this chapter, he has a great conclusion, but the conclusion has weight only if the resurrection is as real as Paul says it is. When Paul gets to the end, he encourages the Corinthian church, “Therefore, my dear brothers, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain” (v. 58). If there is no real resurrection, our labor in the Lord is in vain, because there would be no forgiveness of sins and peace with God. But if Jesus rose, as the Bible says He did, then it is also true that He will return to reward those who trust in Him. He will raise them from the dead to be with Him forevermore. Therefore, what we have done for Christ really will last. And because of the resurrection, we will stand firm. We sing in one of our hymns these words:
His oath, his covenant, his blood support me in the whelming flood; when all around my soul gives way, he then is all my hope and stay.
On Christ, the solid rock, I stand; all other ground is sinking sand.
