Novelist John Updike wrote a poem about the resurrection. It was surprising, seeing as Updike was an author of secular novels with stories that were not necessarily G rated. Here are stanzas one and four of his poem “Seven Stanzas on the Resurrection”:
Make no mistake: if he rose at all
It was as His body;
If the cell’s dissolution did not reverse, the molecule reknit,
The amino acids rekindle,
The Church will fall.
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.
Updike believed in the fact of the literal resurrection. No watering it down into analogy, mere symbol or ethereal vision. None of that wimpy speaking of it as “Christ raised in the hearts of the disciples” with the resurrection’s literalness and physicality considered optional, or maybe even considered embarrassing to modern minds.
Updike must have had a Bible passage from the Apostle Paul in mind. Paul was blunt, he didn’t tolerate any nonsense that distracted from the fact that Christ literally rose from the dead: “…if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins…But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead…” (1 Corinthians 15:17, 20).
Of all the miracles of the Bible, this one has by far the most evidence. The God-inspired writers go to great pains to make sure the reader not only knows about the resurrection, but also makes sure we know that the evidence for it is real, absolute and literal.
Critics might say that the writers made it all up. Well, if critics don’t want to believe, they won’t believe. But there is one thing the critics cannot dismiss–the fact that Christianity was not founded in the usual way that successful movements start. Its hero had no army, had no political connections, no ‘network’. And after a humble three years of public ministry this hero died on a cross, the most humiliating way to die back then. He looked like a loser, and his earliest followers did too.
Usually a movement has a leader who goes from strength to strength. There’s nothing like power and might to win success. And who doesn’t love a winner! Christianity did not look like a winner. There was every expectation that it would die out quickly, and that’s assuming that anyone even bothered to have an expectation for it at all. I remember one church historian noting that Christianity came into a crowded marketplace of religions; its prospects looked bleak amid all the other well-established options.
Christ made no attempt to be successful in the usual way. He made no attempt to live the life, or die the death, of a ‘winner’. Even his closest followers, at least most of them, ran away at the critical moment. This is not the playbook for building a movement.
But when Jesus rose from the grave three days after he died, just as He said he would, it was so real and literal that Roman soldiers trembled. When Christ appeared to his followers they quickly got over their fear and cowardice.
And they never forgot it. They lived the rest of their lives–at whatever cost to themselves–to speak of the truth of what they had seen.
The apostles do not behave like people are following a hoax or a lie or a rumor. They knew a fact: Jesus was resurrected. Their Spirit-empowered movement became unstoppable. Even their enemies took note of their zeal: “When they saw the courage of Peter and John and realized that they were unschooled, ordinary men, they were astonished and they took note that these men had been with Jesus,” (Acts 4:13). What they had was an unshakable belief in the resurrection of Christ.
Charles Colson, one of the advisors to President Richard Nixon, went to prison for his involvement in the Watergate scandal. Colson later became a Christian and one our nation’s leading evangelicals. On one of his Breakpoint radio broadcasts, he spoke about Easter. He compared the apostles to the Watergate conspirators. He said of himself and his co-conspirators:
“There were no more than a dozen of us. Could we maintain a cover-up–to save the president? Consider that we were political zealots. We enjoyed enormous political power and prestige. With all that at stake, you’d expect us to be capable of maintaining a lie to protect the president.
But we couldn’t do it…What we know today as the great Watergate cover-up lasted only three weeks. Some of the most powerful politicians in the world–and we couldn’t keep a lie for more than three weeks.
So back to the question of historicity of Christ’s resurrection. Can anyone believe that for fifty years that Jesus’ disciples were willing to be ostracized, beaten, persecuted, and all but one of them suffer a martyr’s death–without ever renouncing their conviction that they had seen Jesus bodily resurrected? Does anyone really think the disciples could have maintained a lie all that time under that kind of pressure?
No, someone would have cracked, just as we did so easily in Watergate.”
The resurrection of Christ is the foundation of the church, the center of our faith, and along with the cross, the avenue by which we are saved. It was a miracle. Miracles can be hard to accept, especially in this scientific age. But God is God; He can do miracles when He wants to. And he did it with Christ’s resurrection. And because He did it, we can be saved.
Have a happy Easter!