Faith: “strong belief in God or in the doctrines of a religion, based on spiritual apprehension rather than proof.”
Now, we all know the power of faith in the Gospel. We know that our trust in the Word of God, and in the Word made Incarnate…Jesus, comes from the teachings we read in the Bible, from traditional accounts handed down to us through the generations and, perhaps most importantly, from revelation from the third person of the Trinity. The Holy Spirit. Nowhere is this more critical than in the Resurrection. The event we celebrate this weekend. By the way. If you have never been to an Easter Vigil Mass, do yourself a favor and go. It is truly the pinnacle of our faith.
Without the Resurrection we as Christians would be fools. We would be worshipping a man who died a horrible death and then fades into history. It is the Resurrection that separates Jesus from other faiths. No other religion has a figure that compares to Christ. To what he accomplished on earth and how He conquered death. And while faith is sufficient for the believer, it is always helpful to have some facts to back it up. So, I would like to prime you for the joyous celebration we will experience tomorrow, with a few hard to deny back-ups for Jesus rising from the dead.
- Jesus lived and died by crucifixion. We read the history of Jesus’ life and death in the Bible. But there are also multiple Non-Christian authors from the first and second centuries that attest to these facts. Jewish and pagan authors such as Flavius Josephus, Cornelius Tacitus and Maimonides give account of the events of Jesus’ life and His death at the hands of Pontius Pilate during the reign of Tiberius Caesar.
- The Empty Tomb – The tomb where Jesus was buried was found empty Sunday morning by His disciples. The large stone was rolled away. The burial clothes were rolled up and found where His body was laid. Some argue that His body was stolen by His disciples. But the tomb was guarded by Roman soldiers. The burial clothes had expensive spices used to anoint the body at burial. These surely would have been taken when the body was removed. If the disciples stole the body, they would have obviously known that the Resurrection did not happen. And as a consequence they would never have undergone torture and martyrdom for an event that they KNEW never happened.
- the first witness account to the empty tomb told in the Bible was from women. Now I know it is not politically correct today to discount the reliability of testimony from women, but in Jesus’ time women had no credibility on their own. They were not even allowed to act as legal witnesses to criminal events. So if the Apostles wanted to falsely claim that the tomb was empty, they would certainly have used male witnesses in the story, such as Peter or John.
- Many, many, many people saw Jesus after His Resurrection. Mary Magdalene was the first to witness the empty tomb and the risen Jesus in the garden. He appeared to Peter, to the two disciples on the Road to Emmaus. He appeared to all the disciples in the Upper Room. He was seen by more than 500 brothers at one time. Most who were still living at the time of the writing of the Gospels. If the Gospel accounts were fraudulent, these living witnesses would have written accounts dispelling the Gospel version.
- The Apostles went from being frightened and hiding from the Jews after Jesus’ crucifixion to being bold proclaimers of the Gospel soon afterwards. Most of His disciples died a martyr’s death, refusing to recant their testimony to Jesus’ Resurrection. If they KNEW that the resurrection story was fake, do you think they would have allowed themselves to undergo torture and death for a lie
- Christianity exploded in Jerusalem in the weeks following Jesus’ death. If it were a lie, would you have expected that the movement would have developed in the very place where He died and was claimed to have Resurrected?
- Jesus predicted his death by crucifixion. A fate He had little control over. He could not have determined the means of His death at the hands of the Romans.
- Saul, a notorious persecutor of early Christians became Paul and a dedicated follower of Christ and perhaps the greatest evangelist of all time. These events occurred after his vision of Christ on the road to Damascus.
So, there you have it. There is little room for doubt that Jesus Christ lived. That he had large groups of followers. That He died by crucifixion at the hands of the Romans and Jewish leaders. That He was buried in a garden tomb. That the tomb was found empty. And that He was seen alive after His death by many of His disciples. As Paul tells us in 2 Corinthians 5:7:
“For we walk by faith, not by sight.”
But a little factual back-up couldn’t hurt, could it? Happy Easter. “He is Risen!! He is Risen Indeed!”
