By Professor A.N.I. Ekanayaka
Emeritus Professor

Easter commemorates a plain historical event. It is the historical bodily resurrection from the dead of Jesus three days after he had been brutally tortured executed and buried by the mighty rulers of his day around 2000 years ago. It is as much an event of history as the Roman siege of Jerusalem in 70 AD, the American declaration of independence in 1774, the French revolution in 1789, the end of Apartheid in 1989 or any of the innumerable occurrences that mark the timeline of recorded history of mankind on the planet, including for that matter the independence of Sri Lanka from colonial rule in 1948!

Whether people believe it or not, history records that having risen from the dead Jesus appeared to hundreds of people including his disciples who heard him, saw him, talked face to face with him, were able to touch him, ate and drank with him, walked with him were taught by him, and even enabled to make a miraculous haul of fish after a frustrating night’s fishing.

Throughout human history miracles have never failed to thrill mankind. And it goes without saying that raising the dead to life is the ultimate miracle to crown all miracles. Jesus performed innumerable miracles and this included bringing the dead back to life. But what makes his own resurrection staggering is that he not only confidently predicted his own death and the manner of his execution, but he also predicted and precisely controlled the timing of his own bodily resurrection. The Bible records Jesus as saying, “I lay down my life that I may take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down and I have authority to take it up again.” What that means is that having allowed his persecutors to murder him without resisting, he masterminded his own return to life three days later.

Not since the world began has there been a stupendous occurrence of this magnitude. What makes the resurrection of Jesus unique in human history is that from first to last he determined and controlled his own resurrection. It raises the question who was this Jesus who wielded such supreme power over life and death enabling him to raise himself from the dead three days after being entombed?

Who he was logically leads to the question of who Jesus claimed to be during his ministry on earth. Obviously, if Jesus’ resurrection from the dead is to be believed as a fact of history, then he must have been who he claimed to be. This is why the world shrinks from accepting the evidence of history that Jesus rose physically from the dead. The implications of accepting the plain testimony of history about his resurrection are too challenging, for that would involve accepting Christ as whom he claimed to be, rather than an insipid caricature of Christ after the human imagination that people feel more comfortable with.

The logical implications of taking Jesus at his word and believing who he said he was inexorably leads to a radically different uniquely Christian world view and understanding of eternal Truth. It compels a peculiarly and exclusive Christian understanding of the meaning of life, the nature of the human predicament, the means of salvation, and the path to eternal life. That is why even the Church has so many unbelievers heretics and religious pluralists (even apostate priests bishops and cardinals), who nervously dilute distort and reinterpret the truth about the historical resurrection so as to make it more credible to a skeptical world and less in conflict with truth as understood by other religions.

But Christianity stands or falls depending on whether the bodily resurrection of Christ did or did not take place. That is because Christianity is nothing without Christ. It is grounded and centered in the historical Jesus. Not some watered-down image of Christ cut down to what faithless worldly human beings feel able to believe, but the Christ of the Bible in terms of who he boldly and unequivocally claimed to be. The great apostle Paul writing in the spring of AD 55 said, “And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain … if in this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.” So, we come back to the crucial question. Who did Jesus Christ claim to be?

The answer has been the cornerstone of the Christian religion through the ages. Jesus claimed to be God in human form. That he openly and defiantly made this claim is an indisputable fact of history. Jesus claimed to be the perfect human embodiment of the one true Almighty God who has made heaven and earth. He claimed to be perfect God who had become incarnate as perfect man. That is to say God in heaven had taken human flesh taking the form of Jesus the Son of God, entering human history in fulfillment of ancient prophecy at a specific point in time for a specific period of time on a targeted mission to save sinners.

As the writer of the famous letter to the Hebrews in the Bible puts it “in these last days he (God) has spoken to us by his Son (Jesus) whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom (Jesus) also he (God) created the world. He (Jesus) is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature”. It was this astonishing seemingly presumptuous claim making himself equal with God that alienated Jesus from the secular and ecclesiastical authorities of his day who hated him and conspired to do away with him. Otherwise, if he was only a great teacher renowned for his goodness and meritorious works he would have only endeared himself to them.

The historical resurrection of Jesus validates his astounding claim to divine authority over all human kind. Though sounding irreverent it has been rightly said that any man who makes such a claim must have been either mad or bad or God as he claimed! Faced with Jesus’ claim the same choice confronts a skeptical world in every age, whether to reject him as ‘bad’, ignore him as ‘mad’ or to worship him as ‘God’. There are no intervening choices.

Many non-Christians in good faith but through naivety readily concede that Jesus was a good and holy man even the noblest of men, and a great role model of righteousness. Even many Christians who subscribe to a spurious Christianity after their own imagination tend to have the same perspective but with much less excuse. I recently received an email from an old schoolmate in which he admitted that to him “Jesus Christ was the embodiment of social justice and equity”. No doubt he thought he was being kind. But such intended compliments while enabling individuals to remain in their own religious traditions while showing respect for Christianity are in reality a travesty of the truth. They are a denial and mockery of Jesus’ own claim that he was himself the all-knowing omnipotent God who had momentarily laid aside some of his divine attributes so as to come down to earth in great humility and save sinners.

So, if it is true that the historical Jesus physically rose from the dead and if that truth validates his claim to being the eternal Son of God only one question remains. Why did Jesus come down to earth? The answer lies in the great good news of the “Gospel” which defines the Christian religion. It is the news of God’s historic offensive against human sin saving lost mankind through Jesus who came into the world to save sinners. That historic divine visitation in due time was the centerpiece of God’s redemptive plan for sinful mankind. Jesus crucified and rising from the dead was its climax.

The fundamental predicament of mankind in a fallen world is neither social, economic, political nor environmental. It is human sin that has alienated mankind from a holy God provoking his wrath. All people in their natural state even the best and noblest among them are thus alienated from their creator hopeless, guilty, lost, helpless, and walking in the way of death. All their meritorious works are worthless by the standard of God’s perfect holiness. People have no power to save themselves. Sin has corrupted their conscience and captured their will. In their total depravity and total inability, the truth is only God can save. So, the Gospel teaches.

It was to resolve this deadly impasse that Jesus came into the world to save sinners. Jesus became the saviour and sin bearer dying on the cross in place of sinners, paying the price for their sin, victoriously rising from the dead his mission accomplished to rule as anointed king over all creation. In all this, God was in Jesus reconciling sinful humanity to himself so that through the merits of Christ (not worthless human merit), even the worst of sinners who humbly turn to Christ in repentance and faith should not perish but have eternal life! The resurrection validates the Gospel and is indisputable proof that the message of Jesus as Judge and Saviour is true. If the resurrection is believed and Christianity is the ‘truth’ then logically all other understandings of ‘truth’ must be false. That is not to disparage other belief systems. Indeed, the converse is just as true. If what some other religion teaches is considered to be ‘truth’ Christianity must logically be deemed to be false. There is a singular exclusivity about core concepts of eternal truth. Concepts of multiple truth driven by pluralist diplomacy are lacking in intellectual authenticity.

Christianity rests on the certainty of Jesus’ resurrection as a space time occurrence in history. Except for the bodily resurrection of Jesus, the early Church would have rapidly disintegrated and disappeared in humiliating defeat; Christianity would be nonexistent. The fact that beginning with 13 men the fledgling first generation Church survived the ruthless onslaught of the Roman Empire and has since spread to the ends of the earth with countless believers happy to suffer and die for the faith through the running centuries, represents circumstantial evidence for the truth of the resurrection in addition to the historical evidence. It is the burning reality of the historical resurrection of Jesus that has enabled billions of believers down the ages to live victoriously in this present life with the hope of glory in the life to come.