Jesus Rose for Doubters!

Treasured Friends,

One thought I have been pondering this Easter season is that ours is not the first age to have found the resurrection of Jesus Christ a challenge to our assumptions.  C.S. Lewis wrote about the danger of “chronological snobbery,” that proud assumption that every generation is necessarily smarter and better than the ones before.

The danger of such snobbery is precisely its presumptuousness.  On what basis can we confidently assume we know better than our ancestors what happens to bodies when they die?  Does the Bible give us any reason to conclude that those first disciples or the earliest Christians didn’t know what death meant?

In fact, it gives us all sorts of evidence to the contrary.  When the women arrived at the tomb, they came bearing spices and ointments to finish the burial preparations that had begun on Friday but had to be suspended with the approach of the Sabbath (Mark 16:1-3).  When Mary found the tomb empty, she did not immediately celebrate or assume Jesus had risen, but that His body had been stolen and taken somewhere else (John 20:13-16).  When the risen Christ appeared to the larger group of believers and later to Thomas, their first instinct was not to assume that it was Jesus standing in front of them (John 20:19-29).  Similarly, twenty years after the events of that first Easter, Paul encouraged the believers at Corinth not to doubt the resurrection but to believe it because he and others saw it with their own eyes (1 Cor. 15:1-12).

The struggles of those who came before us is one more strong piece of evidence that this really did happen.  Those first disciples may not have known all that modern science has since discovered, but they knew enough.  They’d buried loved ones and knew the sting of death.  They had every reason to assume that the One they’d put in a tomb on Good Friday would never be seen again, but then when they saw Him with their own eyes and heard Him with their own ears they had every reason to believe that the impossible was now possible.  Not only for Him, but for all who are His own.

On the journey with you,

Mike