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For the hope of the resurrection

Acts 23: 6 – 10

Rev. Peter R Green, Sunday morning, 16 Apr, 2006

PAUL MET the risen Christ around 35 AD, as he headed to Damascus to persecute Christians. He was still talking about the resurrection at the end of his life.

If one thing was central to his message, it was that Jesus was alive again, that Jesus had risen from the dead.

People sometimes say that, in ancient times, people would believe anything. They say that the people around Jesus were primitive and unsophisticated. They say that resurrection was an easy thing for anyone to believe in those days. They say that we today are advanced and sophisticated and would never be taken in in that way.

Paul went from Jerusalem to Saudi Arabia, to Damascus and into Turkey before travelling across into Greece. Some people even say he got as far as Spain. It’s almost certain that he was executed in Rome around 34 years after he began.

Wherever he went, whenever he went, Paul preached Christ crucified and resurrected.

Ancient attitudes to resurrection

And people found it no more easy to believe in the resurrection then than they do today.

When I was a kid, I liked to read Charles Kingsley’s book, The Heros, about the Greek heros, like Oddyseus, Theseus, Orpheus, Peleus, and so many others. There was the one-eyed giant, Cyclops, there was the kind centaur, Cheiron; there was the Minotaur.

One story was about Orpheus. His beautiful wife, Eurydice, died. Orpheus was determined to get her back, which meant entering Hades, the place of the dead, which he could only reach by crossing the dark, cold river Styx.

Orpheus was a singer of such magical power that he was able to charm the rulers of the dark realms with his songs and bring his wife back to life. However, he was told he must not look at her until they were safely out of the underworld.

He looked back once, and Eurydice was snatched back to Hades.

Not even the greatest and most skilled man could get someone back from the place of the dead. That’s the point of the story.

To the Greeks — and the Romans, who borrowed these stories — death was final. They believed in a ghostly existence in the Underworld, but never in a return to this world.

Even in societies where they thought the spirits of the dead hung around among the living, no one believed that someone might physically return from the dead,

Of course, you suspected all this. After all, the Greeks, the Romans, the pagans around the Middle East — none of them had the Bible.

So what about the People of the Book? What about the Jews? Surely resurrection would be right up their alley?

Not entirely.

Some Jews did believe in resurrection, some didn’t. But not even the ones who believed in resurrection took easily to the idea that it might happen now.

It’s easier to believe in something as a future possibility than to believe in it as a present reality.

When I was small, there were many people who believed that humans would eventually reach the moon, and there were all kinds of speculations about how it could be done. Jules Verne — and he was a bit before my childhood — thought of a giant cannon which could fire a shell to the moon. I don’t remember how he intended to get the people back, though.

I remember pictures of beautiful, shining, polished steel missiles, the kind of thing we now know would burn up on re-entry. That was what some people imagined.

The realists said it would never happen. They pointed out that no one had even managed to get a rocket outside earth's atmosphere. They said that no one would be able to stand the forces of accelleration.They asked how the human body would cope with weightlessness and all that cosmic radiation.

And I'm sure that many of the people who hoped that it would be done didn’t imagine that it was all that realistic a hope.They wouldn’t give it up, but if anyone had phoned up and said, “Listen to the news tonight: Russia has landed men on the moon,” these people would have said, “Nonsense! It won’t be done for another 50 years!”

So the Pharisees who believed in resurrection didn’t expect resurrection in their day.

And the Sadducees were convinced that there would never be a resurrection. It was all superstitious backwoods fundamentalism. It wasn’t going to happen. It wasn’t in the Bible.

Martha, Mary and their brother, Lazarus, were Pharisees. When Lazarus died, Jesus came to see the sisters. We read,

^{JN 11:20} When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went out to meet him, but Mary stayed at home.

²¹ “Lord,” Martha said to Jesus, “if you had been here, my brother would not have died. ²² But I know that even now God will give you whatever you ask.”

²³ Jesus said to her, “Your brother will rise again.”

²⁴ Martha answered, “I know he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day.”

²⁵ Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies; ²⁶ and whoever lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?”

²⁷ “Yes, Lord,” she told him, “I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who was to come into the world.”

Jesus challenged her about her belief in resurrection. She was fine about resurrection on Judgment Day. Could she believe in resurrection today?

Exposing disbelief

This was the world to which Paul preached his message of Christ crucified, risen and coming again.

People didn’t believe it.

When Paul went to Athens, he preached Jesus and Resurrection. Some people thought he was talking about two gods, one called Jesus and one called Anastasia, which means Resurrection in Greek. Other people just thought he was talking nonsense. They asked,

What is this babbler saying?

They could make nothing of this fantastic tale of a dead man coming back to life.

The amazing thing is that Paul never gave up on the message or watered it down.

We see that in that confrontation with the Sanhedrin.

Paul could see that some of them were Sadducees who denied any resurrection and that others were Pharisees who believed that there would be a resurrection, so he said,

“My brothers, I am a Pharisee, the son of a Pharisee. I stand on trial because of my hope in the resurrection of the dead.”

And that had exactly the results he predicted. The council fell into an uproar.

In one sense, what Paul did was an astute political move. He polarised the council, and it couldn’t make a decision about him.

In fact, the Roman soldiers had to rescue Paul from the melée.

But, in another sense, Paul made a very effective move in declaring the gospel to the council itself, and exposing their spiritual bankruptcy.

He didn’t tackle them over whether or not Jesus was the Christ, nor even about whether Jesus had risen from the dead. He tackled them over the whole question of whether they believed in the power of God.

From the moment Paul made that declaration, you will notice that they lost interest in Paul, they lost interest in the case concerning Paul, and all they could think about was themselves.

Paul was saying — and they knew it — that he believed that Jesus was raised from the dead. And he was saying that that confirms his belief since childhood in the resurrection. And he was saying that he had been brought to trial for a belief that was entirely in accord with one recognised strand of Jewish thinking.

But they were not interested in why Paul believed what he believed — though it was Paul on trial. And they were not interested in whether the resurrection had actually occurred — though Paul based his faith in resurrection on that event. They were interested in two competing theories about resurrection and in which of the two theories would win.

The message of the resurrection put the beliefs of the Jewish leaders themselves on trial.

Paul confronted them with the truth, and they couldn’t handle the truth. There wasn’t a good man among them. It is God’s saving deeds which show us his amazing grace and our own depravity and rebellion against himself.

Conclusions

And this brings us our own responses to the news of the risen Christ.

I want to draw two conclusions from this.

The first is, that we must stick to the message of the resurrection, not because it is popular — because it is not — but because it is true.

The second is, that we must always consider our own responses to the message of the risen Christ, and not fall into the Sanhedrin’s trap. We can call that the “San trap” for short.

(a) The truth of the message

I could go into great detail today about why I believe that the resurrection is true. I don’t intend to. I will only outline the case.

I believe it is true, because Jesus himself predicted it.

John, in his gospel, records that Jesus said, ”Destroy this temple, and, in three days, I will raise it again.”

Mark, who seems to know nothing of this statement, records that

...some stood up and gave this false testimony against him: ⁵⁸ “We heard him say, `I will destroy this man-made temple and in three days will build another, not made by man.’ “ ⁵⁹ Yet even then their testimony did not agree.

It sounds like true testimony, until we discover that John remarks that Jesus was not talking about Herod’s Temple, but about his own body.

The testimony against Jesus didn’t agree, because people knew that Jesus wasn’t talking about the man–madeTemple at all.

Linguistic scholars have dug into original Greek copies of all the Gospels, and have translated them back into Aramaic. These Aramaic translations have been computer–analysed, and guess which parts translate most fluently and accurately into Aramaic?

It’s the verses recording Jesus’ sayings about his death and resurrection. These are the most clearly genuine words of Christ. He predicted his death and his resurrection.

We also believe in the resurrection because there were so many witnesses. When Paul wrote to the Corinthians about 15 years after the events, he reported that up to around 500 people at one time saw the risen Christ, and many of them were still alive.

We believe in the resurrection because of the way that it transformed the disciples.

After Jesus died, they were defeated. They scattered. Some of them decided to go home and get on with life.

Yet, after meeting the risen Christ, they were brought together again. They were so convinced of the resurrection that they all went out and preached it. You would expect that, out of 11 men and their close friends, there would have been at least a couple of dissenters if the resurrection had been doubtful or untrue. Yet over 100 people were already together in conviction of the resurrection when Pentecost came.

All but one of these 11 were killed for their faith in the risen Christ. People don’t change so dramatically unless they are absolutely convinced of a new set of facts.

We believe that Jesus rose again, because no one ever produced a body. The simplest way to end the Christian expansion would have been to produce a body. The counter argument, that the Christians stole the body and hid it is a bit silly. Where would you hide a body in the Middle East before they invented refrigeration?

And then there is Paul himself. Transformed from a persecutor into a preacher, through that dramatic meeting on the Damascus Road with the risen and powerful Christ.

Finally, don’t forget the testimony of people down through the ages that, in some way or another, Jesus is alive, and they have encountered him.

That’s a tiny bit of the full story.

We preach the risen Christ, even if the entire world says it can’t have happened. We preach it, because it is true.

(b) Our response

The other side of the question is, “What is my own response to the resurrection?”

I am sure that everyone here assents to the resurrection. We believe that it happened. But does it transform us?

C.S Lewis, who wrote The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, once commented that, just when the world is patting the earth down on the grave of the church, resurrection happens again.

But how often does it seem that the world is patting the earth down on our grave and all that happens is that it bounces back up a little before settling back? Where is the mighty power by which God raised Christ from the dead?

Have we taken to agreeing with the facts, but not letting them have any present reality to us?

Is he alive?

— Yes!

Is he alive today?

— Yes!

Is he alive in your experience of him today?

— Maybe!

Until we can get a resounding, “Yes!” to all three questions, we will be in the San trap with the Sanhedrin Pharisees — believing in the possibility, but unable to grapple with the reality.

Let’s pray:

Lord Jesus, you are risen from the dead. We know that fact. We believe with all our heart that you are alive still today.

Lord, renew in us the experience of your presence. Convince us that you are the living Lord today. Transform us by your risen power, so that we might live and work for you.

AMEN

© Peter R. Green 2006. Permission is granted for quotation in full for non-commercial purposes provided that authorship is acknowledged and this copyright notice is displayed with the text. Portions also copyright The Bible, NIV (Zondervan Ltd.)