The scriptures referred to are Matthew 28:1-10.
Comedian John Mulaney was performing at Graceland, and he brought his 4-year-old son. The boy is a huge Elvis fan and so he wanted to tour Elvis' house. While they were in the famous “Jungle room” his son asks if he can meet Elvis. And Mulaney realizes that he doesn't know that Elvis is dead. And all of his son's grandparents are alive and he has never had a goldfish. He has never experienced death and loss. And now Mulaney has to figure out how to tell his son that everybody dies. He opts to simply tell him that Elvis is in heaven. But like all kids, his son asks why. How do you tell a child that his hero died in the most humiliating way, from drug abuse while on the toilet? In relating the story to Stephen Colbert, Mulaney jokes that he told his son, “Well, sometimes when people are in their early 40s, and they have a job and a schedule a lot like Daddy, and some of the same issues as Daddy, they go to the bathroom and they go to heaven.”
How did you learn that everyone dies? When did you realize that you will one day die? It's not a secret, yet while we may decide it's time to tell a kid about the facts of life, we don't usually have a formal talk on the end of life. It just sort of hits you when a pet or a person you love dies. And, weirdly, while it makes sense that you become sad, it is not uncommon that it strikes you as unfair. That's why one of the stages of grief is anger.
And yet in one sense death is the fairest thing there is: it happens to everyone without exception. One can see it as unfair when a person dies young or in a terrible manner. But everyone dies. That's the moral of the oldest surviving written story, the Epic of Gilgamesh. When his best friend, Enkidu, dies, Gilgamesh goes searching for eternal life. But the answer he receives from the only man to survive the great flood is, “Life, which you look for, you will never find. For when the gods created man, they let death be his share, and life withheld in their own hands.”
Even gods die in many mythologies. The Greek god Pan dies. The Egyptian god Osiris dies and becomes king of the underworld. At Ragnarok, the Norse gods, including Odin and Thor, die.
The founders of religions die. The Buddha died in Uttar Pradesh in India some time in the 5th century BC. Muhammad died on June 8, in the year 632 AD. Moses died before entering the promised land, possibly in the 13th century BC. And Jesus died on a Friday in either 30 or 33 AD. But only one of them rose to life again.
Of course, the disciples all knew that the dead don't come back to life, not until the end of the present evil age when all are resurrected to face judgment. Which is why every gospel mentions them doubting when they hear the women say he is risen. Even when they encounter the risen Jesus, they think at first that he is a ghost. Which is why he has them touch him and why he eats with them. He raised others who died of natural deaths but his rising by himself after being crucified is something unprecedented.
Of course, a lot of people since then have doubted this as well. They say the disciples went to the wrong tomb, or all hallucinated the same thing, or just made it up. None of these alternate explanations hold up. The authorities could have simply produced the body.
And why would the disciples do this? To keep the movement going? But Buddhism, Judaism and Islam survived the deaths of their founders. Plus the disciples got persecuted and martyred for holding to their belief. There was no incentive to lie, not when it could get you killed. Yet not one renounced the resurrection.
Could the story have evolved over time, like the legend of King Arthur? There's not enough time. The documents show that it took hundreds of years for a battle leader possibly named Arthur to evolve into the king of all Britain in the now magical tales. But the earliest Christian writings, Paul's letters, already refer to Jesus as God's Son, “whom he raised from the dead.” (1 Thessalonians 1:10) That's in Paul's first letter to the Thessalonians, dated around 50 AD. So it took centuries for a warrior to simply become king but only 2 decades for Jesus, whom people still remembered, to become God's crucified and risen Son?
Plus the first description of Jesus' resurrection appearances is found in Paul's first letter to the Christians in Corinth, composed around 55 AD. He writes, “For I passed on to you as of the first importance what I also received—that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died. Then he appeared to James, and then to all the apostles. Last of all, as though to one born at the wrong time, he appeared to me also.” (1 Corinthians 15:3-8) It is gutsy for Paul to mention the 500 who saw him and remark that most are still alive. In other words, Paul is saying, “You don't have to take my word for it; ask one of them.”
Incidentally, this explains why the gospels were written later. There was no need for the words and works of Jesus to be written down while there were living witnesses around, who could come to your church and tell you about him. The gospels were probably written because of the martyrdoms of the apostles. Mark, who worked with both Peter and Paul, wrote the first gospel in the early to mid-60s AD, when those two were executed by Nero. Matthew and Luke basically took Mark's gospel and added the stories and teachings of Jesus they had access to. John's gospel, composed in the 90s AD, 60 years after the resurrection, appears to have been written with knowledge of the other three and so skips some of the events they record and concentrates on his additional material. John's gospel lets us know that Jesus' ministry lasted at least 3 years.
The process is similar to biographies written about C.S. Lewis, who died in 1963, a little over 60 years ago. I've read most of them and each has facts the others don't. Lewis' stepson David Gresham, who is still alive, revealed things that earlier biographies, mostly written by friends and former students of Lewis, didn't have. And the most recent, written by Alister McGrath, who did not know Lewis, unearthed still more facts and even corrected a crucial date, the year Lewis became a Christian, by reading everything Lewis wrote, including his letters, in chronological order.
While some extreme skeptics try to eliminate the problem by saying Jesus never existed, he is actually better attested by ancient writers than some other historical persons, like Socrates. Bart Ehrman, a respected New Testament scholar who is not however a believer, counts at least thirty ancient independent sources that knew the man Jesus existed. Of course, he and other historians doubt the resurrection. But even historian Michael Grant admitted that without the resurrection of Jesus, it was hard to explain not only the survival of the movement but its explosive growth. But if Jesus defeated death, that would account for it.
Some people think that the idea of resurrection or even an afterlife is unnecessary. If everyone just acknowledged that death is the end, they would realize how precious life is and behave better. But we have seen that is not true. The atheistic countries of the Soviet Union, communist China, and Cambodia killed nearly twice as many people in 1 century (67 million) than are attributed to Christians in 20 centuries (36 million). If anything, belief in the God we see in Jesus restrains us from being as violent as we can be. Because it is just as easy to think that if this is the only life you get, and that there's no afterlife or judgment, then there is ultimately no justice in the universe, life is meaningless in the long run and you should just do whatever you want.
But does Christianity need the resurrection? Aren't its moral teachings enough? Thomas Jefferson cut up a couple of Bibles to paste various passages into a book he entitled The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth. He omitted all of the miracles including the resurrection. I wonder if he noticed that much of what Jesus taught about how to live makes no sense without the resurrection. Jesus said, “You have heard that it was said, 'An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.' But I say to you, do not resist the evildoer. But whoever strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other to him as well.” (Matthew 5:38-39) He tells us to love our enemies and to pray for those who persecute us. (Matthew 5:44) Crucially he says, “If anyone wants to become my follower, he must disown himself, take up his cross, and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and for the gospel will save it.” (Mark 8:34-35) That's a good way to get yourself killed. It got Jesus killed. If death is the end, this is suicide. Jesus' morals would be foolish, not wise.
But what if the afterlife is just continuing in a disembodied state, free from the flesh and its limitations? That would be like being a living brain in a jar or an AI program, where you would unable to use the senses you had while in a body or use the skills you learned and the talents you honed in this life. That doesn't seem like a reward for living in this world. It seems like being imprisoned in a sensory deprivation tank. It seems like hell.
God made the world and pronounced it good. He made us as unities of body and spirit. The spiritual gives the physical meaning and the physical gives the spiritual form and agency. He made us able to sing and dance and run and climb and play and embrace and help one another through the bodies he gave us. The Gnostics thought the material universe was irredeemably bad. The Bible says that the physical universe is good, loaded with God's gifts. It is our misuse, abuse or neglect of them that creates evil. With our intelligence and our bodies we can enhance and save lives or we can harm and destroy them, the same way you can use a knife to perform surgery or commit murder.
Not only does Jesus' resurrection make sense of our embodied existence and his teachings about how to behave, it also demonstrates God's plan for us and for all of creation. Lots of people think the story of the Bible concludes with the end of the world. But it actually continues with the creation of a new heaven and a new earth. God is restoring things to the way he intended them to be, populated by folks who are new creations in Christ, who love and trust him and who love and trust each other, and who use his gifts in good and creative and helpful and healthy ways.
One characteristic of life is growth. Plants and animals grow. Our bodies and our minds grow. And we are meant to grow spiritually as well. Paul talks about how we are to “reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, reaching to the very height of Christ's full stature.” (Ephesians 4:13) But how are we finite beings ever going to be able to become completely like the one who is infinite? Only by growing forever. The afterlife is not going to be eternal stasis but eternal growth. It will be a life where our growth in understanding and wisdom and the use of our talents and gifts will not be cut off by death or limited by age. There will always be new horizons to discover. There will always be new things to learn, new things to do and new ways to do them. There will be all the time in the world to find and do good things and to share them with others.
Jesus Christ's resurrection did not just give him new life; it gives all people the opportunity to have a new life. All we have to do is give to him our messed up and limited lives and open ourselves to receive his life, eternal life, the life of the God who is love. Jesus opened up a new way of living, not just to live for ourselves but for him and for others. And he opened a new realm in which we can live, the kingdom where God reigns and his will, to give life in all its abundance, is done on a reborn earth as it is in heaven. When we enter into Christ's life, we will see not only that death is not the end of all our adventures but is the beginning of new ones we can not possibly imagine. It is not the end of all we are but the real start to achieving all that we can be. In Christ, we will find the life we were looking for, the life we were longing for, the life God made us for. He is not withholding it from us; he is holding it out to us. And it can begin now!
