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Published 5:32 pm Friday, April 10, 2020
For the moment, ignore everything else, even the current pandemic. Let’s focus instead on what tomorrow, Easter Sunday, means. As writer G.K. Chesterton said, “The most wonderful thing about miracles is that they sometimes happen.”
Christians believe a miracle occurred, now marked by this movable feast we call Easter. In many ways, it forms the crux of history.
Chesterton scholar Dale Ahlquist wrote that something unique occurred on that morning, when a tomb was found to be empty, and a resurrected Christ appeared before his followers.
“The more we study it, the more we see that Christianity is truly different from any other religion,” Ahlquist wrote in “G.K. Chesterton: Apostle of Common Sense.” “The Church carried a unique message, and it puzzled the world that its members acted like messengers. They even called their message the gospel, the good news.”
That good news, unique among religions of the time, was revolutionary. God became man, and died in our place, in repayment for our sins. His resurrection was the seal, the assurance of our salvation.
And it’s a key historical claim. It’s either a historical fact, or it is not. And upon that hinges everything.
“If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the dead,” acknowledges the Apostle Paul in I Corinthians, Chapter 15 (New International Version).
Arguments against the resurrection, of course, are invariably circular. Such an event could only happen if it was a miracle, and miracles are impossible. Why are they impossible? Because they’re miracles, which can’t happen. See the flawed logic here?
And as Chesterton liked to point out, the arguments also are contradictory. Daily, we base the lives of criminal defendants on the judgment of 12 common people. It’s not a perfect system, but we, as a society, have decided it’s the most reliable, least corruptible, and the system most likely to determine the true facts.
Why, then, is the resurrection dismissed, based on the fact it was judged to have occurred by 12 common people, the Apostles?
There’s no doubt those 12 common people and their good news changed the world. Some historians like to claim Christianity changed it for the worse; that’s demonstrably untrue.
As Chesterton said, “It did not shake the world; it steadied the world.”
“It has endured for nearly 2,000 years; and the world within it has been more lucid, more levelheaded, more reasonable in its hopes, more healthy in its instincts, more humorous and more cheerful in the face of death, than all the world outside,” he said.
Ultimately, of course, the fact of the resurrection is a matter of faith for each of us to consider ourselves. Its meaning, however, is even larger and shouldn’t be overlooked. God took the greatest pity on us, then sealed it with a promise.
Christ is risen indeed.