Today's Daily Lesson is from 1 Corinthians 15: 3-5:
3 For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, 4 that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, 5 and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.
Easter is always a great day at church as there is always so much buzz in the air. Yesterday, a ninety-some-odd man stopped me in the hall on our way to worship. "This is the day," he said. "If it wasn't for this day our religion would be deader than a dog in a ditch."
He is right; if it wasn't for the resurrection then the name Jesus of Nazareth would just have been a minor footnote in first century history of the region. His name have been lost in the same way all the other messianic would-bes names have been lost. Gone and soon forgotten.
This is why Paul is so adamant in his telling of what happened. It is of "first importance". Paul says, "he appeared" to Peter and to the twelve, then to 500 some-odd others, and the other apostles, and finally, Paul says, Jesus appeared to Paul himself. Like a skilled trial lawyer, Paul summons all the evidence and eye witness accounts from reliable sources to buttress his case.
I suppose Paul's case rested to some degree on the reliability of the eye witnesses. Were they trustworthy? Did they have integrity? Was there evidence in the way they lived their lives that this claim was true and worth building a life on? Did this extraordinary claim that Jesus rose from the tomb make a difference in these people's lives and their world?
And I suppose the case still rests on the same things 2,000 years later.
Clarence Jordan used to say that the proof of the resurrection isn't so much a rolled away stone, but a carried away church. If we aren't more than a little bit carried away by all this then our religion is, well, deader than a dog in a ditch.
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