“Unassailable Light and Life”
“Unassailable Light and Life”
Acts 2:14a, 22-32
Acts 2:14a, 22-32
A few years back I had the opportunity to watch a BBC documentary on the famous cyclist Lance Armstrong entitled Stop at Nothing. Back during the time when Lance won a record 7 Tour De France titles from 1998-2005, I was a big fan of this larger-than-life hero. Every night I’d watch two hours of highlights and be in awe of Lance and the other cyclists as they rode daily for hours and hundreds of miles through the beautiful countryside and the grueling uphill climbs through the mountains. Nor did I take seriously the taunts over the years by critics who called him a doper, that is, until 2012 when he pleaded guilty to doping allegations and was stripped of all of his titles.
Like millions of others, I was shocked as Lance became known as America’s greatest cheater, and Stop at Nothing provided the explosive backstory of the greatest fraud in sporting history, as he enriched himself by cheating his fans, his sport, and the truth. In the end his nemesis was his former friends and teammates whose lives and careers were destroyed as Armstrong’s cheating and bullying became more extreme.
In truth, Lance Armstrong was the ring leader of the most sophisticated, professionalized, and successful cover-up ever seen in sport. But only for seven years, as finally a few brave souls from the inner circle decided to come clean in spite of huge pressure to keep silent. The truth finally got out and it begs the question: If this sophisticated cover-up failed, do you think the uneducated disciples of Jesus could have been successful in pulling off a hoax – asserting that Jesus rose from the dead and somehow, they got His body out of the tomb and safely hidden away? It’s the same perspective I heard previously regarding a similar cover-up at a place called Watergate back in the 1970s which resulted in the resignation of President Nixon. Christian author Josh McDowell pointed out that there were twelve men surrounding President Nixon, who tried to pull off the cover-up – sophisticated lawyers. They failed to dupe the public, and, if they couldn’t, how could a group of twelve uneducated fishermen possibly succeed in a conspiracy where they remained a united front by insisting that the body of their Leader, Jesus of Nazareth, had not been hidden away some place, but instead that He had experienced resurrection?
On this second Sunday of Easter that’s the assertion of St. Peter twice in today’s lesson from the Book of Acts. Jesus is risen from the dead – and it’s stood the test of time for over 2,000 years. This is the rock-solid foundation of our faith – God’s precious gift of unassailable light and life granted to a benighted world. Yet from the very beginning there has been a backlash to turn it into a cover-up, a hoax. In truth, on the day of Resurrection a conspiracy was set in motion, but not by Jesus disciples. Rather Jesus’ enemies, the Jewish authorities were forced to deal with the embarrassing fact of the empty tomb. They could have put a stop to all the wild rumors about a resurrection by pointing to a sealed tomb and producing a body. However, the seal was broken and the body missing. Thus, there was the need for an official plot. Even as Mary Magdalene and the other women were running to report to Peter and the other disciples their discovery of the empty tomb, the bribed Roman soldiers were rehearsing an alibi, their role in the scheme of damage control. They would claim that Jesus’ disciples came during the night and stole Him away while they were asleep. But how could a huge stone be rolled away without disturbing sleep? Also, how could they identify the disciples if they were asleep?
So much more could be said about the various conspiracy theories developed through the ages that would seek to disprove the fact of Jesus’ Resurrection. Skeptics have claimed that the many eyewitnesses were experiencing mass hallucinations. Really, five hundred at a time? And then there arose the theory brought forth in the book The Passover Plot where the author alleges that Jesus never died after crucifixion, but merely swooned. But those don’t stand a chance against the proof of simply eliminating the possible suspects. Did the Jews take the body? No. Romans? No. Disciples? No. Grave Robbers? No. However, to me, the greatest proof was with the disciples and how hard it was for them to believe. Some people who discount the Resurrection of Jesus tend to portray them as gullible rubes. There’s a term called chronological snobbery where we modern people take claims of a bodily resurrection with skepticism while the ancients were more naïve and immediately accepted a supernatural event as the resurrection. However, the report of Jesus’ resurrection would have been unthinkable to the Jews. By Jesus’ day many Jews had come to hope that someday in the future there would have been part of the complete renewal of the whole world. However, the idea of an individual being resurrected in the middle of history while the rest of the world continued to suffer sickness and death was inconceivable. If someone had said to any first century Jew, “so and so has been raised from the dead!” the response would be: “Has disease and death ended and true justice established in the world? Are you crazy?”
That’s the Jewish world the disciples lived in, and that was an engrained part of their mindset. Though Jesus had reportedly foretold that He would first suffer and die, but then rise on the third day, it was like talking to a blank wall. It didn’t sink in, and even after hearing from Mary Magdalene that something totally unexpected had occurred, the empty tomb – that of itself, did not convince them. They believed Peter’s eyewitness confirmation that the tomb was empty, but that fact only demonstrated, “He is not here,” not, “He is risen.” The only one who really “got it” was Mary, the sister of Lazarus who had anointed Jesus for His burial. The disciples were still in a fog. None of them believed the wild report of the women. Resurrection. “Nonsense,” they called it. Contrary to the view that the disciples were gullible rubes, the disciples were hardened in disbelief. Consequently, convincing the skeptical disciples would require intimate personal encounters with the One Who had been their Master for three years. Only continuous appearances of Jesus could dispel the powerful influence of life’s grim reality: Is not death by definition irreversible? For the next seven weeks until Pentecost, Jesus provided the living proof they needed.
And the result. Jesus made His identity so obvious that no disciple could ever deny Him again (and none did). In a word, Jesus overwhelmed the witness’ faith. Anyone who saw the resurrected Jesus lost the freedom of choice to believe or disbelieve. Jesus was now irrefutable. Jesus succeeded in changing a snuffling band of unreliable followers to fearless evangelists. What else explains the whiplash change in men known for their cowardice and instability? One need only read the Gospel’s description of disciples huddling behind closed doors, and then proceed to the book of Acts as in our lesson, where Peter and the other disciples were proclaiming Christ openly in the streets to sense the seismic significance of what took place on the Sunday of the Resurrection. They expressed absolute faith in the resurrected Jesus. Peter used Psalm 16 where King David declared: “Your Holy One will not see decay,” by insisting David, the prophet, was going beyond his own life and time. Instead, David was pointing to Jesus, Who was not abandoned to the grave and whose body did not see decay. Boldly Peter proclaimed: “God has raised this Jesus to life and we are all witnesses of the fact.” Jesus’ resurrection became the epicenter of belief where those few witnesses set loose a force that would overcome violent opposition in Jerusalem and then Rome and beyond.
In truth, something had happened, something beyond all precedent. Surely the disciples would not lay down their lives for the sake of a cobbled together conspiracy theory. No, the electrifying message was this: God’s power had come from outside of history into this world. The first Christians had a resurrection centered view of reality and it brought forth unassailable light and life to the world. Jesus died for our sins in our place so that through faith we can know His love and receive a guarantee of eternal life – all by grace as a gift. Because Jesus’ death for sin and resurrection happened in history everything has changed. We will be resurrected and every tear wiped away.
So, after hearing all of this, does it prove beyond a shadow of rational doubt that the resurrection of Jesus Christ actually occurred? Frankly, no event in past history can be proven the way something can be tested in a laboratory. We can’t know that William the Conqueror invaded England in 1066 the way we know a compound liquifies at such and such a temperature. There is room for intellectual doubt of every historical event, but, to me, theologian N.T. Wright gets to the heart of it when he declares:
No other explanations have been offered, in 2000 years of sneering skepticism … that can satisfactorily account for how the tomb became empty, how the disciples came to see Jesus, and how their lives and world views were transformed.
The unassailable light and life of the Resurrection. Why would the disciples of Jesus have come to the conclusion that His crucifixion had not been a defeat but a triumph – unless they had seen Him risen from the dead? However, in spite of all the historical and rational arguments, we must appropriate these truths personally by faith. “Blessed are those who have not seen, and yet have believed,” Jesus said to doubting Thomas.
Even if some of us or our loved ones have doubts, don’t we all at a deep level want the Easter story to be true? Something deep within us cries out against the reign of death. However, may it be for most all of us here that do believe, that we hold on to this understanding: Since He rose from the dead we can trust that His words and promises are true. We don’t have to be afraid of anything. There’s infinite hope and reason to pour ourselves out for the needs of the world – that some seeing the expressions of our love would open the door of their hearts, even so slightly at first, to Him Who is the Way, the Truth, and the Resurrection life.