Resurrection—Sense or Nonsense

One of Jesus' disciples was Thomas, also called Didymus in Greek. The ESV and several other Bible versions translate the Greek word as Twin, which is certainly one of the correct meanings of the word. It can also mean twofold. Some have guessed that Thomas was the twin brother of Matthew, and was originally called Jude. Jude, they say, was the son of James the Less, and therefore grandson of Alpheus. Some legends make Thomas the twin of James. But it is all conjecture and guesswork. We do not know.

The thing about Thomas is that he was not an easy man to convince. And that makes him valuable. John tells us that when the other disciples reported that Jesus was alive and that they had seen him, he dispensed with their witness, saying, "Unless I see in his hands the mark of the nails and place my finger into the mark of the nails and place my hand into his side, I will never believe" (John 20:25).

That makes Thomas, the Twin, a very modern man. He needed rational, solid physical evidence. He was not about to put up with dreams, visions and wild imaginings. He needed scientific proof. When Jesus provided the kind of proof Thomas demanded, he exclaimed, "My Lord and my God!" In other words, he had seen and touched Jesus. His faith rested secure. He had scientific, tangible, sensible, palpable proof of the resurrection.

Because we cannot touch Jesus and certainly not see Him with our hands, eyes and senses, many modern men reject this and all other accounts as mere legends. There are those who say that John's Gospel was not written by the John who was part of Jesus' inner circle of disciples (Matthew 17:1), but decades later by a group of disciples that were a kind of group that liked the way John thought. By that time the legends about the resurrection were full blown. The basis for this view of John's Gospel is based upon some rather far out presuppositions I won't bother with at this time.

Following the lead of those folks however, there are those who say it does not matter whether you believe in the physical resurrection. Instead, they write about the resurrection as being something they call spiritual and not physical. By this they seem to say that the early Christians shared some internal experience of Christ, some renewed idea of life beyond the grave. They did not need to see Jesus' physical body at all. As I read these people's writings I'm quite confused by what that is supposed to mean. There are even some who teach this nonsense and still want to be called Lutheran.

Finally, there are those who reject the whole thing as nonsense. There is no resurrection of any sort, they say. There never was and there never will be. Humanist Richard Carrier is one such. He writes about why he does not buy the resurrection story. He rejects all ideas of resurrection, physical, spiritual or you name it. He says that no wise or compassionate God would expect us to believe such an incredible thing as the resurrection without providing every necessary proof, not through unreliable mediaries like John and the other disciples. 

"This is the very principle that has delivered us from superstition to science. Any claim can be made about a drug, but people are rightly wary of swallowing anything that hasn't been thoroughly tested and re-tested and tested again. Since I have no such proofs regarding the resurrection story, I'm not going to swallow it, and it would be cruel, even for a god, to expect otherwise of me. So I can reason rightly that a god of all humankind would not appear in one tiny backwater of the Earth, in a backward time, revealing himself to a tiny unknown few, and then expect the billions of the rest of us to take their word for it, and not even their word, but the word of some unknown person many times removed."

So why are we Christians stupid enough to believe that Jesus really did rise from the dead and that we also will share in that resurrection, that physical, tangible, bodily resurrection? Listen to what John records Jesus saying to Thomas after he acknowledged Jesus as his Lord and God.

"Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed."

Then John writes a conclusion to his Gospel story,

"Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name" (John 20:29-31).

John wrote much about the signs of Jesus. He turned water to wine, healed the sick, raised Lazarus from the dead, fed thousands with a few loaves of bread and some fish and, above all other signs, He Himself returned from death. However, again and again, we read, "Though he had done so many signs before them, they still did not believe in him." And why not? John says, "they loved the glory that comes from man more than the glory that comes from God" (John 12:43).

In His sermon on the mount Jesus said, "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God"(Matthew 6:5). The impure in heart needs nothing that Jesus has to offer. This man believes himself without sin, able to satisfy God's anger by his righteous life—if there even is a God. Self-centered rather than God-centered, he claims purity and goodness for himself. He needs no revelation. He has all he needs with his mind, his science, his rationality, his learning and his philosophy. Armed with these he boldly marches toward eternity and darkness, believing nothing but what his senses tell him.

The pure in heart, however, has no such allusions about himself. He joins the Apostle Paul to admit that the "law of sin" is at work within his members and thus he is doomed to death (Romans 7:18-24). However, such a man is blessed, Jesus says, because he has no choice other than to throw himself upon God's mercy. To this poor sinner God speaks His word, the word about which John wrote, the Word of God made flesh and blood in Jesus (John 1:1-14). The Spirit works in John's written word to reveal the Word given to the world, namely Jesus, the long-awaited Messiah, the Son of God sent by His Father to bear the weight of all men's sins, to suffer for them, to die and to rise again on the third day. The sinner who believes this has a gift, given by God's unmerited grace and kindness. He is a new creation. He believes, believes because his Creator has worked this faith in his heart. He has been reborn to a new a living hope (John 3:5-8; 1 Peter 1:3;).

The self-righteous unbeliever knows nothing of this. For him we can only pray.