Why A Resurrection?

No other event in human history is more important than the resurrection of Jesus Christ. It is the key to all Christian claims. In his first letter to the Church of the Corinthians, the apostle Paul writes that if Christ Jesus has not been raised (from the dead), then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain (15:14). In order to debunk Christianity, the only thing one must do is show that the bodily resurrection of Christ did not happen. If that can be established, it is an automatic game over. At the same time, if Christ really did rise from the dead, then this leaves humankind with a serious dilemma. If Christ resurrected then we should all be Christians, because all that He taught is true and He is the eternal God in the flesh. If Christ did not resurrect then nobody should be a Christian because it is false. To understand the meaning of the resurrection as well as examine the evidence for it to make an educated decision on this matter is essential.

 
In different conversations with people about the nature of Christ, a simple yet profound question can arise: why did Christ have to be put to death and rise again? There are encyclopedic amounts of theological answers to this question, but I shall give a few brief responses to encourage further investigation. The first reason is because Jesus Christ is the Lamb of God. Jesus, born as a Jew in the first century, was a part of Second Temple Judaism. The practice of sacrificing an unblemished lamb to God as an atonement for human sin was a standard and cornerstone practice of the faith. Christ symbolically became the one perfect, eternal sacrifice for the sin of all humankind because no temporal, mortal sacrifice could truly atone for the damage we cause to the supernatural order through our sin. We could never have enough sheep, we could never offer enough sacrifices to make things eternally right with God. Therefore, the Jewish ritual of sacrifice was a precursor, a typological blueprint, to prepare human history for the one final and perfect sacrifice for human atonement. Not only did Christ offer Himself as this sacrifice, he did so during the feast of Passover. Passover was when Jews remember and celebrate the sacrificial blood of the lamb that saved them from death in Egypt and allowed them to escape bondage. That typological event was the precursor to Christ who, as the lamb, shed his blood not just for Jews but for all humankind to escape the bondage of and death because of sin.

 
In the time of Christ, many people claimed to be prophets and the highly anticipated messianic figure proclaimed throughout the Old Testament. In order for Jesus of Nazareth to be associated with the Messiah, He needed to not only teach in a rabbinic role but to show that he had supernatural alignment. The ministry of Christ, as documented by eyewitness testimony throughout the New Testament, includes a variety of miraculous work. Christ healed the sick, gave sight to the blind, made the crippled walk, multiplied food and turned water into wine, walked on water, calmed storms, and even raised people from the dead. By far His most significant and Godly miracle of all was his prophecy that he would be put to death and would rise again on the third day. Human beings are skeptical by nature. Many Jews of His time would see miracles performed and associate it with magic, demons, and tricks. We see references to this in scripture. As one final and most important event to transform not only Judaism but all of human history, Christ Himself defeats our most ancient and powerful foe: death. Christ dies in the bodily form, just as we die in the bodily form, descended into the nether regions where souls had resided up until his perfect sacrifice, and rose again into a newly transformed spirit-body complex that has a different relationship to our perceivable reality. As typology goes, Christ showed us exactly what will happen to every human being at the end of time. Our soul will depart from our bodies upon death, but once the Final Judgment occurs there will be a reuniting of body and soul through the process of resurrection. As the most potent and powerful sign of Christ’s divinity, the resurrection is what assures Christians that even in the face of excruciating martyrdom and suffering, there is ultimate confidence in putting our faith in Christ.

 
One even simpler Catholic school of thought comes from the Franciscan thinking around the Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection of Christ. While in part it was as a means of reparation for sin, it was also a pure act of extreme love. In Christian theology, God is love. The reason for creation, the reason we exist, the reason that God took the form of man, was out of infinite love for every human person. In Franciscan theology, Christ would have entered into human history regardless of sin and simply out of God’s free desire to love man. The Franciscan Journey by Lester Bach puts it like this:

 
It is our belief as Franciscans that God’s love is what prompted God to send Jesus to earth to be with us. Sin is not what influenced God to send Jesus. Rather, whether we had sinned or not, Jesus would have come among us because God’s love seeks to be with us. That love is made visible in the humanity of Jesus, the Christ. Only secondarily did this love rescue us from our sin and unfaithfulness. Hence, one theological truth of faith for Franciscans is - God’s love finds expression in the Incarnation. God chooses to come among us because God loves us.