Easter time is here, happiness and cheer… *Vince Guaraldi’s dulcet tones continue to warm the soul. Or something like that. Like Christmas, Easter is a busy time for my church-employed family. As far as pew-filling goes, it can’t hold a candle to Silent Night on Christmas, but it’s the holiday of Christianity from a theological perspective. It’s tempting to say that there isn’t really good seasonal music for Easter, but that’s incorrect: Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Russian Easter Overture is fantastic, and when you get done with that, you can listen to anything else the man composed, because it’s all great. I’ve read rumors that Rimsky-Korsakov was a pantheist, and there is a quote attributed to him in circulation that asserts the Easter piece was written to evoke non-Christian elements of the holiday too–even though Easter is not a pagan holiday! I keep pestering my organist mother to get her church to play it for one of their services, but she keeps giving me this line about how hiring a full orchestra would be “impractical”. Ugh. Whatever.
The pastors always seem to get really into the holiday, which makes sense–you wouldn’t think they’d be there otherwise. Like Christmastime, Holy Week and the time prior is a busy and stressful season, and come Easter day, the staff is usually at their limit. But the spirit of the holiday gives them this invigoration. It’s kind of sweet to watch: the artist and his muse. It must be so disheartening to see such full seats on Easter and then a drop to regular numbers the next week. Christmas can be excused: that’s an old cultural thing, and people are with family for the holiday. But Easter? If you liked what you heard, why not come back next week? If not, why show up again next year?
The verses that will be read are Matthew chapter 28, Mark 16, Luke 24, and John 20, among others. These are the various accounts of the women going to anoint the corpse of Jesus, only to find an unsealed tomb and an angel (or pair of angels) telling them the good news that Christ is risen. Death is not permanent: God can and has defeated it. It’s the linchpin for Christian theology. The resurrection is evidence that everything in the religion matters: grace, forgiveness, redemption. The apostle Paul put it succinctly in 1 Corinthians 15: “13 If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. 14 And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith” (NIV). For 1500 years, give or take, the Western world has based its outlook on life on this point: Christ is risen. It was an uncontested backbone of Western philosophy until the Enlightenment, but even still it’s the dominant hegemon by a wide margin.
Using the parlance of the Easter story, the watchword is the “empty tomb” (I know, that’s two words). The tomb is empty, ergo Jesus is not here; he is risen. For the better part of the West’s recent history, that was the foregone conclusion. This is the Gospel truth. And there’s no harm in doubting–as Thomas did in the Gospel of John. But rest assured that this is what happened. At the end of the day, you can rely on that historical truth. What separates the Abrahamic religions from most of the religions of antiquity was historical realism. Zeus and his companions were stories of “once upon a time”, but Jesus was an actual man in a very discrete temporal locus. I mean, our calendar is based on a calculation of when he was born. It’s an interesting niche. As history as a discipline has developed, it’s only reasonable that we would analyze the story of Jesus with a keen historical eye. Christian historical scholarship is indeed a substantial field. But the vast, vast majority of the scholarship is done by believers. It makes sense. For one, most people in the West are Christians, so your odds of any given historian being Christian is pretty good to start. And the faith gives its adherents incentive to study the subject. But this presents as a phenomenally substantial bias. Like most biases, it is one its bearers seem oblivious to. There are exceptions to the rule (John Shelby Spong comes to mind), but for the most part the bias is painfully obvious from an agnostic’s perspective.
I decided to angry up the blood and re-read Lee Strobel’s The Case for Christ tonight, looking over the chapter on the empty tomb, which involves him having a back-and-forth with scholar William Lane Craig. Craig is one of the paragon examples of a scholar oblivious to their own bias. Strobel is biased as all get-out too, but he’s not a scholar, so whatever. The argument really boiled down to: “Are you sure the empty tomb is a historical fact?” “Yeah, I mean, I think so”. “Okay, cool.” I won’t take the annoyingly tepid exchange as the Christian case for the arguments, but it is a fairly common representation of the arguments. At the root of a lot of appeals to the gospels being accurate historical accounts is really an argument from incredulity: why would the disciples lie? What would they have to gain? Well, how about everything? Again, Paul himself phrased it so well in 1 Corinthians 15. The precise details about what actually happened are frankly irrelevant, and demanding skeptics lay out an irrefutable chain of events is to fight a straw man–as many Christians seem keen on doing. The details may be fun to ponder, for sure, but at the end of the day, some disciples ended up with a dead teacher who they though had a special connection with God.
Paul continues in the same chapter, “15 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. But he did not raise him if in fact the dead are not raised. 16 For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised either. 17 And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. 18 Then those also who have fallen asleep [died] in Christ are lost. 19 If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied” (NIV).
The disciples understood this. They saw Joseph of Arimathea take to body off the cross and seal it up in a tomb. Imagine you’re there. You sit outside that tomb. It’s dark, cloudy, rainy–how could it be anything else? You stare into that stone seal that encases that tomb with the body of everything your faith stands for. Grace, forgiveness, redemption: they all rest of that body not being there.
What’s the alternative? God is not with us. God will not forgive us. God will not make us new again. The dead are dead and will never have life again. That’s it. All we are is a fleeting moment in time. Suffering will never be undone. Crime will go unpunished, virtue will go unrewarded. There’s no God, no higher power, no raison d’être. Just a corpse in a tomb. There but for the grace of God go you.
“How do you explain the empty tomb?” asks the apologist. The believer needs the argument to be over an empty tomb. Because the alternative, the utterly indescribably terrifying alternative that the tomb wasn’t empty? That means nothing.
So you bow your head, close your eyes, and clasp your hands in prayer. “He is risen!”
He is risen indeed.