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Opinion: What if the Easter story is true?
20 March 2008
Dr Bruce Manners
Senior minister, Avondale College Seventh-day Adventist Church
The Easter story sounds simply unbelievable. Not the chocolate and rabbits and eggs bit, but the Jesus bit. You know: the part where He dies and then lives again.
We can't dismiss many things about the story of Jesus. We know a man called "Jesus" lived in first-century Palestine. He served as a rabbi, a teacher, who challenged the religious thinking of His day. His popularity among the commonfolk couldn't save Him from the powerful. Too many of them hated Him--hated Him enough to condemn Him to death. After His death, His teaching spread quickly throughout the Roman Empire and beyond.
Today, Christians would have you believe He died and then rose from the dead. A demonstration, they say, of God's plan for His followers, a plan involving life eternal. This sounds like something we should consign to fables from days of yore. It sounds unbelievable.
Yet, after His death, there were enough people with an interest in producing Jesus--dead or alive--to make it difficult for Him or His followers to get away with any deception. It never happened.
But, we need to consider another factor: people still believe! It began with those who followed Him. They were there. They say they saw Him, touched Him and ate with Him--after His resurrection. They said He was alive. They believed it with a passion. So, they spread the news. Within a few decades, almost all of them had died a martyr's death because they believed Jesus was alive. They were certain he was alive.
And we have passed that certainty on for centuries. It's a certainty of belief that isn't going away. It's a certainty that may sound unbelievable, but one that's worth checking out. It's a certainty worth celebrating--this Easter.
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