About a generation after the death of Jesus, Paul wrote to the church at Corinth, a city in Greece, “If Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation is in vain and your faith is in vain.”
The verse is from the 15th chapter of First Corinthians, a chapter worth reading in full – won’t take you long – on Easter Sunday.
Babylon Bee was ahead of the pack by having the Bibe-waving Donald Trump compose his “first epistle to the Floridians.” That’s pretty clever. The Bible is light on jokes, heavy on thought. The above thought from Paul is among the most powerful in monotheism – as well as the key to why Easter is 100X more important than Christmas.
To locate me on the faith spectrum: I am a Christian agnostic. That’s a real thing. More here.
Christmas is a wonderful holiday for children, too commercialized and too focused on materialism for adults. Still, wonderful.
That Christmas is both a religious and a secular event sometimes gets lost. You don’t need to be Christian to celebrate the secular aspects of the day.
Those who want Christmas lights and shiny decorations out of public schools and courthouses seem confused regarding this. There are no flying reindeer or toy-making elves in the Bible! In any event the much-exaggerated “war on Christmas” each season ends with unconditional surrender of the attacking forces.
There are two Christmas accounts in the Gospels, in the initial chapters of Matthew and Luke. Matthew offers the adoration of the magi (Persian priests); in Luke the arrival of Jesus is announced not to kings or princes of the assembly but to “shepherds living in the field,” too poor to hire guards to watch their flock.
That laborers without means or influence are chosen to receive the celestial child into history is one of the aspects that make this story feel real. If you were fabricating a Messiah, the birth would be decreed amidst rays of golden splendor in a palace -- not told to some destitute workmen who haven’t had a bath in a month.
However this is viewed, Christmas fundamentally is about celebrating a moment of happiness. Easter is about awful suffering follow a promise of redemption.
Your writer has a lifelong habit of rising before dawn to observe Easter sunrise. Here the sun rises over Manhattan on Easter 2022, seen from the New Jersey side of the Hudson River.
Easter does have a few secular aspects – the magic bunny, the egg hunts.
Early in the postwar era, department stores -- then a major commercial sector -- and Madison Avenue tried to push Easter as a second Christmas. See the 1948 Fred Astaire/Judy Garland movie Easter Parade, a musical set in an alternative-reality squeaky-clean New York City where it’s gotta-dance and everyone is completely obsessed with Easter shopping.
Judy Garland in Easter Parade.
While Christmas is about joy, Easter is about theology.
If the resurrection was real, you would be foolish not to be a believer. Though, still far from clear what you would believe.
Even if Jesus did rise from the dead there are many possible interpretations of his ministry, his charge to the living, what God and heaven might be.
If Jesus rose, there must be a higher power – not necessarily an omnipotent omniscient God (this is a topic for another day) but at the least an essence that is far more than human.
What was Christ’s view? “God is spirit,” Jesus said at John 4:24, and seemed content to leave it at that.
And if Jesus did not rise? “Then our proclamation [evangelizing] is in vain and your faith is in vain,” Paul wrote to those in Corinth practicing the Jesus way.
That’s a bummer, but only means a person cannot confess the resurrection as proof of there is a God. One can still trust in Christ’s moral teachings regardless of whether the resurrection occurred.
Indeed, the strongest argument for Jesus is that it doesn’t matter whether he was supernatural.
His moral teachings are real and fully realized. If there had never been any Christian church, but society followed Christ’s morality, most of the world’s problems would resolve themselves.
Like the Christmas stories, Easter accounts in the Gospels contain details that seem real because no fabricator would make them up.
For example, in every Gospel telling of Easter morning, the empty tomb is found not by the apostles or by religious leaders or by princes but by ordinary women.
At the time, women’s testimony was considered unreliable, usually inadmissible in court.
Depending on the Bible book, the women at the empty tomb are some combination of Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, Joanna, and “the other woman.” Ordinary women – none have any station in society.
The women are not happy to discover the tomb empty, rather, are “overcome with terror and dread” (Mark 16:8), another detail a fabricator would not make up.
At the empty tomb an angel tells the women not to be afraid, saying, “I know you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. He is not here.”
If there were a canvass to ascertain the most influential short phrase in human history, many votes would be cast for, “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” Votes would be drawn by “Man is born free but everywhere in chains,” by “Yet it moves” (Galileo after being threatened with death if he did not say Earth is stationary), by “Workers of the world unite!”
I’d cast my ballot for the four simple words, “He is not here.”
At John 21, the resurrected Jesus appears to the disciples as they are fishing and urges them to redouble their efforts to make a catch – because Jesus is hungry and wants roast fish for breakfast. Resurrection certainly sounds like it would give you an appetite!
At Christmas, we know a child can be born, we know very bright stars sometimes appear – there’s nothing about the basic account to test faith.
At Easter, we are asked to believe in bodily resurrection, something no one today has ever observed.
This makes Easter a barrier many rationalists cannot cross: yes Jesus was a great philosopher but rising from the dead is obvious mythology.
That is the view taken by many, including Thomas Jefferson. Others, including the contemporary poet Stephen Mitchell, have supposed the apostles talked themselves into thinking they’d seen their beloved master again, or hallucinated his presence.
Being an agnostic, I don’t have any problem believing Jesus rose from the dead. I also have no idea if it happened – that’s the agnostic part – and don’t know how the resurrection could ever be proven or disproved.
But is it possible? Sure!
Many use the word “miracle” to mean “unlikely.” Every March Madness there is a long winning shot at the buzzer and an announcer cries, “It’s a miracle!” It wasn’t a miracle, just unlikely.
Miracles are events that contravene physical law. Whether there has ever been an actual event that contravened physical law, I don’t know. Certainly, none in my lifetime.
But every day there are events that rationalists of prior centuries would have said contravened physical law.
Isaac Newton would have called the jetliner physically impossible – a miracle must keep it in the sky!
Thousands of people are walking around with someone else’s heart beating in their chests, which Louis Pasteur would have called a miracle, if not witchcraft.
There are many similar examples of that which seems normal to us but would have seemed miraculous in the past. The distinction is, today we possess the necessary knowledge.
Today surgeons can bring patients back to life after clinical death on the operating table. This can only be done a few minutes later, not three days later. But that may only be a matter of not yet possessing the necessary knowledge.
It’s worth noting that in the New Revised Standard translation, Christ never speaks nor hears the word “miracle.”
When he feeds a multitude using only a few loaves and fishes, he doesn’t say, “Look, a miracle!” He just gives food to the hungry. When Jesus commands an angry sea to become calm, he doesn’t attach any miraculous credit, rather, rebukes the disciples for lacking faith – then takes a nap.
When we see a jetliner flying we don’t consider this a miracle because we know about lift, thrust and air-pressure differences above a warped wing. Jesus may not have considered stilling the sea a miracle because he possessed the necessary knowledge, or had a pipeline to someone who did.
We can’t control weather now, but maybe someday we’ll know how, and then we won’t think stilling the sea is a miracle, either.
Easter makes me reflect that the “miracle” verses of the Bible – raising the dead, turning water to wine – are the easy parts of scripture to accept.
Already maglev trains weighing many tons float on invisible fields. If you can levitate an entire train, surely there’s a way to levitate a man in sandals as he walks across a sea. We just don’t know how it’s done yet.
Someday people may not grow grapes or go to a store for wine, rather, load the Mr. Sommelier on the kitchen counter and press a button for whatever wine is desired. We just don’t know how to do this yet.
Miracles are the easy part of the sacred writing to accept – divine anger and the existence of evil are the hard parts.
Through the early Bible books, God kills, shows rage, does terrible things. God has a shameful past! How do we reconcile this with the concept of a serene, loving God? Why is a serene loving God silent before human evil?
Those are the hard parts of the Bible to accept.
The miracles – including the resurrection – are pretty straightforward.
So maybe Easter actually happened, maybe it did not. We know the moral teachings of the Redeemer happened.
Hope someone gives you a Cadbury’s creme egg on Sunday!
Bonus: Christians and Jews at Easter. Here is Friday’s essay
arguing Easter should remind us how close Judaism and Christianity are in theology and faith formation.
Bonus: Resurrection and the Ancients. Many Christians of the early centuries believed that at the end time, the righteous would be resurrected, in their original bodies, entering a new, now-perfect physical reality.
To this day Christian liturgies include the phrase, “We look to the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.”
The 2011 Terrence Malick movie The Tree of Life has human history conclude with everyone physically resurrected and walking around in a new world.
Bonus: Religious Details. This essay quotes the New Revised Standard, one of the academically sound translations.
All four Gospels have Christ rising from death. The synoptic (“same view”) Gospels, the first three, do not call Christ divine, nor does Jesus make this claim about himself. The fourth Gospel, John, which differs from the common-view books on many points, says Christ was preexistent.
So if you cite the first three Gospels, Jesus was a normal man with special gifts, and the resurrection came as a shock. If you cite the fourth Jesus was a god, and resurrection shouldn’t surprise anyone.
There’s no way of being sure whether the synoptic books or John should have the final word, or if a final word is possible.
Thank you for sharing your views about Easter, theology and Agnosticism. You probably realize how risky it is in today's climate to post such a dissertation. So kudos to you for doing so. As a Spiritualist, I do not believe in miracles, only Natural Law. If you read only the supposed quotes of the Nazarene, he talks of peace, love, and following him to a better place. All religions in the world today as well as beliefs in history support a life after death scenario. I believe that the ancients, long before the birth of the Nazarene, knew instinctively that the physical body is merely the first step in the evolution of the spirit and soul, to be shed once its time has come. So many interpretations have been made of this basic idea, from storing worldly goods "just in case" in pyramids, to having circles and chanting to ancestors around campfires. In any case, the real question is "Do You Believe in Life After Physical Death?" If you do, then that takes you down one path, whatever that may be. If you don't, another. If you are not sure, the best thing to do is to keep an open mind when your time is near. I believe "Heaven" is really there, and so are all those that have gone before you. Spritualists believe in a Great Spirit, which, in other words, is a force in the Universe, that governs all things. The Nazarene, very much alive in the next world, still weeps for what we have done in the name of his teachings.
I really your essays on religion - especially the one on being an agnostic. I keep it handy.
It also got me to recall the following --
"There lives more faith in honest doubt, believe me, than in half the creeds.'
-- Alfred Lord Tennyson