The Resurrection - fact or fancy?

The reading is taken from the Gospel of Mark, chapter 16, beginning at the first verse. When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James and Salome, bought spices so that they might go out to anoint Jesus' body. Very early on, the first day of the week, just after sunrise, they were on their way to the tomb, and they asked each other, who will roll away the stone from the entrance of the tomb? But when they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had been rolled away.

As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man, dressed in a white robe, sitting on the right side, and they were alarmed. Don't be alarmed, he said. You are looking for Jesus, the Nazarene, who was crucified.

He has risen. He is not here. See the place where they laid him.

But go, tell his disciples and Peter, he is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you. Trembling and bewildered, the woman went out and fled from the tomb.

When Jesus rose early on the first day of the week, he appeared, first of Mary Magdalene, out of whom he had driven seven demons. She went out and told these who had been with him and who were mourning and weeping. When they heard that Jesus was alive and that she had seen him, they did not believe it.

Afterwards, Jesus appeared in a different form to two of them while they were walking in the country. These returned and reported it to the rest, but they did not believe them either. Later, Jesus appeared to the eleven as they were eating.

He rebuked them for their lack of faith and their stubborn refusal to believe those who had seen him after he had risen. He said to them, Go into all the world and preach the good news to all creation. Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned.

And these signs will accompany those who believe. In my name they will drive out demons. They will speak in new tongues.

They will pick up snakes with their hands. And when they drink deadly poison, it will not hurt them at all. They will place their hands on sick people and they will get well.

After the Lord Jesus had spoken to them, he was taken up into heaven and he sat at the right hand of God. Then the disciples went out and preached everywhere. And the Lord worked with them and confirmed his word by the signs that accompanied it.

Amen. Let my soul rejoice. Take joy, my King, in what you hear.

Let me be a sweet, sweet sound in your ears. I love you, Lord, and I lift my voice to worship you. Let my soul rejoice.

Take joy, my King, in what you hear. Let me be a sweet, sweet sound in your ears. Let my prayer be set forth before thee as incense and the lifting up of my hands as the evening sacrifice.

I love you, Lord, and I lift my voice to worship you. Let my soul rejoice. Take joy, my King, in what you hear.

Let me be a sweet, sweet sound in your ears. I love you, Lord, and I lift my voice to worship you. Let my soul rejoice.

Take joy, my King, in what you hear. Let me be a sweet, sweet sound in your ears. A Czechoslovakian theologian told Canon Michael Green of Oxford that on one occasion a communist philosopher was lecturing a large number of people in Eastern Europe against the concept of God.

And after he'd been going on for some time, he turned to an Orthodox priest and he said to the priest, You've now got five minutes to state your case. The priest said, I don't want five minutes for you to be convinced as to what these people really believe. Give me five seconds.

And he shouted out, Christos Anesti! And like a clap of thunder came the response. Alethos Anesti! Jesus is risen! He is risen indeed! Thank God the Orthodox Church still to this day gets excited about the resurrection. And men and women in Eastern Europe, in Africa, in the Americas, around the world, be they of the Orthodox Church, be they of certain sections of the Catholic Church, be they from the Protestant Church, there are many millions of people who couldn't care a fig for their denominations, but they are glad to know this, that Jesus Christ is alive, and it's that that binds Christian people together around the world.

I quoted from Pilgrim's Progress this morning, and you get to that point in that marvellous allegory, where Christian has had his sins forgiven, as he recognizes the saving value of the death and the resurrection of Jesus, and Bunyan said, then Christian gave three leaps for joy and went on singing. C.S. Lewis described the Christian Church in terms of a community that should always know Easter laughter. Easter laughter.

I think it's good to get excited about some of the great truths of the Christian Church, particularly the resurrection of our Saviour. I'll tell you a story, a true one. I went visiting St. Francis' nursing home some two years ago.

It's a home run by Catholic nuns in Little Hampton, and I went to visit quite a dear friend of mine, who used to come along to the tabernacle here quite frequently, and he was there for a pretty nasty operation, and the operation had been done, and it was just leading up to Easter, and he was feeling fair, but you know, not too good. And when I visited him after Easter, he said, hey, do you know what happened on Easter Sunday? So I said, no, what? Well, he said, all these nurses here, all these nun stroke nurses, they had a procession down the top corridor, and every time they saw a patient standing at their room door, they kissed him. So I said, did they? Yeah, he said, it was really encouraging.

He said, in fact, I so appreciated it, that when they'd gone past me, I nipped down the stairs at the bottom of the corridor, and stood downstairs, and got the second blessing on the way out. It's good to feel excited about the fact that Jesus Christ has been raised from the dead. It's the most important doctrine of the Christian church.

Professor C.E.M. Jode was once asked, which person in history would he most like to meet? And the good professor said, Jesus Christ. Well, said the interviewer, what question would you put to him if you could meet him? And Jode said, I'd ask, did you really rise from the dead? Did you really rise from the dead? And that's my subject for a short while this evening. Jesus Christ's resurrection, is it fact, or is it fancy? If it's fancy, then we may as well sell this church, and we may as well go home.

And I really do mean that. If Jesus is not risen, then we have no faith whatsoever. And so let's have a look into this subject this evening, at least for a while.

There are certain people who have given explanations, so called, as to what would really satisfy the events and cause people like ourselves to reach another conclusion, apart from the idea that Jesus was literally raised from the dead. And the first suggestion that was made many centuries ago, was simply this. It was all a matter of deception.

Deception by the bad. You come across the idea in Matthew's Gospel in chapter 27, when we read in the 62nd verse, after there had been some rumor, that strange events had occurred outside the garden tomb, or within the tomb in which Jesus had been laid. The next day, the one after preparation day, the chief priests and the Pharisees went to Pilate.

Sir, they said, we remember that while he was still alive, the deceiver said, after three days I will rise again. So give the order for the tomb to be made secure until the third day. Otherwise his disciples may come and steal the body, and tell the people that he has been raised from the dead.

The last deception will be worse than the first. That was chapter 27. Here is chapter 28.

Verse 11, while the women were on their way, some of the guards went into the city, and reported to the chief priests everything that had happened. When the chief priests had met with the elders and devised a plan, they gave the soldiers a large sum of money, telling them, you are to say his disciples came during the night, and stole him away while we were asleep. If this report gets to the governor, we will satisfy him and keep you out of trouble.

So the soldiers took the money, and did as they were instructed. And this story has been widely circulated among the Jews to this very day. This, according to some, is what explains the Christian gospel away.

It was a question of deception. The disciples, they pinched the body. But really, when you think it through, it becomes a nonsense of an argument.

First of all, that stone was sealed with the authority of the Roman governor Pilate himself. And if it were true that the disciples, or rather the soldiers, were asleep when the tomb was rifled, then how could the sleeping soldiers say that it was the disciples who took it? The logic there is highly suspect. And if it was the disciples who took the body, why? Why would they have taken the body? Why would they have made up the story that Jesus crucified on the cross his bloody, emaciated body for all to see, deposited in a tomb, and the tomb was sealed by the stone? Why would they have risked their lives to have stolen the body, and then put out a story that the man from Nazareth had come back and risked the same fate as he had suffered themselves? Imagine if Arthur Scargill had been born centuries ago.

Imagine it. Let's say that he was born at the time when the Romans occupied England. Let's say that he lived not in Yorkshire, but in Cornwall, where they had tin mining.

And let's say that the miners went on strike because the Romans weren't paying enough money. Because General McGregor had been brought over from Italy, and he wasn't dealing very well with the English artisans. And so there's a conflict, and the miners' leader is killed.

What point the miners, rifling the grave in Cornwall, and putting out the myth that Arthur has come back? Would miners do that? Would they have done it then, allowing for my story? Would they do it today? Of course not. Working-class men are pretty cute when it comes to getting as much as they can, and when it comes to acknowledging a leader and then dumping the leader if they don't feel that he is really helping for their own advantage. And what's more? Imagine that this was the case, that the body of Jesus had been stolen by the disciples.

How did they manage to keep it quiet? There are 11 of them, and presumably more would have to be in on the secret. Have you ever tried to keep a secret amongst 5 people, let alone 11 people? Do you know the Watergate scandal, how it broke? Because the CIA, with all its ingenuity, and President Nixon, with all the authority of his office, was not able to contain one of the most daft things that any American president ever did. And eventually it was his own tapes that got released, that defrocked him.

As a British comedian would have said, he got speared on his own javelin. He couldn't keep it quiet. And are you meaning to say that these disciples could have kept quiet, this story that they put out years ago? We shot a film on the Mormon Church last Sunday.

I don't apologize for showing it either. I'd show it again. I'd keep it running for a week here in Worthing if I had the opportunity so to do and get people in to see it.

The Book of Mormon was translated, allegedly, as a result of Joseph Smith digging around in some mountains where he was brought up as a lad, and he found some plates. And the plates had inscribed on them letters in Reformed Egyptian, a language that no one had ever heard of before nor since. Conveniently, alongside the plates were a pair of spectacles.

And when he put the spectacles on, he could work out what the writing represented. And he had several witnesses to say when he took these plates home and dictated the translation to his secretary, who was in another part of the curtain-off room, he had several witnesses to say that what he did was right, that it was all historical, that they had seen the plates, that they had watched him, in part, translating them. And several of those witnesses in the Church of Latter-day Saints will never tell you this.

Before the years went by, they reneged on their testimony. They withdrew it. It was a farce.

You can't keep something like that quiet. If it's a fabrication, sooner or later, and sooner generally than later, because that's akin to human nature, it gets out. And the idea that the disciples contrived to rob, to rifle the tomb where the body of Jesus lay and then put out the notion that He'd been brought back from the dead is absolutely ridiculous.

You could probably make a better explanation than yourself. So the first one that we rule out is deception by the bad. The second one, delusion by the sad.

Now, you've come across this. It's actually acknowledged in Scripture and so much for the honesty of the New Testament which touches on these explanations that were already being put out in the days of the early church. It's touched on in Luke's Gospel and chapter 24.

And believe it or not, the first people who claim that the resurrection might be as a result of the vivid imagination of some women are none other than the disciples. I read from the ninth verse. When they came back from the tomb, they told all these things, that is the women, they told all these things to the eleven and to all the others.

It was Mary, Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James and the others with them who told this to the apostles but they did not believe the women because their words seemed to them like nonsense. Nonsense. At first it seemed as though it was just a hallucination.

As a French philosopher, Renan, said some century or so ago, the strong imagination of Mary Magdalene played an important part and with Renan's typical eloquence he goes on, oh divine power of love, sacred moments in which the passion of a hallucinated woman gave the world a resurrected God. But hallucination had to be discounted by the disciples as far as Mary was concerned because ultimately they had an experience of the risen Christ themselves. Hallucinations generally are individual things.

People don't share common hallucinations. I might get up here one day and if I do then you'll certainly know that it's time for me to quit and say I am a poached egg. Now my brother who is with us this evening, he wouldn't be taken in by it.

Neither would my closest friends nor even those who are less than my friends be taken in by it. But I might literally think this because it's incredible how mental sickness can bring a delusion. But it's an individual thing.

We don't all think instantaneously that we're poached eggs. Though one person might be under that sad delusion. And what's more, did you know of a hallucination that such tend to reoccur over long periods.

And what's more, they become increasingly bizarre. Not just a poached egg but bacon as well if you like. Not just a simple thing but it gets more and more complex.

And it's recurrent. But it's always on an individual basis. But when you think about the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ there's a delightful uniformity about the experience that people have.

They all seem to be saying the same thing. Jesus is back again. And what is more, this experience is shared by many differing people.

Ex-rabbis, tax collectors, fishermen, ordinary folks, all having the same impression and on one occasion 500 together. It is absurd to suggest that such as this, the combined testimony of so many differing people can be explained simply in terms of hallucination. So if the resurrection of Jesus is inexplicable in terms of a deception by the bad and delusion by the sad, what final conclusion, what only option is left open to you? Well I suggest the resurrection of Jesus, far from the other two, is a declaration by our God.

A declaration by our God. As to what? As to the deity of the Lord Jesus. Listen to the first chapter of Romans.

Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God the gospel He promised beforehand through His prophets in the Holy Scriptures regarding His Son who as to His human nature was a descendant of David and through the Spirit of holiness was declared with power to be the Son of God by His resurrection from the dead. Why did Jesus die? To demonstrate His power not only over the forces of nature, He'd done that when He stilled a storm. Not only over the human body, He'd done that when He healed many, many sick people.

But He wanted to show His authority over man's greatest and most feared enemy, death and hell themselves. And that's what the empty tomb is all about. Jesus who died, now glorified, raised again on the third day.

I wish I had time to marshal even more and more evidence because there is so much that combines to make the resurrection of Christ one of the strongest attested incidents in the whole of history. A couple of hundred years ago there were two men by the name of Littleton and West. They were both friends of Dr. Johnson and they were both agnostics.

Living in a time when it was fashionable to question Christianity. The 18th century was an age of unbelief as much as the 20th century. And so they made a pact.

One of them decided that he would write a book to disprove that Saul ever converted to Christianity. And the other, he wrote a book that was going to disprove the resurrection of Christ. They met up again some months later both in a shame-faced fashion.

And Littleton said to West, My book, alas, as far as our original intention was concerned, has proved beyond the shadow of doubt that Saul did convert to Christianity. And West said, Strange you should say that. The book that I'm writing is demonstrating without a shadow of doubt that Jesus Christ has been raised from the dead.

And the book that he wrote was entitled Observations on the History and Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus. And on the fly leaf, the first leaf of that book, written as I say in the 18th century, is this comment, Blame not before thou hast examined the truth. Have you ever examined the truth of the resurrection of Jesus? Take the evidence.

Try the options. Think them through. Deception? That's ridiculous.

Delusion? It doesn't square with the facts. A declaration that Jesus is the Son of God, that is the only tenable conclusion to which you can be drawn. Jean-Paul Sartre, a French philosopher, a very old man, wrote this in 1980.

Oh well, I'll be dead in five years at the most. In any case, the world is such an ugly and a bad place, it's absolutely without hope. Then Sartre went on in his article.

There, that's the cry of despair of an old man who will die in despair, but that is exactly what I resist. I know I shall die in hope, but that hope needs a foundation. Precisely so.

And the Christian hope of the resurrection has a historical foundation. Jesus Christ was no John Brown whose body lies a-mouldering in the grave while his soul goes marching on. There is no distinction between the Christ of faith and the Jesus of history.

The two are one. If Jesus is not raised from the dead, our faith is empty. It is bankrupt, says the apostle Paul.

But if it be so that he has been raised from the dead, then we who are Christians are of all men the most happy. And if Jesus has been raised from the dead, that fact is at one, the most terrific and the most terrifying of concepts. Terrific why? Because I can face death.

I can go into that dark night without fear. I can face a firing squad as a young Ugandan lad did some while ago and say, don't mutilate my body. Don't chop off my arms.

I'll not flinch beneath your execution. You can face death and not be afraid because of the resurrection and your acknowledgement that Jesus died for your sins. It's a terrific fact.

It's also terrifying. Terrifying why? Because if Jesus has been raised and if the soul of man is immortal, then one day you will have to stand before almighty God and answer for the way that you have lived your life. And that's the reason why many people want to disprove the resurrection, the thought of standing before God, of having an immortal soul.

It terrifies them. But for those who recognize that Jesus bled and died on the cross for their sins and was raised for their justification, who become one with Him, having acknowledged His life, His death and resurrection and its saving benefits, they can look forward to a great and glorious eternity yet to be. Why don't you confess this risen Christ as your Savior now and follow through the logic of the argument that I've confronted with you, that I've confronted you with this evening.

Let's pray. Not a deception by the bad. The evidence does not warrant that.

Nor a delusion by the sad. Father, there is nothing to sustain the notion but a declaration by God. That's behind the resurrection of Christ.

And the Bible says, if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in thine heart that God hath raised Him from the dead, thou shalt be saved. Do that. Do it in the quietness of these next 30 seconds.

Do it now. Father, we bless you for the resurrection message. We lift our hearts to you and ask that you will receive us ultimately into your immediate presence and in the interim.

Let us know the Spirit of Jesus by the power of the Holy Ghost with us day by day and week by week until the day dawns, the shadows flee away and we are with you eternally. Amen. Now it's only 22.08. The night is still very young and we'd be glad to have your company at our After Church Fellowship which is full of very interesting items and gives us further chance to praise our risen Lord Jesus.

But let's conclude this part of our worship by singing 287 in the supplement Jesus is Lord. Now this second verse. Jesus is Lord, yet from His throne eternal in flesh He came to die in pain on Calvary's tree.

We sing that sensitively. And then when we get to the anthem where you really raise it. You can't have Russian Orthodox service broadcast on the BBC with more enthusiasm than tabernacle singing here in Worthing.

Let's really lift it. I was looking round one session of singing earlier. I count at least five young people who weren't singing at all.

Now they will be on their own for the third verse if they're not singing the second. So let's really, seriously, let's lift this anthem to the Lord. Second verse, rather sensitive.

And then the third verse, really let that rise in praise to our great Heavenly Father for the gift of His Son. Jesus is Lord, yet from His throne eternal in flesh He came to die in pain on Calvary's tree. Jesus is Lord, how dearly do I proceed that every time I rise to die God's blessing must be.

how dearly do I proceed He is Lord, He is Lord, He is risen from the dead and He is Lord, He is my Lord, Jesus Christ is Lord. Can it be true the things they say of you you walk this earth sharing with friends you knew all that they had the work, the joy, the pain that they may find the way to heaven again Can it be true the things they did to you the death, the shame and were your brains so few yet you returned again alive and free Can it be true my Lord it had to be Lord Jesus Christ you have come to us you are one with us Mary's son cleansing our souls from all their sin pouring your love and goodness in Jesus our love for you we sing living Lord Lord Jesus Christ you have come to us born as one of us Mary's son led out to die on Calvary risen from death to set us free living Lord Jesus help us see you are Lord Jesus Christ I would come to you live my life for you son of God all your commands I know are true your many gifts will make me new into my life your power breaks through living Lord and now may the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God the friendship and fellowship of the Holy Spirit be our experience until the day dawns the shadows flee away and we find ourselves in the company of the risen Nazarene and with all our brothers and sisters who've gone on before Amen