Lent Part 4: The Cross and the Empty Tomb

Welcome back for the final installment of this miniseries. I will be looking for new things to write about and if you have any suggestions please let me know. I have some ideas floating around but we will see what happens with those. Happy Easter. I hope you have been enjoying yourselves and are rested. If you wish to explore how the Christian Easter began, I have another video link for you - Sacred Calendar: Easter. (This is also made by the University of Nottingham). Essentially the details of the video include, the centrality of Easter to the Christian faith; Easter focuses the Gospels onto the risen Christ; Easter originates out of the Jewish Passover; the Christian enters into the new life of Christ through baptism; Easter is the end of the preparation of Lent. With that aside, let's go.

First off, here is a rough layout of some of the key events from Matthew 21, leading up to the crucifixion.

Crucifixion, as you may have heard before, was a Roman punishment which was not administered to Roman citizens. It involved being nailed or tied to a wooden cross. The person on the cross would be left to hang for hours, even days until they died. The legs of the condemned would often be broken so they would be unable to push themselves up. Eventually their weight would stop their breathing and they would die. This method of execution was evidently very gruesome and horrible. Jesus was sentenced to die in this manner. He died at roughly three in the afternoon, then was laid in a tomb on Good Friday. The tomb was discovered to be empty the following Sunday. Jesus then appeared to his followers and gave them a task to spread the Gospel to the world.

We can see from the early rise of Christianity that despite the fear of death and the widespread  persecutions that began as early as 30 years into the beginning of the Jesus movement, the movement exploded. Initially, the Christian's who first spread the Gospel were the disciples. These men had journeyed with Jesus for some years and had come to worship him as the Son of God. It is unsurprising that the Jewish people of the time considered this blaspheme. For the people in Jerusalem and Judea it would have been very difficult to conceive of the Creator God of the world and heavens to limit Himself in the form of a human. That he would not be even a king but a carpenter. However, some of the early Christians pushed heavily on an elevated understanding of Christ. The Philippian Hymn (Phil. 2:5-11)  is perhaps one of the earliest doxologies, that is to say if you read it you will get a feeling for a people wanting to worship Jesus as God. These people knew him. Some, like James, were even related to him.

What is interesting about early Christianity is that the Jesus movement grew rapidly despite, as we see in Acts 4:32-35, the followers giving up their material wealth and generally not forcing anyone to convert. What should have been limiting for the growth actually did not seem to halt growth. The leaders of the movement did not end well. For a short concise summary please visit this link,

https://www.reclaimingthemind.org/content/Parchmentandpen/DeathoftheApostles.pdf

The guy who wrote it is doing some interesting things with coffee shops and studied at Dallas Theological Seminary, where Daniel B. Wallace teaches, of whom I have a Greek textbook (There's your six degrees of separation, although not quite).

Essentially my point is that the main witnesses of Jesus' ministry all told as many others as they could until their preaching led to their deaths. These people were from different walks of life, some fishermen, one a tax collector, another a zealot (basically a rebel against the Roman rule in Judea). They all agreed for the most part on what they saw. They all believed this enough to give up their lives for events they were present at. If that isn't worth consideration, I'm not sure what is.

The Theology Network at Nottingham recently hosted the Revd. Dr Ian Paul, who I remember saying something along the lines of, "I'm not 100% certain, but I'm confident enough to stake my life on the Gospel." (http://www.psephizo.com/ is the link to his blog, I also may be misquoting him slightly and if so I apologize. As far as I am aware that was the general gist.) What I found fascinating about that is since Christianity started, followers have been willing to give up their lives for the sake of the Gospel. Unfortunately people have also sometimes chosen to make others give up their lives when they don't want the Gospel but I hope we can agree that this was a mistake.

Just under two thousand years ago, a man called Jesus walked on the earth. He was crucified, died, laid in a tomb, and then rose again. People who witnessed this testified until they were executed. They knew this would happen. Paul for example was present when Stephen was stoned, then went around after his conversion/calling doing near on the same thing. Have a think, maybe a pray, and I will finish with an open question. In concrete terms, what would it take for you to believe the account given in the Gospel according to Matthew and would these terms be hugely different from what it takes to make you believe in anything else?

Take care, I will be back soon,

Joe