Have I Been Misled?

It’s a bit unnerving when you wake up one morning thinking “Y’know, I might have wasted nearly sixty years of my life!”  I mean, when I think about the amount of time and energy I’ve put into telling the Easter Story, I‘d have to be seriously deluded or certifiably crazy to have made the investment of my one precious go at life on this planet on a purely fictional event. So, I re-ran the movie in my mind just to check.
 
I first took the Jesus story on board as a kid because trustworthy adults around me lived as if the whole thing was true and they had found it worked in making sense of life.  Some hard-bitten cynics at university gave my basic faith a much needed workout, but an equally tough minded bloke showed me the evidence for the resurrection could stand rigorous inquiry. He took me with him to stand up in public spaces to debate the case with all sorts. It put muscle and sinew into my beliefs and gave me a road tested world view.

Since then, I’ve preached it on city streets and beaches, up and down the coast and into the Outback. I’ve acted it in plays to big audiences of young people.  I’ve told the story to kids in classrooms, I’ve sung it in churches, schools, universities and camps. I’ve spoken it on radio and written it into books and blogs, magazine and newspaper articles. I’ve held it out as bright hope at the bedside of dying friends and spoken it as comfort to family and friends standing over their open graves. I‘ve taught it as bona fide fact to men and women from countries all over the earth in classrooms and churches and seen it change their lives.

I’m a trained historian so you can take it that I’ve done my homework. I’ve researched the case for Christ pretty fully and been taught indirectly by the very best scholars in the world through books and lectures. More importantly, for fifty-plus years I’ve put the claim that the resurrection of Jesus is the single most powerful event in human history to the test in the laboratory of my own life. I know it works.
 
At the risk of sounding arrogant, I’ve seen enough proof to assure me I haven’t wasted my life, which is something of a relief at this point in time! In rehearsing all this I’m not trying to be especially heroic, just genuinely convinced, in company with a growing number of people around the world.
 
A few years after the disappearance of Jesus body, the ferocious rabbi Saul of Tarsus set about hunting down Christians as they had spread across the Empire teaching Jesus’ resurrection. After being personally confronted by a fully alive Jesus, he turned 180 degrees to become one of the energetic leaders of the movement. He put the case bluntly for all of us who follow a vigorously alive Jesus:
 
“…if Christ was not raised then neither our preaching nor your faith has any meaning at all…Truly, if our hope in Christ were limited to this life only, we should of all mankind, be the most to be pitied.”
 
A visit to Israel in 1995 brought the Easter story into vivid 3D focus. It was good to share it with my friend and fellow teacher Mike Stone. There he is standing on a hillside above the Sea of Galilee retelling the story of Jesus on location and again at the Wailing Wall with Avram, a Messianic Jew who kindly guided us into the strategic events leading up to the trial and crucifixion that changed the world.
 
But my favourite moment was outside the Garden Tomb where groups of Jesus’ followers from all around the world were sitting in different alcoves singing. People from an African American church were belting out a gospel song, ‘One day when I was lost Jesus died upon the cross!’ Nearby, European voices were chanting joyful prayer mingling with hymns from a number of other language groups in the distance.
 
I couldn’t help myself – I just had to sing a funky resurrection song that I’d sung under crimson cathedral skies at Easter services out on the plains west of Bourke. It centres on the angel’s words to the discouraged women who came to anoint Jesus’ body early on that first Easter morning, ‘Don’t look for the living in the place of the dead!’
 
I knew without the shadow of a doubt we haven’t been misled.