He is Risen

                                     by Joe Keirouz, (San Jose)

Only a few weeks ago, Christians celebrated, perhaps in different ways, Christ's death and His resurrection three days later, events that occurred about two thousand years ago, yet they are pillar events on which Christianity stands or falls.

Even though Christ's death was a shock to His disciples, it should not have been a surprise as He had warned them on more than one occasion that He would suffer, die and rise three days later. Once Christ was arrested, all His disciples forsook Him and fled. Later Peter, the one who confessed that Christ was the Son of the Living God, could not gather enough courage to acknowledge being Christ's disciple when His trial was taking place: all those miracles that he had witnessed Christ perform, even his own short walk on water, faded into irrelevance. It does not seem from the Gospels that any of His followers expected His resurrection to occur, and why would they? They either saw His death or heard about it directly or indirectly from those who witnessed it.

Though scriptures have a few cases of a dead person being resurrected, none of them occurred spontaneously: besides the ones that Christ had done, there were two others done by living prophets (Elijah and Elisha) and one that occurred when a dead man’s body touched Elisha's bones!

The disciples’ actions reflected their initial lack of belief in Christ’s resurrection:

-The women took spices to anoint His body.

-The disciples doubted the women who were told by the angel that He is risen.

-Thomas did not believe his fellow disciple's testimony of seeing Christ resurrected until he saw Him personally!

Yet, soon afterwards, we see Christ's disciples becoming fearless, boldly proclaiming that He was resurrected by God as they have seen Him alive, a message that they continued to proclaim till the end of their lives even though it brought them nothing but persecution.

Over the years, non-believers have attempted to come up with alternate scenarios of what happened after Christ's crucifixion without allowing for a resurrection, among them (1Corinthians 15:14,17):

-The Gospels are fictitious as Christ never existed.

-The disciples stole His body.

-They went to the wrong tomb.

-He was not dead and later escaped.

-Christ's appearances were all imagined.

None of the alternate scenarios have been able to explain satisfactorily the details of the post crucifixion events found in the Gospels, making it easier to accept the Gospel accounts than the above scenarios that indicate someone would be willing to suffer and die for a lie they invented!

An unbiased evaluation of the events of the Gospels lead to one conclusion: Christ is risen. As a convert to Christianity from Buddhism answered why he changed religion: “It's like this: if you were walking along and came to a fork in the road and two men were there and one was dead and the other alive, which man's direction would you follow?” It is a great question to keep in mind as we continue our life journey!